Intellectuals in Russia

Dear Leigh, Comrade in Arms,
The place of intellectuals in the USSR seems to me to be an interesting one, because they were highly valued if they supported the regime and furthermore used their talents toward making the state stronger and sent to the Gulag if they expressed opposition. The intellectual elite is always an especial threat to totalitarian regimes because of the respect they command for their education. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the most famous examples: though he served in the Red Army during WWII (showing, perhaps, how the threat of Germany transcended political beliefs to some extent), he was later sent to the Gulag and exiled from the Soviet Union for writing comments critical of Stalin in a private letter to a friend. His threat to the state seems minimal, but the authorities cracked down hard and in the process created a worse enemy than they started with. His most critical books were written after his first-hand experience of conditions in the Gulag; whereas before he could only take issue with what he saw directly, the management of the Red Army, now he had been exposed to an entirely new aspect of the system: the prisons. And nothing says quite so much about a country as its prisons. (Read an excerpt from his excellent book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, here)