The Russian Revolution

Front matter

BY

LEO TOLSTOY.

The Free Age Press Christchurch, Hants.

The Meaning of the Russian Revolution

"We live in glorious times… Was there ever so much to do? Our age is a revolutionary one in the best sense of the word—not of physical but moral revolution. Higher ideas of the social state, and of human perfection, are at work. I shall not live to see the harvest, but to sow in faith is no mean privilege or happiness."—W. E. Channing.

"For the worshippers of utility there is no morality except the morality of profit, and no religion but the religion of material welfare. They found the body of man crippled and exhausted by want, and in their ill-considered zeal they said: 'Let us cure this body; and when it is strong, plump, and well nourished, its soul will return to it.' But I say that that body can only be cured when its soul has been cured. In it lies the root of the disease, and the bodily ailments are but the outward signs of that disease. Humanity to-day is dying for lack of a common faith: a common idea uniting earth to heaven, the universe to God.

"From the absence of this spiritual religion, of which but empty forms and lifeless formularies remain, and from a total lack of a sense of duty and a capacity for self-sacrifice, man, like a savage, has fallen prostrate in the dust, and has set up on an empty altar the idol 'utility.' Despots and the Princes of this world have become his High Priests; and from them has come the revolting formulary: 'Each for his own alone; each for himself alone.—Mazzini.

"When He saw the multitude, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were distressed and scattered, as sheep not having a shepherd.’,—Matt. ix, 36.

A Revolution is taking place in Russia, and all the world is following it with eager attention, guessing and trying to foresee whither it is tending, and to what it will bring the Russian people.

To guess at and to foresee this, may be interesting and important to outside spectators watching the Russian Revolution, but for us Russians, who are living in this Revolution and making it, the chief interest lies not in guessing what is going to happen, but in defining as clearly and firmly as possible what we must do in these immensely important, terrible, and dangerous times in which we live.

Every Revolution is a change of a people's relation towards Power.

Such a change is now taking place in Russia, and we, the whole Russian people, are accomplishing it.

Therefore to know how we can and should change our relation towards Power, we must understand the nature of Power: what it consists of, how it arose, and how best to treat it.

I.

Always and among all nations the same thing has occurred. Among people occupied with the necessary work natural to all men, of providing food for themselves and their families, by the chase (hunting animals), or as herdsmen (nomads), or by agriculture, there appeared men of their own or another nation, who forcibly seized the fruit of the workers' toil: first robbing, then enslaving them, and exacting from them either labour or tribute. This used to happen in old times, and still happens in Africa and Asia, And always and everywhere the workers (occupied with their accustomed, unavoidably necessary, and unremitting task (their struggle with nature to feed themselves and rear children) though by far more numerous and always more moral than their conquerors, submitted to them and fulfilled their demands.

They submitted because it is natural to all men (and especially to those engaged in a serious struggle with nature to support themselves and their families) to dislike strife with other men; and feeling this aversion, they preferred to endure the consequences of the violence put upon them, rather than to give up their necessary, customary, and beloved labour.

There were, certainly, none of those contracts whereby Hugo Grotius and Rousseau explain the relations between the subdued and their subduers. Neither was there, nor could there be, any agreement as to the best way of arranging social life, such as Herbert Spencer imagines in his "Principles of Sociology"; but it happened in the most natural way, that when one set of men did violence to another set, the latter preferred to endure not merely many hardships, but often even great distress, rather than face the cares and efforts necessary to withstand their oppressors; more especially as the conquerors took on themselves the duty of protecting the conquered people against internal and external disturbers of the peace. And so the majority of men, occupied with the business necessary to all men and to all animals (that of feeding themselves and their families) not only endured the unavoidable inconveniences and hardships, and even the cruelty, of their oppressors, without fighting, but submitted to them and accepted it as a duty to fulfil all their demands.

When speaking about the formation of primitive communities the fact is always forgotten, that not only the most numerous and most needed, but also the most moral, members of society were always those who by their labour keep all the rest alive; and that to such people it is always more natural to submit to violence and to bear all the hardships it involves, than to give up the necessary work of supporting themselves and their families in order to fight against oppression. It is so now, when we see the people of Burmah, the Fellahs of Egypt, and the Boers, surrendering to the English, and the Bedouins to the French; and in olden times it was even more so.

