On the Road to Class Power: Writers and the Nations in the Late Soviet Era

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Decolonization and Geopolitics I: Geopolitical and Class Agendas among Post-Stalin-Era Multinational Soviet Writers and National Intelligentsias

Abstract

In the late-Soviet period, especially during perestroika, writers assumed a key role in the national movements of Russia and other republics. The Romantic association of writers and nation was reinforced during the Soviet period, as was writers' cultural capital, and when open politics became possible during the perestroika era, outside of the Communist Party, they were better positioned than anyone else to enter the realm of nationalist politics by claiming to speak for the nation and by converting their literary capital into political one. Subsequent scholarship on the national movements of that era has largely taken these writers at their word, adopting their largely primordialist language and understanding of nations. By applying the class analysis of late socialist societies pioneered by Ivan Szelenyi (Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, 1974) and his students and refined and updated by Georgi Derluguian (Bourdieu's Admirer in the Caucasus, 2004) to the trajectories of a number of late- and post-Soviet writers such as Vasil' Bykau and Valentin Rasputin, I will advance an alternative account of the intelligentsia's role in the nationalist movements, namely, as a class project that massively increased its power in the republics during late perestroika only to be completely deflated when its enabling condition--a culture-centric, non-capitalist, authoritarian Soviet state--was no more.

Author

• Rossen Lilianov Djagalov, New York U