Anxious Intellectuals
Выкладываю свой текст из недавно вышедшего сборника по интеллектуалам в Восточной Европе и России. Меня интересует место интеллектуалов в постсоветском "классовом" проекте и те способы, которыми они (мы) оправдываем свое право на определение реальности и, соответственно, на участие вo власти (толчком к анализу стала несостоявшаяся "джинсовая революция" в марте 2006г.): In Marx's Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia ed. by C. Bradatan and S. Oushakine, Lanham (MD): Lexington Books, 2010.
Elena Gapova
ANXIOUS INTELLECTUALS: FRAMING THE NATION AS CLASS IN BELARUS Pp. 197-218
…sometimes you get the impression the Free Speech movement produced more corporate executives than Harvard Business School.
David Brooks1
In his “Invitation to Sociology” Peter Berger defined sociology as an attempt to understand.2 For several years already I have been trying to understand the “perturbations” that happened with the democratic and liberal visions of the brave new world that used to be the mantra of Soviet liberal intelligentsia. When the new world did arrive, many former critics of the “Soviet regime,” semi-dissident proponents of free speech and human rights, who had spent their nights reading samizdat, listening to the jammed “Voice of America” programming, and dreaming of freedom and the abolition of all forms of censorship, reemerged as patriarchal nationalists, religious conservatives, moral censors and antifeminists: put differently, as the promoters of new boundaries and of various forms of censorship. Those who have retained liberal views are too often full of contempt for “the people,” whom they see as lowly and vulgar sovki, bearing the worst “Soviet” psychological makeup and not being able to embrace liberal values. Some sociologists related the “perverted” character of Soviet social, political, and economic institutions to a particular human type and argued that fundamental
changes in personality structure were needed before any civilizing changes in institutions could be realized.3
Andrey Sinyavsky, an exiled Soviet dissident and writer was indignant of the intellectual position constructed on the opposition to “the people,” for that was an extreme deviation from the traditional intelligentsia vision of narod.4 On the other hand, this position is opposed to the Soviet developmental project, which initially embraced the idea of a new person, a communist man, more advanced spiritually, than an average human being and living according to the principle “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Brezhnevist-era propaganda celebrated Soviet people as a “new historical unity” who had arguably embodied a new, fraternal type of social bondage. These idealizing views were done with during perestroika, as some intellectuals reverted to the notions
of the quality of population and the quality of “genofond” (genetic pool) to explain the calamities of Soviet history. They argued that Stalin’s purges had wiped out the bloom of the nation: the best educated, the most talented, those incarnating ulterior principles and not prone to moral compromise. Thus the human “material,” with which intelligentsia is left, is just not good enough to realize any democratic projects. For example, a Belarusian intellectual characterizes his contemporaries, who, in his view, are more concerned with their well-being (“full stomach”), than freedom, in the following way: “our local population has inherited from their ancestors only those skills which had ensured their survival when authorities resorted to the use of force, and are absolutely not capable of articulating their critical will in any civilized form.”5
This text will be telling a story involving some Belarusian intellectual groups, who in pursuit of their alleged democracy cause find themselves across the barricade from the “people.” What needs to be explained, then, is the reason for this discursive alienation. I see this transformation of the intellectual vision as a part of their response to the “crisis of intelligentsia,” a social process into which intellectual actors are currently involved and inside which they try to reinvent themselves as a group with interests. My
assertion is that the Belarusian situation is not unique, but is an ultimate expression of some trends common for the post-Soviet region, where intellectuals try to negotiate their place within the new social order. Belarus, often labeled the last dictatorship in Europe, makes, for a number of reasons, a representative case study, which can be a clue to a larger postsocialist conundrum.
THE REVOLUTION THAT NEVER HAPPENED
During the last decade several post-Soviet nations have lived through major power confrontations, which resulted in the overthrow of formally legitimate governments by Westernized elites. The events got the name of colored revolutions after the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution,” which took place in 2004. An earlier one, named “the Revolution of Roses,” but smaller in scale, was realized in Georgia, and still another, the “Tulip Revolution,” in Kyrgyzstan. All of them were spurred by controversial presidential elections, as the nomenklatura-type elites with communist and/or criminal past, who had stayed in power since the 1990s, resorted to media manipulation and the use of police against street protests to conceal threatening election results. Those who opposed them on the other side claimed to represent people rising for justice and their human dignity. Another thing common for all the revolutions was their spectacular visual form: developing as popular “performances,” which made them attractive for younger people, they were extensively televised by international media. The growing use of the Internet was their mobilizing resource; flash-mobs, humor, and art helped to deliver a message, while local NGOs, believed to be grassroots,but openly reliant both financially and ideologically on Western governments
and foundations, were involved in them in significant ways.
A similar event was expected in Belarus in March 2006: even before the presidential elections did take place, the “jeans revolution” was discussed in oppositional media as well as in some European newspapers. For example, the British Financial Times published an article asking whether a jeans revolution was capable of liberating Europe from its last surviving dictator.6 The color of the forthcoming revolution, for the pattern of having a powerful symbol had already been established, was supposed to be blue: the color of the sky, of liberty, and, importantly, of the flag of the European Union which symbolized the freedom of which the nation had been deprived since 1994, when Alexander Lukashenko had been elected the president in the first democratic elections. Blue ribbons, readily delivered “from Europe,” were handed out by activists in the streets of the capital city to inspire a revolutionary mood and to establish a visual continuity with earlier colored revolutions. Wearing the ribbons, which could be classified as unsanctioned protest, was quite dangerous, for the lack of rights for publicly expressing political views is no joke in Belarus.
But against all hopes, the revolution did not happen: unlike the way it had been in the Ukraine, Georgia, or Kyrgyzstan, Belarusian people did not take to the streets to support several hundred (at certain times, several thousand) protesters, who rallied against the reelection of Alexander Lukashenko.7 The opposition argued that the March 2006 elections, as well as the ones that took place five years earlier, were both illegal and unfair. They
were illegal, because to participate in them for the third time, which was against the Constitution, Lukashenko changed it, for the second time, allegedly on request from the people. They were not fair, because the opposition was not given a fair chance or hardly any chance at all. Some political parties were banned from the polls, others were almost ousted through media manipulation and “administrative resources,” that is, the local authorities,
police, and courts. State sponsored media advertised the president’s program, while independent media were hardly available outside the capital city, because of the obstacles put to them. There was pressure on stateemployees and students to vote for the president. Any sociological polls but the government ones were forbidden, and thus no one can really say how
many votes were cast for the candidates. The Central Election Committee reported the president’s victory at 83 percent; Independent Institute for Social and Economic research, which had polled people clandestinely, declared in several weeks that the president had won, but at 63 percent.8 Alexander Lukashenko later recognized that when he had learned of his own victory at 93 percent, he ordered to change the figure to be announced to 83 percent,
out of modesty. A decent guy indeed.
On the election day oppositional leaders appealed to the nation to hold a rally at the October Square in Minsk. By late evening, as the news arrived of the president’s landslide victory and the crowd roared with indignation, it was suggested to return to the square the next day to sum up the election results. It was on that next day that several young people, evidently inspired by the spectacle of the Ukrainian Maidan, put up the first tent on the cold night pavement. In a couple of hours, there were several tents and dozens of young people ready to remain there “till the end.” According to the urban legend, the four-day act of nonviolent civil disobedience was an impromptu thing.9 The oppositional leaders, having to be inventive, urged everyone to phone their friends and relatives to inform them of the protests and to ask for hot coffee and blankets. One of the participants described this beginning in her blog:
On March the 20th, in the evening, the first tents were put up. Young people,
guys and girls, holding their hands, surrounded those who were putting up the
tents, to shield and protect them. It became clear immediately what was to be
done. My grandmother lives across the street from the Square. I said as soon
I appeared at the door: “Turn on the kettle.” While the water was heating, I
picked up all the warm clothes that could be found. I even discovered an old
cottonwool coat. I told my mother that there were tents in the Square and that
I was going to stay there. We needed hot tea, which, most probably, would be
needed throughout the whole night. Mama was scared.10
The camp was permanently surrounded by militia and ununiformed agents, who tended to stop anyone trying to deliver food, hot tea and blankets, but these, somehow, were delivered anyway. During the day just several people were staying near the tents under the falling snow, but in the evenings, the public space of the Square became much more populated. Passing cars horned their support, women brought homemade pirozhki, speeches were made and flags waved, with some slogans in English, so the world could understand: as international TV crews started arriving, the campers, competing for emotional attention, became aware of their spectacular potential.
Government media, busy with celebrating the president’s victory, hardly mentioned the camp, presenting it as an anarchic gathering of moral deviants and brutes, concerned less with democracy than projecting Western interests and, in fact, directly supported by some Western governments.11 On the forth night, at around 3 AM the camp was “liquidated” by OMON (special police force): according to some evidence, the protesters, while transported to prison, were told, as a “joke,” that they would be shot in a forest, and the women were told that they would be raped. The captives remained in the prison yard for several hours without a permission to use bathrooms, and in the morning, hasty judges sentenced more than four
hundred detainees to fifteen days’ imprisonment for disturbing public order. The sentence implied the loss of jobs for those employed at the state sector and the expulsion from universities for students.12 State TV vilified the campers by displaying porno magazines, used condoms, empty vodka bottles, and syringes allegedly found in the tents, but, most probably, put there by the TV-crews to plant a vision of moral degradation. Belarusian
state media was selling a cover story of the enemies of the nation, on pay from the West, plotting to undermine and overthrow the legitimate government, the way it had happened in Serbia.13
At this point I need to stop to resolve some methodological issues which arise when heartless social scientists turn to touchy subjects, involving human heroism and sacrifice or cruelty. I am looking for a structural pattern, and my further analysis will rely on actors, interests and other social categories, and some readers might imagine a crude “expert” disregarding human agency in favor of an alienated structural explanation and thus failing to take
account of the microprocesses at the level of the individual. Under these charges I am turning to the point made by Georgi Derluguian in his book focused on the extremely charged subject of Chechnya intellectuals: some of his interviewees might have been involved in wartime atrocities (at which point he stopped interviews). Derluguian points to “the false antinomy of structure and agency,” which is effectively overcome by resorting to the operational concepts of habitus and structural field, offered by Pierre Bourdieu. Through
this conceptual apparatus, developed to analyze ideologies and intellectuals, the actions of intellectuals, who promote interests and create alliances across classes, are seen within a certain “structural field.” Thus “Bourdieu has shown us how to apply, in research practice, the intuitions of earlier thinkers such as ... Antonio Gramsci.”14 Relying on similar principles in my further analysis, I will operate outside of moral categories, but refer to structured relations that define “a form of sociation and a discursive strategy that corresponds to it.”15 This said, I can now revert to my topic.
The March events launched an existential search for answers as to why the nation did not join the protest to turn it into a decisive blow on the “regime,” for neither entrepreneurs, nor workers, not even intelligentsia in any significant numbers or the drivers of the horning cars stood in the square. Though the evening rallies did attract up to ten thousand people in the capital city, in Ukraine or Georgia hundreds of thousands went into the streets. Thus journalists, scholars, and public intellectuals glorified the young campers as a postcommunist generation, who had internalized democratic values and by refusing to swallow the lies, had saved the honor of the apathetic nation. The nonviolent resistance in “Freedom Square” or “Kalinowsky Square” as it was named after the leader of the 1863 anticzarist
uprising, was perceived as “the revolution of free spirit”16 and an outbreak of creative will realized by romantic revolutionaries, devoid of any interests and urged just by love for freedom.17 Some camp survivors focused, in their reflexive self-search blogs, on the issue of personal choice with which they had been confronted,18 and an author writing in the independent intellectual journal Arche, which is made possible through Western, support, recognized: “That which was happening and is happening in Belarus, has some metaphysical quality.”19 In his perception, the campers were like the great heroes of antiquity, whose courage and pure and noble spirit were beyond cold and rational logic.
