Leo Tolstoy

The American progressive economist Henry George was one of the most popular social theorists of the second half of the nineteenth century. His philosophy brought together socialist and libertarian ideas in a synthesis that Tolstoy found especially appealing. Like many intellectuals of the time, George had tried to identify the causes for the stark contrast between rapid technological progress and growing poverty.

George’s most famous book, Progress and Poverty, was published in 1879 and sold several million copies. George supported the notion of private property insofar as it concerned the products of a person’s own labour, but not for natural resources: land, in particular, he considered an indivisible asset of humanity. At the same time, he did not propose the nationalization of land. Instead, he suggested the ‘nationalization of rent’ from it in the form of a universal land tax, the level of which would depend upon the productivity and location of the land. In Progress and Poverty George tried to demonstrate by meticulous calculations that a correctly calibrated land tax would increase the productivity of land, lead to its redistribution in a way favourable to farmers, provide enough income to abolish all other taxes and sustain a modest social security network.

It is unlikely that Tolstoy checked George’s figures, but he referred to them as a theorem that had been proven beyond reasonable doubt. He even proposed a range of tax rates that, he believed, would allow Russia to keep the land profitable for cultivation and avoid speculation. He found in George a system that struck him as being fair, simple, reasonable and, most importantly, congruent with the natural sense of justice prevalent among the peasants. In George’s economic theories he had found a ‘green stick’ that would eventually bring happiness to humanity.

Unlike George, Tolstoy was an anarchist who rejected, as a matter of principle, not only the notion of taxation, but the very idea of the state itself. Nonetheless, the ideas of the American theorist showed him a possible way to peacefully transform the current order into a world in which people willing to engage in agricultural labour would have access to enough land and others would have to produce the goods and services necessary for those who cultivate the land. In this utopian world, states, governments and laws would themselves become redundant.

Tolstoy had discovered Henry George in February 1885, when he wrote to Chertkov that he ‘was sick for a week but consumed by George’s latest [Social Problems] and the first book Progress and Poverty, which produced a strong and joyous impression’ on him:

This book is wonderful, but it is beyond value, for it destroys all the cobwebs of Spencer–Mill political economy – it is like the pounding of water and acutely summons people to a moral consciousness of the cause and even defines the cause . . . I see in him a brother, one of those who according to the teachings of the Books of the Apostles [has more] love [for people] than for his own soul. (CW, LXXXV, p. 144)

Moved and flattered by Tolstoy’s approval, Henry George wanted to come to Russia to talk to the great man, but his health did not permit him to make such a journey. When George died in 1897, Tolstoy wrote to Sofia that he was shocked by the death and felt as if he had lost ‘a very close friend’. Around the same time, he made Nekhlyudov in Resurrection give away his land according to George’s principles: ‘What a head this Zhorzha was’ (CW, XXXII, p. 231), an old peasant says admiringly, having finally understood the plan. Tolstoy’s interest in Henry George reached its peak during the revolution of 1905, when he wrote a foreword to the translation of Social Problems that had been made by his follower Sergei Nikolaev and several essays popularizing Georgism.

In June 1907 Nicholas II dissolved the Duma and issued a new electoral law ensuring the victory of loyalists at the next elections. This gave de facto dictatorial powers to Pyotr Stolypin, the minister of interior affairs he had appointed a year before at the height of revolutionary upheaval. Stolypin was known for personal courage, fierce independence and had the reputation of a reformer. Stolypin was also Tolstoy’s distant relative; Tolstoy had personally known and liked his father.