Abstract: The article analyses the position of Russia’s creative community during the first years of Soviet rule and the events concerning the strike of the Moscow professorate which was headed in 1921 by A. D. Arkhangelsky, V. S. Gulevich, V. A. Kostitsyn, A. P. Pavlov, D. D. Pletnev, V. V. Stratonov, and supported by M. Gorky. The author studies the unfolding of the strike, the participants’ demands, and the reaction of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the Council of the People's Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Ministry of Education. The author further examines the consequences of the strike that led to the creation of the Soviet model of the relationship between the intelligentsia and the government. This relationship was founded on the one hand on the cultural, judicial, socio-economic (fiscal, housing, staffing, rewarding and repressing) policy of the Bolsheviks, and on the other hand was based on the conformist position of the country’s main body of the creative community. The article analyses the activity of the Central Committee in improving the living conditions of scientists and of the attitude of the All-Union Professional Union of Workers in the Arts towards the intelligentsia, reviewing its members, qualifications, value for the Soviet government, selecting privileged groups of "specialists-communists", "heroes of labour", "honoured workers of science, technology and art". The article ends with the conclusion that despite the suppression of the creative community’s external resistance, the relationship constructed with them by the Soviet government did not withstand the test of time as it denied the main condition of its existence – intellectual freedom, which was pushed into counterculture and which eventually undermined the Soviet regime.