The rest of the nation was declared too cowardly and loaded with material interests to rise for their human dignity. One of the first reaction texts at the Nashe mnenie (Our opinion) analytical blog juxtaposed the material and the disinterested: “In contemporary Belarus, again, we have a postperestroika dilemma of ‘freedom vs. sausage.’”20 The phrase alludes to the Soviet metaphor of “sausage” which, at the times of deficiency of consumer goods, stood for consumer satisfaction and general well-being, and the author maintained:
On the one hand, there are those who would stand day and night in the cold,
bearing beatings and violations by police, or unbelievable lies about them in
the state media. On the other, there are commoners, who would not even understand,
what it means to be free.21
The view of lowly commoners, driven by their “stomach needs,” was widespread. A journalist remarked in a Ukrainian newspaper: “The nation, for whom a piece of sausage is more important than freedom, can only be told: Bon appetit!”22 An oppositional intellectual wrote:
Really, one can hardly explain the value of freedom to someone, especially
if the person does not want to feel it. One cannot explain the flavor of some
exquisite food to those who have never tried the dish, or to render the feeling
of a flight to those who are not capable of flying. Love for freedom is like a
religious feeling. It cannot be explained rationally. But it can be “caught” from
those who do feel freedom and long for it.23
Valeriya Novodvorskaya, a former Russian dissident, used, in a TV interview, the Polish-Belarusian word bydlo, which means “cattle,” to name those who “did not rise.”24 Historically, the word denoted both domestic animals and serfs and is extremely denigrating, because Belarusian peasants had been called bydlo by the Polish landlords. Thus the insult had both class and ethnic subtones, in fact characterizing the nation as slaves.
The “sausage versus freedom” metaphor was the first explanatory trope for the Belarusian civic division, but within the next year, the search for the roots of the nation’s “apathy”-put differently, for the failure to mobilize a larger support base-resulted in academic articles, memoirs and documentaries. 25 All of them could only be created outside the official academia or public sphere and with support from international donors. The philosophical journal Topos, affiliated with European Humanities University, a Belarusian
university currently “in exile” in Lithuania, published a special issue titled “Elections and Choice” (“Vybor i vybory”). Its authors, philosophers and scholars of culture, largely focused on the concept of freedom and the manipulative strategies of the state to control and brainwash the public.26 A special bondage, which resulted from the common experience of confronting injustice, became a recurrent theme (“Now, in 2006, it is the thirst for freedom and honor that unites us”), alongside with that of a noble cause. According to one political scientist, “Many used to doubt that freedom, just freedom, and not social issues, would become the mobilizing resource in resisting the Lukashenka regime.”27 Instead of structural positions, related to the categories of political economy, moral qualities emerged as a broad explanation for political and civic choices that flattered some authors. Unlike the “commoners,” either brainwashed or not able to discern the true value of freedom, the allegedly disinterested intellectuals rose for European values and rights: thus, they emerged as legitimate moral leaders.
While there is no doubt that those declaring their love for freedom unconditional do believe it, they participate in the struggle for political power, which directly involves interests, as the above reference demonstrates. If, according to T. Adorno, identity is the ulterior form of ideology, there is usually something that people do not know about themselves, when they assume that others are self-serving, while they are not. As “freedom” seems to be the primary code-word in the intellectuals’ thinking about themselves (they “value freedom” and stand for it, “freedom unites us against them,” etc.), deconstructing the meaning with which this concept is entrusted in colored revolutions might prove helpful.
If post-socialist democratization is to be seen as an evolving process, then colored revolutions can be perceived as the “second wave” or a continuation of the negotiated revolutions of 1988 to 1989. They seek to change political regimes through a peaceful public protest, turning to the issues that have not been resolved with the disintegration of socialism or which arose during the transition. The Ukrainian scholar Tatyana Zhurzhenko
argues that these revolutions were driven by the interests of business and professional elites in normalizing brutal and “Darwinian” post-Soviet market for the former nomenklatura had used its social and political capital to reinvent itself as the propertied “class,” too powerful to be constrained by law. Thus, colored revolutions, insisting on rights and rule of law, targeted post-Soviet “oligarchic” or “clan” capitalism.28 According to Yaroslav Grytsak,
to mobilize masses, the Ukrainian Orange Revolution resorted to the universalist and liberal rhetoric of dignity, human honor (cf. the discourse of “the revolution of spirit” in Belarus), and political transparency (instead of national language, culture and history, as was the case in 1991).29 The successful revolutions resulted in establishing pro-Western governments and in the general Westernization and modernization of political and economic life through the use of the “rule of law” and “democratic standards.” The question is then why these modern concepts did not work in Belarus or, put differently, what is the real nature of the division that was named “sausage vs. freedom.” The intellectual failure to mobilize a revolution cannot be explained without an analysis of Belarusian internal
social dynamics.
FRAMING NATION AS CLASS
However infatuated might intellectuals be with their own role of disinterested social critics, they do not stand outside of society. Intellectuals are linked, as Antonio Gramsci argued in his Prison Notebooks, to real social actors, by their inclusion into a class structure and their participation within a particular social order.30 Post-Soviet intellectuals in particular are bound with a new type of social stratification, resulting from an enormous social shift, post-Soviet and postindustrial at the same time. It overtly started with the disintegration of the USSR which, in popular imagination, is often linked to national issues. Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s closest allies, stated during perestroika that nationalism “resurrects now and then, like a phoenix from the ashes. Hence, there must be some objective reasons for that.”31 Simultaneously some scholars of nationalism noticed a relationship between Soviet nationalist movements and the economic views of their proponents. Ernest Gellner and Roman Szporluk argued that the ideal of market economy was most strongly articulated “at the edges” (of the USSR), where nation-building had resumed, while socialist administrative methods were more characteristic of the Soviet imperial center.32 Evidently, in late socialism, nationalism was intertwined with economic liberalism in some profound way, while intellectuals were the main articulators of both. To uncover the meaning of this relationship, I shall draw on the work of Ivan Szelenyi, an outstanding scholar of socialist intellectuals on their road to “class power,” as he called their project.
Szelenyi established a connection between the discourse of human rights and civil society, which was pursued by Central European dissidents from the 1970s through 1989, and that of the (free) market. He argues that the notion of civil society, a crucial topic in dissident circles, was “simply a code to say “capitalism” when this idea was still taboo,”33 as the term “civil” did not carry the baggage that “bourgeois” did, and thus was useful as a radical
step on the road from socialism. Civil society stands for democratic participation and thus can serve to legitimize the propertied class, as only an economically independent man (a “bourgeois” and a citizen at the same time) could confront the (socialist) state as an autonomous actor. In the 1980s the process of making “Burgers” or “citizens” became a major theoretical and ideological issue in dissident theorizing, as it implied “the transition
from subject to citizen as much as the making of the propertied class.”34
In the USSR, the discursive role played by “civil society” in Central Europe was taken over by the rhetoric of nationalism, which resurrected during perestroika: “nationhood,” “independence,” and “national liberation” were used to code similar demands for a non-socialist economic and political system. The nation is a powerful symbol and can be used to legitimize different social regimes as being “better” for it, and thus discourses around national independence became a legitimate way for the emerging elites
to argue for private property and the market as a more effective and fair system, much in the same way as civil society could be used to actually promote liberal capitalism. For example, Zyanon Paznyak, the founder of the Belarusian Popular Front, argued in his work “On the Empire and Property” that the abolition of private property, which makes the core of the Marxist project, deprives individuals of freedom and autonomy to turn them into dependent lumpen-proletarians.35 He believed that only by restoring propertied individuals one could make them truly autonomous. Similarly, Paznyak argued, Soviet national republics, exploited and exhausted by Russia, would have a chance to establish fair economic relations only if they
became independent, sovereign states.
This evidence is important for defining post-Soviet nation-building as a “class” project, which is related to the overt development of social inequalities that existed under state socialism into economic ones in the interests of the new “rising class”: nomenklatura, state managers, or some educated specialists, for whom the Soviet system of resource allocation seemed too restrictive, as their power and resources resulted from their status, and not
from ownership, and as such were insecure.36 The project is also related-in complicated ways-to the activism of intellectuals, who were the main producers of liberal and nationalist discourses (and it was at that moment that they became concerned with the “quality of the population”), forproducing a discourse turns intellectuals into recognized social actors. By
nationalism, I mean sentiments and movements related to the status of communities, which at some point begin defining themselves through national terms: perceived common history, origin, culture, destiny, language, and-most importantly-national oppression. Imagined national injustice, perceived in terms of Soviet occupation, language controversies, perished
great culture, devastated nature, uprooted peasantry, annihilated nobility, disputed territories, and the exhaustion of natural resources, legitimized the claims of independence from “others,” as they “occupied,” “exhausted resources,” “hampered the use of the national language,” “killed national poets,” “ruined national sacred places,” “built their military bases,” and so forth. According to Katherine Verdery, this was possible, because nationalities
were the only organizational forms with an institutional history within the Soviet social universe and provided a principal base for alternative (to the socialist ones) formations.37 Although the issue was in the market system of resource allocation, based on a different idea of social justice, the motive had to be something with which people could identify, and thus
nationalism became the cultural resource capable of actually mobilizing the masses. The Russian publisher Boris Nemirovsky described in a radio interview how deeply moved he had been when in August 1991, right after the coup, Boris Yeltsin called his fellow countrymen “Russian citizens,” instead of “comrades”:
I came back in 1991 and found myself in Moscow during the coup. On
August 21 I was with the crowd defending the White House (Russian Parliament-
e.g.) right at the moment when they raised the Russian “tricolour” for
the first time instead of the red Soviet flag. And I roared as a bull, when Boris
Yeltsin addressed us as “Dear Russian citizens,” and I felt as if my life became
“defined” at that moment. Many times after that I felt like I should give up
this feeling and thought like-well, to hell with all that, but still would go
back to it again and again. At that moment a lot in my life became redefined
for good.38
In Belarus, though, the fusion of nationalism and anticommunism was never realized, which, as will be made clear later, is largely related to elite configuration: the nation seemingly “rejected” independent nationhood through electing Alexander Lukashenko as their president in 1994. He signed a not yet realized reunion with Russia into a common state, initiated and won several referenda on the issues of the state language (rejecting Belarusian as the only state language and reinstating the equal, but, in fact, dominant, status of Russian), national symbols (reintroducing the slightly modified Soviet ones instead of those which were “tinted” during WWII by fascist collaborators) and the prolongation of his presidency. Thus his politics was often interpreted as “antinational,” and the civic division between his supporters and opponents (who argued for an independent “European belonging”), which became evident in March 2006, as the one over “lost nationhood.” Allegedly, for historical reasons common folks forgot their “true” national belonging and had problems identifying themselves as a nation: some became Russified, having adopted “metropolitan” identity, while others turned into “creoles.”39 In a similar way those denationalized
subjects could not grasp “the value of freedom” and failed to rise for their human dignity.
I argued elsewhere that the Belarusian controversy is a “class” one, having at its core, rather than national issues, different methods of resource allocation-market or socialism-and the interests of some groups who benefit (or think that they do) from each of them.40 Lukashenko has saved the centralized system of controlling and distributing resources and, having monopolized a fatherly concern for the people, he secured an almost socialist “welfare state” over which he has extreme power. He got a popular nickname of bat’ka, or “dad,” for “paying” pensions and allowances, fixing prices on basic goods, introducing affirmative action on behalf of students from rural areas, preserving universal healthcare and lengthy maternity leaves, and-not least important-regularly imprisoning government officials of various ranks who allegedly tried to profit “from the people.” In this system, “social justice”-satisfying the basic needs of those who do not have too many assets to be competitive in the market and thus were nostalgic of socialism-was exchanged for their loyalty. Lukashenko’s initial social base included older people, the urban poor, countryside
dwellers, and more women than men, that is, those who had felt marginalized by the early 1990s market reforms. In that system they do not have resources that are needed to realize “autonomy” and “rights’ which, in the final end, are entitled to “burgers” or “middle class.” The rejection of the liberal economic system initially took the form of the rejection of the “national” agenda, which was its symbol. But it was not language or culture per se that were rejected, but the new system of economic inequality, and thus the Belarusian division can be perceived as “class struggle” between the groups possessing different economic and-most importantly- cultural and “cognitive” assets. This division was largely predisposed by the former economic configuration with Belarusian industry focused on heavy and military production, a fairly satisfying (subsidized with Soviet petro-dollars) consumption pattern, and an extremely high proportion of “cosmopolitan” military men from all the former USSR within the population (the Republic was the Soviet “outpost”), who had no stake in the promotion of national issues.41 Currently, power is in the hands of post-Sovietbureaucrats, many of whom are former villagers and the products of the Soviet educational and social system. As social stratification is fundamental to society, and in Belarus it initially took a “national” form, the nation makes a perfect case study for the scholars of post-Soviet, supposedly ethnic divisions and conflicts.
