One thing that the entire post-Stalinist Moscow intelligentsia knew was the word Lumumbarium. Not all its members would have used the word, but they knew its exact meaning: it was a disparaging nickname for the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University, where young people from friendly third-world countries came to study in Soviet Moscow. The cosy, mild, seemingly comical racism of those years was challenged by no one, neither the Soviet government, busy with what it saw as more dangerous misdeeds on the intelligentsia’s part, nor the intelligentsia itself. It went without saying that if the Soviet government was aiding the “progressive” movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America, then “normal” people (who “understood everything” and smelled official hypocrisy a mile away) should treat these movements, their aims and their adherents with restrained irony, if not condescending mockery. In any case, if the Soviet government was for them, then the intelligentsia, discussing life late at night over vodka, tea and cigarettes, were against them.
The system of values that held sway in the minds of the late Soviet intelligentsia rested on three pillars. The first was that by default things were better “in the west” than in Russia. The second was that before the revolution, things were better by default than afterwards. The third was that the Soviet intelligentsia’s historical circumstances - their sense of being estranged from their forebears and the great traditions (both “western” and Russian pre-revolutionary) - could be remedied if they “returned” to the ranks of civilised peoples and the domain of “great Russian culture.”
Naturally, I have in mind the late-Soviet intelligentsia, which identified with the Russian language, Russian culture and a correspondingly Russian way of life. The nationally-oriented intelligentsia of other Soviet republics professed somewhat different views, but they too were defined by the idea of “returning” to “normalcy” (for example, in the Baltic countries, to a pre-1939 state of affairs), even if this normalcy was often a mere ideological phantom of the historical era of national revivals. And only “the West,” where everything was much better than in the Soviet Union, could facilitate this about-face. It was a vicious circle.
