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

whom they are accustomed to regard as their

divinely appointed spiritual guides, and see their secular leaders

with calm assurance organizing murder, proud to wear murderous

arms, and demanding of others in the name of the laws of the

country, and even of God, that they should take part in murder.

Men see that there is some inconsistency here, but not being able

to analyze it, involuntarily assume that this apparent

inconsistency is only the result of their ignorance. The very

grossness and obviousness of the inconsistency confirms them in

this conviction.

 

They cannot imagine that the leaders of civilization, the

educated classes, could so confidently preach two such opposed

principles as the law of Christ and murder. A simple uncorrupted

youth cannot imagine that those who stand so high in his opinion,

whom he regards as holy or learned men, could for any object

whatever mislead him so shamefully. But this is just what has

always been and always is done to him. It is done (1) by

instilling, by example and direct instruction, from childhood up,

into the working people, who have not time to study moral and

religious questions for themselves, the idea that torture and

murder are compatible with Christianity, and that for certain

objects of state, torture and murder are not only admissible, but

ought to be employed; and (2) by instilling into certain of the

people, who have either voluntarily enlisted or been taken by

compulsion into the army, the idea that the perpetration of murder

and torture with their own hands is a sacred duty, and even a

glorious exploit, worthy of praise and reward.

 

The general delusion is diffused among all people by means of the

catechisms or books, which nowadays replace them, in use for the

compulsory education of children. In them it is stated that

violence, that is, imprisonment and execution, as well as murder

in civil or foreign war in the defense and maintenance of the

existing state organization (whatever that may be, absolute or

limited monarchy, convention, consulate, empire of this or that

Napoleon or Boulanger, constitutional monarchy, commune or

republic) is absolutely lawful and not opposed to morality and

Christianity.

 

This is stated in all catechisms or books used in schools. And

men are so thoroughly persuaded of it that they grow up, live and

die in that conviction without once entertaining a doubt about it.

 

This is one form of deception, the general deception instilled

into everyone, but there is another special deception practiced

upon the soldiers or police who are picked out by one means or

another to do the torturing and murdering necessary to defend and

maintain the existing R�GIME.

 

In all military instructions there appears in one form or another

what is expressed in the Russian military code in the following

words:

 

ARTICLE 87. To carry out exactly and without comment the orders

of a superior officer means: to carry out an order received from a

superior officer exactly without considering whether it is good or

not, and whether it is possible to carry it out. The superior

officer is responsible for the consequences of the order he gives.

 

ARTICLE 88. The subordinate ought never to refuse to carry out

the orders of a superior officer except when he sees clearly that

in carrying out his superior officer’s command, he breaks [the law

of God, one involuntarily expects; not at all] HIS OATH OF

FIDELITY AND ALLEGIANCE TO THE TZAR.

 

It is here said that the man who is a soldier can and ought to

carry out all the orders of his superior without exception. And

as these orders for the most part involve murder, it follows that

he ought to break all the laws of God and man. The one law he may

not break is that of fidelity and allegiance to the man who

happens at a given moment to be in power.

 

Precisely the same thing is said in other words in all codes of

military instruction. And it could not be otherwise, since the

whole power of the army and the state is based in reality on this

delusive emancipation of men from their duty to God and their

conscience, and the substitution of duty to their superior officer

for all other duties.

 

This, then, is the foundation of the belief of the lower classes

that the existing R�GIME so fatal for them is the R�GIME which

ought to exist, and which they ought therefore to support even by

torture and murder.

 

This belief is founded on a conscious deception practiced on them

by the higher classes.

 

And it cannot be otherwise. To compel the lower classes, which

are more numerous, to oppress and ill treat themselves, even at

the cost of actions opposed to their conscience, it was necessary

to deceive them. And it has been done accordingly.

 

Not many days ago I saw once more this shameless deception being

openly practiced, and once more I marveled that it could be

practiced so easily and impudently.

 

At the beginning of November, as I was passing through Toula, I

saw once again at the gates of the Zemsky Courthouse the crowd of

peasants I had so often seen before, and heard the drunken shouts

of the men mingled with the pitiful lamentations of their wives

and mothers. It was the recruiting session.

 

I can never pass by the spectacle. It attracts me by a kind of

fascination of repulsion. I again went into the crowd, took my

stand among the peasants, looked about and asked questions. And

once again I was amazed that this hideous crime can be perpetrated

so easily in broad daylight and in the midst of a large town.

 

As the custom is every year, in all the villages and hamlets of

the one hundred millions of Russians, on the 1st of November, the

village elders had assembled the young men inscribed on the lists,

often their own sons among them, and had brought them to the town.

