Leo Tolstoy

For twenty years Tolstoy’s main preoccupations were novels and family life. In 1881 the need to educate his eldest children compelled him to buy a house in Moscow. In the meantime, his country changed beyond recognition. The abolition of serfdom, rapid industrialization and a demographic boom had unleashed a flood of migrants from the villages to the cities. Railroads enabled massive grain exports that had the effect of pushing up bread prices. The peasants, though liberated from serfdom, could not benefit from this increasing demand because most agricultural land remained in the hands of their former landlords, and the rents rose more steeply than profits from harvests. The land owned by peasants belonged to rural communes and was regularly redistributed between households according to the size of their families. This meant that individual peasants could not sell their land before moving to the city and had little incentive to invest in it to increase productivity. Social changes and the generational imbalance caused by the demographic boom were destroying traditional ways of life and family structures. Crime, drunkenness and prostitution were on the rise both in villages and cities. Tolstoy could now witness the new urban poverty at first hand. The poorest could not rely on the kind of social network provided by rural communes. Their extreme misery and moral degradation was made even more abject and manifest by the stunning economic growth that had belatedly begun in the 1880s.

View from the garden of Tolstoy’s house in Moscow, 1898.

Social crisis brought political unrest. The Great Reforms had boosted the expectations of the growing number of young, active and eager graduates churned out by a proliferating number of universities. A highly stratified society could barely accommodate them or enable them to improve their social status, leading to frustration. Radical groups began a campaign of revolutionary propaganda among the peasants. When this strategy failed they turned to outright terror. The second half of the 1870s was marked by several unsuccessful attempts on the life of Alexander II before the assassins finally succeeded on 1 March 1881, the day before a decree establishing a proto-parliamentary representative body with consultative functions was due to be signed by the reforming tsar. The assassination ushered in a backlash led by the new emperor Alexander III and Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an arch-reactionary whose influence expanded beyond his original role of supervising Church policy and came to define the spirit of the new reign.

Tolstoy had some sympathy for the revolutionaries. He appreciated the power of their convictions, their readiness for martyrdom and sincere compassion for the poor, qualities that, in his view, were entirely wanting in the kind of educated society in which he lived. At the same time, he was appalled by their narrow-mindedness, atheism and positivism, and most of all by their willingness to resort to violence, based on the obstinate belief that they knew the needs of the people they intended to liberate better than those people themselves. From the early 1880s Tolstoy was certain that revolution was approaching and had no doubt that the regime that would emerge from the ruins would be even more tyrannical than the existing one.

He wrote a letter to Pobedonostsev petitioning the new tsar to pardon his father’s assassins. Tolstoy argued that such a pardon would demonstrate moral greatness and Christian feelings and engender a process of reconciliation in society. Both Pobedonostsev and Alexander III refused to consider such an act of clemency that, in their eyes, would be tantamount to encouraging political terror. The new emperor admired Tolstoy as a writer, but began to view his activities as subversive.

In January 1882, hoping to understand the roots of social evil and ways in which it might be alleviated more deeply, Tolstoy volunteered to take part in conducting the census. He chose one of the most notorious parts of Moscow, full of shelters for the homeless and the outcast. He spoke to people, listened to their life stories and gave out significant amounts of money. For a while Tolstoy sought to advance plans for a charity that would collect money by subscription and administer the relief. This venture failed. The rich were not interested in providing the required funds and the poor themselves tended to spend the money Tolstoy gave them on drinking, gambling and fornication.