V. I. Lenin

L. N. Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy is dead. His universal significance as an
Artist and his universal fame as a thinker and preacher reflect, each in
its own way, the universal significance of the Russian revolution.

L. N. Tolstoy emerged as a great artist when serfdom still held sway in
the land. In a series of great works, which he produced during the more
than half a century of his literary activity, he depicted mainly the old,
pre-revolutionary Russia which remained in a state of semi-serfdom even
after 1861—rural Russia of the landlord and the peasant. In depicting
this period in Russia’s history, Tolstoy succeeded in raising so many great
problems and succeeded in rising to such heights of artistic power that his
works rank among the greatest in world literature. The epoch of preparation
for revolution in one of the countries under the heel of the serf-owners
became, thanks to its brilliant illumination by Tolstoy, a step forward in
the artistic development of humanity as a whole.

Tolstoy the artist is known to an infinitesimal minority even in
Russia. If his great works are really to be made the possession of
all , a struggle must be waged against the system of society which
condemns millions and scores, of mil lions to ignorance, benightedness,
drudgery and poverty—a socialist revolution must be accomplished.

Tolstoy not only produced artistic works which will always be
appreciated and read by the masses, once they have created human conditions
of life for themselves after over throwing the yoke of the landlords and
capitalists; he succeeded in conveying with remarkable force the moods of
the large masses that are oppressed by the present system, in depicting
their condition and expressing their spontaneous feelings of protest and anger. Belonging, as he did, primarily to the era
of 1861–1904, Tolstoy in his works—both as an artist and as a thinker
and preacher—embodied in amazingly bold relief the specific historical
features of the entire first Russian revolution, its strength and its
weakness.

One of the principal distinguishing features of our revolution is that
it was a peasant bourgeois revolution in the era of the very
advanced development of capitalism throughout the world and of its
comparatively advanced development in Russia. It was a bourgeois revolution
because its immediate aim was to overthrow the tsarist autocracy, the
tsarist monarchy, and to abolish landlordism, but not to overthrow the
domination of the bourgeoisie. The peasantry in particular was not aware of
the latter aim, it was not aware of the distinction between this aim and
the closer and more immediate aims of the struggle. It was a peasant
bourgeois revolution because the objective conditions put in the forefront
the problem of changing the basic conditions of life for the peasantry, of
breaking up the old, medieval system of land ownership, of “clearing the
ground” for capitalism; the objective conditions were responsible for the
appearance of the peasant masses on the arena of more or less independent
historic action.

Tolstoy’s works express both the strength and the weakness, the might
and the limitations, precisely of the peasant mass movement. His heated,
passionate, and often ruthlessly sharp protest against the state and the
official church that was in alliance with the police conveys the sentiments
of the primitive peasant democratic masses, among whom centuries of
serfdom, of official tyranny and robbery, and of church Jesuitism,
deception and chicanery had piled up mountains of anger and hatred. His
unbending opposition to private property in land conveys the psychology of
the peasant masses during that historical period in which the old, medieval
landownership, both in the form of landed estates and in the form of state
“allotments”, definitely became an intolerable obstacle to the further
development of the country, and when this old landownership was inevitably
bound to be destroyed most summarily and ruthlessly. His unremitting
accusations against capitalism—accusations permeated with most profound
emotion and most ardent indignation—convey all the horror felt by the patriarchal peasant
at the advent of the new, invisible, incomprehensible enemy coming from
somewhere in the cities, or from somewhere abroad, destroying all the
“pillars” of rural life, bringing in its train unprecedented ruin,
poverty, starvation,, savagery, prostitution, syphilis—all the calamities
attending the, “epoch of primitive accumulation”, aggravated a
hundredfold by the transplantation into Russian soil of the most modern
methods of plunder elaborated by the all powerful Monsieur

Coupon. {1}

But the vehement protestant, the passionate accuser, the great critic
at the same time manifested in his works a failure to understand the causes
of the crisis threatening Russia, and the means of escape from it, that was
characteristic only of a patriarchal, naive peasant, but not of a writer
with a European education. His struggle against the feudal police state,
against the monarchy turned into a repudiation of politics, led to the
doctrine of “non-resistance to evil”, and to complete aloofness from the
revolutionary struggle of the masses in 1905–07. The fight against the
official church was combined with the preaching of a new, purified
religion, that is to say, of a new, refined, subtle poison for the
oppressed masses. The opposition to private property in land did not lead
to concentrating the struggle against the real enemy—landlordism and its
political instrument of power, i.e., the monarchy—but led to dreamy,
diffuse and impotent lamentations. The exposure of capitalism and of the
calamities it inflicts on the masses was combined with a wholly apathetic
attitude to the world-wide struggle for emancipation waged by the
international socialist proletariat.