Latterly, in the curious and widely diffused teaching called the Science of Sociology, it has been asserted that the relations between the members of human society have been, and are, dependent on economic conditions. But to assert this is merely to substitute for the clear and evident cause of a phenomenon one of its effects. The cause of this or that economic condition always was (and could not but be) the oppression of some men by others. Economic conditions are a result of violence, and cannot therefore be the cause of human relations. Evil men—the Cains—who loved idleness and were covetous, always attacked good men—the Abels—the tillers of the soil, and by killing them or threatening to kill them, profited by their toil. The good, gentle, and industrious people, instead of fighting their oppressors, considered it best to submit: partly because they did not wish to fight, and partly because they could not do so without interrupting their work of feeding themselves and their neighbours. On this oppression of the good by the evil, and not on any economic conditions, all existing human societies have been, and still are, based and built.

II.

From the most ancient times, and among all the nations of the earth, the relations of the rulers to the ruled have been based on violence. But this relation, like everything else in the world, was and is continually changing. It changes from two causes. First because the more secure their power becomes and the longer it lasts, the more do those in power (the leisured classes who have power) grow depraved, unreasonable and cruel, and the more injurious to their subjects do their demands become. Secondly, because as those in power grow more depraved, their subjects see more and more clearly the harm and folly of submitting to such depraved power.

And those in power always become depraved: firstly, because such people, immoral by nature, and preferring idleness and violence to work, having grasped power and used it satisfy their lusts and saute, give themselves up more and more to these passions and vices; and secondly, because lusts and passions, which in the case of ordinary men cannot be gratified without meeting with obstacles, not only do not meet such obstacles and do not arouse any condemnation in the case of those who rule, but on the contrary are applauded by all who surround them. The latter generally benefit by the madness of their masters; and besides, it pleases them to imagine that the virtues and wisdom to which alone it is natural for reasonable men to submit are to be found in the men to whom they submit; and therefore, the vices of those in power are lauded as if they were virtues, and grow to terrible proportions.

Consequently the folly and vice of the crowned and uncrowned rulers of the nations have reached such appalling dimensions as were reached by the Neros, Charleses, Henrys, Louis, Johns, Peters, Catherines, and Marats.

Nor is this all. If the rulers were satisfied with their personal debauchery and vices they would not do so much harm; but idle, satiated, and depraved men, such as rulers were and are, must have something to live for—must have some aims and try to attain them. And such men can have no aim except to get more and more fame. All other passions soon reach the limits of satiety. Only ambition has no limits, and therefore almost all potentates always strove and strive after fame, especially military fame, the only kind attainable by depraved men unacquainted with, and incapable of, real work. For the wars devised by the potentates, money, armies and, above all, the slaughter of men, are necessary; and in consequence of this the condition of the ruled becomes harder and harder, and at last the oppression reaches a point at which the ruled can no longer continue to submit to the ruling power, but must try to alter their relation towards it.

III.

Such is one reason of alteration in the relations between the rulers and the ruled. Another still more important reason of this change is that the ruled—believing in the rights of the power above them and accustomed to submit to it—as knowledge spreads and their moral consciousness becomes enlightened, begin to see and feel not only the ever increasing material harmfulness of this rule, but also that to submit to such power is becoming immoral.

It was possible five hundred or a thousand years ago for people, in obedience to their rulers, to slaughter whole nations for the sake of conquest, or for dynastic or religio-fantastic aims to behead, torture, quarter, encage, destroy and enslave whole nations. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, subjugated people, enlightened by Christianity or by the humanitarian teachings which have grown up out of it, can no longer without pangs of conscience submit to the powers which demand that they should participate in the slaughter of men defending their freedom (as was done in the Chinese, Boer, and Philippine wars) and can no longer with quiet consciences, as formerly, know themselves to be participators in the deeds of violence and the executions which are being committed by the Governments of their countries.

So that force-using power destroys itself in two ways.

It destroys itself through the ever-growing depravity of those in authority, and the consequent continually-increasing burden borne by the ruled; and through its ever-increasing deviation from the ever developing moral perception of the ruled. Therefore, where force-using power exists, a moment must inevitably come when the relation of the people towards that power must change. This moment may come sooner or later according to the degree and the rapidity of the corruption of the rulers, to the amount of their cunning, to the quitter or more trestles temperament of the people, and even from their geographical position helping or hindering the intercourse of the people among themselves; but sooner or later that moment must inevitably come to all nations.

To the Western nations, which arose on the ruins of the Roman Empire, that moment came long ago. The struggle of people against Government began even in Rome; continued in all the States that succeeded Rome, and still goes on. To the Eastern nations; Turkey, Persia, India, China, that moment has not yet arrived. For the Russian people, it has now come.

