On the Ideological Front

This book centres on a powerful and gripping story, the 1922-1923 expulsion from Soviet Russia of some one hundred prominent intellectuals - professors, journalists, philosophers, writers, engineers, agronomists, and others. Stuart Finkel's meticulously researched account of this purge is the first close scholarly examination of this event and the first to set it in the context of Bolshevik curbs, prohibitions, and punishment of intellectuals who resisted ideological conformity. The book demonstrates that the infamous expulsion was part and parcel of the Bolshevik effort to redefine the role of the intelligentsia and to establish a distinctly Soviet public sphere. Lenin and his colleagues' policy toward intellectuals was closely connected to their endeavours to create a harmonious, unitary, and unconditionally Bolshevik society.