Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  For in addition to the ‘dawnist’ optimism of his essay, there is another strand which is much more frightening. As a reader of Proudhon and de Maistre, he sees that power is of its essence violent, and that governments can only continue, whatever their complexion, by possessing the means to subdue their enemies with violence. ‘To seize power and retain it it is necessary to love power. But love of power does not go with goodness but with the opposite qualities – pride, cunning and cruelty.’ That is why he opposes any idea of revolutionary activity against the regime which advocates violent means. For this would simply be to replace one system of violence with another, one lot of violent tyrants with another lot. ‘Today, let us say, the power is in the hands of a tolerable ruler, but tomorrow it may be seized by a Biron, an Elizabeth, a Catherine, a Pugachov, a Napoleon I or a Napoleon III. And the man in whose hands the power lies may be tolerable today but tomorrow he may become, a beast or he may be succeeded by a mad or crazy heir – like the King of Bavaria or our Paul I.’23

  Here Tolstoy raises the very heart of the difficulty, and he is unable to answer it. He is unable, even, to face it sensibly, and soon reverts, with tragic lack of foresight, to the feeling (how often is it uttered in pre-revolutionary situations) that ‘a revolution could hardly be more disastrous for the great mass of the people than the existing order. . . .’ or even to pathetically, ridiculously naïve questions. ‘Without a state,’ we are told, ‘we should also be subject to violence and attacks from evil men in our own country. But who are these evil men in our midst from whose attacks and violence we are preserved in the state and its army?’

  History would provide him with a long list of names in answer to that question; all men who understood the truth which he saw with the realistic side of his nature when he wrote, ‘It has been so since the beginning of the world and is so now. The evil always domineer over the good and inflict violence upon them.’

  The Kingdom of God is Within You, then, is a disturbed and broken thing, passages of sublime truth alternate with pages of complete nonsense; optimism of the craziest kind jostles with a ghastly realism of vision. The world would be better, Tolstoy asserts, without governments, without standing armies, without police forces and without prisons. But he is unable to show that this would abolish the proclivity of evil men for dominating the good, and for the strong bullying the weak. The essay has many historical postscripts. One cannot read it today without these postscripts intruding into one’s sense of the truth or untruth of his words.

  When one contemplates that within thirty years of his book being written, tens of thousands of young men were killing each other every day in the battlefields of the Somme, Passchendaele, Mons, his analysis of the folly and barbarity of war seems quite unanswerable. Tolstoy’s words seem nothing but the truth. The decisions of the generals and the politicians seem nothing better than lunacy.

  Or another postscript, British India. It is well known that Mahatma Gandhi began to read Tolstoy when he was in South Africa and that all his pacifist writings, especially The Kingdom of God is Within You, made a deep impression upon him. It was from Tolstoy that he learnt the idea of passive resistance. And it was by passive resistance, helped along by a catastrophically changed economic climate at home in England, that the Raj fell. Here, allowing for all the obvious modifications and exceptions which such a generalisation would demand, it would seem as though passive resistance did actually work. It is hard for an Englishman to write the next sentence without seeming ludicrously smug on his own nation’s behalf; but it has to be said that it only worked because of a fundamental decency in the manner by which the Raj was organised. In England and in India, there genuinely had been a change of heart of the kind which Tolstoy described. Public opinion had lost sympathy with the Imperial idea. And it would have been unthinkable for any post-1920s British administration to authorise a gunning down of the passive protesters. (The millions who were slain after British withdrawal during the time of partition provide their own interesting commentary on Tolstoy’s ideas that governments in themselves always produce, rather than repress, violence.)