With time, national issues lost their political prominence (the fact recognized by the ideologues of the national cause), as the controversy was not really about what language to speak, but how to distribute resources.42 The failure of the “jeans revolution” to mobilize larger society can be explained by the specific Belarusian social structure. By leveling economic inequality, Lukashenko “halted” class formation, and the broad antagonisms
around which post-Soviet social discontent was built elsewhere, failed to be formed. First, there are not enough emerging agents, who would be both interested, as the owners of property and resources, in the autonomy from the state, which could push them to stand for their “human dignity,” or, in other words, for a liberal and transparent system benefiting them as independent actors. Second, with reduced inequality, there could be no “oligarchs,” that is, those very (post-nomenklatura semi-criminal) elites, against whom people’s ire was targeted in the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution.” Former communist nomenklatura and state managers were not able to transform themselves into propertied bourgeoisie to such an extent, as it had happened under political capitalism elsewhere. With most resources controlled by the state, and the president regularly and publicly curtailing the burgeoning capitalists “on behalf of the people,” as soon as there is the slightest suspicion that someone might become too independent and, thus, a threat to his power, “oligarchs” could not be produced. Under moderate inequality (there are no super-rich or absolutely poor) and rigid state control,
economic elites are dependent on the state and the government (of which they are often a part) and cannot confront it directly.43 Lukashenko’s supporters saw the goal of the “jeans revolution” in the promotion of economic inequality and bringing to power “greedy” capitalists.
It makes sense now to turn to the Belarusian “educated class” to consider their position within post-Soviet structuration. The disintegration of the USSR led to the fractuation of intellectual elite44 and to at least one fundamental division: the division between those whose capitals remain bound with the slightly transformed state academia (and the bureaucratic
positions they might have occupied there) and those whose new social, cultural, and cognitive capitals are invested into new “independent” academic and intellectual institutions supported by international donors.45 These humanistic scholars embody a special habitus that became possible with the deconstruction of state control over the production of knowledge. Through participation in these institutions this intellectual faction is able, having shed state ideological restraints, to achieve the autonomy to enter prestigious international symbolic markets and to benefit from global intellectual exchanges.
Independent intellectuals and artists made a disproportionate part among those who rallied in the “Freedom Square.” If this fact was ever noticed by experts, they tended to resort to love for freedom as an explanation for human behavior. It is important to remember, though, that intellectual cadres whose subsistence comes from institutional grants, personal fellowships, or commissions, and not state salaries, are both autonomous and interested to stand for civil rights and “freedom” (many of them demonstrated real courage and human dignity in this). This brings us back to the point of Yaroslav Grytsak, mentioned earlier in this chapter, who argued that the “Orange Revolution” resorted to the civic, rather than nationalist, rhetoric
of dignity and honor.
If it can be argued that important participation by independent intellectuals in the “Freedom Square” is a sign that they are emerging of the Soviet collapse as a group with an interest, what “arguments” do they have then to negotiate their position in the new social order? This question takes us to the basic debates about intellectuals, which concern the nature of their
social weight in society. Stanley Aronowitz, a contemporary leftist theoretician, asks if intellectuals can constitute discursive communities that generate unique subject positions, or whether they have to rely on social actors with real power to assert their status.46 This issue is of special interest as regards post-Soviet intellectual actors, who are starting to develop an identity of interests in postindustrial age, where knowledge is believed to be a new productive force. I will consider these questions further below.
ANXIOUS INTELLECTUALS
In the autumn of 2005 the Belarusian intellectual journal ARCHE published the transcript of a recent roundtable discussion that had been focused on the role of critical intellectuals in contemporary Belarus.47 The panelists were the editors of several independent intellectual journals (“ARCHE,” “Frahmenty,” “Topos,” “Palitychnaya sphere”) and web magazines and some authors associated with them (me included), coming from two loosely defined and partially overlapping intellectual milieu. On the one hand, there were self-conscious and assertive Belarusian-speakers and the initiators of intellectual projects that emerged in Minsk in the 1990s. Many of them switched to Belarusian in a kind of a statement and a political act.
They are perceived as the intellectual voices representing the post-Soviet Belarusian nation, and in this capacity are relatively well known among their Central European colleagues.
The other group was made of some Russian-speaking academics, affiliated with European Humanities University (EHU), which relocated to Lithuania and is supported by the European Commission and several major academic foundations, after the Belarusian government had closed it in 2004 for political reasons. The members of this second group are hardly known at Central European cultural markets, but publish their work in American and European academic and Russian intellectual journals. Most of the panelists were fluent in English and German or French.
The moderator remarked that some time ago it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to imagine the two “opposing” national poles discussing a common topic at the same table. Academia and cultural production are the main points of symbolic confrontation between the two factions of independent intellectuals, and they were used to competition, rather than solidarity. But the topic was of common concern, and they turned to looking for common ground, and this demonstrates that they, in fact, share the position in social structure and play one common role in post-Soviet intellectual market, developing the paradigm of “new humanities” (postcolonial, cultural, or gender studies or their interdisciplinary combinations), that is, the disciplines which presuppose a “Western connection.” This type of “new knowledge” is rarely institutionalized in post-Soviet state academia, and its proponents tend to be located in independent universities, research centers, or temporary projects, where their work is made possible with Western grants or fellowships, travel, publications, and conference support. The division between Russian-speaking and Belarusian-speaking “new knowledge” producers proves to be less and less important.
The roundtable where intellectuals were discussing intellectuals was a politically important event, but not a unique one: discussions, articles, essays, statements, and conversations attempting collective self reflection take place at Site belorusskogo intellektual’nogo soobshchestva (Belarusian Intellectual Community Website), Nashe Mnenie analytical blog, in
the 2005 special issue of Topos, in Nasha niva independent weekly, and elsewhere.48 The rise during the last decade of such discussions is more than just a Belarusian phenomenon: a similar trend is observed in Russia (where multiple publications focus on the role of intelligentsia or on the critique of post-Soviet philosophy or sociology), in Ukraine and, probably, elsewhere. This can be seen as cultural evidence of a distinct anxiety of some
intellectuals over their own status. However salient had intelligentsia been for perestroika, arguing for democratic change (as it turned out, on behalf of the emerging class), their position in the new social structure is far from dominant. With the disintegration of Soviet order, intelligentsia was robbed of its legitimacy and its traditional (in the Russian universe) privilege to be moral and cultural arbiters. Russian sociologists Lev Gudkov and Boris Dybin recognized: “The period of intelligentsia’ monopoly on the ideological
and symbolic classification of reality . . . is over.”49
Contemporary discussions of the nature of intellectual work and the intellectuals’ role, besides being the vehicles of self-reflection and communicating an identity, have a public function, performative and political rather than reflexive, to negotiate a new group status and privilege. Not having any material assets, intellectuals have two interrelated options. They can gain social power by establishing connections with other powerful agents, on whose behalf intellectuals might act: “new humanities” make a good example, as their academic legitimacy and, hence, the social weight of their explorers comes from the “West” as the locus of (cognitive, academic, or political) power. The second option is to claim power and privilege based on the intellectuals’ own assets, which have to be discursively affirmed as
their exclusive monopoly. The specific intellectual asset is “knowledge” or, rather, the hegemony that knowledge producers attempt to build by monopolizing it.
For the project to be successful, knowledge needs to be perceived as the capital that intellectuals possess exclusively and that endows them with a special vision. For example, a Belarusian sociologist, explaining the reason for the gender gap in voting (for Lukashenko), sees it in a bigger number of elderly women than men. He believes that the elderly, for historical reasons, could not get good education and without it, they are not able to make the right voting decision. He writes:
Gender per se is not important. The real reason is the following. Women-and
this is how natural demography works-live longer than men, so there are
more elderly women, than elderly men. . . . The most important factor is the
educational capital. It allows one to critically assess information, first, and
opens access to other sources of information, second. And in Belarusian social
space these sources are distributed unevenly: the bigger the town, the more
information sources are available. In the countryside, state TV dominates. On
the other hand, education and age are related, for the elderly people did not
have an opportunity to get it.50
Further on, the article builds a connection between access to the contemporary sources of information, especially the Internet-and this results from one’s “educational level”-and voting against Lukashenko: those opposed to him are better educated to make the “correct choice.” This explanation disregards that the very unequal access to information is involved with social inequality and accumulated capitals: those having an “Internet connection” possess other perks as well. They have more information, because they have different professions and status, more money, they live in bigger cities with more opportunities, and not in the countryside. In other words, they belong to a different social group and have more assets (age and education being some of them) to be successful in the market economy. They
are in a different social situation even before they start having any access to information and assessing it, although intellectuals may fail to see it. “I have been amazed for some time now, an intellectural maintains, that a big group of Belarusians regularly, almost every day read Russian newspapers, for example, Izvestia. I never fail to ask these people: and why wouldn’t you read the German Zeit, or the English Times?51
These views are quite revealing of the group interests of intellectuals, for deriving the “correct” voting choices from the capacity to “critically evaluate” information implies the right of those who “know” to guide others and even speak for them. For example, a Belarusian philosopher in the paper on the March 2006 events disregards any social issues or interests, insisting that the very juxtaposition of social-economic and political rights is a pseudoproblem. She believes that all citizens should just “want” to assert their rights, as intellectuals did in March 2006. Evidently not everyone will, and thus intellectuals need to be ready to do this work for other groups.52 Another prominent philosopher, Valyantsin Akudovich, trying to rationalize the elitist position in one of his essays, argues that the oppositional message- that the “regime” is immoral and needs to be changed-although true, is
meaningless for the nation at large, as “social province,” as he names common folks, has its own values and a different lifestyle. He maintains that he is a writer and a philosopher, and thus freedom of speech is for him a “life or death” issue. But his parents, who live in the countryside and have not read a book since they finished high school, do not care about freedom of expression, because they have no stake in it. On the other hand, it would be a major deprivation for them, if their right to grow potatoes or to slaughter a pig for Christmas were curtailed. Thus, he concludes, “our values” are meaningless for those who make a living with their own calloused hands. Evidently, intellectuals and common folks have “very different scopes of responsibility,” and he wished there would be more of “us” (intellectuals)
to remove “the social province” to where it belongs and should be, for then the province would worry about the issues that are appropriate for them, and we would take care about those that belong to us.53
Akudovich is the most brilliant intellectual of his generation, deeply involved into theorizing the “fate” of the nation, and I remember reading the essay for the first time, expecting every moment that he is going to say that unless we make our values meaningful for those living through their calloused hands, our project cannot be either moral or legitimate. But he never did, having discursively translated epistemological hegemony into the right
for political power. The exclusive intellectuals’ right to “rule” according to the meaning that they give to reality is justified because the people “do not know”: they are either too dumb to understand and appreciate the right ideas, or have no need in them. In Belarusian “democratic” media those on whose behalf intellectuals make democratic claims are seen as “zombied electorate,”54 “social province”55 (i.e., backward and opposed to progressive
change), irrational “lumpens,”56 plebians and primitives, having poor taste in art and leisure,57 “crazy babushkas,” irrationally lured to Stalinist principles,58 passive and not capable of active and responsible behavior,59 and driven by interests and not by the ulterior and abstract concepts of honor or freedom. It is often believed that Lukashenko was elected, because his voters “do not know” and thus, a writer claims, we should not stay the “hostages
of his collective-farmer’s intellect.”60 In another post-Soviet example the famous Russian feminist Maria Arbatova, who wrote a book about her failed attempt to become a member of the Russian Duma explains, why she wanted to be a candidate from the “university precinct” of Moscow, the area with the highest number of voters with advanced degrees: “This is my
main lure, for my feminist political program can only be appreciated in this precinct.”61
In this type of post-Soviet discourse “correct choices” and “knowledge” itself do not emerge as social constructions and categories of power, created through a discourse and social action, but as objectively existing “truths,” similar to the Hegelian absolute idea, which can be discovered or understood in the same way as the laws of nature. In March 2006 that objective truth must have been “freedom.” Some attained it, being able to understand, and others didn’t. By their very nature (being educated and producing knowledge), intellectuals turn out as those who would understand this “idea” best, but to maintain their knowledge monopoly, they need to prove that others do not know, that is, to produce a differentiation between “us” and “them,” creating inequality through a discourse and claiming a “classed
position.”
