Stalin’s Attack on the Soviet Intelligentsia Kruzhki of the Early 1930s: The Case of the Mathematical Circle of Nikolai Luzin

• In Event: The Teacher: Charismatic Intellectuals in Academic and Literary Institutions in Soviet Russia

Abstract

In the early 1930s, the emerging Stalinist state launched a massive attack against Soviet intelligentsia kruzhki in a variety of areas. The best-known facet of this attack was on literary circles, as they were dismantled and their members forced into the heavily bureaucratized Writers’ Union. The purpose was to compel these writers to produce socialist realist literature through application of the whips and carrots of the Union. The focus of historians analyzing this event has typically been on the indignities of forcing an art form into a routinized system in service of the state, which has obscured the fact that all kinds of intelligentsia circles were being forced into state-directed institutions at that time. The mathematical community of the highly charismatic Nikolai Luzin was one such circle, as he and his followers were forced into the newly burgeoning Soviet Academy of Sciences. For the Stalinist attack on the kruzhki was less an attack on art, than a state effort to exert new control over what it saw as expertise, whether expertise in guiding society through social transformation by means of literature, or expertise in math, science and technology to build industry. My presentation will explore this profoundly significant moment in the global Modern Era relationship between what might be called information expertise on the one hand, and populist authoritarianism on the other. We are living through another such moment globally today; thus it behooves us to explore the full implications of the historical confrontation between the Soviet intelligentsia kruzhki and Stalin’s state in the early 1930s.

Author

• Barbara Brigitte Walker, U of Nevada, Reno