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The Kingdom of God is within you

L >> Leo Tolstoy >> The Kingdom of God is within you




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 round were heard the sobs of
wives, mothers, children, the families of the tortured man and of
all the others picked out for punishment.

The miserable governor, intoxicated with power, was counting the
strokes on his fingers, and never left off smoking cigarettes,
while several officious persons hastened on every opportunity to
offer him a burning match to light them. When more than fifty
strokes had been given, the peasant ceased to shriek and writhe,
and the doctor, who had been educated in a government institution
to serve his sovereign and his country with his scientific
attainments, went up to the victim, felt his pulse, listened to
his heart, and announced to the representative of authority that
the man undergoing punishment had lost consciousness, and that, in
accordance with the conclusions of science, to continue the
punishment would endanger the victim's life. But the miserable
governor, now completely intoxicated by the sight of blood, gave
orders that the punishment should go on, and the flogging was
continued up to seventy strokes, the number which the governor had
for some reason fixed upon as necessary. When the seventieth
stroke had been reached, the governor said "Enough! Next one!"
And the mutilated victim, his back covered with blood, was lifted
up and carried away unconscious, and another was led up. The sobs
and groans of the crowd grew louder. But the representative of
the state continued the torture.

Thus they flogged each of them up to the twelfth, and each of them
received seventy strokes. They all implored mercy, shrieked and
groaned. The sobs and cries of the crowd of women grew louder and
more heart-rending, and the men's faces grew darker and darker.
But they were surrounded by troops, and the torture did not cease
till it had reached the limit which had been fixed by the caprice
of the miserable half-drunken and insane creature they called the
governor.

The officials, and officers, and soldiers not only assisted in it,
but were even partly responsible for the affair, since by their
presence they prevented any interference on the part of the crowd.

When I inquired of one of the governors why they made use of this
kind of torture when people had already submitted and soldiers
were stationed in the village, he replied with the important air
of a man who thoroughly understands all the subtleties of
statecraft, that if the peasants were not thoroughly subdued by
flogging, they would begin offering opposition to the decisions of
authorities again. When some of them had been thoroughly
tortured, the authority of the state would be secured forever
among them.

And so that was why the Governor of Toula was going in his turn
with his subordinate officials, officers, and soldiers to carry
out a similar measure. By precisely the same means, i. e., by
murder and torture, obedience to the decision of the higher
authorities was to be secured. And this decision was to enable a
young landowner, who had an income of one hundred thousand, to
gain three thousand rubles more by stealing a forest from a whole
community of cold and famished peasants, to spend it, in two or
three weeks in the saloons of Moscow, Petersburg, or Paris. That
was what those people whom I met were going to do.

After my thoughts had for two years been turned in the same
direction, fate seemed expressly to have brought me face to face
for the first time in my life with a fact which showed me
absolutely unmistakably in practice what had long been clear to me
in theory, that the organization of ur society rests, not as
people interested in maintaining the present order of things like
to imagine, on certain principles of jurisprudence, but on simple
brute force, on the murder and torture of men.

People who own great estates or fortunes, or who receive great
revenues drawn from the class who are in want even of necessities,
the working class, as well as all those who like merchants,
doctors, artists, clerks, learned professors, coachmen, cooks,
writers, valets, and barristers, make their living about these
rich people, like to believe that the privileges they enjoy are
not the result of force, but of absolutely free and just
interchange of services, and that their advantages, far from being
gained by such punishments and murders as took place in Orel and
several parts of Russia this year, and are always taking place all
over Europe and America, have no kind of connection with these
acts of violence. They like to believe that their privileges
exist apart and are the result of free contract among people; and
that the violent cruelties perpetrated on the people also exist
apart and are the result of some general judicial, political, or
economical laws. They try not to see that they all enjoy their
privileges as a result of the same fact which forces the peasants
who have tended the forest, and who are in the direct need of it
for fuel, to give it up to a rich landowner who has taken no part
in caring for its growth and has no need of it whatever--the fact,
that is, that if they don't give it up they will be flogged or
killed.