  But the Raj postscript is not the one which comes first to mind, and it is not the one which comes first in historical order. Lying down in front of a train or a mounted policeman might have been a good idea in Delhi in 1946. But what good would it have done in Kiev or Moscow or Leningrad in 1936? Tolstoy had a vision of human barbarity eventually being tempered by the ideals of Christ. No one could have any conception of the sufferings and horrors which were to befall Russia once Lenin and Stalin were in control. And Stalin was Lenin’s natural heir, the fulfiller of his own understanding of, and belief in, unbridled and absolute power. Under Stalin, it did not make any difference whether you thought of yourself as resisting or submitting. You suffered or you got killed. Tolstoy could not conceive that there should dawn a day in Russia when there would be a government who did not merely fail to share his ideas of decency, but regard them with derision. The Kingdom of God is Within You is therefore an infinitely sad book to read. It is as far as an eighteenth-century rationalist can go in pointing out how human beings have fallen short of the ideals of Christ. But he starts with a neutered Christ, the Christ of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, a Christ purged of miracle and of terror, a Christ who can only hold out barely attainable ideals to help decent people be a little more decent. The Christ of the New Testament is a powerful figure, supernaturally conceived and understood. He is the embodiment of love itself, of God Himself, and on the Cross of Calvary, he utters the psalm which speaks of the total and, until that moment in history, unbridgeable gap between the mystery of human sin and the glory of the everlasting godhead. ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ An English or an American rationalist or Christian Modernist may find much with which he would agree in Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You; but it has very little to say to the slain of the trenches, or the victims of the Russian Civil War, or the countless millions who died as a result of Hitler and Stalin’s death camps, purges, and battles. To those numberless and nameless ones, perhaps, who had suffered from the oppression of unbridled evil, triumphant, irrational demonic power, Dostoyevsky’s The Devils makes more sense.

  When they looked back at the reign of Alexander III, historians could see that the famine and cholera deaths of 1891–3 had been a turning point. Pilate was weakened by the reproachful gaze of his prisoner. But the alarming thing is that the prisoner was weakened too. A step further had been taken towards mere anarchy being loosed upon the world. During the reign, every attempt had been made to strengthen the autocracy of the Emperor, and in the short term, doubtless, it was to succeed. Liberal newspapers had been silenced, or actually wound up. According to Pobedonostsev, the phantom of representative government had been exposed as the ‘great lie of our time’.24 But there was more at stake than democracy. For both Tolstoy and Pobedonostsev, the malaise which threatened the Empire was essentially religious, but both had radically opposed visions of the symptoms and the cure.

  One tiny detail brings this out with ludicrous poignancy. When the Archduke Nikolay Konstantinovich, the Emperor’s cousin, wrote to Alexander III asking what was to be done about the famine-stricken steppes, Pobedonostsev appended a note to the letter, before passing it on to his royal master, regretting that in his concern for the starving, the Archduke had omitted to comment on the urgent problem of church restoration in the famine areas. There is an emblematic fittingness that Pobedonostsev should have laboured so hard, and spent so much money, on the preservation of so many beautiful abbeys, cathedrals and churches which within decades were to become museums of atheism. One of his last memos to Alexander III concerns the fine old church of Ananour in Tiflis, ‘which is really in a state of the most dangerous dilapidation and ruin. The doors are already sealed shut, a stone has fallen from the cupola, and the roof is crumbling away.’25 Alexander supplied two thousand roubles for this useful work. A few days later, having been taken ill at the age
of fifty in Livadia, in the Crimea, the Emperor died. Neither he nor Pobedonostsev knew, and nor could they conceivably have seen its significance if they had known, that a few yards from that crumbling church in Tiflis a young seminarian called Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, later known as Stalin, had just begun his training for the priesthood.

  * ‘Ask them if they are really sure that their pilgrimage is agreeable to God.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Resurrection

  1894 – 1900

  Я roвopил: тoмy чтo былo,

  У ж нe бывaть! уж нe бывaть! . . .

  Ho вoт oпять зaтpeпeтaли . . .

  [I said: What is past shall be no more, shall be no more! . . . But, lo! They have started to stir again. . . .]

