Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  It is only with the knowledge available to modern historians, and with a tragic hindsight, that we realise that the responses of Alexander III and his Government to this famine crisis could have been worse. A few statistics. Somewhere between three hundred and seventy-five and four hundred thousand people died in the famine districts in 1891–2, which constituted an overall rise in the death rate of twenty-five to thirty per cent. Many of these deaths were avoidable. But compare the famine which swept through India in 1899–1900 – Berar, Anjer, Bombay and Punjab. There, the organisation of the Raj was in every way superior to that of the Russians, and there was an unquestionable desire to help the afflicted. Nevertheless, although the casualties were numerically smaller, there was an overall rise in the death rate of three hundred per cent. In both cases, natural calamity was exacerbated by an inevitable measure of human incompetence and selfishness. The story is unfortunately quite overshadowed in its horror by other stories in Russian history. While Lev Lvovich Tolstoy organised famine relief in the Samara district in 1891–2, there was one very conspicuous absentee from his band of helpers: Lenin, who was at that time in ‘internal exile’ there. According to a witness, Vladimir Ulyanov (as he still was) and a friend were the only two political exiles in Samara who refused to belong to any relief committee or to help in the soup kitchens. He was said to welcome the famine ‘as a factor in breaking down the peasantry and creating an industrial proletariat’.14 Trotsky, too, took the line that it was improper to do anything to improve the lot of the people while the autocracy remained in power. When they themselves seized power, the chaos and desolation were immeasurably worse. One thinks of the crop failure on the Volga in 1921 when somewhere between one and three million died, in spite of the fact that they allowed in foreign aid. By the time of the 1932–3 famine in the Ukraine, the Soviet Union was enjoying the munificent protection of Comrade Stalin. His policy was to allow no foreign aid, and no Government intervention. At least five million died. But Tolstoy cannot be blamed for being unable to foresee barbarity on this scale, nor for his sense that the Government of the Tsar must be shaken and hounded and prodded in its conscience. His son Ilya remarks on the inconsistency between his father’s view of social welfare in What Then Must We Do? and the practical efforts to which he devoted himself during the famine.15 When one compares Tolstoy’s inconsistency with Vladimir Ulyanov’s consistency, one sees the virtue of inconsistency.

  Nevertheless, nearly half a million dead is bad enough, and Tolstoy was outspokenly critical of the part played in the whole affair by the Government. Nor could he limit himself to complaints about the famine. It was the whole system which was at fault, and the famine had merely exposed the evil of it. Everywhere he went now, he heard about, or saw with his own eyes, examples of barbarous cruelty and injustice. Here is one example. (Tolstoy lists dozens in his letters, essays, and other writings.) A certain landowner in the Oryol province wanted to keep his mill pond so high that it flooded all the meadows on which the peasants grazed their flocks. They complained to him, but he got a court order which permitted him to go ahead. The women of the village at this point went down to the canal where the workmen were starting to create a dam, and drove them away. The district commissary gave orders to the police that one woman from each household in the village should be locked up – an order which it was impossible to carry out. So the landlord complained to the local governor, who sent police to the village to enforce the order, and scuffles broke out. The rural chief of police got beaten up by men who did not want to see their wives or mothers locked up. So the Government ordered a special train, and took a battalion of soldiers armed with rifles and rods, and a regimental doctor to supervise their proceedings. Twelve men were arrested, and a bench was set up in the village square. The first man was then stripped, and taken to the bench by two policemen for a flogging, while the village stood around weeping and shouting protest. After fifty strokes had been administered, the peasant had stopped screaming, and the doctor went forward to feel his pulse. The victim had lost consciousness, and the doctor decided that enough was enough. But not for the governor, who was by now really excited, and demanded that the unconscious man, whose buttocks and thighs and sides were swollen with weals and sores, should be given twenty more strokes. And this happened twelve times in the presence of the sadistic district governor.16

  When Tolstoy witnessed recruitments in the army, and saw the poor, drunken, half-starved lads being brought into Tula from the villages in carts by the recruiting officers, he wondered how it was that they eventually came to perpetrate such outrages. When he saw soldiers in uniform, who had been trained, he was only aware of pleasant-faced young men, sitting about on trains, smoking, grinning, laughing. How could such evil be? The evil derived, Tolstoy believed, directly from the fatal human desire for government. If they did not have governments, they would not need armies and torturers and penal systems to enforce their will.