And yet if it is clear that it was only by means of menaces,
blows, or murder, that the mill in Orel was enabled to yield a
larger income, or that the forest which the peasants had planted
became the property of a landowner, it should be equally clear
that all the other exclusive rights enjoyed by the rich, by
robbing the poor of their necessities, rest on the same basis of
violence. If the peasants, who need land to maintain their
families, may not cultivate the land about their houses, but one
man, a Russian, English, Austrian, or any other great landowner,
possesses land enough to maintain a thousand families, though he
does not cultivate it himself, and if a merchant profiting by the
misery of the cultivators, taking corn from them at a third of its
value, can keep this corn in his granaries with perfect security
while men are starving all around him, and sell it again for three
times its value to the very cultivators he bought it from, it is
evident that all this too comes from the same cause. And if one
man may not buy of another a commodity from the other side of a
certain fixed line, called the frontier, without paying certain
duties on it to men who have taken no part whatever in its
production--and if men are driven to sell their last cow to pay
taxes which the government distributes among its functionaries,
and spends on maintaining soldiers to murder these very taxpayers-
—it would appear self-evident that all this does not come about as
the result of any abstract laws, but is based on just what was
done in Orel, and which may be done in Toula, and is done
periodically in one form or another throughout the whole world
wherever there is a government, and where there are rich and poor.

Simply because torture and murder are not employed in every
instance of oppression by force, those who enjoy the exclusive
privileges of the ruling classes persuade themselves and others
that their privileges are not based on torture and murder, but on
some mysterious general causes, abstract laws, and so on. Yet one
would think it was perfectly clear that if men, who consider it
unjust (and all the working classes do consider it so nowadays),
still pay the principal part of the produce of their labor away to
the capitalist and the landowner, and pay taxes, though they know
to what a bad use these taxes are put, they do so not from
recognition of abstract laws of which they have never heard, but
only because they know they will be beaten and killed if they
don't do so.

And if there is no need to imprison, beat, and kill men every time
the landlord collects his rents, every time those who are in want
of bread have to pay a swindling merchant three times its value,
every time the factory hand has to be content with a wage less
than half of the profit made by the employer, and every time a
poor man pays his last ruble in taxes, it is because so many men
have been beaten and killed for trying to resist these demands,
that the lesson has now been learnt very thoroughly.

Just as a trained tiger, who does not eat meat put under his nose,
and jumps over a stick at the word of command, does not act thus
because he likes it, but because he remembers the red-hot irons or
the fast with which he was punished every time he did not obey; so
men submitting to what is disadvantageous or even ruinous to them,
and considered by them as unjust, act thus because they remember
what they suffered for resisting it.

As for those who profit by the privileges gained by previous acts
of violence, they often forget and like to forget how these
privileges were obtained. But one need only recall the facts of
history, not the history of the exploits of different dynasties of
rulers, but real history, the history of the oppression of the
majority by a small number of men, to see that all the advantages
the rich have over the poor are based on nothing but flogging,
imprisonment, and murder.

One need but reflect on the unceasing, persistent struggle of all
to better their material position, which is the guiding motive of
men of the present day, to be convinced that the advantages of the
rich over the poor could never and can never be maintained by
anything but force.

There may be cases of oppression, of violence, and of punishments,
though they are rare, the aim of which is not to secure the
privileges of the propertied classes. But one may confidently
assert that in any society where, for every man living in ease,
there are ten exhausted by labor, envious, covetous, and often
suffering with their families from direct privation, all the
privileges of the rich, all their luxuries and superfluities, are
obtained and maintained only by tortures, imprisonment, and
murder.

The train I met on the 9th of September going with soldiers, guns,
cartridges, and rods, to confirm the rich landowner in the
possession of a small forest which he had taken from the starving
peasants, which they were in the direst need of, and he was in no
need of at all, was a striking proof of how men are capable of
doing deeds directly opposed to their principles and their
conscience without perceiving it.

