The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy [books to read fiction .TXT] 📗

Truth: Do Not

unto Others what you Would Not they should Do unto You—As our

Duties to Self Must be Subordinated to our Duties to Others, so

Must our Duties to Others be Subordinated to our Duties to God—

The Only Way Out of our Position Lies, if not in Renouncing our

Position and our Privileges, at Least in Recognizing our Sin and

not Justifying it nor Disguising it—The Only Object of Life is to

Learn the Truth and to Act on it—Acceptance of the Position and

of State Action Deprives Life of all Object—It is God’s Will that

we should Serve Him in our Life, that is, that we should Bring

About the Greatest Unity of all that has Life, a Unity only

Possible in Truth.

 

I was finishing this book, which I had been working at for two

years, when I happened on the 9th of September to be traveling by

rail through the governments of Toula and Riazan, where the

peasants were starving last year and where the famine is even more

severe now. At one of the railway stations my train passed an

extra train which was taking a troop of soldiers under the conduct

of the governor of the province, together with muskets,

cartridges, and rods, to flog and murder these same famishing

peasants.

 

The punishment of flogging by way of carrying the decrees of the

authorities into effect has been more and more frequently adopted

of late in Russia, in spite of the fact that corporal punishment

was abolished by law thirty years ago.

 

I had heard of this, I had even read in the newspapers of the

fearful floggings which had been inflicted in Tchernigov, Tambov,

Saratov, Astrakhan, and Orel, and of those of which the governor

of Nijni-Novgorod, General Baranov, had boasted. But I had never

before happened to see men in the process of carrying out these

punishments.

 

And here I saw the spectacle of good Russians full of the

Christian spirit traveling with guns and rods to torture and kill

their starving brethren. The reason for their expedition was as

follows:

 

On one of the estates of a rich landowner the peasants had common

rights on the forest, and having always enjoyed these rights,

regarded the forest as their own, or at least as theirs in common

with the owner. The landowner wished to keep the forest entirely

to himself and began to fell the trees. The peasants lodged a

complaint. The judges in the first instance gave an unjust

decision (I say unjust on the authority of the lawyer and

governor, who ought to understand the matter), and decided the

case in favor of the landowner. All the later decisions, even

that of the senate, though they could see that the matter had been

unjustly decided, confirmed the judgment and adjudged the forest

to the landowner. He began to cut down the trees, but the

peasants, unable to believe that such obvious injustice could be

done them by the higher authorities, did not submit to the

decision and drove away the men sent to cut down the trees,

declaring that the forest belonged to them and they would go to

the Tzar before they would let them cut it down.

 

The matter was referred to Petersburg, and the order was

transmitted to the governor to carry the decision of the court

into effect. The governor asked for a troop of soldiers. And

here were the soldiers with bayonets and cartridges, and moreover,

a supply of rods, expressly prepared for the purpose and heaped up

in one of the trucks, going to carry the decision of the higher

authorities into effect.

 

The decisions of the higher authorities are carried into effect by

means of murder or torture, or threats of one or the other,

according to whether they offer resistance or not.

 

In the first case if the peasants offer resistance the practice is

in Russia, and it is the same everywhere where a state

organization and private property exist, as follows. The governor

delivers an address in which he demands submission. The excited

crowd, generally deluded by their leaders, don’t understand a word

of what the representative of authority is saying in the pompous

official language, and their excitement continues. Then the

governor announces that if they do not submit and disperse, he

will be obliged to have recourse to force. If the crowd does not

disperse even on this, the governor gives the order to fire over

the heads of the crowd. If the crowd does not even then disperse,

the governor gives the order to fire straight into the crowd; the

soldiers fire and the killed and wounded fall about the street.

Then the crowd usually runs away in all directions, and the troops

at the governor’s command take those who are supposed to be the

ringleaders and lead them off under escort. Then they pick up the

dying, the wounded, and the dead, covered with blood, sometimes

women and children among them. The dead they bury and the wounded

they carry to the hospital. Those whom they regard as the

ringleaders they take to the town hall and have them tried by a

special court-martial. And if they have had recourse to violence

on their side, they are condemned to be hanged. And then the

gallows is erected. And they solemnly strangle a few defenseless

creatures.

 

This is what has often been done in Russia, and is and must always

be done where the social order is based on force.