Stanley Aronowitz used Althusser and Gramsci to suggest that “Science is a term we affix to ideology that wishes to become hegemonic.”62 If hegemonic ideology is disguised as science or knowledge, the latter, as a form of specific intellectual capital, becomes directly converted into power claims. If intellectuals know and if those who can ever know can only be intellectuals, a very important link, an “intimate relationship,”63 as Ivan Szelenyi calls
it, between knowledge and power gets established. Szelenyi draws from Michel Foucault and his theorizing of knowledge and power to show how both socialist and post-socialist intellectuals use knowledge as the vehicle of their own legitimization. To get power and resources, they need to persuade everyone that they are the ones who know: under socialism that was a rebellious idea, for it was the party that was supposed to know then. After socialism, though, these claims become legitimate and imply the autonomy of knowledge producers. As intellectuals resort to this strategy, they claim a privileged position for themselves and act as a group with an interest or a “new class,” as scholars of postindustrial society (Richard Florida, Alvin Gouldner, Ivan Szelenyi, and others) tend to think of those who work with knowledge and information.
In contemporary writings on (postsocialist) intellectuals the term “new class,” created by Djilas to include nomenklatura or bureaucrats, gets a new content. Intellectuals are sometimes seen as class or, rather, as those who attempt to become a class, because in contemporary social analysis a new understanding of class has emerged. After Marx, classes were seen as collectivities (though his own understanding was more complicated). If this could be true for classical capitalism, with the advancement of “postindustrial” society with its multiple and complicated social divisions and delineations, classes come to be seen as the modes of differentiation which can be created through the use of different forms of capital or even through the power of the discourse. In this system, “people do not have to
explicitly recognize class issues, or identify with discrete class groupings, for class processes to operate.”64
As a broad organizing concept for the investigation of a wide range of issues associated with social inequality and social differentiation, “class” includes, after P. Bourdieu, matters of culture, lifestyle and taste. Different class cultures can be viewed as the modes of differentiation, and hierarchy emerges, when “others” are made the objects of “cultural shame.” A journalist, who asserts in the oppositional newspaper that street concerts, carnivals, and rallies organized by the state to celebrate the National Independence Day, can only attract primitives and plebeians and there is nothing for a cultured person like him to see,65 acts as a social critic and a judge of taste (the two intellectual roles, according to Z. Bauman). In this way he produces class difference, without directly applying the notions of
economic inequality, as “cultural outlooks are implicated in the modes of exclusion and/or domination.”66
Intellectuals usually see themselves as highly individualized actors and are unwilling to place themselves within a certain place in class structure or to recognize their class belonging. They tend to reject an inclusion with the propertied or powerful on the basis of the fact that they “do not have anything” of material value. At the same time, they construct a hierarchy by claiming a specific identity and using the power of defining others as culturally inferior. This is the strategy that connects social identity with the pursuit for domination, characteristic of some post-Socialist intellectual groups.
Knowledge, the main vehicle for intellectual legitimation, does not exist as an “objective truth” that needs to be discovered, extracted, and presented to the public. As M. Foucault has shown, it is constructed by actors with interests, who declare their ideas as science and condemn others as “ideology” or even illiteracy. As a constructed entity, knowledge cannot be legitimized “by itself” and needs a link to some external power. This makes intellectuals very vulnerable social agents: in their projects to convert knowledge into power, they always have to rely on “real power.”
After the disintegration of socialism, “scholarly interests helped to foster cohesive communities with a sense of professional dignity and kinship with the intellectual community outside” the national borders.67 For post-Soviet independent intellectuals, a link to that community or the presence in a common symbolic field with it is involved with the material support of their work, their research projects, publications, the journals that they publish and the conferences that they organize (from this point of view, Belarusian intellectuals were not really sincere when they claimed to have been free of material interests). Interacting with donors always implies promoting their ideas,68 at least in the Foucaldian sense, and thus intellectuals become involved into a social process that they can hardly escape. By the virtue of the social position from which they speak, they tend to articulate the interests of the “rising class,” though they may be honest in believing that they have no other interests, but serving their nation and their people. Thus they may substitute the interests of the people they claim to represent by their own corporate interests, which result from their role in the field of symbolic production. These interests are rarely purely economic ones, but they are still tied to the economic opportunities, social capital and power. Post-Soviet intellectuals have not been able to reach “class power” by becoming independent actors; whether they can really argue on behalf of the “people,” remains to be seen.
NOTES
1. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 39.
2. Peter Berger, An Invitation to Sociology: Humanistic Perspective (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963).
3. Gudkov Lev and Boris Dubin, “Ot avtorov,” Intelligentsia (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2009), 7-8.
4. See Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
5. Alexander Gritsanov, “Nichego, krome zheludka,” BelGazeta 28, no. 700 (2009): 21.
6. See, for example, Kastus’ Bandaruk, “Financial Times: Tsi adbudzetsa jeansovaya
revalutsia?” Radyjo Svaboda, March 16, 2006, www.svaboda.org/content/article/767947.html.
7. For an analysis of the March 2006 events see Elena Korosteleva, “Was There a Quiet Revolution? Belarus after the 2006 Presidential Election,” Journal of Communist
Studies and Transition Politics 25, no. 2 (2009): 324-46.
8. See Novosti NISEPI, Vypusk 2, no. 40 (2006), www.iiseps.org/bullet06-2.html.
9. The narratives of the events were later collected in D. Kostenko and A, Fox, Kashko i dr. Partizanskaya respublika. Aktsii protesta v Minske 19-25 marta 2006 goda (Moskva: ROO Centr “Panorama,” 2006).
10. See www.ucpb.org/?lang=rus&open=13673.
11. See Pavel Starodub, “Lyudi ikukly,” Sovetskaya Belorussia, March 23, 2006, sb.by/post/50508/.
12. The opposition appealed to Western governments, and the expelled students were accepted into Polish universities within the newly created “Kalinowsky program.” It has functioned since then, bringing young activists to Poland to study, in case they can prove persecution by the Belarusian regime.
13. For examples, see Alexey Krivolap, “Stabil’nyi crizis v nestabil’nom obshchestve,”
Topos 13, no. 2 (2006): 70-80.
14. Georgi Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 81.
15. Eyal Gil, The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 122.
16. Maxim Zhbankov and Andrey Rasinsky, Revalyutsya duhu, yakoi ne chakali. Borba idet ne za vozhdei, a za svobodu lichnogo vybora, nmnby.org/pub/060306/25-d.html.
17. Petra Rudkouski, “Paustanne na Ktrychnitskai ploshchy,” ARCHE, no. 3 (2006), arche.bymedia.net/2006-4/rudkouski406.htm.
18. See by-ua.livejournal.com/71679.html; juzny.livejournal.com/37016.html;
anika-vsh.livejournal.com/11477.html; worvik.livejournal.com/17534.html.
19. Rudkouski, “Paustanne na Kastrychnitskai ploshchy.”
20. Victor Bobrov, “Ploshchad’ Svobody,” Nashe mnenie, March 28, 2006, www
.nmnby.org/pub/060306/28-m.html.
21. Bobrov, “Ploshchad’ Svobody.”
22. Tatiana Montik, “Belorusam bylo gorazdo trudnee, chem Ukraintsam,” Charter-
97, March 31, 2006, charter97.org/bel/news/2006/03/31/ukraina.
23. Montik, “Belorusam bylo gorzado trudnee, chem Ukraintsam.”
24. See Victor Bobrov, “Nabliudenie za nabliudatelem,” Nashe mnenie, April 11,
2006, www.nmnby.org/pub/0604/11-m.html.
25. See “Ploshchad’ Kalinovskogo,” which documents the events in the “Freedom
Square,” www.ucpb.org/?lang=rus&open=13695.
26. See Vladimir Furs, “‘Vlast naroda’: Sovremennye predstavleniia demokratii i belorusskaia model ‘narodovlastia’”; Alexander Sarna, “Belorusskoe televidenie: Osobennosti natsional’noi propagandy v predvybornyi period”; Almira Ousmanova, “Belorusskii detourment, ili iskusstvo obkhodnogo manevra kak politika,” Topos 13, no. 2 (2006).
27. Vital Silitski, “Pachatak revalutsii duhu,” Arche, no. 4 (2006), arche.bymedia.net/2006-4/silicki406.htm.
28. Tatiana Zhurzhenko, “Mezhdu klanom, sem’ei i natsiei: Postsovetskaia masculinnost’/feminnost’ v tsvetnykh revolutsiakh,” Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2007).
29. Yaroslav Grytsak, “Rebirth of Ukraine,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas. Debaty o politike i kul’ture, 38, no. 6 (2004).
30. Antonio Gramsci, “On Intellectuals,” in Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992-2007).
31. Alexander Yakovlev, Sumerki (Moscow: Materik, 2003), 445.
32. Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2000), 264.
33. L. King and I. Szelenyi, Theories of the New Class: Intellectuals and Power (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 114.
34. King and Szelenyi, Theories of the New Class, 115.
35. Zyanon Paznyak, “Pra imperyu i ulasnasc,” in Sapraudnae ablichcha (Minsk: “Palifact,” 1992), 198.
36. For an exploration of the process see Timo Piirainen, Towards a New Social Order
in Russia: Transforming Structures and Everyday Life (Hanover, Conn.: Dartmouth University Press, 1997).
37. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 85.
38. See euro.svoboda.org/programs/OTB/2001/OBT.081301.asp (electronic document).
39. See Uladzimir Abushenka, “Creolstva i prablema natsyanalna-kulturnai samaidentyfikatsii,” Antalehia suchasnaga belaruskaga myslennya, Ukladalniki Ales Antsipenka, Valyantsin Akudovich (Minsk, 2004).
40. See Elena Gapova, “On Nation, Gender and Class Formation in Belarus... and Elsewhere in the Post-Soviet World,” Nationalities Papers 30, no. 4 (2002).
41. For an overview of Belarusian socialist economy see Grigory Ioffe, Understanding
Belarus and How Western Foreign Policy Misses the Mark (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008).
42. See Elena Gapova, “O politicheskoi ekonomii natsional’nogo iazyka v Berlarusi,” Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2005).
43. Alexander Feduta, Lukashenko: Politicheskaia biografiia (Moscow: “Referendum,” 2005), 369.
44. Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer, 124.
45. I consider this division in “Post-Soviet Academia and Class Power: Belarusian
Controversy over Symbolic Markets,” in Studies in East-European Thought (forthcoming).
46. Stanley Aronowitz, “On Intellectuals,” in Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Poetics, ed. B. Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 11.
47. “Krytychnya int’lektualy: symbalichnaya barac’ba i strukturnae procistayan’ne. Krugly stol,” Arche, no. 6 (2005), arche.bymedia.net/2005-6/stol605.htm.
48. These discussions are analyzed in: Alexander Pershai, “Questioning the Hegemony of the Nation-State in Belarus: Production of Intellectual Discourses as Production of Resources,” Nationalities Papers 34, no. 5 (November 2006).
49. Lev Gudkov and Boris Dybin, “Pechat i izmenenia v sisteme tsennostei postsovetskogo
obshchestva” (1993), in Intelligentsia (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2009), 211.
50. Mickalai Katsuk, “Mity belaruskai sacyalogii,” Arche, no. 10 (2005).
51. Olga Shparaga, belintellectuals.com/discussions/?id=132 (electronic document).
52. Olga Shparaga, “Vybory v contekste kul’tury prav cheloveka: Sluchai Belarusi,” Topos 13, no. 2 (2006): 5-13.
53. Valyantsin Akudovich, “Vendée, albo svboda yak forma vyaulennya ulady,” in Razburyts Paris (Mensk: “Logvinau,” 2004), 108.
54. Aleh Loika, “Geta mif, shto nasha apasitsia slabaya,” www.gs.promedia.by/ arhiv/2002/gs268/other.htm (electronic document).
55. The term is by Valyantsin Akudovich.
56. Feduta, Lukashenko, 311, 124.
57. “Dva svyaty, dva svety,” Nasha niva, July 8, 2005, p. 12.
58. The term used by the essayist Lyolik Ushkin in the newspaper Nasha niva.
59. Vadzim Kaznacheu, “Apasitsia abmyarkouvae plan dzeyannyau,” Svaboda, December 22, 1997, www.belarus.net/MassMedia/ Newspaper/Svaboda/140/140_2.htm.
60. Svetlana Alexievich, “My ne dolzhny byt’ zalozhnikami kolkhoznogo intellekta Lukashenko,” Charter-9.7, charter97.org/ru/news/2008/5/30/6995/ (electronic document).
61. Maria Arbatova, Kak ya pytalas’ chestno popast’ v Dumu (Moscow: “Eksmo,” 2003), 93.
62. Aronowitz, “On Intellectuals.”
63. King and Szelenyi, Theories of the New Class.
64. Wendy Bottero, “Class Identities and the Identity of Class,” Sociology 38, no.5 (2004): 989.
65. “Dva svyaty, dva svety,” Nasha niva, August 2005, p. 12.
