by BEN WOOLLARD
A fateful visit to a market in Moscow entirely upended Tolstoy’s view on life and society—and changed the trajectory of his work and purpose.
On a visit to Moscow in 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy was horrified at the destitution he encountered. He’d seen poverty before, had witnessed beggars and country dwellers barely eking out a living from the land, burdened by taxes and rents. But he wasn’t prepared for the magnitude and raggedness of the city’s poor, nor for the extent of their persecution by the police. He was horrified to realize that the beggars in the streets had to ask for alms with caution lest they be arrested. On the advice of a friend, he went to the Khitrov Market, a center of poverty and homelessness. What he saw there permanently changed his outlook on life and society. Following the crowds of tattered men and women, he entered the free night-lodging house and spoke to those seeking shelter. Afterwards, he returned to his servants and opulent town house and sat down to a five-course meal.
The disjunction between these two worlds, that of the rich and that of the poor, disgusted him. He grew irritated at the thought of well-kept horses, decadent table spreads, and the lavish entertainment of theaters.
“I could not help seeing, in contrast to all this,” he wrote in What Is to Be Done? (1886), “those hungry, shivering, and degraded inhabitants of the night-lodging-house. I could never free myself from the thought that these conditions were inseparable—that the one proceeded from the other.”
At first, Tolstoy attempted to alleviate the suffering of the poor through charity. He took up collections and joined the census in order to find the needy on whom to bestow the alms of the rich. Yet he found money to be insufficient. Not only were many not in direct, desperate need of it, simply handing out bills only exasperated the system of exploitation and warped values that generated poverty.
“It is not enough to feed a man, dress him, and teach him Greek,” he wrote. A whole shift in values was necessary, one in which all learned “how to take less from others and give them more in return.”
Thus, Tolstoy began to question the very foundations of Russian society, a path of inquiry that led him ultimately to criticize the very basis of civilization as commonly understood. Combining such reflections with a radical, though idiosyncratic, Christianity, he articulated a new politics with prophetic fervor, a belief system best described as Christian anarchism.
The nineteenth century saw a flowering of anarchist thought with figures such as Proudhon, Fourier, Kropotkin, Rousseau, and others. Tolstoy was thus not unique in his espousal of the doctrine, though he gave it his own particular flavor. While there are no perfectly identical principles common amongst these thinkers, the political scientist R. B. Fowler observes that nineteenth-century anarchists can be broadly characterized by a “rejection of the familiar norms and structures, especially the political ones, of their age” and a belief that humanity ought to live free of government structures and in accord with nature—meaning both the environment and human nature more specifically. While nature was variously defined by different anarchists, most agreed that human nature ought to guide civilization and that human beings are basically good, intrinsically capable of harmony. Nature, therefore, and not individual will or desire, ought to be the guide. As Fowler outlines, in contrast to much contemporaneous Liberal thought, anarchists believed that personal liberty was best pursued socially, in a community free of government and living peacefully with the wider environment.
While for many nineteenth-century anarchists, human nature was understood in scientific terms, Tolstoy understood it religiously. His guiding principles were derived from his interpretation of Christianity, though he rejected much of orthodox doctrine, including Jesus’s divinity, the existence of angels, and the validity of the church. Instead, Tolstoy saw the meaning of Christianity primarily in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. As the economist Robert Higgs writes, the sermon can be summarized by the commandments “to love others as one’s self and to abstain from the use of force or violence.” These teachings, Tolstoy believed, formed the true essence of Christianity, which had been distorted by the church in order to protect its own interests. He thus rejected much Christian tradition, stating in The Kingdom of God Is Within You that “the churches are placed in a dilemma: the Sermon on the Mount or the Nicene Creed—the one excludes the other.”
This isn’t to say, however, that Tolstoy denied the existence of God or the necessity of the divine in human life. Rather, his whole conception of human nature and Christian life was based on the presence of God within each individual person, particularly in reason and conscience. As Fowler writes, Tolstoy believed “in the authority of the divine vested in man’s conscience.” It’s not so much human nature understood in isolation that serves as the basis for Tolstoy’s anarchism, then, as it is the presence of God within that nature, guiding reason and conscience toward a conception of life based on the love of all. True human freedom, for Tolstoy, consisted not in autonomy or power over one’s circumstances, “but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the truth…and becoming the free and joyful participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of the world.”
With this basis, and in keeping with the larger anarchist tradition, Tolstoy rejected many of the social structures of his time. In What Is to Be Done?, he described how his experiences with the Moscow poor led him to abhor the class divides that kept so many in poverty. He came to believe that the injustice he witnessed was caused by the refusal of the rich to labor. Having taken by force the goods of the peasants in taxes and rent, the rich congregated in cities. The peasants followed out of a need to earn a living, but they were frequently corrupted by the ideals of luxury and idleness exemplified by the rich, further driving them into poverty.
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