Leo Tolstoy and a Unique Generation of Terrorists

The generation of terrorists in the Russian Empire between 1901-1911 constitute a unique generation in the history of European and world terrorism.

This generation created mass terrorism in today’s world. These terrorists also found a supporter in Leo Tolstoy, the world’s greatest writer.

The government’s decision in August 1906 to use speedy courts martial against terrorists. Within eight months, the courts tried 2,000 people and sentenced 1,102 to death. [1, p. 86] This prompted Tolstoy to write his pamphlet <<I Cannot Be Silent>> on May 9, 1908.

Tolstoy, as he had in his novel Resurrection, blamed the government for degrading the population and provoking it to commit violence. For Tolstoy, revolutionaries and criminals had a higher moral status than people in the government and other ruling institutions. It would be extremely difficult to find a bigger exoneration of terrorism from any other major writer in world history.

Several quotations will suffice. Analysis will follow in the next article.

<<What is most dreadful in the whole matter is that all this inhuman violence and killing, besides the direct evil done to the victims and their families, brings a yet more enormous evil on the whole people by spreading depravity among every class of Russians, in the same way that fire spreads amid dry straw. This depravity grows with special rapidity among the simple working folk because all these iniquities – exceeding by a hundredfold all that is or has been done by thieves, robbers, and all the revolutionaries put together — are done as though they were something necessary, good, and unavoidable. These deeds are not merely excused but supported by different institutions inseparably connected in the people’s minds with justice, and even with sanctity: the Senate, the Synod, the Duma, the Church, and the Czar.

All you are now doing with all your searching, spying, exiling, prisons, penal settlements, and gallows does not bring the people to the state you desire, but on the contrary increases the irritation and destroys all possibility of peace and order. “But what is to be done?” you say. “What is to be done? How are the iniquities that are now perpetrated to be stopped?”

The answer is very simple: “Cease to do what you are doing.”

Then again you say, “We did not begin all this. The revolutionaries began it, and their terrible crimes can only be suppressed by firm measures” (so you call your crimes) “on the part of the government.”
You say the atrocities committed by the revolutionaries are terrible. I do not dispute it. I will add that besides being terrible they are stupid and that, like your own actions, they fall short of their target. Yet however terrible and stupid their actions may be — all those bombs and violence, those revolting murders and thefts of money — still all these deeds do not come anywhere near the criminality and stupidity of the deeds you commit.

They are doing just the same as you and for the same motives. They are in the same (I would say “comic” were its consequences not so terrible) delusion that men, having formed for themselves a plan of what in their opinion is the desirable and proper arrangement of society, have the right and possibility of arranging other people’s lives according to that plan. The delusion is the same. The method of implementing that delusion is violence of all kinds, including taking life. And the excuse is that an evil deed committed for the benefit of many ceases to be immoral.

Therefore, without offending against the moral law, one may lie, rob, and kill whenever this leads toward the realization of that supposed good condition for the many, which we imagine that we know and can foresee, and which we wish to establish.

You government people call the acts of the revolutionaries “atrocities” and “great crimes,” but the revolutionaries have done and are doing nothing that you have not done, and done to an incomparably greater extent.  They only do what you do.  You keep spies, practice deception, and spread printed lies, and so do they.  You take people’s property by all sorts of violent means and use it as you consider best, and they do the same.  You execute those whom you think dangerous, and so do they.

You certainly cannot legitimately blame the revolutionaries while you employ the same immoral means as they do for the attainment of your aim.  All that you can adduce for your own justification, they can equally adduce for theirs; not to mention that you do much evil that they do not commit, such as squandering the wealth of the nation, preparing for war, making war, subduing and oppressing foreign nationalities, and much else.> [2]

Just what made Tolstoy so willing to justify terrorism? What he wrote in “I Cannot Be Silent” was the result of years of his delegitimizing the government.

Sources Used

1. Daly, Jonathan W., Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia. The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 74, No. 1 (March 2002), pp. 62-100.
2. Толстой, Л.Н. Не могу молчать. (I cannot be silent) 1908 г. http://tolstoy.ru/creativity/publicism/795/ I am using an English translation that I found years ago. However, the link to this translation is no longer secure.