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The intelligentsia is a Status group composed of the university-educated people of a society who engage in the complex mental labours by which they critique, shape, and lead in the politics, policies, and culture of their society; as such, the intelligentsia consists of , academics, teachers, journalists, and literary writers. Conceptually, the intelligentsia status class arose in the late 18th century, during the Partitions of Poland (1772–1795). Etymologically, the 19th-century Poland intellectual Bronisław Trentowski coined the term inteligencja (intellectuals) to identify and describe the university-educated and professionally active social stratum of the patriotic bourgeoisie; men and women whose intellectualism would provide moral and political leadership to Poland in opposing the cultural hegemony of the Russian Empire.
Before the Russian Revolution, the term () identified and described the status class of university-educated people whose cultural capital (schooling, education, and intellectual enlightenment) allowed them to assume the moral initiative and the practical leadership required in Russian national, regional, and local politics. In practice, the status and social function of the intelligentsia varied by society. In Eastern Europe, the intellectuals were at the periphery of their societies and thus were deprived of political influence and access to the effective levers of political power and of economic development. In Western Europe, the intellectuals were in the mainstream of their societies and thus exercised cultural and political influence that granted access to the power of government office, such as the Bildungsbürgertum, the cultured bourgeoisie of Germany, as well as the professionals of Great Britain.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Polish word and the sociologic concept of the inteligencja became a European usage to describe the social class of men and women who are the intellectuals of the countries of central and of eastern Europe; in Poland, the critical thinkers educated at university, in Russia, the nihilism who opposed tradition in the name of reason and Progressivism. In the late 20th century, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said that the intelligentsia has two types of workers: (i) intellectual workers who create knowledge (practical and theoretic) and (ii) intellectual workers who create cultural capital. Sociologically, the Polish inteligencja translates to the intellectuels in France and the Gebildete in Germany.
In On Love of the fatherland (1844), Polish philosopher Karol Libelt uses the term inteligencja—which was the status class composed of scholars, teachers, lawyers, and engineers, et al.—as the educated people of society who provide the moral leadership required to resolve the problems of society, hence the social function of the intelligentsia is to "guide for the reason of their higher enlightenment."
In the 1860s, journalist Pyotr Boborykin popularised the term (интеллигенция) to identify and describe the Russian social stratum of people educated at university who engage in the intellectual occupations (law, medicine, engineering, the arts) who produce the culture and the dominant ideology by which society functions.С. В. Мотин. О понятии «интеллигенция» в творчестве И. С. Аксакова и П. Д. Боборыкина. Известия Пензенского государственного педагогического университета им. В.Г. Белинского, 27, 2012 (in Russian)Пётр Боборыкин. Русская интеллигенция. Русская мысль, 1904, № 12 (in Russian)Пётр Боборыкин. Подгнившие "Вехи". Сб. статей В защиту интеллигенции. Москва, 1909, с. 119–138; первоначально опубл. в газете "Русское слово", No 111, 17 (30) мая, 1909 (in Russian)
In The Rise of the Intelligentsia, 1750–1831 (2008) Maciej Janowski writes that the Polish intelligentsia were the think tank of the State, intellectual servants whose progressive social and economic policies decreased the social backwardness (illiteracy) of the Polish people, and also decreased Russian political repression in partitioned Poland.
Nonetheless, writers Stanisław Brzozowski and Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński criticised Libelt's ideological and messianism representation of a Polish republic, because it originated from the social traditionalism and the reactionary conservatism that pervaded Polish culture and impeded socio-economic progress.Boy-Żeleński, T. (1932) Nasi okupanci|Our Occupants. Consequent to the Imperial Prussian, Austrian, Swedish and Russian partitions of Poland, the imposition of Tsarist cultural hegemony caused many of the political and cultural élites to participate in the Great Emigration (1831–70).
The idea of progress, which originated in Western Europe during the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, became the principal concern of the intelligentsia by the mid-19th century; thus, progress social movements, such as the Narodniks, mostly consisted of intellectuals. Russian philosopher Sergei Bulgakov said that the Russian intelligentsia was the creation of Peter the Great, that they were the "window to Europe through which the Western air comes to us, vivifying and toxic at the same time." Moreover, Bulgakov also said that the literary critic of Westernizer, Vissarion Belinsky was the spiritual father of the Russian intelligentsia.
In 1860, there were 20,000 professionals in Russia and 85,000 by 1900. Originally composed of educated nobles, the intelligentsia became dominated by Raznochintsy (classless people) after 1861. In 1833, 78.9 per cent of secondary-school students were children of nobles and bureaucrats, by 1885 they were 49.1 per cent of such students. The proportion of commoners increased from 19.0 to 43.8 per cent, and the remaining percentage were the children of priests. In fear of an educated proletariat, Tsar Nicholas I limited the number of university students to 3,000 per year, yet there were 25,000 students by 1894. Similarly the number of periodicals increased from 15 in 1855 to 140 periodical publications in 1885. The "third element" were professionals hired by Zemstvo. By 1900, there were 47,000 of them, most were liberal radicals.
Although Tsar Peter the Great introduced the idea of progress to Russia, by the 19th century, the tsars did not recognize "progress" as a legitimate aim of the state, to the degree that Nicholas II said "How repulsive I find that word" and wished it removed from the Russian language.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 divided the intelligentsia and the social classes of tsarist Russia. Some Russians emigrated, the political reactionaries joined the right-wing White movement for counter-revolution, some became Bolsheviks, and some remained in Russia and participated in the political system of the Soviet Union. In reorganizing Russian society, the Bolsheviks deemed non-Bolshevik intelligentsia Class struggle and expelled them from society, by way of deportation on Philosophers' steamers, forced labor in the gulag, and summary execution. The members of the tsarist-era intelligentsia who remained in Bolshevik Russia (the USSR) were Proletariat. Although the Bolsheviks recognized the managerial importance of the intelligentsia to the future of Soviet Russia, the bourgeois origin of this stratum gave reason for distrust of their ideological commitment to Marxist philosophy and Bolshevik societal control.
Vladimir Putin has expressed his view on the social duty of intelligentsia in modern Russia.
We should all be aware of the fact that when revolutionary—not evolutionary—changes come, things can get even worse. The intelligentsia should be aware of this. And it is the intelligentsia specifically that should keep this in mind and prevent society from radical steps and revolutions of all kinds. We've had enough of it. We've seen so many revolutions and wars. We need decades of calm and harmonious development.
In the book Campus Power Struggle (1970), sociologist Richard Flacks addresses the concept of mass intelligentsia:
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