Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (73 page)

A
LTHOUGH
T
OLSTOY
DID
NOT
like to call himself an anarchist, because of its popular association with violence, he may be considered one of the greatest anarchist thinkers for his eloquent and reasoned defence of freedom. He was a Russian aristocrat like Bakunin, but he utterly repudiated his call for violent revolution. Tolstoy’s politics were inextricably connected with his moral views which in turn were based on a highly unorthodox version of Christianity. He was one of the most powerful critics of the fraud of government, the immorality of patriotism, and the danger of militarism. He not only tried to live according to his principles — however unsuccessfully — but bis religious anarchism gave rise to many communities of Tolstoyans. He was a major influence in shaping Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence and continues to inspire many libertarian pacifists.

Leo Tolstoy at first sight seems an unlikely candidate to become one of the most uncompromising of anarchists. He was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana in Tula province, the third of five children. His father Count Nikolai was a veteran of the 1812 campaign against Napoleon. He was orphaned at an early age: his mother died when he was not quite two, and his father died when he was nine. He was brought up by a pious and elderly aunt who was concerned with the spiritual welfare of the poor. This did not prevent him from having a happy childhood. His father never used corporal punishment and taught the young Leo to be polite to the servants.

The enlightened atmosphere of the home encouraged the utopian dreams of the children. The game which Tolstoy most enjoyed was invented by his elder brother Nikolai who claimed to have discovered a remarkable secret written on a green stick in a nearby forest. When known it would make all men happy; there would be no more disease, no misery, no anger and all would love one another. They would become like ‘the brotherhood of ants’, referring it seems not to a hierarchical colony of insects, but to the religious sect of Moravians whose name in Russian sounds like the word
for ants!
¹
The existence of such a secret truth haunted all Tolstoy’s later spiritual expeditions.

Tolstoy was educated at home; at one stage there were eleven tutors living in the house. In 1844, he went to Kazan University were he intended to study oriental languages, but lost interest and did not graduate. Whilst at university he began his lifelong habit of keeping a diary of his thoughts and plans. He tried to write down some ‘Rules of Life’ but he did not get very far: the constant struggle in his life between his strong moral conscience and his strong sensual desires had begun. He later described the period of his youth and early manhood as one of ‘coarse dissoluteness, employed in the service of ambition, vanity, and, above all, lust’, but he was not much different from other young Russian aristocrats of his time.
²
His later anarchist morality called for the repression, not the liberation, of his strong and unruly sensual desires.

At this time Tolstoy still wanted to follow a rigorous course of self-study but he played the gentleman-farmer for a while on his estate. He then enjoyed the pleasures of Moscow for several years, before turning his back on polite, frivolous society in 1851 to accompany his brother Nikolai to the North Caucasus, where he joined an artillery regiment. He was stationed in a Cossack village, and went on expeditions to subdue the mountain tribes, on one occasion nearly being killed by a grenade, and, on another, narrowly escaping capture. He could not stop himself gambling and womanizing, and he loved the wild nature all around.

The example of the peasant communities, regulating their affairs through custom and voluntary agreement, also impressed him deeply. He later wrote that he witnessed, in the communes of the Cossacks, who did not acknowledge private ownership of land, ‘such well-being and order that did not exist in society where landed property is defended by the organized violence of government’.
³
But he did not yet reach anarchistic conclusions. After reading Plato and Rousseau, he wrote in his diary, on 3 August 1852: ‘I will devote the rest of my life to drawing up a plan for an aristocratic, selective union with a monarchical administration on the basis of existing elections. Here I have an aim for a virtuous life. I thank thee, O Lord. Grant me strength.’

It was in the Caucasus that Tolstoy began his literary career, producing several autobiographical stories and his first novel
Childhood.
As he later acknowledged: ‘I didn’t become a general in the army, but I did in literature.’

Commissioned at the outbreak of the Crimean war in 1854, he was given the command of a battery during the defence of Sevastopol. It was to have a traumatic effect. He described the horrors of the war in
Tales from Army Life
and
Sketches of Sevastopol
(1856) and then left the army in 1856.
He went on to see in conscription one of the worst expressions of governmental violence and later urged the young to refuse to serve in the army. In the Crimea, Tolstoy also recovered his earlier aim in life — the ideal of virtue — which had been long forgotten because of the temptations of military society. He now decided at the age of twenty-seven that it would be his purpose in life to found a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind: ‘the religion of Christ, but purged of beliefs and mysticism, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth’.
⁴

After returning to the capital, Tolstoy circulated in the literary
demimonde
of St Petersburg. In 1857 he left for Western Europe, spending six months in France, Switzerland and Germany. In Paris he witnessed the public guillotining of a murderer which was to prove a key event in his life and the beginning of his gradual conversion to anarchism. He was filled with horror at the State’s ‘insolent, arrogant desire to carry out justice and the law of God’. In a letter to a friend, he wrote of this nonsensical law contrived by man:

