Society of Communist Czechoslovakia - Intelligentsia

Intelligentsia

By convention, Marxist theorists subdivided the intelligentsia into:

• the creative (writers, artists, and journalists),
• the professional (lawyers, educators, physicians, civil servants, and party bureaucrats), and
• the technical (engineers - directors and deputy directors of socialist enterprises, chairmen of agricultural cooperatives, and managers of retail shops, hotels, restaurants, services, and housing).
• The year 1948 saw a turnover in civil service personnel (especially the police) and a substantial influx of workers into political and managerial positions.
• The 1950s purges struck hardest at the party faithful, i.e., the most direct beneficiaries of the 1948 takeover. The upheaval of nationalization and collectivization efforts that went further than anywhere else in Eastern Europe, coupled with two currency reforms, signaled a flux in economic fortunes during the first decade of communist rule. A Czech, for example, who was a chief executive in industry in 1948, worked as a carpenter for several years thereafter, served a number of years in prison, and then retrained for a career in law was not exceptional.
• In early 1970s, over 25,000 government and trade union officials were replaced. All told, perhaps 150,000 professionals were unable to work in their fields by the end of the decade. The purges included technical and managerial personnel, as well as writers, artists, and KSC members active in the reform movement.
• Estimates at the high end suggested that, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, some 400,000 members of the intelligentsia joined the ranks of manual laborers.