66. Devine F. Savage and M. Savage, “Conclusion: Renewing Class Analysis,” in
Renewing Class Analysis, ed. R. Crompton et al. (London: Blackwell, 2000), 195.
67. Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer, 111.
68. Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern
Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 88.
Elena Gapova
ANXIOUS INTELLECTUALS: FRAMING THE NATION AS CLASS IN BELARUS Pp. 197-218
…sometimes you get the impression the Free Speech movement produced more corporate executives than Harvard Business School.
David Brooks1
In his “Invitation to Sociology” Peter Berger defined sociology as an attempt to understand.2 For several years already I have been trying to understand the “perturbations” that happened with the democratic and liberal visions of the brave new world that used to be the mantra of Soviet liberal intelligentsia. When the new world did arrive, many former critics of the “Soviet regime,” semi-dissident proponents of free speech and human rights, who had spent their nights reading samizdat, listening to the jammed “Voice of America” programming, and dreaming of freedom and the abolition of all forms of censorship, reemerged as patriarchal nationalists, religious conservatives, moral censors and antifeminists: put differently, as the promoters of new boundaries and of various forms of censorship. Those who have retained liberal views are too often full of contempt for “the people,” whom they see as lowly and vulgar sovki, bearing the worst “Soviet” psychological makeup and not being able to embrace liberal values. Some sociologists related the “perverted” character of Soviet social, political, and economic institutions to a particular human type and argued that fundamental
changes in personality structure were needed before any civilizing changes in institutions could be realized.3
Andrey Sinyavsky, an exiled Soviet dissident and writer was indignant of the intellectual position constructed on the opposition to “the people,” for that was an extreme deviation from the traditional intelligentsia vision of narod.4 On the other hand, this position is opposed to the Soviet developmental project, which initially embraced the idea of a new person, a communist man, more advanced spiritually, than an average human being and living according to the principle “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Brezhnevist-era propaganda celebrated Soviet people as a “new historical unity” who had arguably embodied a new, fraternal type of social bondage. These idealizing views were done with during perestroika, as some intellectuals reverted to the notions
of the quality of population and the quality of “genofond” (genetic pool) to explain the calamities of Soviet history. They argued that Stalin’s purges had wiped out the bloom of the nation: the best educated, the most talented, those incarnating ulterior principles and not prone to moral compromise. Thus the human “material,” with which intelligentsia is left, is just not good enough to realize any democratic projects. For example, a Belarusian intellectual characterizes his contemporaries, who, in his view, are more concerned with their well-being (“full stomach”), than freedom, in the following way: “our local population has inherited from their ancestors only those skills which had ensured their survival when authorities resorted to the use of force, and are absolutely not capable of articulating their critical will in any civilized form.”5
This text will be telling a story involving some Belarusian intellectual groups, who in pursuit of their alleged democracy cause find themselves across the barricade from the “people.” What needs to be explained, then, is the reason for this discursive alienation. I see this transformation of the intellectual vision as a part of their response to the “crisis of intelligentsia,” a social process into which intellectual actors are currently involved and inside which they try to reinvent themselves as a group with interests. My
assertion is that the Belarusian situation is not unique, but is an ultimate expression of some trends common for the post-Soviet region, where intellectuals try to negotiate their place within the new social order. Belarus, often labeled the last dictatorship in Europe, makes, for a number of reasons, a representative case study, which can be a clue to a larger postsocialist conundrum.
THE REVOLUTION THAT NEVER HAPPENED
During the last decade several post-Soviet nations have lived through major power confrontations, which resulted in the overthrow of formally legitimate governments by Westernized elites. The events got the name of colored revolutions after the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution,” which took place in 2004. An earlier one, named “the Revolution of Roses,” but smaller in scale, was realized in Georgia, and still another, the “Tulip Revolution,” in Kyrgyzstan. All of them were spurred by controversial presidential elections, as the nomenklatura-type elites with communist and/or criminal past, who had stayed in power since the 1990s, resorted to media manipulation and the use of police against street protests to conceal threatening election results. Those who opposed them on the other side claimed to represent people rising for justice and their human dignity. Another thing common for all the revolutions was their spectacular visual form: developing as popular “performances,” which made them attractive for younger people, they were extensively televised by international media. The growing use of the Internet was their mobilizing resource; flash-mobs, humor, and art helped to deliver a message, while local NGOs, believed to be grassroots,but openly reliant both financially and ideologically on Western governments
and foundations, were involved in them in significant ways.
A similar event was expected in Belarus in March 2006: even before the presidential elections did take place, the “jeans revolution” was discussed in oppositional media as well as in some European newspapers. For example, the British Financial Times published an article asking whether a jeans revolution was capable of liberating Europe from its last surviving dictator.6 The color of the forthcoming revolution, for the pattern of having a powerful symbol had already been established, was supposed to be blue: the color of the sky, of liberty, and, importantly, of the flag of the European Union which symbolized the freedom of which the nation had been deprived since 1994, when Alexander Lukashenko had been elected the president in the first democratic elections. Blue ribbons, readily delivered “from Europe,” were handed out by activists in the streets of the capital city to inspire a revolutionary mood and to establish a visual continuity with earlier colored revolutions. Wearing the ribbons, which could be classified as unsanctioned protest, was quite dangerous, for the lack of rights for publicly expressing political views is no joke in Belarus.
But against all hopes, the revolution did not happen: unlike the way it had been in the Ukraine, Georgia, or Kyrgyzstan, Belarusian people did not take to the streets to support several hundred (at certain times, several thousand) protesters, who rallied against the reelection of Alexander Lukashenko.7 The opposition argued that the March 2006 elections, as well as the ones that took place five years earlier, were both illegal and unfair. They
were illegal, because to participate in them for the third time, which was against the Constitution, Lukashenko changed it, for the second time, allegedly on request from the people. They were not fair, because the opposition was not given a fair chance or hardly any chance at all. Some political parties were banned from the polls, others were almost ousted through media manipulation and “administrative resources,” that is, the local authorities,
police, and courts. State sponsored media advertised the president’s program, while independent media were hardly available outside the capital city, because of the obstacles put to them. There was pressure on stateemployees and students to vote for the president. Any sociological polls but the government ones were forbidden, and thus no one can really say how
many votes were cast for the candidates. The Central Election Committee reported the president’s victory at 83 percent; Independent Institute for Social and Economic research, which had polled people clandestinely, declared in several weeks that the president had won, but at 63 percent.8 Alexander Lukashenko later recognized that when he had learned of his own victory at 93 percent, he ordered to change the figure to be announced to 83 percent,
out of modesty. A decent guy indeed.
On the election day oppositional leaders appealed to the nation to hold a rally at the October Square in Minsk. By late evening, as the news arrived of the president’s landslide victory and the crowd roared with indignation, it was suggested to return to the square the next day to sum up the election results. It was on that next day that several young people, evidently inspired by the spectacle of the Ukrainian Maidan, put up the first tent on the cold night pavement. In a couple of hours, there were several tents and dozens of young people ready to remain there “till the end.” According to the urban legend, the four-day act of nonviolent civil disobedience was an impromptu thing.9 The oppositional leaders, having to be inventive, urged everyone to phone their friends and relatives to inform them of the protests and to ask for hot coffee and blankets. One of the participants described this beginning in her blog:
On March the 20th, in the evening, the first tents were put up. Young people,
guys and girls, holding their hands, surrounded those who were putting up the
tents, to shield and protect them. It became clear immediately what was to be
done. My grandmother lives across the street from the Square. I said as soon
I appeared at the door: “Turn on the kettle.” While the water was heating, I
picked up all the warm clothes that could be found. I even discovered an old
cottonwool coat. I told my mother that there were tents in the Square and that
I was going to stay there. We needed hot tea, which, most probably, would be
needed throughout the whole night. Mama was scared.10
The camp was permanently surrounded by militia and ununiformed agents, who tended to stop anyone trying to deliver food, hot tea and blankets, but these, somehow, were delivered anyway. During the day just several people were staying near the tents under the falling snow, but in the evenings, the public space of the Square became much more populated. Passing cars horned their support, women brought homemade pirozhki, speeches were made and flags waved, with some slogans in English, so the world could understand: as international TV crews started arriving, the campers, competing for emotional attention, became aware of their spectacular potential.
Government media, busy with celebrating the president’s victory, hardly mentioned the camp, presenting it as an anarchic gathering of moral deviants and brutes, concerned less with democracy than projecting Western interests and, in fact, directly supported by some Western governments.11 On the forth night, at around 3 AM the camp was “liquidated” by OMON (special police force): according to some evidence, the protesters, while transported to prison, were told, as a “joke,” that they would be shot in a forest, and the women were told that they would be raped. The captives remained in the prison yard for several hours without a permission to use bathrooms, and in the morning, hasty judges sentenced more than four
hundred detainees to fifteen days’ imprisonment for disturbing public order. The sentence implied the loss of jobs for those employed at the state sector and the expulsion from universities for students.12 State TV vilified the campers by displaying porno magazines, used condoms, empty vodka bottles, and syringes allegedly found in the tents, but, most probably, put there by the TV-crews to plant a vision of moral degradation. Belarusian
state media was selling a cover story of the enemies of the nation, on pay from the West, plotting to undermine and overthrow the legitimate government, the way it had happened in Serbia.13
At this point I need to stop to resolve some methodological issues which arise when heartless social scientists turn to touchy subjects, involving human heroism and sacrifice or cruelty. I am looking for a structural pattern, and my further analysis will rely on actors, interests and other social categories, and some readers might imagine a crude “expert” disregarding human agency in favor of an alienated structural explanation and thus failing to take
account of the microprocesses at the level of the individual. Under these charges I am turning to the point made by Georgi Derluguian in his book focused on the extremely charged subject of Chechnya intellectuals: some of his interviewees might have been involved in wartime atrocities (at which point he stopped interviews). Derluguian points to “the false antinomy of structure and agency,” which is effectively overcome by resorting to the operational concepts of habitus and structural field, offered by Pierre Bourdieu. Through
this conceptual apparatus, developed to analyze ideologies and intellectuals, the actions of intellectuals, who promote interests and create alliances across classes, are seen within a certain “structural field.” Thus “Bourdieu has shown us how to apply, in research practice, the intuitions of earlier thinkers such as ... Antonio Gramsci.”14 Relying on similar principles in my further analysis, I will operate outside of moral categories, but refer to structured relations that define “a form of sociation and a discursive strategy that corresponds to it.”15 This said, I can now revert to my topic.
The March events launched an existential search for answers as to why the nation did not join the protest to turn it into a decisive blow on the “regime,” for neither entrepreneurs, nor workers, not even intelligentsia in any significant numbers or the drivers of the horning cars stood in the square. Though the evening rallies did attract up to ten thousand people in the capital city, in Ukraine or Georgia hundreds of thousands went into the streets. Thus journalists, scholars, and public intellectuals glorified the young campers as a postcommunist generation, who had internalized democratic values and by refusing to swallow the lies, had saved the honor of the apathetic nation. The nonviolent resistance in “Freedom Square” or “Kalinowsky Square” as it was named after the leader of the 1863 anticzarist
uprising, was perceived as “the revolution of free spirit”16 and an outbreak of creative will realized by romantic revolutionaries, devoid of any interests and urged just by love for freedom.17 Some camp survivors focused, in their reflexive self-search blogs, on the issue of personal choice with which they had been confronted,18 and an author writing in the independent intellectual journal Arche, which is made possible through Western, support, recognized: “That which was happening and is happening in Belarus, has some metaphysical quality.”19 In his perception, the campers were like the great heroes of antiquity, whose courage and pure and noble spirit were beyond cold and rational logic.
The rest of the nation was declared too cowardly and loaded with material interests to rise for their human dignity. One of the first reaction texts at the Nashe mnenie (Our opinion) analytical blog juxtaposed the material and the disinterested: “In contemporary Belarus, again, we have a postperestroika dilemma of ‘freedom vs. sausage.’”20 The phrase alludes to the Soviet metaphor of “sausage” which, at the times of deficiency of consumer goods, stood for consumer satisfaction and general well-being, and the author maintained:
On the one hand, there are those who would stand day and night in the cold,
bearing beatings and violations by police, or unbelievable lies about them in
the state media. On the other, there are commoners, who would not even understand,
what it means to be free.21
The view of lowly commoners, driven by their “stomach needs,” was widespread. A journalist remarked in a Ukrainian newspaper: “The nation, for whom a piece of sausage is more important than freedom, can only be told: Bon appetit!”22 An oppositional intellectual wrote:
Really, one can hardly explain the value of freedom to someone, especially
if the person does not want to feel it. One cannot explain the flavor of some
exquisite food to those who have never tried the dish, or to render the feeling
of a flight to those who are not capable of flying. Love for freedom is like a
religious feeling. It cannot be explained rationally. But it can be “caught” from
those who do feel freedom and long for it.23
Valeriya Novodvorskaya, a former Russian dissident, used, in a TV interview, the Polish-Belarusian word bydlo, which means “cattle,” to name those who “did not rise.”24 Historically, the word denoted both domestic animals and serfs and is extremely denigrating, because Belarusian peasants had been called bydlo by the Polish landlords. Thus the insult had both class and ethnic subtones, in fact characterizing the nation as slaves.