  Pushkin

  Nicholas II became the Emperor of Russia in October 1894. It would have required great gifts of prescience, at the beginning of the new reign, to know that he would be the last of his line. Optimists would have predicted the very opposite. When one Russian tyrant dies and is replaced by another, there are usually thoughts of change. Nicholas differed from his father in ways which might have made a dispassionate observer believe that he would transform the monarchy, and survive. He had a much deeper understanding of international relations and of Russia’s place among the nations, having travelled more than any of his predecessors since Peter the Great. Since 1893, he had been the chairman of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the year before his accession had been spent travelling about the Empire. Even more than his father had done, he valued the expertise of the Finance Minister, Witte. He understood and valued Witte’s perception that Russia had to expand as a modern, industrial society.

  Liberals had further grounds for hope. Nicholas had espoused – and within months of succeeding, married – Princess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt, a match to which Alexander III had been implacably opposed. With hindsight, we can see that he was absolutely right, and that no greater disaster ever befell the Russian monarchy than the arrival of this hysterical, humourless, German princess, and her eager conversion of herself into Alexandra Fyodorovna, the Orthodox zealot. Her paranoia, her religiosity, and her sheer inability to understand and get along with people were all unknown to the Russians when she arrived; and her calamitous association with Rasputin, her pathetic belief that the charlatan could cure her son’s haemophilia – the whole sorry story – lay in the future. All the constitutionalists knew was that the courtship of Nicholas and Princess Alice had taken place at Windsor under the approving eye of their grandmother, who presided over the stablest constitutional monarchy in Europe. Surely some of Queen Victoria’s political wisdom would rub off on the young pair? Zemstvo leaders began to hope that the new Emperor would set up representative assemblies. The zemstvo from the Tver province went so far as to voice this hope, to claim it, indeed, as a right, ‘so that the expression of the needs and thought not only of the administration but also of the Russian people may reach to the very height of the throne’.1

  This was fighting talk for a document which was going to be shown to Pobedonostsev. On January 17, 1895, a reception was held for deputations of the nobility, the zemstvos and the cities. It was at this reception that the Emperor gave that reply which became instantly notorious: ‘I am informed that recently in some zemstvo assemblies, voices have made themselves heard from people carried away by senseless dreams about participation by representatives of the zemstvo in the affairs of internal Government. Let all know that I, devoting all my strength to the welfare of the people, will uphold the principle of autocracy as firmly and as unflinchingly as my late, unforgettable father.’2

  So much for the liberal hopes. The sentence about ‘senseless dreams’ is one which Lenin would echo, not only with his lips but in his life. Stalin would be the same. But, as with all official pronouncements given from an autocratic source, there is a message here given out between the lines. Tolstoy heard it clearly enough. He and his daughter Tanya were staying at Nikolskoye with their friends the Olsufyevs when they heard news of the Tsar’s speech. ‘An important event,’ Tolstoy thought, ‘which I’m afraid will not be without consequence for me.’3

  As Tolstoy saw things, Russia at this time presented him with two alternatives. The first was to join with the revolutionaries, ‘to break violence with violence, terror, dynamite, bombs and daggers’. The other alternative was to work with the Government; to attempt, by means of compromise, ‘gradually to unravel the net which holds the people fast and free it’. Both these courses were equally abhorrent to Tolstoy. ‘One thing only remains: to fight the Government with weapons of thought, word and way of life, not making any concessions to it, not joining its ranks, not increasing its powers oneself. That’s the one thing needful and it will probably be successful. And this is what God wants and this is what Christ taught.’4

  He had defined the position of the refusenik. His confidence that in so doing he was recapturing the original intentions of Christ won many hearts. The Tsar, egged on by Pobedonostsev, had sent back the clear message that Tolstoyism, in practice if not in word, was now an indictable offence.

  This is well exemplified in the career of a man like Prince D. A. Khilkov. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, Khilkov had been an officer in the regiment of Hussar Guards. The experience of killing a Turk in battle had been a shattering one. After the war, he became a pacifist, and was drawn to the practices and beliefs of a pacifist sect which flourished in the regions where he had been quartered on military service. The sect called themselves the Dukhobors, which means ‘Spirit Wrestlers’.5

  On his return home from life among the Spirit Wrestlers, Prince Khilkov started to read Tolstoy. From his new religious friends, he had learnt pacifism and hostility to Orthodoxy. To these were now added a distrust of land ownership. He divided his estates among his peasants, lived among them in poverty and tried to convert them to his newly found point of view.

