On a visit to Moscow in 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy was horrified at the destitution he encountered. He’d seen poverty before, had witnessed beggars and country dwellers barely eking out a living from the land, burdened by taxes and rents. But he wasn’t prepared for the magnitude and raggedness of the city’s poor, nor for the extent of their persecution by the police. He was horrified to realize that the beggars in the streets had to ask for alms with caution lest they be arrested. On the advice of a friend, he went to the Khitrov Market, a center of poverty and homelessness. What he saw there permanently changed his outlook on life and society. Following the crowds of tattered men and women, he entered the free night-lodging house and spoke to those seeking shelter. Afterwards, he returned to his servants and opulent town house and sat down to a five-course meal.
The disjunction between these two worlds, that of the rich and that of the poor, disgusted him. He grew irritated at the thought of well-kept horses, decadent table spreads, and the lavish entertainment of theaters.
“I could not help seeing, in contrast to all this,” he wrote in What Is to Be Done? (1886), “those hungry, shivering, and degraded inhabitants of the night-lodging-house. I could never free myself from the thought that these conditions were inseparable—that the one proceeded from the other.”
At first, Tolstoy attempted to alleviate the suffering of the poor through charity. He took up collections and joined the census in order to find the needy on whom to bestow the alms of the rich. Yet he found money to be insufficient. Not only were many not in direct, desperate need of it, simply handing out bills only exasperated the system of exploitation and warped values that generated poverty.
“It is not enough to feed a man, dress him, and teach him Greek,” he wrote. A whole shift in values was necessary, one in which all learned “how to take less from others and give them more in return.”
Thus, Tolstoy began to question the very foundations of Russian society, a path of inquiry that led him ultimately to criticize the very basis of civilization as commonly understood. Combining such reflections with a radical, though idiosyncratic, Christianity, he articulated a new politics with prophetic fervor, a belief system best described as Christian anarchism.
The nineteenth century saw a flowering of anarchist thought with figures such as Proudhon, Fourier, Kropotkin, Rousseau, and others. Tolstoy was thus not unique in his espousal of the doctrine, though he gave it his own particular flavor. While there are no perfectly identical principles common amongst these thinkers, the political scientist R. B. Fowler observes that nineteenth-century anarchists can be broadly characterized by a “rejection of the familiar norms and structures, especially the political ones, of their age” and a belief that humanity ought to live free of government structures and in accord with nature—meaning both the environment and human nature more specifically. While nature was variously defined by different anarchists, most agreed that human nature ought to guide civilization and that human beings are basically good, intrinsically capable of harmony. Nature, therefore, and not individual will or desire, ought to be the guide. As Fowler outlines, in contrast to much contemporaneous Liberal thought, anarchists believed that personal liberty was best pursued socially, in a community free of government and living peacefully with the wider environment.
While for many nineteenth-century anarchists, human nature was understood in scientific terms, Tolstoy understood it religiously. His guiding principles were derived from his interpretation of Christianity, though he rejected much of orthodox doctrine, including Jesus’s divinity, the existence of angels, and the validity of the church. Instead, Tolstoy saw the meaning of Christianity primarily in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. As the economist Robert Higgs writes, the sermon can be summarized by the commandments “to love others as one’s self and to abstain from the use of force or violence.” These teachings, Tolstoy believed, formed the true essence of Christianity, which had been distorted by the church in order to protect its own interests. He thus rejected much Christian tradition, stating in The Kingdom of God Is Within You that “the churches are placed in a dilemma: the Sermon on the Mount or the Nicene Creed—the one excludes the other.”
This isn’t to say, however, that Tolstoy denied the existence of God or the necessity of the divine in human life. Rather, his whole conception of human nature and Christian life was based on the presence of God within each individual person, particularly in reason and conscience. As Fowler writes, Tolstoy believed “in the authority of the divine vested in man’s conscience.” It’s not so much human nature understood in isolation that serves as the basis for Tolstoy’s anarchism, then, as it is the presence of God within that nature, guiding reason and conscience toward a conception of life based on the love of all. True human freedom, for Tolstoy, consisted not in autonomy or power over one’s circumstances, “but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the truth…and becoming the free and joyful participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of the world.”
