Maximilian Voloshin's "House of the Poet": Intelligentsia social organization and culture in early 20th century Russia.

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the formation of the Soviet Russian intelligentsia. The traditional historiographic approach to this problem has been to focus on Bolshevik Party policy in the early Soviet period and on intelligentsia resistance, collaboration, or victimization. This study focuses instead on intelligentsia social organization and culture before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The fundamental institution of pre- and post-Revolutionary intelligentsia life was the intelligentsia circle or kruzhok; the patterns of thought, behavior, and interaction which surrounded the kruzhok made up what can be called "kruzhok culture." Components of kruzhok culture examined in this study are social networks and networking, economic and intellectual clientelism, gender and generational relations as they are rooted in the domestic sphere, and the Russian personality cult. By tracing the life and career of influential Russian intellectual Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932), this study shows how kruzhok culture led the Soviet intelligentsia into an increasingly intimate economic and therefore political relationship with the state in the early Soviet period. At the same time, it led them to form an increasingly separate, even isolated domestic sphere into which it was difficult for the state to penetrate. This study concludes that kruzhok culture as it expressed itself in the early Soviet period laid the foundations for a social contract between the intelligentsia and the Soviet state. According to the terms of this contract, the Soviet intelligentsia received a degree of economic support administered by means of a growing welfare and privilege system, in return for political support or acquiescence. This contract provided the Russian intelligentsia with a functional, corporate role in Soviet society such as it had never had under autocratic rule in the pre-Revolutionary period.