The “sausage versus freedom” metaphor was the first explanatory trope for the Belarusian civic division, but within the next year, the search for the roots of the nation’s “apathy”-put differently, for the failure to mobilize a larger support base-resulted in academic articles, memoirs and documentaries. 25 All of them could only be created outside the official academia or public sphere and with support from international donors. The philosophical journal Topos, affiliated with European Humanities University, a Belarusian
university currently “in exile” in Lithuania, published a special issue titled “Elections and Choice” (“Vybor i vybory”). Its authors, philosophers and scholars of culture, largely focused on the concept of freedom and the manipulative strategies of the state to control and brainwash the public.26 A special bondage, which resulted from the common experience of confronting injustice, became a recurrent theme (“Now, in 2006, it is the thirst for freedom and honor that unites us”), alongside with that of a noble cause. According to one political scientist, “Many used to doubt that freedom, just freedom, and not social issues, would become the mobilizing resource in resisting the Lukashenka regime.”27 Instead of structural positions, related to the categories of political economy, moral qualities emerged as a broad explanation for political and civic choices that flattered some authors. Unlike the “commoners,” either brainwashed or not able to discern the true value of freedom, the allegedly disinterested intellectuals rose for European values and rights: thus, they emerged as legitimate moral leaders.
While there is no doubt that those declaring their love for freedom unconditional do believe it, they participate in the struggle for political power, which directly involves interests, as the above reference demonstrates. If, according to T. Adorno, identity is the ulterior form of ideology, there is usually something that people do not know about themselves, when they assume that others are self-serving, while they are not. As “freedom” seems to be the primary code-word in the intellectuals’ thinking about themselves (they “value freedom” and stand for it, “freedom unites us against them,” etc.), deconstructing the meaning with which this concept is entrusted in colored revolutions might prove helpful.
If post-socialist democratization is to be seen as an evolving process, then colored revolutions can be perceived as the “second wave” or a continuation of the negotiated revolutions of 1988 to 1989. They seek to change political regimes through a peaceful public protest, turning to the issues that have not been resolved with the disintegration of socialism or which arose during the transition. The Ukrainian scholar Tatyana Zhurzhenko
argues that these revolutions were driven by the interests of business and professional elites in normalizing brutal and “Darwinian” post-Soviet market for the former nomenklatura had used its social and political capital to reinvent itself as the propertied “class,” too powerful to be constrained by law. Thus, colored revolutions, insisting on rights and rule of law, targeted post-Soviet “oligarchic” or “clan” capitalism.28 According to Yaroslav Grytsak,
to mobilize masses, the Ukrainian Orange Revolution resorted to the universalist and liberal rhetoric of dignity, human honor (cf. the discourse of “the revolution of spirit” in Belarus), and political transparency (instead of national language, culture and history, as was the case in 1991).29 The successful revolutions resulted in establishing pro-Western governments and in the general Westernization and modernization of political and economic life through the use of the “rule of law” and “democratic standards.” The question is then why these modern concepts did not work in Belarus or, put differently, what is the real nature of the division that was named “sausage vs. freedom.” The intellectual failure to mobilize a revolution cannot be explained without an analysis of Belarusian internal
social dynamics.
FRAMING NATION AS CLASS
However infatuated might intellectuals be with their own role of disinterested social critics, they do not stand outside of society. Intellectuals are linked, as Antonio Gramsci argued in his Prison Notebooks, to real social actors, by their inclusion into a class structure and their participation within a particular social order.30 Post-Soviet intellectuals in particular are bound with a new type of social stratification, resulting from an enormous social shift, post-Soviet and postindustrial at the same time. It overtly started with the disintegration of the USSR which, in popular imagination, is often linked to national issues. Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s closest allies, stated during perestroika that nationalism “resurrects now and then, like a phoenix from the ashes. Hence, there must be some objective reasons for that.”31 Simultaneously some scholars of nationalism noticed a relationship between Soviet nationalist movements and the economic views of their proponents. Ernest Gellner and Roman Szporluk argued that the ideal of market economy was most strongly articulated “at the edges” (of the USSR), where nation-building had resumed, while socialist administrative methods were more characteristic of the Soviet imperial center.32 Evidently, in late socialism, nationalism was intertwined with economic liberalism in some profound way, while intellectuals were the main articulators of both. To uncover the meaning of this relationship, I shall draw on the work of Ivan Szelenyi, an outstanding scholar of socialist intellectuals on their road to “class power,” as he called their project.
Szelenyi established a connection between the discourse of human rights and civil society, which was pursued by Central European dissidents from the 1970s through 1989, and that of the (free) market. He argues that the notion of civil society, a crucial topic in dissident circles, was “simply a code to say “capitalism” when this idea was still taboo,”33 as the term “civil” did not carry the baggage that “bourgeois” did, and thus was useful as a radical
step on the road from socialism. Civil society stands for democratic participation and thus can serve to legitimize the propertied class, as only an economically independent man (a “bourgeois” and a citizen at the same time) could confront the (socialist) state as an autonomous actor. In the 1980s the process of making “Burgers” or “citizens” became a major theoretical and ideological issue in dissident theorizing, as it implied “the transition
from subject to citizen as much as the making of the propertied class.”34
In the USSR, the discursive role played by “civil society” in Central Europe was taken over by the rhetoric of nationalism, which resurrected during perestroika: “nationhood,” “independence,” and “national liberation” were used to code similar demands for a non-socialist economic and political system. The nation is a powerful symbol and can be used to legitimize different social regimes as being “better” for it, and thus discourses around national independence became a legitimate way for the emerging elites
to argue for private property and the market as a more effective and fair system, much in the same way as civil society could be used to actually promote liberal capitalism. For example, Zyanon Paznyak, the founder of the Belarusian Popular Front, argued in his work “On the Empire and Property” that the abolition of private property, which makes the core of the Marxist project, deprives individuals of freedom and autonomy to turn them into dependent lumpen-proletarians.35 He believed that only by restoring propertied individuals one could make them truly autonomous. Similarly, Paznyak argued, Soviet national republics, exploited and exhausted by Russia, would have a chance to establish fair economic relations only if they
became independent, sovereign states.
This evidence is important for defining post-Soviet nation-building as a “class” project, which is related to the overt development of social inequalities that existed under state socialism into economic ones in the interests of the new “rising class”: nomenklatura, state managers, or some educated specialists, for whom the Soviet system of resource allocation seemed too restrictive, as their power and resources resulted from their status, and not
from ownership, and as such were insecure.36 The project is also related-in complicated ways-to the activism of intellectuals, who were the main producers of liberal and nationalist discourses (and it was at that moment that they became concerned with the “quality of the population”), forproducing a discourse turns intellectuals into recognized social actors. By
nationalism, I mean sentiments and movements related to the status of communities, which at some point begin defining themselves through national terms: perceived common history, origin, culture, destiny, language, and-most importantly-national oppression. Imagined national injustice, perceived in terms of Soviet occupation, language controversies, perished
great culture, devastated nature, uprooted peasantry, annihilated nobility, disputed territories, and the exhaustion of natural resources, legitimized the claims of independence from “others,” as they “occupied,” “exhausted resources,” “hampered the use of the national language,” “killed national poets,” “ruined national sacred places,” “built their military bases,” and so forth. According to Katherine Verdery, this was possible, because nationalities
were the only organizational forms with an institutional history within the Soviet social universe and provided a principal base for alternative (to the socialist ones) formations.37 Although the issue was in the market system of resource allocation, based on a different idea of social justice, the motive had to be something with which people could identify, and thus
nationalism became the cultural resource capable of actually mobilizing the masses. The Russian publisher Boris Nemirovsky described in a radio interview how deeply moved he had been when in August 1991, right after the coup, Boris Yeltsin called his fellow countrymen “Russian citizens,” instead of “comrades”:
I came back in 1991 and found myself in Moscow during the coup. On
August 21 I was with the crowd defending the White House (Russian Parliament-
e.g.) right at the moment when they raised the Russian “tricolour” for
the first time instead of the red Soviet flag. And I roared as a bull, when Boris
Yeltsin addressed us as “Dear Russian citizens,” and I felt as if my life became
“defined” at that moment. Many times after that I felt like I should give up
this feeling and thought like-well, to hell with all that, but still would go
back to it again and again. At that moment a lot in my life became redefined
for good.38
In Belarus, though, the fusion of nationalism and anticommunism was never realized, which, as will be made clear later, is largely related to elite configuration: the nation seemingly “rejected” independent nationhood through electing Alexander Lukashenko as their president in 1994. He signed a not yet realized reunion with Russia into a common state, initiated and won several referenda on the issues of the state language (rejecting Belarusian as the only state language and reinstating the equal, but, in fact, dominant, status of Russian), national symbols (reintroducing the slightly modified Soviet ones instead of those which were “tinted” during WWII by fascist collaborators) and the prolongation of his presidency. Thus his politics was often interpreted as “antinational,” and the civic division between his supporters and opponents (who argued for an independent “European belonging”), which became evident in March 2006, as the one over “lost nationhood.” Allegedly, for historical reasons common folks forgot their “true” national belonging and had problems identifying themselves as a nation: some became Russified, having adopted “metropolitan” identity, while others turned into “creoles.”39 In a similar way those denationalized
subjects could not grasp “the value of freedom” and failed to rise for their human dignity.
I argued elsewhere that the Belarusian controversy is a “class” one, having at its core, rather than national issues, different methods of resource allocation-market or socialism-and the interests of some groups who benefit (or think that they do) from each of them.40 Lukashenko has saved the centralized system of controlling and distributing resources and, having monopolized a fatherly concern for the people, he secured an almost socialist “welfare state” over which he has extreme power. He got a popular nickname of bat’ka, or “dad,” for “paying” pensions and allowances, fixing prices on basic goods, introducing affirmative action on behalf of students from rural areas, preserving universal healthcare and lengthy maternity leaves, and-not least important-regularly imprisoning government officials of various ranks who allegedly tried to profit “from the people.” In this system, “social justice”-satisfying the basic needs of those who do not have too many assets to be competitive in the market and thus were nostalgic of socialism-was exchanged for their loyalty. Lukashenko’s initial social base included older people, the urban poor, countryside
dwellers, and more women than men, that is, those who had felt marginalized by the early 1990s market reforms. In that system they do not have resources that are needed to realize “autonomy” and “rights’ which, in the final end, are entitled to “burgers” or “middle class.” The rejection of the liberal economic system initially took the form of the rejection of the “national” agenda, which was its symbol. But it was not language or culture per se that were rejected, but the new system of economic inequality, and thus the Belarusian division can be perceived as “class struggle” between the groups possessing different economic and-most importantly- cultural and “cognitive” assets. This division was largely predisposed by the former economic configuration with Belarusian industry focused on heavy and military production, a fairly satisfying (subsidized with Soviet petro-dollars) consumption pattern, and an extremely high proportion of “cosmopolitan” military men from all the former USSR within the population (the Republic was the Soviet “outpost”), who had no stake in the promotion of national issues.41 Currently, power is in the hands of post-Sovietbureaucrats, many of whom are former villagers and the products of the Soviet educational and social system. As social stratification is fundamental to society, and in Belarus it initially took a “national” form, the nation makes a perfect case study for the scholars of post-Soviet, supposedly ethnic divisions and conflicts.
