ABSTRACT
Western and Russian authors alike have expressed divergent views concerning the emergence of the intelligentsia as a distinct social group. Some of them trace the appearance of the intelligentsia to Peter the Great and, in fact, conceive of him as the first Russian intelligent;1 others claim that the “type of the Russian intelligentsia was established by its first member Radishchev,”2 that is, during Catherine’s reign; still others date the origin of the intelligentsia from either the forties or the sixties of the last century. There is little doubt that underlying this disagreement over the origin of the intelligentsia are competing definitions of the term itself.
