ABSTRACT
In Russia, prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary alike, the intelligentsia has been the key to reform. The state fears the intelligentsia and represses it, but needs it and must cultivate it. The ruling class formed under Stalinism, with its worker-peasant origins, inherited the cultural veneer of the revolutionary quasi-intelligentsia but remains profoundly hostile to the dominant class of the trained and the creative. When the revolutionary era began with the abortive protest movements of 1905, the intelligentsia was totally united in support of the overthrow of the autocracy. Nikita Khrushchev seems to have compromised and maneuvered from month to month, beginning with the Central Committee resolution of June 30, 1956. Once Khrushchev's reformist leadership faltered, and the younger representatives of the Stalinist bureaucracy took over, the cause of reform inherent in the logic of the revolution was doomed for another generation. The neo-Stalinist conspiracy against Khrushchev rapidly took form for the denouement of October 1964.