 

But in the second case, when the peasants do submit, something

quite special, peculiar to Russia, takes place. The governor

arrives on the scene of action and delivers an harangue to the

people, reproaching them for their insubordination, and either

stations troops in the houses of the villages, where sometimes for

a whole month the soldiers drain the resources of the peasants, or

contenting himself with threats, he mercifully takes leave of the

people, or what is the most frequent course, he announces that the

ringleaders must be punished, and quite arbitrarily without any

trial selects a certain number of men, regarded as ringleaders,

and commands them to be flogged in his presence.

 

In order to give an idea of how such things are done I will

describe a proceeding of the kind which took place in Orel, and

received the full approval of the highest authorities.

 

This is what took place in Orel. Just as here in the Toula

province, a landlord wanted to appropriate the property of the

peasants and just in the same way the peasants opposed it. The

matter in dispute was a fall of water, which irrigated the

peasants’ fields, and which the landowner wanted to cut off and

divert to turn his mill. The peasants rebelled against this being

done. The land owner laid a complaint before the district

commander, who illegally (as was recognized later even by a legal

decision) decided the matter in favor of the landowner, and

allowed him to divert the water course. The landowner sent

workmen to dig the conduit by which the water was to be let off to

turn the mill. The peasants were indignant at this unjust

decision, and sent their women to prevent the landowner’s men from

digging this conduit. The women went to the dykes, overturned the

carts, and drove away the men. The landowner made a complaint

against the women for thus taking the law into their own hands.

The district commander made out an order that from every house

throughout the village one woman was to be taken and put in prison.

The order was not easily executed. For in every household there

were several women, and it was impossible to know which one was to

be arrested. Consequently the police did not carry out the order.

The landowner complained to the governor of the neglect on the

part of the police, and the latter, without examining into the

affair, gave the chief official of the police strict orders to

carry out the instructions of the district commander without

delay. The police official, in obedience to his superior, went to

the village and with the insolence peculiar to Russian officials

ordered his policemen to take one woman out of each house. But

since there were more than one woman in each house, and there was

no knowing which one was sentenced to imprisonment, disputes and

opposition arose. In spite of these disputes and opposition,

however, the officer of police gave orders that some woman,

whichever came first, should be taken from each household and led

away to prison. The peasants began to defend their wives and

mothers, would not let them go, and beat the police and their

officer. This was a fresh and terrible crime: resistance was

offered to the authorities. A report of this new offense was sent

to the town. And so this governor— precisely as the governor of

Toula was doing on that day—with a battalion of soldiers with

guns and rods, hastily brought together by means of telegraphs and

telephones and railways, proceeded by a special train to the scene

of action, with a learned doctor whose duty it was to insure the

flogging being of an hygienic character. Herzen’s prophecy of the

modern Ghenghis Khan with his telegrams is completely realized by

this governor.

 

Before the town hall of the district were the soldiery, a

battalion of police with their revolvers slung round them with red

cords, the persons of most importance among the peasants, and the

culprits. A crowd of one thousand or more people were standing

round. The governor, on arriving, stepped out of his carriage,

delivered a prepared harangue, and asked for the culprits and a

bench. The latter demand was at first not understood. But a

police constable whom the governor always took about with him, and

who undertook to organize such executions—by no means exceptional

in that province—explained that what was meant was a bench for

flogging. A bench was brought as well as the rods, and then the

executioners were summoned (the latter had been selected

beforehand from some horsestealers of the same village, as the

soldiers refused the office). When everything was ready, the

governor ordered the first of the twelve culprits pointed out by

the landowner as the most guilty to come forward. The first to

come forward was the head of a family, a man of forty who had

always stood up manfully for the rights of his class, and

therefore was held in the greatest esteem by all the villagers.

He was led to the bench and stripped, and then ordered to lie

down.

 

The peasant attempted to supplicate for mercy, but seeing it was

useless, he crossed himself and lay down. Two police constables

hastened to hold him down. The learned doctor stood by, in

readiness to give his aid and his medical science when they should

be needed. The convicts spit into their hands, brandished the

rods, and began to flog. It seemed, however, that the bench was

too narrow, and it was difficult to keep the victim writhing in

torture upon it. Then the governor ordered them to bring another

bench and to put a plank across them. Soldiers, with their hands

raised to their caps, and respectful murmurs of “Yes, your

Excellency,” hasten obediently to carry out this order. Meanwhile

the tortured man, half naked, pale and scowling, stood waiting,

his eyes fixed on the ground and his teeth chattering. When

another bench had been brought they again made him lie down, and

the convicted thieves again began to flog him.

 

The victim’s back and thighs and legs, and even his sides, became

more and more covered with scars and wheals, and at every blow

there came the sound of the deep groans which he could no longer

restrain. In the crowd standing