"My Visit to Tolstoy": Five Discourses

by Joseph Krauskopf

If United States would take bolder stand Russia would yield.

He entered at length upon an exposition showing that if the United States would refuse to countenance discriminations between her citizens on account of religious belief, Russia would be obliged to yield. I told him of the audience which Mr. White and myself had had with M. Witte, and that the latter had said that, the Czar being sick, nothing could be done without his consent, that I should state my request in the form of a petition, written in English and Russian, and that he would present it to the Czar with his approval upon the latter's return, and that I had complied with the advice given. The count had little faith that my petition would ever reach the eyes of the Czar—and it never did, for the Czar never returned alive. And he had little faith in all official promises. The men in power at that time he believed to be either fanatics or cowards. The former sought to secure for themselves a soft berth in heaven, the latter sought it on earth. These were afraid to speak out their honest thought and to deal an honest blow for right and justice. They were afraid of losing caste or position or of being condemned to penal servitude, as if better persons than they had not suffered martyrdom before, or were not now paying in Siberia the price for exercising their right to liberty of thought and speech.

Approves of my mission but has little hope.

He warmly approved of my mission but saw no present possibility of its realization. Even if the Czar were to feel kindly disposed toward my plan, Pobiedonostzeff, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, would interpose his objections to permitting Jews rooting themselves on Russian soil.

The policy of the Procurator, he said, was to root out the Jews, to drive them either into the Greek Catholic Church or into exile or starvation, stupidly attributing the evils of Russia to her tolerance of non-orthodox-Christian faiths and seeing relief only in their extinction within the empire. And that miscreant considered himself the official head of the Russian church, and the administrator of its creed in the name of Jesus, of him who bade man to love even his enemy, to do good even to those who do evil, to forgive even those who offend, to bless even those who curse.

Asks my attitude toward Jesus, and defines his.

Stopping suddenly, and turning his face full upon me, he asked "What is your belief respecting Jesus?" I answered that I regard the Rabbi of Nazareth as one of the greatest of Israel's teachers and leaders and reformers, not as a divine being who lived and taught humanly but as a human being who lived and taught divinely. "Such is my belief," said he, and he continued "Your belief, however, is not that of the Jews in Russia. Many of them have little knowledge of Jesus, and more of them, I fear, have little love for him. And who can blame them?" he continued, "they have been made to suffer so much in his name that it would be little short of a miracle if they loved him. Mohamed was more honest, he gave to people the choice between the Koran and the sword. Christians profess love, and practice hatred." I told the count that through the mediation of Mr. White, the Procurator had consented to grant me an audience, but not till after the lapse of seven weeks, after his return from some monastery to which he had retired for prayer, penance and meditation. "Well may he meditate," said the count, "on the wrongs he has committed, and even were he to do penance seven times seven weeks or seven times seven months or seven years, he could not blot out the guilt that stains his soul, and that has darkened and cursed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent human beings."

Tells why he escaped Siberia.

Amazed at the freedom with which he exposed his condemnation of the most powerful officials of the realm, and convinced that as he spoke to me he must have spoken often to others, and that the government could not possibly be ignorant of it, I asked how it was that he had escaped seizure, exile or imprisonment, to which he replied: "I am not yet sure that I shall not end my days in Siberia. That I have escaped thus far is due to the government's sensitiveness of the world's opinion. It knows of the hold my publications have gained for me on civilized people. It fears the cry of outrage that would be raised at the banishment or imprisonment of a man as old as I."