  Tolstoy openly encouraged discussion and publication of abuses in the system. When the American journalist George Kennan went to Siberia and began to write about the treatment of prisoners there, Tolstoy wrote to him, ‘I am very, very grateful to you, as is every Russian person now living, for publicising the horrors which have been perpetrated under the present Government. . . . We know nothing here. We only know that thousands of people undergo the dreadful agonies of solitary confinement, forced labour and death, and that all this is hidden from everyone except those participating in these cruelties.’17

  There was an allowable hyperbole in claiming that all Russians were grateful for having the horrors brought to light, but one group of people who did not share Tolstoy’s sense of gratitude were the Committee of Ministers. Tolstoy was by now not merely taking risks. He was going much further than that. He was using his position as a famous and internationally regarded writer to challenge the lawful Government of the Emperor; to challenge its very right to exist. In 1890, his friend Nikolay Ge had exhibited a picture at the St. Petersburg Wanderers’ Exhibition entitled What is Truth? It was a picture of Christ before Pilate. ‘The treatment of Christ as God has produced many pictures whose supreme perfection is already far behind us,’ he wrote. ‘Contemporary art can no longer treat Christ in this way. And now in our time people are attempting to depict the moral significance of Christ’s life and teaching. These attempts have been unsuccessful until now. But Ge has found a moment in Christ’s life which is important for all of us now and which is repeated everywhere throughout the world – in the struggle of the moral, rational consciousness of a man making himself manifest in the humdrum realities of life, with the traditions of a refined, good-natured and self-confident force crushing this consciousness. Such moments are many.’18

  By now Tolstoy was preparing himself to be such a figure standing before kings and governors for Christ’s sake and suffering as they had always suffered. There were many in Russia who now absorbed the simple and incontrovertible logic of his position. ‘The socialists, communists, and anarchists, with their bombs, riots, and revolutions, are not nearly so much dreaded by governments as these scattered individuals in various countries all justifying their refusals on the ground of one and the same familiar doctrine.’19

  This was a challenge which did indeed pose an extraordinary threat to a Government which was more than nominally Christian. The Emperor and his Committee of Ministers believed that their authority derived from Christ. And here was Tolstoy, reminding young readers, in the clearest terms, that you could not, in Christ’s name, do what was forbidden by Christ. Tolstoy heard with a mixture of delight and fear of a young man – his case was by now typical – who refused military service in Moscow Town Hall. He was required to take the oath on the Gospels. He refused, pointing to the passage in the Gospels where oaths are forbidden. Though he refused to take the oath, they forced him to enrol, but he then refused to perform any of his military duties. They could put him on a charge, and imprison him for insubordination, but the challenge remained. He was
refusing, not on revolutionary, but on Christian grounds. So, after a spell in prison, he was sent to a lunatic asylum. In those days in Russia they had not become sufficiently advanced to use lunatic asylums as places of political torture. When the doctors had examined him, and found him to be sane, they were obliged to release him. And for two years, he was sent with a party of convicts to the Caucasus, refusing at any time to bear arms or obey military orders. In a country which was nominally Christian, and really believed Christ to be God, what could be done with such a man? He was eventually released. And this was going on all over Russia.20 If such ideas were to-spread, it would undermine everything.

  Tolstoy’s immediate followers became convinced in the course of 1893 that the scene of Christ before Pilate could not be far from its enactment. Chertkov went to England, carrying with him the bulk of Tolstoy’s private papers and manuscripts, to keep them from the hands of the secret police. But what could they do to Tolstoy? They could send him into exile, where they could be certain that he would be tireless in his attacks upon the wrongdoings suffered by the Russian people. They could lock him up, as they were beginning to lock up his followers. But locking up political dissidents can so often rebound upon the powers that do it. . . .

  The cunning and haunting truth of Ge’s painting is that everyone who sees it knows that power, in the end, is on the side of the silent, dispossessed figure of Christ, rather than that of Pilate. And this was the problem which Tolstoy very calculatedly and brilliantly arranged for the Government.

  In Saltykov-Shchedrin’s amusing novel, The Golovlyov Family, it is proposed that the tiresome young scapegrace son Styopka should be banished to the Suzdal’ monastery to keep him out of harm’s way. And this was a suggestion which was seriously proposed for Tolstoy in the early 1890s. Suzdal’ has been described as an ‘ecclesiastical Bastille’. The point of such an incarceration would be to emphasise that Tolstoy was a heretic. Certainly the story went the rounds of St. Petersburg that this was going to happen, and it reached the ears of his cousin Alexandrine, who immediately sought an audience with the Emperor.

  ‘In a few days,’ she told Alexander III, ‘a report will be made to you about shutting up in a monastery the greatest genius in Russia.’

  ‘Tolstoy?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ve guessed it, sir.’

  ‘Does that mean that he is plotting against my life?’

