The dawn in Russia

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

TOLSTOY’S HOME.

PEASANTS.

At parting, I looked again at the peasant and his wife, in their clean poverty, with the marks of their almost passionate labour upon them and their five children growing up round their knees, and certainly it did seem incredible that these were just the people who are marched off to the village police-court, are tied face downwards to a sloping bench, have their clothes turned up, and are flogged with whips or rods by officials and police because they cannot pay the taxes for the Japanese war, or for the interest on the French loans.

Yet, in the last resort, it is upon violence almost as brutalizing and indecent that all Empires are founded, and I was all the more ready to welcome what Tolstoy said to me next day, when he received me—as generously as he receives every one—in his “Bright Home” (Jasnaia Poliana) as the country-house is called. He told me that, among the many other plans of work which he could not live to finish, he was then engaged on a book to be called “The End of an Age.”

“You are young and I am old,” he said, “but as you grow older you will find, as I have found, that day follows day, and there does not seem much change in you, till suddenly you hear people speaking of you as an old man. It is the same with an age in history; day follows day, and there does not seem to be much change, till suddenly it is found that the age has become old. It is finished, it is out of date.

“The present movement in Russia is not a riot, it is not even a revolution, it is the end of an age. And the age that is ending is the age of Empires—the collection of smaller States under one large State. There is no true community of heart or thought between Russia, Finland, Poland, the Caucasus, and all our other States and races. Or what have Hungary, Bohemia, and Styria, or the Tyrol to do with Austria? No more than Canada, Australia, India, or Ireland have to do with England. People are now beginning to see the absurdity of these things, and in the end people are reasonable. That is why the age of Empires is passing away.

“They tell me, for instance, that if the Russian Empire ceased to exist, swarms of Japanese would overrun our country and destroy our race. But the Japanese also are reasonable people, and if they came and found how much better off we were without any Empire at all, they would go home and imitate our example.”

The whole argument, which ran on with a half-ironic simplicity of this kind, was magnificent, not so much for its daring as for its quiet confidence in human reason. I remembered how for the last twenty years all the brazen trumpets of vulgarity had been sounding the note of Empire over us as the one great and stirring purpose of existence. And here was this rugged old man calmly telling me, as though it were something of a platitude, that we had just come to the end of an age—the age of Empires. There he sat in the familiar grey shirt without coat or collar, the belt round the waist, and the high leather top-boots (for he had just tramped round his land in the snow), quietly following out the exact logic of his principles, no matter where it might lead him. He was seventy-seven, and in terms of years one was forced, as he said, to call him old. The spirit had retired more deeply into the shrunk and wrinkled form. But under the shaggy brows, the grey-green eyes still looked out with the clearness of profound thought and fearless simplicity which have made him the greatest rebel in the world.

As to the present condition of his own country, he believed, as is well known from his writings, that the return of the land to the peasants is the only possible cure for Russia’s misery. He told me that he would accept Henry George’s method of nationalization, or any other which gave the peasants a true hold on the land they work. He quoted Kropotkin’s investigations into “intensive culture” to prove that, with improved methods, there is plenty of land in Russia to maintain an immensely increased population. As things stood, less than a third of the cultivated land was held by peasants or village communities, and less than a quarter of the cultivable land was used at all. The Tsar should at once restore the land to the peasants. With their long experience of the communal system, they could then manage very well for themselves without any State at all, as they had successfully proved in the Siberian colonies; for communism ran in the Russian blood, and its ideal had never been lost in the country.