It was the disastrous Russo-Japanese War which finally brought an end to imperial hubris. The Foreign Ministry and the armed forces had stagnated under Nicholas II: the British ambassador to Russia knew he could safely go on leave from September to december, and ministry officials would habitually arrive for work at midday and leave again at four. The stagnation was born of an unmerited complacency. So great had been Russia’s sense of superiority towards Japan that when it acquired a lease from China to expand into its north-eastern provinces in 1898, Foreign Minister Nikolay Muravyov declared that one flag and a sentry was all that was required to secure Port Arthur: Russian prestige would do the rest. But the ill-founded perception of Russian might was about to be challenged. Within weeks of Admiral Makarov arriving in Port Arthur, he perished with all his crew when the Russian flagship Petropavlovsk hit a Japanese mine. When war broke out, Tolstoy was distressed by feelings of patriotism which he did not feel able to suppress, and he started riding over to Tula several times a week to read the latest telegrams.148 Naturally he soon put pen to paper.149 In his article ‘Bethink Yourselves!’, Tolstoy exhorted his fellow-Russians to remember biblical texts like Luke 13: 5 (‘If you do not bethink yourselves, you will all perish’).150 Insisting that the war contravened the teachings of both Christ and the Buddha, he deplored its wanton violence:
We say that wars of today are not as those of yesterday, and that we are very far removed from that ancient cannibalism in Nation struggles, but it exists still under other forms. What other can be said of the destruction of the fleet and of the siege of Port Arthur? When did Humanity witness such horrors? What comparison can be found equal to those caused by this frightful carnage? More than 200,000 lives have been lost now in this insensate struggle …151
Chertkov translated this article into English, and arranged for its publication in newspapers throughout Europe, which provoked some people to write to Tolstoy in protest at his lack of patriotism, but expressions of sympathy were more common.152
Altogether, 1904 was a fairly bleak year for Tolstoy. Although he had little tolerance for those who espoused the Orthodox faith, he was nonetheless greatly saddened to receive the news of the death of his old relative Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya in March 1904. After their frosty meeting back in 1897 there had been little contact between them, but they were reconciled the year before she died at the age of eighty-seven. In his last letter, in which he addressed her as ‘dear, kind, old friend Alexandrine’, he thanked her for half a century’s friendship.153 In July Chekhov lost his fight against tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, and in August, a couple of weeks after Tolstoy’s wayward son Andrey was posted to the front (it was already bad enough that he was serving in the army), his elder brother Sergey died of cancer. Sergey had led a secluded and quite unhappy life, disappointed by his four surviving children, and by his marriage to someone from such a different background, and he spent his last days in agony. Tolstoy went out to Pirogovo three times in the summer of 1904, and was instrumental in relaying his sister and sister-in-law’s wish that Sergey receive communion before he died. To their surprise he agreed, despite his well-known religious indifference.154
13. Tolstoy photographed with his brother Sergey’s widow Maria Mikhailovna, the former gypsy singer in 1906
When Port Arthur finally fell to the Japanese in december 1904, Tolstoy became very despondent. Meanwhile, the 18,000-mile voyage halfway round the world of the imperial Baltic Fleet under Admiral Rozhdestvensky was dogged by incompetence. Soon after leaving St Petersburg in October, one inebriated captain opened fire on British fishing trawlers in the North Sea, mistaking them for Japanese torpedo boats, while another frigate in what came to be known as the ‘Russian mad-dog fleet’ was eventually discovered to be travelling up the Thames due to a navigation error. The day after the fleet finally arrived in the Pacific in May 1905, Japanese forces summarily destroyed it in the Battle of Tsushima. This was the final humiliating defeat which brought the war to a close.155 Tolstoy followed all these events with horror from Yasnaya Polyana, and was aghast when there was further violence closer to home. The extent of Russia’s domestic problems meant that the war with Japan enjoyed no popular support, as expressed by the assassination in July 1904 of the Minister of Internal Affairs. Nicholas II’s halfhearted response to calls for reform led to the outbreak of revolution on the infamous ‘Bloody Sunday’ of 9 January 1905, when tsarist troops fired on an unarmed procession of workers bringing a petition to the Winter Palace. The public outcry was followed by mass strikes all over Russia and the assassination on 22 January of the governor general of Moscow, Grand duke Sergey Alexandrovich, who had received Sonya during the famine in 1892. Tolstoy was stunned, and confessed that the news had made him physically suffer.156 Amongst the disturbances and uprisings which followed was a mutiny in June 1905 on the battleship Potemkin in Odessa. Perhaps regretting that he had not heeded Tolstoy’s brazen personal appeal back in 1902, Nicholas II was forced now to retreat from autocratic rule. In October he issued the historic manifesto which promised civil rights, the creation of a national legislative assembly (the ‘duma’), the abolition of censorship, religious tolerance and permission to found political parties. There was also a general amnesty.
The 1905 Revolution directly affected Tolstoy, since it meant that all his banned writings could now suddenly be published, although it took a while for the reforms to take effect. His new article, ‘Appeal to the Russian People’, in which he predictably condemned both the government and the revolutionaries, was seized by the police before it could be distributed in March 1906, but it went on sale freely in St Petersburg at the end of the year when it was published by the Free Word Press, which Chertkov had just moved to St Petersburg.157 Scores of Tolstoy’s other previously banned writings followed, while he moved on to his next article: ‘The Meaning of the Russian Revolution’. In March 1906 Chertkov received official notification that he could return to Russia, but he had already made one visit back home. In the midst of all the disturbances in 1905, Chertkov’s influential mother had obtained permission from the Tsar for her son to make a three-week visit, not only to St Petersburg to see her, but also to Yasnaya Polyana. It was a joyous reunion, and even Sonya was glad to see Chertkov.158 Moving back to Russia permanently was inhibited for Chertkov by his sick wife, the comfort of his surroundings in England and the extent of his publishing operations, and so it was a gradual process which took place over the next few years.