Independent Organizations and Independent Thinkers

The first purge of intellectuals and other "anti-Soviet” thinkers set up a formal machinery for identifying those who did not agree with the Bolshevik regime. A special conference was established that could recommend anyone they felt was exhibiting signs of dissent or unlike thinking for jail or exile. The conference worked on the basis of employer records and recommendations, meaning that persons on poor terms with their colleagues or employers could be singled out. There was no legal recourse for those arrested. Their only review was by a committee headed by a Politburo member and an OGPU official.

Intellectuals were an early target of Bolshevik repression for fear that they would present an alternative view of reality, different from the "truth” enunciated in the official party line. The only real truth with respect to politics, economy, arts, and literature was supposed to be that enunciated by the party. "Soviet” artists, physicians, scientists, and poets were those who were prepared to accept the infinite wisdom of the party line. Anti-Soviet intellectuals were those who were prepared to disagree with the party line. Kondrat'ev, as an example, was an economist-statistician, who spent his career collecting economic data and relating what he felt these statistics had to say about economic reality. Berdiaev believed in the superiority of the individual over any party or state. The writer Zamiatin wrote allegories that might be critical of the Soviet system, but party authorities could not know for sure. Such intellectuals posed a formidable threat because their version of the truth differed from that of the party.

Soviet fear and hostility toward intellectuals continued until the end of the Soviet regime. The longest serving state-security chief, Yury Andropov, who headed the KGB from 1967 to 1982, was the party's chief warrior in its battle with intellectuals, such as Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Notably, Andropov's methods were the same as Dzerzhinskii's—internal and foreign exiles, harassment, the compiling of compromising materials—anything to neutralize their influence on Soviet society.9