The Russian people are to-day confronted by the dreadful choice of either, like the Eastern nations, continuing to submit to their unreasonable and depraved Government in spite of all the misery it has inflicted upon them; or, as all the Western nations have done, realising the evil of the existing Government, upsetting it by force, and establishing a new one.

Such a choice seems quite natural to the non-labouring classes of Russia, who are in touch with the upper and prosperous classes of the Western nations and consider the military might, the industrial, commercial and technical improvements, and that external glitter to which the Western nations have attained under their altered Governments, to be a great good.

IV.

The majority of the Russian non-labouring classes are quite convinced that the Russian people at this crisis can do nothing better than follow the path the Western nations have trodden and are still treading: that is to say, fight the power, limit it, and place it more and more in the hands of the whole people.

Is this opinion right, and is such action good?

Have the Western nations, travelling for centuries along that path, attained what they strove for? Have they freed themselves from the evils they wished to be rid of?

The Western nations, like all others, began by submitting to the power which demanded their submission: choosing to submit rather than to fight. But that power in the persons of the Charleses (the Great and the Fifth) the Philips, Louis, and Henry the Eights, becoming more and more depraved, reached such a condition that the Western nations could no longer endure it. The Western nations, at different times, revolted against their rulers and fought them. This struggle took place in different forms, at different periods, but always found expression in the same ways: in civil wars, robberies, murders, executions, and finished with the fall of the old power and the accession of a new one. And when the new power became as oppressive to the people as that which had been overthrown, it too was upset, and another new one was put in its place, which by the same unalterable nature of power, became in due course as harmful as its predecessors. Thus, for instance, in France there were eleven changes of power within eighty years: the Bourbons, the Convention, the Directory, Bonaparte, the Empire, again the Bourbons, a Republic, Louis Philippe, again a Republic, again a Bonaparte, and again a Republic. The substitution of new powers for old ones took place among other nations too, though not so rapidly as in France. These changes in most cases did not improve the condition of the people, and therefore those who made these changes could not help coming to the conclusion that the misery they suffered did not so much depend on the nature of the persons in power as on the fact that a few persons exercised power over many. And therefore the people tried to render the power harmless by limiting it. And such limitation was introduced in several countries in the form of elected Chambers of Representatives.

But the men who limited the arbitrariness of the rulers and found the Assemblies, becoming themselves possessors of power, naturally succumbed to the depraving influence which accompanies power, and to which the autocratic rulers had succumbed, These men, becoming sharers in power even though not singly, perpetrated, jointly or separately, the same kind of evil, and became as great a burden on the people as the autocratic rulers had been. Then, to limit the arbitrariness of power still. more, monarchical power was abolished altogether in some countries, and a Government was established chosen by the whole people. In this way Republics were instituted in France, America and Switzerland; and the Referendum and the Initiative were introduced, giving every member of the community the possibility of interfering and participating in legislation.

But the only effect of all these measures was that the citizens of these States, participating more and more in power, and being more and more diverted from serious occupations, grew more and more depraved. The calamities from which the people suffered remain, however, exactly the same under Constitutional, Monarchical, or Republican Governments, with or without Referendums.

Nor could it be otherwise, for the idea of limiting power by the participation in power of all who are subject to it is unsound at its very core, and self-contradictory.

If one man with the aid of his helpers rules over all, it is unjust, and in all likelihood such rule will be harmful to the people.

The same will be the case when the minority rules over the majority. But the power of the majority over the minority also fails to secure a just rule; for we have no reason to believe that the majority participating in government is wiser than the minority that avoids participation.

To extend the participation in government to all, as might be done by still greater extension of the Referendum and the Initiative, would only mean that everybody would be fighting everybody else.

That man should have over his fellows a power founded on violence, is evil at its source; and no kind of arrangement that maintains the right of man to do violence to man, can cause evil to cease to be evil.

Therefore, among all nations, however they are ruled, whether by the most despotic or most democratic Governments, the chief and fundamental calamities from which the people suffer, remain the same: the same ever-increasing, enormous budgets, the same animosity towards their neighbours, necessitating military preparations and armies; the same taxes; the same State and private monopolies; the same depriving the people of the right to use the land (which is given to private owners); the same enslaving of subject races; the same constant threatenings of war; and the same wars, destroying the lives of men and undermining their morality.

V.

