Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy began writing the story in the 1890s but work intensified after his return from Gaspra. Although he was already a radical pacifist, in Hadji Murat he made no effort to conceal his fascination with the figure of a fierce and ruthless warrior. He began with an allegory of a thistle that survives in the field, retaining its wild beauty even under the plough, but which immediately loses its shape and flavour when torn from its native soil. Tolstoy initially planned to call his story

The Thistle.

In 1904, as Tolstoy was working on Hadji Murat

, a major new war had broken out in the Far East. For the first time in its history, Russia was fighting Japan, the new global power. Tolstoy’s reaction was passionate and predictable. Once again, countries were being devastated and bankrupted. People were being separated from their families and everyday labours, taught to kill and dragged off to be killed or maimed for remote chunks of land that were equally useless to the populations of Russia and Japan. In the essay ‘Bethink Yourself’, Tolstoy protested not only at the mass institutionalized murder, but against the tribal ideology of patriotism that incited hatred towards other nations and races. According to his own profession of faith, the fifth commandment of Christ was never to view anyone as an enemy and not to divide people into tribes.

The horrific defeats suffered by the Russian army pained him nonetheless. His daughter Tatiana wrote in her memoirs that, having heard that Russian troops had abandoned the besieged Port Arthur, Tolstoy said that in his youth they did not surrender fortresses without blowing them up. When a Tolstoyan disciple present in the room, and ‘apparently shocked by the Master’s words’, pointed out that this would lead to the loss of human lives, Tolstoy calmly responded: ‘What do you expect? If you are a soldier, you have a job to do. And you do it properly.’¹⁹ Deep inside him, there was still a warrior who could not brook surrender.

The situation was all too familiar to Tolstoy. As at the time of the Crimean War, in which he had fought as a young officer, the government tried to buttress a collapsing political order with a ‘small and victorious war’, as the Russian interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve put it. Once again, the war turned out to be prolonged and bloody. Russia was defeated; von Plehve assassinated by a terrorist. Revolution broke out in 1905.

Like Hadji Murat, who could not find his place among the rebels or with the Russians, Tolstoy could not align himself with either side in the growing divide that was tearing Russian society apart. In 1906 Tolstoy published his ‘Address to the Russian People’, in which he predicted that the government that tried to combine halfhearted political concessions and promises of constitutional reform with new waves of repression would not be able to withstand the revolution ‘under its banner of autocracy even with constitutional amendments’. It could save itself ‘not by a parliament elected in whichever way and even less so by guns, cannon and executions, but only by admitting its sin before the people and trying to redeem itself’ (CW

, XXXVI, p. 304).

For the first time Tolstoy attacked the revolutionaries even more fiercely than the authorities. He accused them of being ready ‘to blow up, destroy and kill’ (CW, XXXVI, p. 306) out of a belief in some abstract form of social order, about which they could not even agree among themselves. According to Tolstoy, the government and the opposition shared the same contempt for ordinary people, trying to impose upon them their own views and prejudices. He urged millions of Russian peasants not to resort to violence, but to stop obeying orders and laws.

In August and October 1905 a terrified emperor issued decrees abolishing censorship, guaranteeing basic civil freedoms and announcing the formation of the State Duma, Russia’s first national parliament, which did not, however, receive the right to appoint the government. Belated and forced concessions only increased agitation and militancy. Tolstoy did not believe in political reforms. His main concern was the situation in rural areas, where peasants were burning down the houses of landowners and demanding redistribution of the land. As a rule these uprisings were controlled and contained by the leaders of the peasant communes. Given the dimensions of the turmoil, the level of physical violence remained relatively low.

Tolstoy saw the revolutionary crisis as a make-or-break moment that would either bring peace to Russia and consequently to the whole world, or end in a nightmare of bloodshed and destruction. He believed he knew how to adjust the social order in a way that would pacify the country. Age and precarious health notwithstanding, Tolstoy was tireless in propagating the socioeconomic theories of a thinker who had influenced him no less than Rousseau or Schopenhauer.