lenin - leo tolstoy as the mirror of the russian revolution

7/29/2019 Lenin - Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution

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LENIN'S ARTICLES ON TOLSTOYLEO TOLSTOY AS THE MIRROR OF THERUSSIAN REVOLUTIONTo identify the great artist with the revolution which he hasobviously failed to understand, and from which he obviouslystands aloof, may at first sight seem strange and artificial' Amirror which does not reflect thi4gs correctly could hardly becalled a mirror. Our revolution, however, is an extremely com-plicated thing. Among the mass of those who are directly makingand participating in it there are many social elements which havealso obviously not understood what is taking place and whichalso stand aloof from the real historica tasks with which thecourse of events has confronted them. And if we have before us areally great artist, he must have reflected in his work at leastsome of the essentiai aspects of the revolution.The legal Russian press, though its pages teem with articles,letters and comments on Tolstoy's eightieth blrthday, is least ofall interested in analysing his works from the standpoint of thecharacter of the Russian revolution and its motive forces. Thewhole of this press is steeped to nausea in hypocrisy, hypocrisy

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eppeNorx 335of a double kind: official and liberal. The former is the crudehypocrisy of the venal hack who was ordered yesterday tohound Leo Tolstoy, and today to show that Tolstoy is a parriot,ad to try to observe rhe decencies before the eyes of Europe.That the hacks of rhis kind have been paid for their screeds iscommon knowledge and they cannot deceive anybody. Muchmore refrned and, therefore, much more pernicious and danger-ous is liberal hypocrisy. To listen to rhe Cader Balalaikins of Rech,one would rhink rhat their sympathy for Tolstoy is of the mostcomplete and ardent kind. Actually, their calculated declam-ations and pompous phrases about the 'great seeker after God'are false from beginning to end, for no Russian liberal believes inTolstoy's God, or symparhises wirh Tolsroy's criticism of theexisting social order. He associates himself with a popular namein order to increase his polirical capital, in order to pose as aleader of the nation-wide opposition; he seeks, with the din andthunder of claptrap, to drown the demand for a srraight and clearanswer to the question: what are the glaring contradictions of'Tolstoyism' due to, and what shortcomings and weaknesses ofour revolution do they express?The contradictions in Tolstoy's works, views, doctrines, in hisschool, are indeed glaring. On the one hand, we have the greatartist, the genius who has nor only drawn incomparable picturesof Russian life but has made firsr-class contributions to worldliterature. On the other hand, we have the landlord obsessedwith Chist. On the one hand, rhe remarkably powerful, forth-right, and sincere protest against social falsehood and hlpocrisy:and on the othe the 'Tolstoyan', i.e., the jaded, hysterical snivel-ler called the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breastand wails: 'I am a bad wicked man, but I am practising moraiselperfection; I don't eat meat any more, I now eat ice cutlets.'On the one hand, merciless criticism of capitalist exploi-tation, exposure of government outrages, the farcical courts

ad the state administrarion, and unmasking of the profound


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336 eppsr orxcontradictions between the growth of poverty, degradation andmisery among the working masses. On the other, the crackpotpreaching of submission, 'resist not evil' with violence. On theone hand, the most sober realism, the tearing away of all andsundry masks; on the other, the preaching of one of the mostodious things on earth, namely, religion, the striving to replaceofficially appointed priests by priests who will serve from moralconviction, i.e., to cultivate the most reflned and, therefore, par-ticularly disgusting clericalism. Verily:

Thou art a pauper, yet thou art abundant,Thou art mighty, yet thou art impotent--Mother Russia!

Thar Tolstoy, owing to these contradictions, could not pos-sibly understand either the working-class movement and its rolein the struggle 1o. seiaism, or the Russian revolution, goeswithout saying. But the contradictions in Tolstoy's views anddoctrines are not accidental; they express the contradictory con-ditions of Russian life in the last third of the nineteenth century-The patriarchal countryside, only recent emancipated fromserfdom, was literally given over to the capitalist and the tax-collector to be fleeced and plundered. The ancient foundationsof peasant economy and peasant life, foundations that had reallyheld for centuries, were broken up for scrap with extraordinaryrapidity. And the contradictions in Tolstoy's views must beappraised not from the standpoint of the present-day working-class movement and present-day socialism (such an appraisal is,of course, needed, but it is not enough), but from the standpointof protest against advancing capitalism, against the ruining ofthe masses, who are being dispossessed of their land-a protestwhich had to arise from the patriarchal Russian countryside.Tolstoy is absurd as a prophet who has discovered new nostrumsfor the salvation of mankind-and therefore the foreign and