With this basis, and in keeping with the larger anarchist tradition, Tolstoy rejected many of the social structures of his time. In What Is to Be Done?, he described how his experiences with the Moscow poor led him to abhor the class divides that kept so many in poverty. He came to believe that the injustice he witnessed was caused by the refusal of the rich to labor. Having taken by force the goods of the peasants in taxes and rent, the rich congregated in cities. The peasants followed out of a need to earn a living, but they were frequently corrupted by the ideals of luxury and idleness exemplified by the rich, further driving them into poverty.
It was not only those wealthy enough to shun work who were at fault, moreover. For Tolstoy, the most important labor was that which contributes to material existence. “Man’s duty to acquire the means of living through the struggle with nature will always be unquestionably the very first,” he wrote in What Is to Be Done? All other activity, from running a business to producing unnecessary luxuries (including, notably, literature), were thus unethical, even parasitical, to the extent that one’s time ought to be spent in useful production, especially agriculture. He didn’t deny the value of art and science (understood as the pursuit of knowledge broadly) or of their promulgation through education. Indeed, as the scholar of Slavonic literatures and essayist Milivoy S. Stanoyevich points out, Tolstoy wasn’t against scientific or artistic pursuits, only those that are neither useful to nor wanted by the laborers.
“He combats those intellectual castes which, having destroyed the old ruling [castes] of the church, the state, and the army, have installed themselves in their place, without being able or willing to perform any service of use to humanity,” Stanoyevich wrote in 1926. The primary duty of labor may be overcome, then, only by the free agreement of the laborers that such pursuits are desirable enough to give of the fruits of their work to support it.
The accumulation of wealth that allowed some to live off the labor of others was thus the root of the problem in Tolstoy’s eyes, and he believed that money itself had been created as a means of exploiting the working classes. As Stanoyevich outlined (and criticized), Tolstoy held that money isn’t merely a medium of exchange but a means of exploitation. While it was true that money could represent labor, as soon as it was accumulated by violence, it began to represent stolen labor; he believed this was the state of affairs from the very beginning of currency, which was insisted upon by dominant groups as a convenient means of carrying away the produce of those whom they exploited. The value of money, moreover, was maintained not by its inherent desirability, but by “law and government, and these institutions are based chiefly on deceit, or represent organized force,” wrote Stanoyevich. Thus, governments supported, or rather imposed, money as a medium of exchange primarily to have a convenient form of taxation, which was, in Tolstoy’s eyes, robbery of the workers.
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Tolstoy felt that the rich must give up their wealth, give the land to those who would work it, and begin to labor themselves. As the literary and cultural historian Irina Paperno writes, this led him, “much to the dismay of his family and servants,” to return home and begin engaging in as much personal labor as possible. He took out his own chamber pot, chopped his own wood, made his own boots, scythed and plowed in the fields. Historian Kenneth C. Wenzer notes that he also tried to give away his property but was prevented from doing so by his wife out of concern for the family’s welfare.
In throwing himself into such labor, Tolstoy didn’t stop writing, though he largely abandoned fiction, choosing instead politics and ethics, as well as an occasional piece of “folk literature.” In 1894 he published The Kingdom of God Is Within You, in which his vision finds arguably its most eloquent and prophetic expression, famously influencing Mahatma Gandhi. The primary concern of the book was pacifism—the rejection of all violence, even to combat evil. Tolstoy argued that such a stance was more than a personal, ethical choice; it was central to the Christian conception of life, one that lives in the truth of universal love and undermines all government and exploitation. All previous understandings of life had been based, he held, on self-love. Even the social, nationalist conception was merely the extension of self-love to one’s community or one’s nation; to progress, humanity must transcend such selfish motives. Christianity was thus poised as the natural evolution of human society, and it was in recognizing the “divine spark” in oneself, which makes each person a “Son of God,” that one is enabled to love.
“The consciousness of being the Son of God, whose chief characteristic is love, satisfies the need for the extension of the sphere of love to which the man of the social conception of life had been brought,” he wrote.