It is true that the Representative Governments of Western Europe and America—Constitutional Monarchies as well as Republics—have uprooted some of the external abuses practised by the representatives of power, and have made it impossible that the holders of power should be such monsters as were the different Louis, Charleses, Henrys and Johns. (Although in representative Government not only is it possible that power will be seized by cunning, immoral and artful mediocrities, such as various Prime Ministers and Presidents have been, but the construction of those Governments is such, that only that kind of people can obtain power.) It is true that representative Governments have abolished such abuses as the lettres de cachet, have removed restrictions on the press, have stopped religious persecutions and oppressions, have submitted the taxation of the people to discussion by their representatives, have made the actions of the Government public and subject to criticism, and have facilitated the rapid development in those countries of all sorts of technical improvements giving great comfort to the life of rich citizens and great military power to the State. So that the nations which have representative government have doubtless become more powerfully industrially, commercially and in military matters, than despotically governed nations, and the lives of their leisured classes have certainly become more secure, comfortable, agreeable and æsthethic than they used to be. But is the life of the majority of the people in those countries more secure, free or, above all, more reasonable and moral

I think not.

Under the despotic power of one man, the number of persons who come under the corrupting influence of power and live on the labour of others, is limited, and consists of the despot's close friends, assistants, servants and flatterers, and of their helpers. The infection of depravity is focussed in the Court of the despot, whence it radiates in all directions.

Where power is limited, i.e. where many persons take part in it, the number of centres of infection is augmented, for everyone who shares power has his friends, helpers, servants, flatterers and relations.

Where there is universal suffrage, these centres of infection are still more diffused. Every voter becomes the object of flattery and bribery, The character of the power itself is also changed. Instead of power founded on direct violence, we get a monetary power, also founded on violence, not directly, but through a complicated transmission.

So that under representative Governments, instead of one or a few centres of depravity, we get a large number of such centres—that is to say, there springs up a large class of people living idly on others' labour, the class called the "bourgeois," i.e. people who, being protected by violence, arrange for themselves easy and comfortable lives, free from hard work.

But as, when arranging an easy and pleasant life not only for a Monarch and his Court, but for thousands of little kinglets, many things are needed to embellish and to amuse this idle life, it results that whenever power passes from a despotic to a representative Government, inventions appear, facilitating the supply of objects that add to the pleasure and safety of the lives of the wealthy classes.

To produce all these objects, an ever-increasing number of working men are drawn away from agriculture, and have their capacities directed to the production of pleasing trifles used by the rich, or even to some extent by the workers themselves. So there springs up a class of town workers so situated as to be in complete dependence on the wealthy classes. The number of these people grows and grows the longer the power of representative Government endures, and their condition becomes worse and worse. In the United States, out of a population of seventy millions, ten millions are proletarians, and the relation between the well-to-do and the proletariat classes is the same in England, Belgium and France. The number of men exchanging the labour of producing objects of primary necessity for the labour of producing objects of luxury is ever increasing in those countries. It clearly follows that the result of such a trend of affairs must be the ever greater overburdening of that diminishing number which has to support the luxurious lives of the ever increasing number of idle people. Evidently, such a way of life cannot continue.

What is happening is as though there were a man whose body went on increasing in weight while the legs that ‘supported it grew continually thinner and weaker. When the support had vanished the body would have to fall.

VI.

The Western nations, like all others, submitted to the power of their conquerors only to avoid the worry and sin of fighting. But when that power bore too heavily upon them, they began to fight it, though still continuing to submit to power, which they regarded as a necessity. At first only a small part of the nation shared in the fight; then, when the struggle of that small part proved ineffectual, an ever greater and greater number entered into the conflict, and it ended by the majority of the people of those nations (instead of freeing themselves from the worry and sin of fighting) sharing in the wielding of power: the very thing they he wished to avoid when they first submitted to power. The inevitable result of this was the increase of the depraving influence that comes of power, an increase not affecting a small number of persons only, as had been the case under a single ruler, but affecting all the members of the community. (Steps are now being taken to subject women also to it.)

Representative Government and Universal Suffrage resulted in every possessor of a fraction of power being exposed to all the evil attached to power: bribery, flattery, vanity, self-conceit, idleness and, above all, immoral participation in deeds of violence. Every member of Parliament is exposed to all these temptations in a yet greater degree. Every Deputy always begins his career of power by befooling people, making promises he knows he will not keep; and when sitting in the House he takes part in making laws that are enforced by violence. It is the same with all Senators and Presidents. Similar corruption prevails in the election of a President. In the United States the election of a President costs millions to those financiers who know that when elected he will maintain certain monopolies or import duties advantageous to them, on various articles, which will enable them to recoup the cost of the election a hundredfold.

