The Making of the “New Intelligentsia”

THE 1920S BOLSHEVIKS sought to turn the universities into “construction sites” for the fabrication of the New Man. The young state was determined to have the institutions of higher education function as the meeting place of the working class and its consciousness. Inevitably, the old intelligentsia proved an obstacle, insisting on civic liberties, occupying the universities, and refusing to turn them over to the proletariat. Lenin set the tone for the Bolshevik enterprise when he summarily rejected the idea that education could be indifferent to class. “The very term ‘apolitical,’” he said in November 1920, “is a piece of bourgeois