pperuolx 337Russian 'Tolstoyals' who have sought to convert the weakestside of his doctrine into a dogma, are not worth speaking of.Tolstoy is great as the spokesman of the ideas and sentiments thatemerged among the millions of Russian peasants at the time thebourgeois revolution was approaching in Russia. Tolstoy is ori-ginal, because the sum total of his views, taken as a whole,happens to express the speciflc features of our revolution as apeosont bourgeois revolution. From this point of view, the contra-dictions in Tolstoy's views are indeed a mirror of those contra-dictory conditions in which the peasantry had to play theirhistorical part in our revolution. On the one hand, centuries offeuda oppression and decades of accelerated post-Reform pau-perisation piled up mountains of hate, resentment, and desper-ate determination. The striving to sweep away completely theofficial church, the landlords and the landlord government, todestroy all the old forms and ways of landovmership, to clear theland, to replace the police-class state by a community of free andequal small peasants-this striving is the keynote of every histor-ical step the peasantry has taken in our revolution; and undoubt-edly, the message of Tolstoy's writings conforms to this peasantstriving far more than it does to abstract 'Christian Anarchism',as his 'system' of views is sometimes appraised.On the other hand, the peasantry, striving towards ne\M waysof life, had a very crude, patriarchal, semi-religious idea of whatkind of life this should be; by what struggle could liberty bewon, what leaders it could have in this struggle, what was theattitude of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsiatowards the interests of peasant revolution, why the forcibleoverthrow of tsarist ule was needed in order to abolish land-Iordism. The whole past life of the peasantry had taught it tohate the landorrner and the official, but it did not, and could not,teach it where to seek an answer to all these questions. In ourrevolution a minor part of the peasantry really did frght, didorganise to some extent for this purpose; and a very small part


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338 npperu orxindeed rose up in arms to exterminate its enemies, to destroy thetsar's servants and protectors of the landlords. Most of the peas-antry wept and prayed, moralised and dreamed, r,lTote petitionsand sent 'pleades'-quite in the vein of Leo Tolstoy! And, asalways happens in such cases, the effect of this Tolstoyan absten-tion from politics, this Tolstoyan renunciation of politics, thisiack of interest in and understanding of politics, was that only aminority followed the lead of the class-conscious revolutionaryproletariat, while the majority became the prey of thoseunprincipled, servile, bourgeois intellectuals who under thename of Cadets hastened from a meeting of Trudoviks toStolypin's ante-room, and begged, haggled, reconciled andpromised to reconcile-until they were kicked out with a mili-tary jackboot. Tostoy's ideas are a mirror of the weakness, theshortcomings of our peasant revolt, a reflection of the flabbinessof the patriarchal countryside and of the hidebound cowardiceof the'enterprising muzhik'.Take the soldiers' insurrections in 1905-06. In sociai com-position these men who fought in our revolution were partlypeasants and partly proletarians. The proletarians were in theminority; therefore the movement in the armed forces does noteven approximately show the same nation-wide solidarity, thesame party consciousness, as were displayed by the proletariat,which became Social-Democratic as if by the wave of a hand. Yetthere is nothing more mistaken than the view that the insurrec-tions in the armed forces failed because no ofcers had ed them.On the contrary, the enormous progress the revolution hadmade since the time of the Narodnaya Volya was shown preciselyby the fact that the 'grey herd' rose in arms against theirsuperiors, and it was this seldependency of theirs that sofrightened the liberal landlords and the liberal officers. Thecommon soldier fuly sympathised with the peasants' cause; hiseyes lit up at the very mention of land. There was more than onecase when authority in the armed forces passed to the mass of