With time, national issues lost their political prominence (the fact recognized by the ideologues of the national cause), as the controversy was not really about what language to speak, but how to distribute resources.42 The failure of the “jeans revolution” to mobilize larger society can be explained by the specific Belarusian social structure. By leveling economic inequality, Lukashenko “halted” class formation, and the broad antagonisms
around which post-Soviet social discontent was built elsewhere, failed to be formed. First, there are not enough emerging agents, who would be both interested, as the owners of property and resources, in the autonomy from the state, which could push them to stand for their “human dignity,” or, in other words, for a liberal and transparent system benefiting them as independent actors. Second, with reduced inequality, there could be no “oligarchs,” that is, those very (post-nomenklatura semi-criminal) elites, against whom people’s ire was targeted in the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution.” Former communist nomenklatura and state managers were not able to transform themselves into propertied bourgeoisie to such an extent, as it had happened under political capitalism elsewhere. With most resources controlled by the state, and the president regularly and publicly curtailing the burgeoning capitalists “on behalf of the people,” as soon as there is the slightest suspicion that someone might become too independent and, thus, a threat to his power, “oligarchs” could not be produced. Under moderate inequality (there are no super-rich or absolutely poor) and rigid state control,
economic elites are dependent on the state and the government (of which they are often a part) and cannot confront it directly.43 Lukashenko’s supporters saw the goal of the “jeans revolution” in the promotion of economic inequality and bringing to power “greedy” capitalists.
It makes sense now to turn to the Belarusian “educated class” to consider their position within post-Soviet structuration. The disintegration of the USSR led to the fractuation of intellectual elite44 and to at least one fundamental division: the division between those whose capitals remain bound with the slightly transformed state academia (and the bureaucratic
positions they might have occupied there) and those whose new social, cultural, and cognitive capitals are invested into new “independent” academic and intellectual institutions supported by international donors.45 These humanistic scholars embody a special habitus that became possible with the deconstruction of state control over the production of knowledge. Through participation in these institutions this intellectual faction is able, having shed state ideological restraints, to achieve the autonomy to enter prestigious international symbolic markets and to benefit from global intellectual exchanges.
Independent intellectuals and artists made a disproportionate part among those who rallied in the “Freedom Square.” If this fact was ever noticed by experts, they tended to resort to love for freedom as an explanation for human behavior. It is important to remember, though, that intellectual cadres whose subsistence comes from institutional grants, personal fellowships, or commissions, and not state salaries, are both autonomous and interested to stand for civil rights and “freedom” (many of them demonstrated real courage and human dignity in this). This brings us back to the point of Yaroslav Grytsak, mentioned earlier in this chapter, who argued that the “Orange Revolution” resorted to the civic, rather than nationalist, rhetoric
of dignity and honor.
If it can be argued that important participation by independent intellectuals in the “Freedom Square” is a sign that they are emerging of the Soviet collapse as a group with an interest, what “arguments” do they have then to negotiate their position in the new social order? This question takes us to the basic debates about intellectuals, which concern the nature of their
social weight in society. Stanley Aronowitz, a contemporary leftist theoretician, asks if intellectuals can constitute discursive communities that generate unique subject positions, or whether they have to rely on social actors with real power to assert their status.46 This issue is of special interest as regards post-Soviet intellectual actors, who are starting to develop an identity of interests in postindustrial age, where knowledge is believed to be a new productive force. I will consider these questions further below.
ANXIOUS INTELLECTUALS
In the autumn of 2005 the Belarusian intellectual journal ARCHE published the transcript of a recent roundtable discussion that had been focused on the role of critical intellectuals in contemporary Belarus.47 The panelists were the editors of several independent intellectual journals (“ARCHE,” “Frahmenty,” “Topos,” “Palitychnaya sphere”) and web magazines and some authors associated with them (me included), coming from two loosely defined and partially overlapping intellectual milieu. On the one hand, there were self-conscious and assertive Belarusian-speakers and the initiators of intellectual projects that emerged in Minsk in the 1990s. Many of them switched to Belarusian in a kind of a statement and a political act.
They are perceived as the intellectual voices representing the post-Soviet Belarusian nation, and in this capacity are relatively well known among their Central European colleagues.
The other group was made of some Russian-speaking academics, affiliated with European Humanities University (EHU), which relocated to Lithuania and is supported by the European Commission and several major academic foundations, after the Belarusian government had closed it in 2004 for political reasons. The members of this second group are hardly known at Central European cultural markets, but publish their work in American and European academic and Russian intellectual journals. Most of the panelists were fluent in English and German or French.
The moderator remarked that some time ago it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to imagine the two “opposing” national poles discussing a common topic at the same table. Academia and cultural production are the main points of symbolic confrontation between the two factions of independent intellectuals, and they were used to competition, rather than solidarity. But the topic was of common concern, and they turned to looking for common ground, and this demonstrates that they, in fact, share the position in social structure and play one common role in post-Soviet intellectual market, developing the paradigm of “new humanities” (postcolonial, cultural, or gender studies or their interdisciplinary combinations), that is, the disciplines which presuppose a “Western connection.” This type of “new knowledge” is rarely institutionalized in post-Soviet state academia, and its proponents tend to be located in independent universities, research centers, or temporary projects, where their work is made possible with Western grants or fellowships, travel, publications, and conference support. The division between Russian-speaking and Belarusian-speaking “new knowledge” producers proves to be less and less important.
The roundtable where intellectuals were discussing intellectuals was a politically important event, but not a unique one: discussions, articles, essays, statements, and conversations attempting collective self reflection take place at Site belorusskogo intellektual’nogo soobshchestva (Belarusian Intellectual Community Website), Nashe Mnenie analytical blog, in
the 2005 special issue of Topos, in Nasha niva independent weekly, and elsewhere.48 The rise during the last decade of such discussions is more than just a Belarusian phenomenon: a similar trend is observed in Russia (where multiple publications focus on the role of intelligentsia or on the critique of post-Soviet philosophy or sociology), in Ukraine and, probably, elsewhere. This can be seen as cultural evidence of a distinct anxiety of some
intellectuals over their own status. However salient had intelligentsia been for perestroika, arguing for democratic change (as it turned out, on behalf of the emerging class), their position in the new social structure is far from dominant. With the disintegration of Soviet order, intelligentsia was robbed of its legitimacy and its traditional (in the Russian universe) privilege to be moral and cultural arbiters. Russian sociologists Lev Gudkov and Boris Dybin recognized: “The period of intelligentsia’ monopoly on the ideological
and symbolic classification of reality . . . is over.”49
Contemporary discussions of the nature of intellectual work and the intellectuals’ role, besides being the vehicles of self-reflection and communicating an identity, have a public function, performative and political rather than reflexive, to negotiate a new group status and privilege. Not having any material assets, intellectuals have two interrelated options. They can gain social power by establishing connections with other powerful agents, on whose behalf intellectuals might act: “new humanities” make a good example, as their academic legitimacy and, hence, the social weight of their explorers comes from the “West” as the locus of (cognitive, academic, or political) power. The second option is to claim power and privilege based on the intellectuals’ own assets, which have to be discursively affirmed as
their exclusive monopoly. The specific intellectual asset is “knowledge” or, rather, the hegemony that knowledge producers attempt to build by monopolizing it.
For the project to be successful, knowledge needs to be perceived as the capital that intellectuals possess exclusively and that endows them with a special vision. For example, a Belarusian sociologist, explaining the reason for the gender gap in voting (for Lukashenko), sees it in a bigger number of elderly women than men. He believes that the elderly, for historical reasons, could not get good education and without it, they are not able to make the right voting decision. He writes:
Gender per se is not important. The real reason is the following. Women-and
this is how natural demography works-live longer than men, so there are
more elderly women, than elderly men. . . . The most important factor is the
educational capital. It allows one to critically assess information, first, and
opens access to other sources of information, second. And in Belarusian social
space these sources are distributed unevenly: the bigger the town, the more
information sources are available. In the countryside, state TV dominates. On
the other hand, education and age are related, for the elderly people did not
have an opportunity to get it.50
Further on, the article builds a connection between access to the contemporary sources of information, especially the Internet-and this results from one’s “educational level”-and voting against Lukashenko: those opposed to him are better educated to make the “correct choice.” This explanation disregards that the very unequal access to information is involved with social inequality and accumulated capitals: those having an “Internet connection” possess other perks as well. They have more information, because they have different professions and status, more money, they live in bigger cities with more opportunities, and not in the countryside. In other words, they belong to a different social group and have more assets (age and education being some of them) to be successful in the market economy. They
are in a different social situation even before they start having any access to information and assessing it, although intellectuals may fail to see it. “I have been amazed for some time now, an intellectural maintains, that a big group of Belarusians regularly, almost every day read Russian newspapers, for example, Izvestia. I never fail to ask these people: and why wouldn’t you read the German Zeit, or the English Times?51
These views are quite revealing of the group interests of intellectuals, for deriving the “correct” voting choices from the capacity to “critically evaluate” information implies the right of those who “know” to guide others and even speak for them. For example, a Belarusian philosopher in the paper on the March 2006 events disregards any social issues or interests, insisting that the very juxtaposition of social-economic and political rights is a pseudoproblem. She believes that all citizens should just “want” to assert their rights, as intellectuals did in March 2006. Evidently not everyone will, and thus intellectuals need to be ready to do this work for other groups.52 Another prominent philosopher, Valyantsin Akudovich, trying to rationalize the elitist position in one of his essays, argues that the oppositional message- that the “regime” is immoral and needs to be changed-although true, is
meaningless for the nation at large, as “social province,” as he names common folks, has its own values and a different lifestyle. He maintains that he is a writer and a philosopher, and thus freedom of speech is for him a “life or death” issue. But his parents, who live in the countryside and have not read a book since they finished high school, do not care about freedom of expression, because they have no stake in it. On the other hand, it would be a major deprivation for them, if their right to grow potatoes or to slaughter a pig for Christmas were curtailed. Thus, he concludes, “our values” are meaningless for those who make a living with their own calloused hands. Evidently, intellectuals and common folks have “very different scopes of responsibility,” and he wished there would be more of “us” (intellectuals)
to remove “the social province” to where it belongs and should be, for then the province would worry about the issues that are appropriate for them, and we would take care about those that belong to us.53
Akudovich is the most brilliant intellectual of his generation, deeply involved into theorizing the “fate” of the nation, and I remember reading the essay for the first time, expecting every moment that he is going to say that unless we make our values meaningful for those living through their calloused hands, our project cannot be either moral or legitimate. But he never did, having discursively translated epistemological hegemony into the right
for political power. The exclusive intellectuals’ right to “rule” according to the meaning that they give to reality is justified because the people “do not know”: they are either too dumb to understand and appreciate the right ideas, or have no need in them. In Belarusian “democratic” media those on whose behalf intellectuals make democratic claims are seen as “zombied electorate,”54 “social province”55 (i.e., backward and opposed to progressive
change), irrational “lumpens,”56 plebians and primitives, having poor taste in art and leisure,57 “crazy babushkas,” irrationally lured to Stalinist principles,58 passive and not capable of active and responsible behavior,59 and driven by interests and not by the ulterior and abstract concepts of honor or freedom. It is often believed that Lukashenko was elected, because his voters “do not know” and thus, a writer claims, we should not stay the “hostages
of his collective-farmer’s intellect.”60 In another post-Soviet example the famous Russian feminist Maria Arbatova, who wrote a book about her failed attempt to become a member of the Russian Duma explains, why she wanted to be a candidate from the “university precinct” of Moscow, the area with the highest number of voters with advanced degrees: “This is my
main lure, for my feminist political program can only be appreciated in this precinct.”61
In this type of post-Soviet discourse “correct choices” and “knowledge” itself do not emerge as social constructions and categories of power, created through a discourse and social action, but as objectively existing “truths,” similar to the Hegelian absolute idea, which can be discovered or understood in the same way as the laws of nature. In March 2006 that objective truth must have been “freedom.” Some attained it, being able to understand, and others didn’t. By their very nature (being educated and producing knowledge), intellectuals turn out as those who would understand this “idea” best, but to maintain their knowledge monopoly, they need to prove that others do not know, that is, to produce a differentiation between “us” and “them,” creating inequality through a discourse and claiming a “classed
position.”
Stanley Aronowitz used Althusser and Gramsci to suggest that “Science is a term we affix to ideology that wishes to become hegemonic.”62 If hegemonic ideology is disguised as science or knowledge, the latter, as a form of specific intellectual capital, becomes directly converted into power claims. If intellectuals know and if those who can ever know can only be intellectuals, a very important link, an “intimate relationship,”63 as Ivan Szelenyi calls
it, between knowledge and power gets established. Szelenyi draws from Michel Foucault and his theorizing of knowledge and power to show how both socialist and post-socialist intellectuals use knowledge as the vehicle of their own legitimization. To get power and resources, they need to persuade everyone that they are the ones who know: under socialism that was a rebellious idea, for it was the party that was supposed to know then. After socialism, though, these claims become legitimate and imply the autonomy of knowledge producers. As intellectuals resort to this strategy, they claim a privileged position for themselves and act as a group with an interest or a “new class,” as scholars of postindustrial society (Richard Florida, Alvin Gouldner, Ivan Szelenyi, and others) tend to think of those who work with knowledge and information.
