ИСТИНА

The 1922 expulsion of “anti-Soviet intelligentsia” was a part of a large-scale campaign aimed at suppression of any forms of dissent and elimination of intellectual elite of the country. Though the whole story of deportation of eminent Russian philosophers, litterateurs, scientists, and engineers has been studied well enough by Western students, in the Soviet Union it was one of forbidden subjects, as well as many other episodes of national history. Only in 1990s, when many documents on 1922 deportation of intellectuals became available, a whole series of books and papers on this matter was published in Russia. Nevertheless, many questions have remained, e.g. the total number of those who were expelled from the country (not including members of their families) is still uncertain and varies according to different authors from 50–60 to several hundred and even several thousand. Exile lists (there were four of them – Moscow, Petrograd, Ukrainian and Additional), compiled in July–August, 1922, contained 217 names. Not all of those included in the exile lists were forced to leave Russia. Part of them were forced to stay. It is a paradox, that while the fate of the former is studied well enough, the fate of the latter arouse almost no interest among either Western or Russian researchers, though it is no less illustrative of the attitude of the Soviet state towards Russian intelligentsia. This paper presents an attempt to look at the whole story of 1922 expulsion of Russian intellectuals from a different perspective: who was excluded from those exile lists, what were the reasons for that and what was the fate of those people under Soviet regime.