  This reply shows how stupid and how remote the Emperor was from anything. Clearly his ministers found it much more convenient to lump together all the revolutionaries and anarchists, and to frighten him into thinking that Tolstoy might do to him what the revolutionaries had done to his father. But evidently wiser counsels prevailed. It was said that he squashed the proposal on the grounds that such an imprisonment would make a martyr out of Tolstoy. The extraordinary fact, however, emphasised by Ge’s picture, is that artists, poets and writers are and have been martyrs in Russia ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In a country ruled by the suppression of the truth, the imaginative writer is in a peculiar position of strength, for he or she can see through the lies without the need for evidence. Perhaps this is why there has existed at the very heart of the Russian autocracy a powerful lingering of respect for literary genius. One thinks of the courage with which Pushkin admitted to Nicholas I, of all people, that he sympathised with the Decembrists. More memorable yet is the moment when Stalin telephoned Boris Pasternak in 1934 to discuss the arrest of Osip Mandelstam. It is one of the most extraordinary conversations in the history of literature. Pasternak behaved like a fool on this occasion, but Stalin’s few words down the line show the unease he felt at having made a victim out of a poet of genius. ‘If I were a poet and a poet friend of mine were in trouble, I would do anything to help him,’ Stalin said. Pasternak, so completely taken aback at the voice which was speaking to him in his flat really being that of Stalin, began to mutter about writers’ organisations not really coping with cases such as Mandelstam’s. ‘But he’s a genius, isn’t he?’ snapped Stalin. ‘But that’s not the point,’ said Pasternak. ‘What is then?’ Stalin asked. Pasternak said that he would like to meet him to have a talk. ‘What about?’ ‘About life and death,’ said Pasternak. Stalin hung up. So, if he had possessed a telephone, would Pobedonostsev. Tolstoy’s cousin Alexandrine had more sense than Pasternak.21 She saw that all that was at issue was Tolstoy’s genius. Any fool, as far as a dictator is concerned, can have ideas about life and death. Not everyone could write War and Peace or Mandelstam’s poems. Stalin gave the word – subsequently changed or discarded – about Mandelstam: ‘preserve but isolate’. Alexander III would love to have done the same to Tolstoy, but he could not. This was partly because the autocracy never came close to Stalin’s thoroughgoing murderous brutality – or, same thing, political efficiency; partly because Tolstoy had outmanoeuvred the Government. By the time his next controversial book had reached the censors, it was already circulating in thousands of lithographed copies and was being published in translation in Germany, France, England and the United States.

  The book was called The Kingdom of God is Within You.

  The Kingdom of God is Within You is an alarming book to read. It fails to hang together and, for once, the chief reasons for its inconsistencies are not merely Tolstoy’s own split personality, but also the divisions and incompatibilities in society; divisions which reflected a profound shake-up in the heart of man, the heart of things towards the close of the nineteenth century. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. There are two warring strands in Tolstoy’s book, and because it is a reasonably long book, and he made no attempt to impose a shape on it, the likelihood is that he did not himself fully see the inconsistencies. However, the fact that they are both there is witness to his unerring honesty. The first strand is a call, which would by now be familiar to anyone who had read his work, to the human race to accept the values of Christ. The familiar Tolstoyan attacks on the Church are trotted out. And he asserts, which is incontrovertible, that there is an absolute opposition between the Gospel of peace, and the practice of war and violence. The writings of American Quakers and others are quoted at great length to substantiate his point of view, and at times the essay drifts into flights of Rousseauesque optimism about the future. Because Christian values are true, and everyone knows in their heart that they are true, Tolstoy concludes that there must come a time when these values eventually overthrow the tyranny and the fear and the oppression which made nineteenth-century Russia, and the whole world, such a miserable place. ‘Men of our time do not merely pretend to hate oppression, inequality, class distinctions, and all kinds of cruelty not only to men but to animals – they really do hate all this, but they do not know how to abolish it or cannot make up their minds to part with the system that supports it all but seems to them indispensable.’ If only, Tolstoy argues, all men and women would obey their consciences, then the whole hateful business would be transformed. With the side of his nature which is not merely a reader of Rousseau, but also a decent individual, he believes that public opinion will eventually become so strong that wars and floggings and tortures and the oppression of the poor must, eventually, come to an end.

  It may be that somewhere in the western world, there are readers of The Kingdom of God is Within You who believe that this idea of an evolving decent public opinion has brought about the good effects which Tolstoy predicts.

  Governors, police officials and tax collectors, pitying the peasants, often try to find pretexts for not collecting the taxes from them. Rich men are reluctant to use their wealth for themselves alone, and disburse it for public purposes. Landowners build hospitals and schools on their own land, and some of them even renounce the ownership of land and transfer it to the tillers of the soil or establish communities on it. Mill-owners and manufacturers arrange hospitals, schools, savings banks and pensions as well as dwellings for their work people. Some of them form companies in which they share equally with the workers. . . . All these facts might app
ear accidental did they not come from one common cause just as it might seem accidental in spring that the buds begin to swell on some of the trees unless we knew that this is caused by the coming of spring generally, and that if the buds have begun to swell on some of the trees they will certainly do so on all of them. It is the same with the manifestation of Christian public opinion in regard to violence and all that is based upon it.22

  It may be that some liberal, comfortable, western reader of these words might suppose that the spring had come. There is, indeed, among decent people, an abhorrence of violence which might well have struck our great-grandparents as extraordinary. There is universal lip service to the idea of ‘human rights’ and human equality. There is an ill-defined economic egalitarianism at the heart of all western democratic government policies, even the most ‘right wing’ of which feel committed to providing care for the old, and the poor, and the sick.

  But only the blindest and most ignorant of western readers could imagine that the buds on Tolstoy’s trees had really heralded the spring. Reading his words nearly a century after they were written, we see a sort of tragedy in the fact that in Russia of all places, he felt – and was justified in feeling – that he could appeal to these feelings of decency, and to a belief in the Gospel of Christ, not only from ‘public opinion’ but from the Government itself.