  When Khilkov’s story became known to the authorities, he was arrested, imprisoned and sent into exile in the Caucasus. He had been in touch, by letter, with Tolstoy ever since 1887, though the two men had never actually met. Khilkov had worse sorrows than exile to endure. In November 1893, he and his wife were visited by his mother, accompanied by the police from Tiflis. (Tiflis, where Stalin was by now starting to get involved in underground social democratic groups such as Mesame Dasi, was the nearest big town to Khilkov’s place of internal exile.) The police abducted Khilkov’s children and told his wife that, by Imperial decree, they were no longer allowed custody of them.

  Tolstoy was distressed by the story and wrote to Chertkov that Khilkov’s mother probably thought that she was acting for the best. ‘Surely you can see how she and everyone involved in this mad, cruel business will explain that it was all done with the best intentions? How can one analyse the extent to which a person is being sincere or unselfish? The only thing to do nowadays is to try not to get mixed up with things like this and not to be a party to them.’6

  The doctrine of non-intervention, however, attractive as it was, could not be pursued with consistency, in this case of the persecuted religious minorities, any more than it could be pursued in the case of the starving. Quite simply, Tolstoy had too much bigness of heart to be able to stand on the sidelines. Tolstoy got Chertkov to take up Khilkov’s cause and he himself intervened with a letter to the Emperor. Khilkov, for his part, was anxious to acquaint Tolstoy with the plight of religious minorities such as the Spirit Wrestlers. Since the period of ‘reaction’ had set in under Alexander III (engineered by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, but enthusiastically supported by innumerable others throughout the Empire) religious orthodoxy was enforced in a manner and to a degree which now barely seem credible. In the case of mixed marriages between Orthodox and, say, Catholics and Lutherans, it now became illegal for the children to follow the religion of the non-Orthodox parent. There were strong financial and political disabilities imposed – in different regions of the Empire
– on Jews, Moslems and Buddhists. Disabilities were removed if the ‘dissident’ consented to Orthodox baptism. But it was to the errant children of the Christian household, rather than to infidels, that the fiercest treatment was dealt out: to those who accepted the truth of Christianity but questioned the Holy Synod’s right to claim for itself a religious authority. Persecution was the reward for Old Believers, themselves more orthodox than the Orthodox, as well as for the zanier extremes, such as the Molokans and the Dukhobors.

  Particular disapprobation was felt for those sects, such as the Dukhobors, who refused military service. They found themselves herded into penal battalions. Someone who suffered in this way gave Chertkov the following account, which was smuggled out to England. Through the crippled translation, we can hear his voice with pathetic clarity:

  From the very first day the bloody chastisement commenced. They were flogged with thorny rods, whose thorns were remaining in the flesh and were thrown in a cold and dark cell afterwards. After few days, they were requested again to do the service, and for the refusal, flogged again. And so it was going on and no end was seen. Besides, they were always hungry, because they were eating no meat and were given too little bread. They were physically exhausted; many were sick; but the doctor was refusing to admit them in the hospital, unless they would agree to eat meat. The chaplain was requiring the performance of the Orthodox rites, and they were driven to church by fists and musket butt-ends. . . .7

  It is against a background of such stories that Tolstoy’s religious and political ideas must be seen. A modern western reader who picks up, say, The Kingdom of God is Within You might be forgiven for thinking that its ideas are crazy. But its assaults are not upon the Orthodox Church of today, neutered in some quarters and made a vassal of an atheist state, purged and chastened in other areas by persecution. Rather, Tolstoy was attacking the cruel and powerful instrument of a spiritual despotism. When the word ‘government’ is synonymous with barbarism, it is understandable why Tolstoy thought it morally imperative to be an anarchist. Solzhenitsyn, eighty years later, was to say that merely to live in the Soviet Union was to be corrupted.