Tolstoy

The political situation in Russia had indeed become very volatile by 1904. In the 1890s radical Marxist groups committed to revolution had changed their tactics from spreading propaganda amongst the new population of oppressed factory workers to mass agitation, causing a wave of strikes, and then had united to form the Social democratic Labour Party, which the police endeavoured but failed to destroy. When he reached the end of his term of Siberian exile in 1900, Vladimir Ulyanov had gone abroad. As well as founding a newspaper and adopting the name of Lenin, he had proposed the creation of a disciplined party of hard-line professional revolutionaries in his tract What Is to Be Done? (not to be confused with eponymous works by Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky). Publication of this tract contributed in 1903 to the Social democratic Labour Party splitting into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Apart from the clamour for reform from liberal parties, in 1904 the Russian government found itself dealing with the constant threat of terrorist activities from the various revolutionary groups, as well as increasing peasant unrest and a rising number of mass strikes in urban factories. discontent was only exacerbated by the government’s heavy-handed pogroms against the Jews (Tolstoy spoke out against them too), its continued persecution of religious minorities and its obvious support for employers rather than employees. With the domestic situation so fraught, the sudden outbreak of war with Japan in January 1904 took everyone by surprise.

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