To implement his reforms, Stolypin needed to suppress the revolution and he was doing this with increasing cruelty. He started by introducing courts martial for civil crimes. Executions, extremely rare in Russia for a century and a half, were taking place on a daily basis and on an unprecedented scale. Each day the now liberated press reported on new hangings and shootings. On 9 May 1908, after reading one such report, Tolstoy began recording his article ‘I Can’t Be Silent’ on a phonograph, but he was overpowered by emotion and soon found himself unable to continue. He spent the whole following month carefully working on the text, which became what is arguably the most famous and most powerful denunciation of capital punishment ever written in any language. Extracts from it appeared on 4 July 1908 in several Russian newspapers, all of which were fined for publishing it.
Tolstoy begins the article with a naturalistic, detached description of a hanging in which his indignation manifested itself only in the precision of his account of the horrifying details. He wrote about the situation in the country, where hatred was growing and little children were now playing out terrorist acts, expropriations and executions in their games. He insisted that, while all killing is abominable, soldiers who obey orders, terrorists who risk their lives, and even actual executioners, who are mostly illiterate and know that their job is disreputable, are more deserving of pardon than the cold-blooded and self-righteous murderers who send people to the gallows. In closing, Tolstoy acknowledged his own moral responsibility for everything that was happening in his country:
Everything now being done in Russia is done in the name of the general welfare, in the name of the protection and tranquillity of the people of Russia. And if this is so, then it is also done for me, since I live in Russia . . . And being conscious of this, I can no longer endure it, but must free myself from this intolerable position! It is impossible to live so! I, at any rate, cannot and will not live so. That is why I write this and will circulate it by all means in my power, both in Russia and abroad. I hope that one of two things may happen: either that these inhuman deeds may be stopped, or that my connection with them may be terminated by my imprisonment, whereby I may be clearly conscious that these horrors are not committed on my behalf. Or better still (so good that I dare not even dream of such happiness), I hope that they put on me, as on those twelve or twenty peasants, a shroud and a cap and push me too off a bench, so that by my own weight I may tighten the well-soaped noose round my old throat. (CW, XXXVII, p. 94–5)
The resonance of the article was comparable only to that of Zola’s J’accuse, published ten years earlier. Tolstoy was accustomed to admiration and hatred. He had already received death threats and remained unfazed. Still, he was aware that whatever he wrote, he would not be arrested or hanged. For twenty years, the tragedy he described in The Light Shines in the Darkness had been torturing him.
In his later years Tolstoy was especially friendly with Maria Schmidt, an old spinster who had adopted his philosophy and settled near Yasnaya Polyana, sustaining herself with hard manual labour. She was so humble and kind that even Sofia, who disliked Tolstoyans, always mentioned her favourably. Schmidt did not approve of ‘I Can’t Be Silent’ because it lacked ‘love’. With enormous difficulty, she managed to convince the author to omit personal attacks on Stolypin, Nicholas II and others. Tolstoy, who called hatred ‘the most painful of all feelings’, was struggling to contain his fury. Worst of all, it was a fury born of despair.
Overcoming strong resistance from the left and the right, Stolypin succeeded in bulldozing his main reforms through the Duma. The peasants were granted the legal right to leave the commune while retaining their strips of land as private property that they could farm or sell, to buy state land and receive subsidies for resettlement. The peasant commune was doomed. Stolypin wrote that twenty years of internal and external peace would transform Russia – this dream proved to be no less utopian than Tolstoy’s Georgism. He was assassinated by a terrorist in 1911 just as he was about to be dismissed from his post. With the revolution suppressed, the emperor no longer needed a ruthless reforming zealot at the helm of the government. Three years later, Russia entered the First World War, which ended in a new revolution, followed by civil war and later the annihilation of the Russian peasantry in the horrors of forced collectivization and the Gulag. Tolstoy was fortunate not to witness these developments, but he could read the writing on the wall.
Maria Schmidt: the exemplary Tolstoyan, 1886.
In the summer of 1908, when Tolstoy was writing ‘I Can’t Be Silent’, Chertkov returned to Russia after being amnestied, and settled nearby. Conversations with his old friend and favourite disciple gave a lot of comfort and support to the ageing writer. Staying at Chertkov’s house, Tolstoy used to wander around and talk to peasants without being recognized. At Yasnaya Polyana, where everyone knew him, this would have been impossible. He recorded the growing plight and hardening resentment of the poor, who started speaking about the educated elite as ‘parasites’, an epithet Tolstoy had never heard before. Use of this word did not bode well for the privileged; later it became a Bolshevik catchword that justified the extermination of the ruling classes. Some conversations, however, were different.
During one of his strolls, Tolstoy met a handsome, intelligent and hard-working young peasant who quickly acquiesced to the stranger’s admonitions about alcohol and promised to quit drinking. Tolstoy could hardly believe in such rapid success, but that evening the young peasant came by to borrow brochures about the evils of intoxication. With obvious satisfaction, he conveyed his mother’s gratitude to the old man. Proud of himself, he also confessed that he was already engaged to a nice girl.
Having congratulated the convert, Tolstoy asked a question ‘that always interested him when he dealt with the young nice people of our time’:
Forgive me for asking, but please, tell the truth, either don’t answer or tell the whole truth.
He looked at me calmly and attentively. ‘Why is not to say?’
Have you sinned with a woman?
Without a moment’s hesitation, he answered simply, ‘God save me, this has never happened.’
That is good, really good, I said. I am glad for you.
Tolstoy published an essay about this conversation under the title ‘From the Diary’. Several days later, he added a conclusion and a new title, ‘Grateful Soil’. The full text appeared in late July 1910:
What a wonderful soil to sow, what a receptive soil. What a terrible sin it is to throw there the seeds of lies, violence, drunkenness, debauchery . . . We, who have a chance to give back to this people at least a bit of what we have ceaselessly been taking from them, what do we give him in return? Aeroplanes, dreadnoughts, 30-storey buildings, gramophones, the cinematograph and all the useless stupidities that we call science and art. And most importantly, the example of empty, immoral, criminal life . . . ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!’ (CW, XXXVIII, pp. 35–6)
This turned out to be the last work he published in his lifetime.
Tolstoy was never a stubborn technophobe. He rode a bicycle, recorded his voice on a phonograph sent to him by Thomas Edison, used trains and put photographs on the walls of his room. He often said that there was nothing inherently good or bad about railways: the main problem was where and for what reason does one travel. Modernity in his eyes failed this litmus test. There was no hope for the peasant he encountered, even if the young man would be able to abstain from drinking and remain chaste. For decades, Tolstoy was fighting against the overwhelming force of history. He had never surrendered, but now he knew that it was time for him to leave the battlefield.