npper ox 339the rank and flle, but determined use of this authoriry washardly made at all; the soldiers wavered, after a couple of days,in some cases a few hours, afrer killing some hated officer, theyreleased the others who had been aresred, parleyed with theauthorities and then faced the frring squad, or bared rheir backsfor the birch, or pur on the yoke again-quite in the vein of LeoTolstoy!Tolstoy reflected rhe penr-up hatred, the ripened striving for abetter lot, the desire ro get rid of the past-and also the imma-ture dreaming, the political inexperience, rhe revoutionary flab_biness. Historical and economic conditions explain both theinevitable beginning of the revolutionary struggle of the massesand their unpreparedness for the struggle, their Tolstoyan non-esistance to evil, which was a most serious cause of the defeat ofthe first revolurionary campaign.It is said thar beaten armies learn well. Of course, revolution_ary classes can be compared with armies only in a very limitedsense. The development of capitalism is hourly changing andintensifying the conditions which roused the millions of peas-ants-united by their hatred for the feudalisr landlords and theirgovernment-for the revolutionary-democratic struggle. Amongthe peasantry themselves the growth of exchange, of the rule ofthe market and the power of money is steadily ousting old-fashioned patriarchalism and patriarchal Tolstoyan ideology. Butthere is one gain from the first years of the revolution and thefirst reverses in mass revolutionary struggle about which therecal be no doubt. It is the mortal blow struck at the formersoftness and flabbiness of the masses. The lines of demarcationhave become more distinct. The cleavage of classes and partieshas taken place. Under the hammer blows of the lessons taughtby Stolypin, and wirh undeviating and consisrent agitation by therevolutionary Social-Democrars nor only the socialist proietariatbut also the democratic masses of rhe peasantry will inevitably

advance from their midst more and more steeled frghters


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340 nppeN orxwho will be less capable of falling into our historical sin ofTolstoyism!First published in Proletory, No. 35, September 11 (2a), 1908,arrd subsequently in Lenin's Collecte Worls, Vol. 15, pp. 202-9,Reprinted from Lenir, On Literqture ond q Moscow ProgressPublishers, 19 67, pp. 28-3 3.L. N. TOLSTOYLeo Tolstoy is dead. His universal significance as an artist ard hisuniversal fame as a thinker and preacher reflect, each in its owrrway, the universal significance of the Russian revolution.L. N. Tolstoy emerged as a great artist when serfdom still heldsway in the lald. In a series of great works, which he producedduring the more than half a century of his literary activity, hedepicted mainly the old, pre-revolutionary Russia whichremained in a state of semi-serfdom even after 1861-ruralRussia of the landlord and the peasant. In depicting this periodin Russia's history, Tolstoy succeeded in raising so many greatproblems and succeeded in rising to such heights of artisticpo\Mer that his works rank among the greatest in world literature.The epoch of preparation for revolution in one of the countriesunder the heel of the serf owners became, thanks to its brilliantillumination by Tolstoy, a step forward in the artistic develop-ment of humanity as a whole.Tolstoy the artist is known to an infi.nitesimal minority even inRussia. If his great works are really to be made the possession ofoll, a struggle must be waged against the system of society whichcondemns millions and scores of millions to ignorance,benightedaess, drudgery and poverty-a socialist revolutionmust be accomplished.Tolstoy not only produced artistic works which will always beappreciated and read by the masses, once they have created

aPPer.orx 341humal condions of life for themselves after overthrowing theyoke of the landlords and capitalists; he succeeded in conveyingwith remakable force the moods of the large masses that areoppressed by the present system, in depicting their conditionand expressing their spontareous feelings of protest and aager.Belonging, as he did, primarily ro rhe era of t ge l-l qO4, Tolstoyi his works-both as an artist and as a thinker ald preacher-embodied in amazingly bold relief the specific historical featuresof the entire frrst Russian revolution, its strength and its weakness.One of the principal distinguishing features of our revolutionis that it was a pedsqt bourgeois revolution in the era of the veryadvalced development of capitalism throughout the world ardof its comparatively advanced development in Russia. It was abourgeois revolution because its immediate aim was to over-throw the tsarist autocracy, the tsarist monarchy, and to abolishIandlordism, but not to overthro\M the domination of the bour-geoisie. The peasaltry in particular was not aware of the latteraim, it was not aware of the distinction between this aim and thecloser and more immediate aims of the struggle. It was a peasantbourgeois revolution because the objective conditions put in theforefont the problem of changing the basic conditions of lifefor the peasantry, of breaking up the old, medieval system oflandovmership, of 'clearing the ground' for capitalism; theobjective conditions were responsible for the appearance of thepeasant masses on the arena of more or less independent historicaction. ,Tolstoy's works express both the strength ald the weakness,the might and the limitations, precisely of the peasant massmovement. His heated, passionate, and often ruttrlessly sharpprotest against the state ald the official church that was in alli-ance with the police conveys the sentiments of the primitivepeasant democratic masses, among whom centuries of serfdom,of official tyranny and robbery, and of church Jesuitism, decep-tion and chicanery had piled up mountains of anger and hatred.

lenin - leo tolstoy as the mirror of the russian revolution

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