In contemporary writings on (postsocialist) intellectuals the term “new class,” created by Djilas to include nomenklatura or bureaucrats, gets a new content. Intellectuals are sometimes seen as class or, rather, as those who attempt to become a class, because in contemporary social analysis a new understanding of class has emerged. After Marx, classes were seen as collectivities (though his own understanding was more complicated). If this could be true for classical capitalism, with the advancement of “postindustrial” society with its multiple and complicated social divisions and delineations, classes come to be seen as the modes of differentiation which can be created through the use of different forms of capital or even through the power of the discourse. In this system, “people do not have to
explicitly recognize class issues, or identify with discrete class groupings, for class processes to operate.”64
As a broad organizing concept for the investigation of a wide range of issues associated with social inequality and social differentiation, “class” includes, after P. Bourdieu, matters of culture, lifestyle and taste. Different class cultures can be viewed as the modes of differentiation, and hierarchy emerges, when “others” are made the objects of “cultural shame.” A journalist, who asserts in the oppositional newspaper that street concerts, carnivals, and rallies organized by the state to celebrate the National Independence Day, can only attract primitives and plebeians and there is nothing for a cultured person like him to see,65 acts as a social critic and a judge of taste (the two intellectual roles, according to Z. Bauman). In this way he produces class difference, without directly applying the notions of
economic inequality, as “cultural outlooks are implicated in the modes of exclusion and/or domination.”66
Intellectuals usually see themselves as highly individualized actors and are unwilling to place themselves within a certain place in class structure or to recognize their class belonging. They tend to reject an inclusion with the propertied or powerful on the basis of the fact that they “do not have anything” of material value. At the same time, they construct a hierarchy by claiming a specific identity and using the power of defining others as culturally inferior. This is the strategy that connects social identity with the pursuit for domination, characteristic of some post-Socialist intellectual groups.
Knowledge, the main vehicle for intellectual legitimation, does not exist as an “objective truth” that needs to be discovered, extracted, and presented to the public. As M. Foucault has shown, it is constructed by actors with interests, who declare their ideas as science and condemn others as “ideology” or even illiteracy. As a constructed entity, knowledge cannot be legitimized “by itself” and needs a link to some external power. This makes intellectuals very vulnerable social agents: in their projects to convert knowledge into power, they always have to rely on “real power.”
After the disintegration of socialism, “scholarly interests helped to foster cohesive communities with a sense of professional dignity and kinship with the intellectual community outside” the national borders.67 For post-Soviet independent intellectuals, a link to that community or the presence in a common symbolic field with it is involved with the material support of their work, their research projects, publications, the journals that they publish and the conferences that they organize (from this point of view, Belarusian intellectuals were not really sincere when they claimed to have been free of material interests). Interacting with donors always implies promoting their ideas,68 at least in the Foucaldian sense, and thus intellectuals become involved into a social process that they can hardly escape. By the virtue of the social position from which they speak, they tend to articulate the interests of the “rising class,” though they may be honest in believing that they have no other interests, but serving their nation and their people. Thus they may substitute the interests of the people they claim to represent by their own corporate interests, which result from their role in the field of symbolic production. These interests are rarely purely economic ones, but they are still tied to the economic opportunities, social capital and power. Post-Soviet intellectuals have not been able to reach “class power” by becoming independent actors; whether they can really argue on behalf of the “people,” remains to be seen.
NOTES
1. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 39.
2. Peter Berger, An Invitation to Sociology: Humanistic Perspective (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963).
3. Gudkov Lev and Boris Dubin, “Ot avtorov,” Intelligentsia (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2009), 7-8.
4. See Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
5. Alexander Gritsanov, “Nichego, krome zheludka,” BelGazeta 28, no. 700 (2009): 21.
6. See, for example, Kastus’ Bandaruk, “Financial Times: Tsi adbudzetsa jeansovaya
revalutsia?” Radyjo Svaboda, March 16, 2006, www.svaboda.org/content/article/767947.html.
7. For an analysis of the March 2006 events see Elena Korosteleva, “Was There a Quiet Revolution? Belarus after the 2006 Presidential Election,” Journal of Communist
Studies and Transition Politics 25, no. 2 (2009): 324-46.
8. See Novosti NISEPI, Vypusk 2, no. 40 (2006), www.iiseps.org/bullet06-2.html.
9. The narratives of the events were later collected in D. Kostenko and A, Fox, Kashko i dr. Partizanskaya respublika. Aktsii protesta v Minske 19-25 marta 2006 goda (Moskva: ROO Centr “Panorama,” 2006).
10. See www.ucpb.org/?lang=rus&open=13673.
11. See Pavel Starodub, “Lyudi ikukly,” Sovetskaya Belorussia, March 23, 2006, sb.by/post/50508/.
12. The opposition appealed to Western governments, and the expelled students were accepted into Polish universities within the newly created “Kalinowsky program.” It has functioned since then, bringing young activists to Poland to study, in case they can prove persecution by the Belarusian regime.
13. For examples, see Alexey Krivolap, “Stabil’nyi crizis v nestabil’nom obshchestve,”
Topos 13, no. 2 (2006): 70-80.
14. Georgi Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 81.
15. Eyal Gil, The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 122.
16. Maxim Zhbankov and Andrey Rasinsky, Revalyutsya duhu, yakoi ne chakali. Borba idet ne za vozhdei, a za svobodu lichnogo vybora, nmnby.org/pub/060306/25-d.html.
17. Petra Rudkouski, “Paustanne na Ktrychnitskai ploshchy,” ARCHE, no. 3 (2006), arche.bymedia.net/2006-4/rudkouski406.htm.
18. See by-ua.livejournal.com/71679.html; juzny.livejournal.com/37016.html;
anika-vsh.livejournal.com/11477.html; worvik.livejournal.com/17534.html.
19. Rudkouski, “Paustanne na Kastrychnitskai ploshchy.”
20. Victor Bobrov, “Ploshchad’ Svobody,” Nashe mnenie, March 28, 2006, www
.nmnby.org/pub/060306/28-m.html.
21. Bobrov, “Ploshchad’ Svobody.”
22. Tatiana Montik, “Belorusam bylo gorazdo trudnee, chem Ukraintsam,” Charter-
97, March 31, 2006, charter97.org/bel/news/2006/03/31/ukraina.
23. Montik, “Belorusam bylo gorzado trudnee, chem Ukraintsam.”
24. See Victor Bobrov, “Nabliudenie za nabliudatelem,” Nashe mnenie, April 11,
2006, www.nmnby.org/pub/0604/11-m.html.
25. See “Ploshchad’ Kalinovskogo,” which documents the events in the “Freedom
Square,” www.ucpb.org/?lang=rus&open=13695.
26. See Vladimir Furs, “‘Vlast naroda’: Sovremennye predstavleniia demokratii i belorusskaia model ‘narodovlastia’”; Alexander Sarna, “Belorusskoe televidenie: Osobennosti natsional’noi propagandy v predvybornyi period”; Almira Ousmanova, “Belorusskii detourment, ili iskusstvo obkhodnogo manevra kak politika,” Topos 13, no. 2 (2006).
27. Vital Silitski, “Pachatak revalutsii duhu,” Arche, no. 4 (2006), arche.bymedia.net/2006-4/silicki406.htm.
28. Tatiana Zhurzhenko, “Mezhdu klanom, sem’ei i natsiei: Postsovetskaia masculinnost’/feminnost’ v tsvetnykh revolutsiakh,” Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2007).
29. Yaroslav Grytsak, “Rebirth of Ukraine,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas. Debaty o politike i kul’ture, 38, no. 6 (2004).
30. Antonio Gramsci, “On Intellectuals,” in Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992-2007).
31. Alexander Yakovlev, Sumerki (Moscow: Materik, 2003), 445.
32. Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2000), 264.
33. L. King and I. Szelenyi, Theories of the New Class: Intellectuals and Power (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 114.
34. King and Szelenyi, Theories of the New Class, 115.
35. Zyanon Paznyak, “Pra imperyu i ulasnasc,” in Sapraudnae ablichcha (Minsk: “Palifact,” 1992), 198.
36. For an exploration of the process see Timo Piirainen, Towards a New Social Order
in Russia: Transforming Structures and Everyday Life (Hanover, Conn.: Dartmouth University Press, 1997).
37. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 85.
38. See euro.svoboda.org/programs/OTB/2001/OBT.081301.asp (electronic document).
39. See Uladzimir Abushenka, “Creolstva i prablema natsyanalna-kulturnai samaidentyfikatsii,” Antalehia suchasnaga belaruskaga myslennya, Ukladalniki Ales Antsipenka, Valyantsin Akudovich (Minsk, 2004).
40. See Elena Gapova, “On Nation, Gender and Class Formation in Belarus... and Elsewhere in the Post-Soviet World,” Nationalities Papers 30, no. 4 (2002).
41. For an overview of Belarusian socialist economy see Grigory Ioffe, Understanding
Belarus and How Western Foreign Policy Misses the Mark (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008).
42. See Elena Gapova, “O politicheskoi ekonomii natsional’nogo iazyka v Berlarusi,” Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2005).
43. Alexander Feduta, Lukashenko: Politicheskaia biografiia (Moscow: “Referendum,” 2005), 369.
44. Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer, 124.
45. I consider this division in “Post-Soviet Academia and Class Power: Belarusian
Controversy over Symbolic Markets,” in Studies in East-European Thought (forthcoming).
46. Stanley Aronowitz, “On Intellectuals,” in Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Poetics, ed. B. Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 11.
47. “Krytychnya int’lektualy: symbalichnaya barac’ba i strukturnae procistayan’ne. Krugly stol,” Arche, no. 6 (2005), arche.bymedia.net/2005-6/stol605.htm.
48. These discussions are analyzed in: Alexander Pershai, “Questioning the Hegemony of the Nation-State in Belarus: Production of Intellectual Discourses as Production of Resources,” Nationalities Papers 34, no. 5 (November 2006).
49. Lev Gudkov and Boris Dybin, “Pechat i izmenenia v sisteme tsennostei postsovetskogo
obshchestva” (1993), in Intelligentsia (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Ivana Limbakha, 2009), 211.
50. Mickalai Katsuk, “Mity belaruskai sacyalogii,” Arche, no. 10 (2005).
51. Olga Shparaga, belintellectuals.com/discussions/?id=132 (electronic document).
52. Olga Shparaga, “Vybory v contekste kul’tury prav cheloveka: Sluchai Belarusi,” Topos 13, no. 2 (2006): 5-13.
53. Valyantsin Akudovich, “Vendée, albo svboda yak forma vyaulennya ulady,” in Razburyts Paris (Mensk: “Logvinau,” 2004), 108.
54. Aleh Loika, “Geta mif, shto nasha apasitsia slabaya,” www.gs.promedia.by/ arhiv/2002/gs268/other.htm (electronic document).
55. The term is by Valyantsin Akudovich.
56. Feduta, Lukashenko, 311, 124.
57. “Dva svyaty, dva svety,” Nasha niva, July 8, 2005, p. 12.
58. The term used by the essayist Lyolik Ushkin in the newspaper Nasha niva.
59. Vadzim Kaznacheu, “Apasitsia abmyarkouvae plan dzeyannyau,” Svaboda, December 22, 1997, www.belarus.net/MassMedia/ Newspaper/Svaboda/140/140_2.htm.
60. Svetlana Alexievich, “My ne dolzhny byt’ zalozhnikami kolkhoznogo intellekta Lukashenko,” Charter-9.7, charter97.org/ru/news/2008/5/30/6995/ (electronic document).
61. Maria Arbatova, Kak ya pytalas’ chestno popast’ v Dumu (Moscow: “Eksmo,” 2003), 93.
62. Aronowitz, “On Intellectuals.”
63. King and Szelenyi, Theories of the New Class.
64. Wendy Bottero, “Class Identities and the Identity of Class,” Sociology 38, no.5 (2004): 989.
65. “Dva svyaty, dva svety,” Nasha niva, August 2005, p. 12.
66. Devine F. Savage and M. Savage, “Conclusion: Renewing Class Analysis,” in
Renewing Class Analysis, ed. R. Crompton et al. (London: Blackwell, 2000), 195.
67. Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer, 111.
68. Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern
Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 88.