The contradictions in Tolstoy’s views are not contradictions inherent
in his personal views alone, but are a reflection of the extremely complex,
contradictory conditions, social influences and historical traditions which
determined the psychology of various classes and various sections of
Russian society in the post-Reform, but pre-revolutionary era.

That is why a correct appraisal of Tolstoy can be made only from the
viewpoint of the class Which has proved, by its political role and its
struggle during the first denouement of these contradictions, at a time of
revolution, that it is destined to be the leader in the struggle for the
people’s liberty and for the emancipation of the masses from exploitation—the
class which has proved its selfless devotion to the cause of democracy and
its ability to fight against the limitations and inconsistency of bourgeois
(including peasant) democracy; such an appraisal is possible only from the
viewpoint of the Social-Democratic proletariat.

Look at the estimate of Tolstoy in the government newspapers. They shed
crocodile tears, professing their respect for “the great writer” and at
the same time defending the “Holy” Synod. As for the holy fathers, they
have just perpetrated a particularly vile iniquity; they sent priests to
the dying man in order to hoodwink the people and say that Tolstoy had
“repented”. The Holy Synod excommunicated Tolstoy. So much the better. It
will be reminded of this exploit when the hour comes for the people to
settle accounts with the officials in cassocks, the gendarmes in Christ,
the sinister inquisitors who supported anti-Jewish pogroms and other
exploits of the Black-Hundred tsarist gang.

Look at the estimate of Tolstoy in the liberal newspapers. They confine
themselves to those hollow, official-liberal, hackneyed professorial
phrases about the “voice of civilised mankind”, “the unanimous response
of the world”, the “ideas of truth, good”, etc., for which Tolstoy so
castigated—and justly castigated—bourgeois science. They
cannot voice plainly and clearly their opinion of Tolstoy’s views
on the state, the church, private property in land, capitalism—not
because they are prevented by the censorship:

on the contrary, the censorship is helping them out of an embarrassing
position!—but because each proposition in Tolstoy’s criticism is a slap
in the face of bourgeois liberalism; because the very way in which Tolstoy
fearlessly, frankly and ruthlessly poses the sorest and most
vexatious problems of our day is a rebuff to the commonplace
phrases, trite quirks and evasive, “civilised” falsehoods of our liberal
(and liberal-Narodnik) publicists. The liberals are all for Tolstoy, they
are all against the Synod—and, at the same time, they are for ... the
Vekhists, with whom “it is possible to disagree”, but with whom it is
“necessary” to live in harmony in one party, with whom it is
“necessary” to work together in literature and politics. And yet the
Vekhists are greeted with kisses by Anthony, Bishop of Volhynia.

The liberals put in the forefront that Tolstoy is “the great
conscience”. Is not this a hollow phrase which is repeated in a thousand
variations both by Novoye Vremya and by all such newspapers? Is
this not an evasion of the concrete problems of democracy and
socialism which Tolstoy posed ? Is this not to put in the forefront
the feature that expresses Tolstoy’s prejudice, not his intellect, the part
of him that belongs to the past and not to the future, his repudiation of
politics and his preaching of moral self-perfection, but not his vehement
protest against all class domination?

Tolstoy is dead, and the pre-revolutionary Russia whose weakness and
impotence found their expression in the philosophy and are depicted in the
works of the great artist, has become a thing of the past. But the heritage
which he has left includes that which has not become a thing of the past,
but belongs to the future. This heritage is accepted and is being worked
upon by the Russian proletariat. The Russian proletariat will explain to
the masses of the toilers and the exploited the meaning of Tolstoy’s
criticism of the state, the church, private property in land—not in order
that the masses should confine themselves to self-perfection and yearning
for a godly life, but in order that they should rise to strike a new blow
at the tsarist monarchy and landlordism, which were but slightly damaged in
1905, and which must be destroyed. The Russian proletariat will explain to
the masses Tolstoy’s criticism of capitalism—not in order that the masses
should confine themselves to hurling imprecations at capital and the rule
of money, but in order that they should learn to utilise at every step in
their life and in their struggle the technical and social achievements of
capitalism, that they should learn to weld themselves into a united army of
millions of socialist fighters who will over throw capitalism and create a
new society in which the, people will not be doomed to poverty, in which
there will be no exploitation of man by man.

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Notes:
{1} “ M Coupon ”—a metaphorical name of capital or capitalists
in the literature of the eighties and nineties of the last century. It was first used by Gleb Uspensky in his sketches “Grievous Sins”
( Russkaya Mysl , 1888, Book XII).