And this corruption, with all its accompanying phenomena—the desire to avoid hard work and to benefit by comforts and pleasures provided by others; interests and cares, inaccessible to a man engaged in work, concerning the general business of the State; the spread of a lying and inflammatory press; and, above all, animosity between nation and nation, class and class, man and man—has grown and grown, till it has reached such dimensions that the struggle of all men against their fellows has become so habitual a state of things, that Science (the Science that is engaged in condoning all the nastiness done by men) has decided that the struggle and enmity of all against all is a necessary, unavoidable and beneficent condition of human life.

That peace, which to the ancients who saluted each other with the words "Peace be unto you!" seemed the greatest of blessings, has now quite disappeared from among the Western peoples; and not only has it disappeared, but by the aid of science, men try to assure themselves that not in peace, but in the strife of all against all, lies man's highest destiny.

And really, among the Western nations, an unceasing industrial, commercial and military strife is continually waged; a strife of State against State, class against class, Labour against Capital, party against party, man against man.

Nor is this all. The chief result of this participation of all men in power is, that men being more and more drawn away from direct work on the land, and more and more involved in diverse ways of exploiting the labour of others, have lost their independence and are forced by the position they live in to lead immoral lives. Having neither the desire nor the habit of living by tilling their own land, the Western nations were forced to obtain their means of subsistence from other countries. They could do this only in two ways: by fraud, that is, by exchanging things for the most part unnecessary or depraving, such as alcohol, opium, weapons, for the foodstuffs indispensable to them; or by violence, that is, robbing the people of Asia and Africa wherever they saw an opportunity of doing this with impunity.

Such is the position of Germany, Austria, Italy, France, the United States, and especially Great Britain, which is held up as an example for the imitation and envy of other nations. Almost all the people of these nations, having become conscious participators in deeds of violence, devote their strength and attention to the activities of Government, and to industry and to commerce, which aim chiefly at satisfying the demands of the rich for luxuries; and they subjugate (partly by direct force, partly by money) the agricultural people both of their own and of foreign countries, who have to provide them with the necessaries of life.

Such people form a majority in some nations; in others they are as yet only a minority; but the percentage of men living on the labour of others grows uncontrollably and very rapidly, to the detriment of those who still do reasonable, agricultural work. So that a majority of the people of Western Europe are already in the condition (the United States are not so yet, but are irresistibly drawn towards it) of not being able to subsist by their own labour on their own land. They are obliged in one way or another, by force or fraud, to take the necessaries of life from other people who still do their own labour. And they get these necessaries either by defrauding foreign nations, or by gross violence.

From this it necessarily results that trade, aiming chiefly at satisfying the demands of the rich, and of the richest of the rich (that is, the Government) directs its chief powers, not to improving the means of tilling the soil, but to making it possible by the aid of machines to somehow till large tracts of land (of which the people have been deprived), to manufacturing finery for women, building luxurious palaces, producing sweetmeats, toys, motor-cars, tobacco, wines, delicacies, medicines, enormous quantities of printed matter, guns, rifles, powder, unnecessary railways, and so forth.

And as there is no end to the caprices of men when they are met not by their own labour but by that of others, industry is more and more diverted to the production of the most unnecessary, stupid, depraving products, and draws people more and more from reasonable work; and no end can be foreseen to these inventions and preparations for the amusement of idle people, especially as the stupider and more depraving an invention is—such as the use of motors in place of animals or of one's own legs, railways to go up mountains, or armoured automobiles armed with quick-firing guns—the more pleased and proud of them are both their inventors and their possessors.

VII.

The longer representative Government lasted and the more it extended, the more did the Western nations abandon agriculture and devote their mental and physical powers to manufacturing and trading in order to supply luxuries to the wealthy classes, to enable the nations to fight one another, and to deprave the udepraved. Thus, in England, which has had representative Government longest, less than one-seventh of the adult male population are now employed in agriculture, in Germany 0.45 of the population, in France one-half, and a similar number in other States. So that at the present time the position of these States is such, that even if they could free themselves from the calamity of proletarian- ism, they could not support themselves independently of other countries. All these nations are unable to subsist by their own toil; and, just as the proletariat are dependent on the well-to-do classes, so are they completely dependent on countries that support themselves and are able to sell them their surplus: such as India, Russia or Australia. England supports from its own land less than a fifth of its population; and Germany less than half, as is the case with France and with other countries; and the condition of these nations becomes year by year more dependent on the food supplied from abroad.