As he later wrote in
A Confession
(1882), the sight of the execution revealed to him the instability of his belief in inevitable progress.
⁶

Tolstoy still was not confident that socialism could transform existing States, but he was now prepared to contemplate their abolition. He was deeply impressed by Proudhon’s belief, as expressed in
What is Property?
(1844), that the government of man by man is oppression, and that the union of order and anarchy is the highest form of society. In his notebook, he was critical of Proudhon’s one-sided materialist philosophy, yet added ‘it is better to see this one side in past thinkers and workers, especially when they complement each other. From this comes love, uniting all these views into one, and this is the simple infallible law of humanity.’
⁷

Tolstoy was not only groping towards his mature conception of universal love. His notebooks show that he was struggling already with many of his future concerns. He was convinced that ‘Nationality is the one single bar to the growth of freedom.’ He was ready to accept that ‘the absence of laws is possible, but there must be security against violence’.
⁸
It was this preoccupation with violence, which he saw in himself as well as on a grand
scale in the Crimean War, which prevented him from supporting the cause of revolutionary socialism. He could see no justification for shedding blood for any political gain, however beneficial. But he was willing (and remained so for the rest of his life) to accept Proudhon’s proposition: ‘All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.’
⁹

After his travels abroad, Tolstoy returned home to Yasnaya Polyana and threw himself into improving the condition of his estate and its serfs. He founded a school for peasant children in 1859 which occupied him for the next three or four years. He was not certain exactly what to teach them — his moral and religious views had not yet hardened — so he let them learn what they liked. He said to himself: ‘In some of its developments progress has proceeded wrongly, and with primitive peasant children one must deal in a spirit of perfect freedom, letting them choose what path of progress they please.’
¹⁰
He based his method on individual freedom and became convinced that the principal part in educating people is played not by schools but by life.

Tolstoy developed his own theory of spontaneous learning. He wanted to eliminate all compulsory methods and allow the students to regulate themselves. Above the school entrance he placed the inscription: ‘Enter and Leave Freely.’ The school practised non-interference, with the students allowed to learn what they wanted to learn: ‘When they submit only to natural laws, such as arise from their natures, they do not feel provoked and do not murmur; but when they submit to predetermined interference, they do not believe in the legality of your bells, programmes, and regulations.’
¹¹

From his experience, Tolstoy felt a certain amount of disorder was useful, and the need for order should come from the students themselves. He was convinced that natural relations between teacher and student could only be achieved in the absence of coercion and compulsion; force, in his view, is always used through haste or insufficient respect for human nature. The students were therefore left to settle their own disputes as far as possible. There were no examinations and no clear system of rewards and punishments. The essential task of education was to teach children ‘as little as possible’ and to encourage an awareness of the fact that ‘all people are brothers and equal to one another’.
¹²

Tolstoy made a sharp distinction between culture and education. Culture is free, but education, he argued, is ‘the tendency of one man to make another just like himself’; it is ‘culture under restraint’.
¹³
On these grounds, Tolstoy consistently opposed State education which tends to shape the young according to its needs: ‘The strength of the government rests on the ignorance of the people, and it knows this, and therefore will always fight
against education.’
¹⁴
For Tolstoy, the most important task was to develop the students’ moral sensibility and ability to think for themselves.

To propagate his views, Tolstoy founded a monthly review called
Yasnaya Polyana
in January 1862 which went through twelve issues. In the first, he boldly declared the principle: ‘In order to determine what is good and what is not, he who is being taught must have full powers to express his dissatisfaction or, at least, to avoid lessons that do not satisfy him. Let it be established that there is only one criterion in teaching: freedom!’
¹⁵

In keeping with his principle that a school must be adapted to the particular needs of its students, Tolstoy was ready to admit that his school might be the worst possible example for others. Most contemporary experts condemned him as a ‘pedagogical nihilist’, but his libertarian approach based on children’s needs not only developed Godwin’s insights, but has had widespread influence on the growth of ‘free schools’ in the twentieth century.

Tolstoy’s interest in educational theory led him to visit Western Europe again in 1860. In England, he heard Dickens read a lecture on education and met several times the Russian exile Alexander Herzen, who was editing
The Pole Star.
In Brussels, he met Proudhon who had just completed his work on armed conflict between nations –
War and Peace.
Tolstoy was impressed by the anarchist thinker who had the ‘courage of his convictions’, while Proudhon found the young Russian a ‘highly educated man’ and was thrilled by his news of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.
¹⁶

On his return to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy was appointed an Arbiter of the Peace to solve disputes between the liberated serfs and their former masters. The experience left him with a permanent distaste for litigation and he later recommended that no one should take any grievance to the lawcourts. A police raid on his school which was intended to unearth subversive literature and revolutionaries further alienated him from the government. He wrote an indignant letter to Alexander II in which he denied that he was a conspirator and proudly described his chosen profession as ‘the founding of schools for the people’.
¹⁷