The Intelligentsia Returns?

47% of percent of my graduating class entered the financial sector. Of those, 100% of the Russian speakers I knew, from all over the CIS, seemed to have joined Lehman Brothers.

Not without a bit of old fashioned Soviet cronyism, mind you (you can take the Sovok out of the USSR…).

Sergei, my first year mentor (an older student assigned to international freshmen as a sort of guide), a precocious mathematician, was head-hunted by Lehman in the spring of his senior year. They even threw in a several thousand dollar re-location package to soften the U-Haul ride down to New York.

The minute he was hired, Sergei, like countless immigrants before him, set about bringing over as many from ‘back home’ as he could (except me, whom he suspected of ideological unreliability).

Of course, these imminent i-bankers first had to get through the so called H1-B lottery: the random annual allocation of business visas.

Those who did not get the visa had to spend a year of purgatory at a Lehman branch overseas, often in London or on the continent, or even in their home countries, and wait to be let in the following year.

The reason that I am writing is because these Lehman types represented the third wave of Russia's brain drain. The first began in the 1970s when restrictions on Jewish immigration were lifted. The second, which took place in the 1990s, saw over 1 million of the best educated men and women go West.

What was so new about this particular brain drain, however, was that a distinctly vocational element had become added to the purely geographic one. The former Soviet Union's brightest were no longer just emigrating to Queens, or even Tribeca; no, this was also internal exile, exile even for those who had stayed put in Moscow or Piter, exile from the research institutes of their parents’ time and into Finance.

Why this trip down memory lane?

I was reminded of my old classmates by the appearance of a Livejournal article that has been lighting up the Russian internet this week.

"The Group Interest of the Intelligentsia", by someone called Lyubu, has been heading the Yandex (Russia's big search site) charts and even got picked up by the high circulation tabloid Argumenti I Fakty.

The article itself was a disappointment: a tired rehash, by self-styled online intellectuals, of the age-old lament that "Our intelligentsia has all fled to the West, or sold out!"

A much more articulate, nuanced and provocative view recently appeared in the Economist. Entitled "The Hand That Feeds Them", the piece explored the dwindling relevance of the intelligentsia in post-Soviet Russia, citing a recent poll in which 79% of Russians considered the intelligentsia to have little or no influence on life.

For all its authoritarian regression, notes the Economist, Russia today is a much freer place than the USSR. "However undemocratic it may be, it is not a totalitarian state. The room for honest speaking is far greater than Russian intellectuals make use of. As Marietta Chudakova, a historian of Russian literature and courageous public figure, puts it, "Nobody has been commanded to lie down‚ and everyone is already on the ground." The media is suffocated by self-censorship more than by the Kremlin's pressure".

In his stark and rebellious manifesto, My Fascism, the poet and activist Kirill Medvedev touches on the origins of some of this intellectual conformist. He writes: "Our national cultural consciousness is a half-Soviet, half-bourgeois swamp, in which rot the decomposing bodies of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Joseph Stalin, Alla Pugacheva and Jesus Christ".

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In such an environment, the liberal intelligentsia has long ceased to exist: "The journalists and politicians among them, the lords of ideas at the start of the 90s, became essentially ordinary people with ordinary strengths and foibles, who decided that they now lived in a normal country and could live how they please. (Maybe that's how it should be, but not in Russia, because Russia has not become a "normal' country).

All well and good, but just how is all this relevant to the financial collapse?

As I write, many of my Russophone classmates have long since cleared their cubicles. More scarily, that might also mean a revocation of their visas (which are specific to place of employment) and a de-facto deportation; to Poland or Latvia if they're lucky, the Tajik National Army if they are less so.

Back in the USSR, the intelligentsia was composed of "a large number of educated, intelligent and underemployed people in their 30s and 40s with little prospect of moving up the career ladder provided a perfect milieu for brewing liberal ideas. With time, they formed a political class".

However, in recent years, and especially during the third brain drain, this very demographic has been disproportionally engaged in investment banking and consulting. They have always been educated and intelligent.

But only now, with the implosion of the financial system, have they suddenly also become underemployed and lacking career prospects.

Like the haggard, landless soldiers of the Russian army returning home en masse from the Eastern Front and paving the way for the Bolshevik Revolution, this new wave of repatriating failed bankers threatens to unleash another powerful social transformation: the resurrection of the Intelligentsia.

If what Sergei Bulgakov wrote in 1909 still holds, that "Russia cannot renew itself without renewing, among other things, its intelligentsia", then the banking crash may have just shown its silver lining.

–by Vadim Nikitin