 

On the road the recruits have been drinking without intermission,

unchecked by the elders, who feel that going on such an insane

errand, abandoning their wives and mothers and renouncing all they

hold sacred in order to become a senseless instrument of

destruction, would be too agonizing if they were not stupefied

with spirits.

 

And so they have come, drinking, swearing, singing, fighting and

scuffling with one another. They have spent the night in taverns.

In the morning they have slept off their drunkenness and have

gathered together at the Zemsky Courthouse.

 

Some of them, in new sheepskin pelisses, with knitted scarves

round their necks, their eyes swollen from drinking, are shouting

wildly to one another to show their courage; others, crowded near

the door, are quietly and mournfully waiting their turn, between

their weeping wives and mothers (I had chanced upon the day of the

actual enrolling, that is, the examination of those whose names

are on the list); others meantime were crowding into the hall of

the recruiting office.

 

Inside the office the work was going on rapidly. The door is

opened and the guard calls Piotr Sidorov. Piotr Sidorov starts,

crosses himself, and goes into a little room with a glass door,

where the conscripts undress. A comrade of Piotr Sidorov’s, who

has just been passed for service, and come naked out of the

revision office, is dressing hurriedly, his teeth chattering.

Sidorov has already heard the news, and can see from his face too

that he has been taken. He wants to ask him questions, but they

hurry him and tell him to make haste and undress. He throws off

his pelisse, slips his boots off his feet, takes off his waistcoat

and draws his shirt over his head, and naked, trembling all over,

and exhaling an odor of tobacco, spirits, and sweat, goes into the

revision office, not knowing what to do with his brawny bare arms.

 

Directly facing him in the revision office hangs in a great gold

frame a portrait of the Tzar in full uniform with decorations, and

in the corner a little portrait of Christ in a shirt and a crown

of thorns. In the middle of the room is a table covered with

green cloth, on which there are papers lying and a three-cornered

ornament surmounted by an eagle� the zertzal. Round the table are

sitting the revising officers, looking collected and indifferent.

One is smoking a cigarette; another is looking through some

papers. Directly Sidorov comes in, a guard goes up to him, places

him under the measuring frame, raising him under his chin, and

straightening his legs.

 

The man with the cigarette—he is the doctor—comes up, and

without looking at the recruit’s face, but somewhere beyond it,

feels his body over with an air of disgust, measures him, tests

him, tells the guard to open his mouth, tells him to breathe, to

speak. Someone notes something down. At last without having once

looked him in the face the doctor says, “Right. Next one!” and

with a weary air sits down again at the table. The soldiers again

hustle and hurry the lad. He somehow gets into his trousers,

wraps his feet in rags, puts on his boots, looks for his scarf and

cap, and bundles his pelisse under his arm. Then they lead him

into the main hall, shutting him off apart from the rest by a

bench, behind which all the conscripts who have been passed for

service are waiting. Another village lad like himself, but from a

distant province, now a soldier armed with a gun with a sharp-pointed bayonet at the end, keeps watch over him, ready to run him

through the body if he should think of trying to escape.

 

Meantime the crowd of fathers, mothers, and wives, hustled by the

police, are pressing round the doors to hear whose lad has been

taken, whose is let off. One of the rejected comes out and

announces that Piotr is taken, and at once a shrill cry is heard

from Piotr’s young wife, for whom this word “taken” means

separation for four or five years, the life of a soldier’s wife as

a servant, often a prostitute.

 

But here comes a man along the street with flowing hair and in a

peculiar dress, who gets out of his droskhy and goes into the

Zemsky Courthouse. The police clear a way for him through the

crowd. It is the “reverend father” come to administer the oath.

And this “father,” who has been persuaded that he is specially and

exclusively devoted to the service of Christ, and who, for the

most part, does not himself see the deception in which he lives,

goes into the hall where the conscripts are waiting. He throws

round him a kind of curtain of brocade, pulls his long hair out

over it, opens the very Gospel in which swearing is forbidden,

takes the cross, the very cross on which Christ was crucified

because he would not do what this false servant of his is telling

men to do, and puts them on the lectern. And all these unhappy,

defenseless, and deluded lads repeat after him the lie, which he

utters with the assurance of familiarity.

 

He reads and they repeat after him:

 

“I promise and swear by Almighty God upon his holy Gospel,” etc.,

“to defend,” etc., and that is, to murder anyone I am told to, and

to do everything I am told by men I know nothing of, and who care

nothing for me except as an instrument for perpetrating the crimes

by which they are kept in their position of power, and my brothers

in their condition of misery. All the conscripts repeat these

ferocious words without thinking. And then the so-called

“father” goes away with a sense of having