By refusing to participate in violence, Tolstoy believed Christians could undermine the state, which was built on slavery. Initially, he proposed, government came about as the lesser of two evils. It was built to suppress the violence of a given population, and it did that by claiming a monopoly on force. But as “the disposition of individuals to violence” diminished, the state was no longer needed to suppress such behavior and instead became its primary instigator. Having been put in a position of power, however, government continued to perpetuate itself to protect its own interests. It did this by maintaining military, police, prisons, courts, and so on to intimidate and punish; by hypnotizing the public through education and religious dogma; by exploiting their resources through taxation; and finally, by brutalizing the people by forcing them to become members of the machinery of violence through mandatory conscription. The means for undermining this system were found in the refusal to participate in it, the refusal of all violence, in accord with the teachings of Christ. Tolstoy believed that once public opinion had progressed enough in the direction of those teachings, the whole state edifice would crumble.
While Tolstoy seemed to consider such resistance primarily an individual task in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, in his later life he began to advocate full-scale social reform, especially championing the system of the American economist Henry George. As Wenzer outlines, Tolstoy differed from George in many respects, especially rejecting the latter’s desire to build a highly technical, industrial society. Nevertheless, he believed that George’s system was the best conceivable, particularly in its insistence that all land ownership be abolished. Productive land should instead be divided for agricultural use and all taxes reduced to a single land tax determined by the quality of the earth in question. Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection (for which he was finally excommunicated), was written largely to articulate and advocate for Georgist land reform. The book’s protagonist, Nekhlyudov, preaches Georgism to the peasants, stating that
the earth is no man’s; it is God’s…. The land is common to all. All have the same right to it, but there is good land and bad land, and every one would like to take the good land. How is one to do in order to get it justly divided? In this way: he that will use the good land must pay those who have got no land the value of the land he uses.
Such a project was for Tolstoy intrinsically religious, moreover, and, as Wenzer states, “[t]he Georgist commune was to eventually develop into what Tolstoy envisioned as a mirror image of heaven on an earth with man and all creatures living in concord.” Through the rejection of violence and the building of a peaceful agrarian society in accordance with Georgist principles, Tolstoy believed that the Christian task of creating the kingdom of God could be accomplished, not as a longed-for afterlife, but as a living, historic reality.
In the decade leading up to Tolstoy’s death, Russian society spiraled in ever-greater unrest. Peasants rose up against the authorities, socialists and communists proliferated, and the government used horrific violence to control the populace.
“Tolstoy’s fears had become a monstrous reality,” writes Wenzer. “People were suffering even more, and blood was pouring in the streets.” Tolstoy, then in his late seventies, continued writing at a furious pace in a desperate effort to save his country. He went so far as to write letters to Tsar Nicholas II and Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich advocating for Georgist land reform. He scorned socialist and democratic solutions, believing that only the tsar could solve the situation by unilaterally going above government hierarchy to implement the reforms that could save Russia before it was too late.
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Tolstoy died, at eighty-two, in a railway station on November 20, 1910, his words unheeded. Within the decade, Russia slipped into full-scale revolution, culminating in the Bolshevik seizure of government and the violence of the Soviet regime. The cycles of oppression led only to more bloodshed, with one government replacing another while the people suffered. Yet it’s unlikely that Tolstoy’s reforms would have proved the panacea to Russia’s ills, as complicated and systemic as they were. It’s equally questionable to what extent his positions can be implemented today. As commentators have pointed out, many of Tolstoy’s ideas about economics and politics are shallow, even incoherent. Higgs, for instance, though admiring Tolstoy’s critiques of the state, calls his understanding of economics “abysmal.” Tolstoy’s approach is frequently emotional, moreover, literary rather than intellectual.
And yet it’s precisely Tolstoy’s appeal to the heart as well as the head, to the conscience as the spark of divinity in every person, that makes his words reverberate down to the present. While we might question the specifics of his platform, his criticisms of injustice and vision of an equitable society retain much of their relevance and power. Few have cared so deeply for the poor and exploited or taken the quest to both know and live out truth more seriously than he, and harmony can’t be achieved otherwise. History will go on; not even a Tolstoy could shift its bloody wheels. But we can always seek truth. As Tolstoy wrote, “The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to the establishment of the kingdom of God, which can only be done by the recognition and profession of the truth.”
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