The special train consisted of one first-class carriage for the
governor, the officials, and officers, and several luggage vans
crammed full of soldiers. The latter, smart young fellows in
their clean new uniforms, were standing about in groups or sitting
swinging their legs in the wide open doorways of the luggage vans.
Some were smoking, nudging each other, joking, grinning, and
laughing, others were munching sunflower seeds and spitting out
the husks with an air of dignity. Some of them ran along the
platform to drink some water from a tub there, and when they met
the officers they slackened their pace, made their stupid gesture
of salutation, raising their hands to their heads with serious
faces as though they were doing something of the greatest
importance. They kept their eyes on them till they had passed by
them, and then set off running still more merrily, stamping their
heels on the platform, laughing and chattering after the manner of
healthy, good-natured young fellows, traveling in lively company.

They were going to assist at the murder of their fathers or
grandfathers just as if they were going on a party of pleasure, or
at any rate on some quite ordinary business.

The same impression was produced by the well-dressed functionaries
and officers who were scattered about the platform and in the
first-class carriage. At a table covered with bottles was sitting
the governor, who was responsible for the whole expedition,
dressed in his half-military uniform and eating something while he
chatted tranquilly about the weather with some acquaintances he
had met, as though the business he was upon was of so simple and
ordinary a character that it could not disturb his serenity and
his interest in the change of weather.

At a little distance from the table sat the general of the police.
He was not taking any refreshment, and had an impenetrable bored
expression, as though he were weary of the formalities to be gone
through. On all sides officers were bustling noisily about in
their red uniforms trimmed with gold; one sat at a table finishing
his bottle of beer, another stood at the buffet eating a cake, and
brushing the crumbs off his uniform, threw down his money with a
self-confident air; another was sauntering before the carriages of
our train, staring at the faces of the women.

All these men who were going to murder or to torture the famishing
and defenseless creatures who provide them their sustenance had
the air of men who knew very well that they were doing their duty,
and some were even proud, were "glorying" in what they were doing.

What is the meaning of it?

All these people are within half an hour of reaching the place
where, in order to provide a wealthy young man with three thousand
rubles stolen from a whole community of famishing peasants, they
may be forced to commit the most horrible acts one can conceive,
to murder or torture, as was done in Orel, innocent beings, their
brothers. And they see the place and time approaching with
untroubled serenity.

To say that all these government officials, officers, and soldiers
do not know what is before them is impossible, for they are
prepared for it. The governor must have given directions about
the rods, the officials must have sent an order for them,
purchased them, and entered the item in their accounts. The
military officers have given and received orders about cartridges.
They all know that they are going to torture, perhaps to kill,
their famishing fellow-creatures, and that they must set to work
within an hour.

To say, as is usually said, and as they would themselves repeat,
that they are acting from conviction of the necessity for
supporting the state organization, would be a mistake. For in the
first place, these men have probably never even thought about
state organization and the necessity of it; in the second place,
they cannot possibly be convinced that the act in which they are
taking part will tend to support rather than to ruin the state;
and thirdly, in reality the majority, if not all, of these men,
far from ever sacrificing their own pleasure or tranquillity to
support the state, never let slip an opportunity of profiting at
the expense of the state in every way they can increase their own
pleasure and ease. So that they are not acting thus for the sake
of the abstract principle of the state.

What is the meaning of it?

Yet I know all these men. If I don't know all of them personally,
I know their characters pretty nearly, their past, and their way
of thinking. They certainly all have mothers, some of them wives
and children. They are certainly for the most part good, kind,
even tender-hearted fellows, who hate every sort of cruelty, not
to speak of murder; many of them would not kill or hurt an animal.
Moreover, they are all professed Christians and regard all
violence directed against the defenseless as base and disgraceful.

Certainly not one of them would be capable in everyday life, for
his own personal profit, of doing a hundredth part of what the
Governor of Orel did. Every one of them would be insulted at the
supposition that he was capable of doing anything of the kind in
private life.

And yet they are within half an hour of reaching the place where
they may be reduced to the inevitable necessity of committing this
crime.

What is the meaning of it?

But it is not only these men who are going by train prepared for
murder and torture. How could the men who began the whole
business, the landowner, the commissioner, the judges, and those
who gave the order and are responsible for it, the ministers, the
Tzar, who are also good men, professed Christians, how could they
elaborate such a plan and assent to it, knowing its consequences?
The spectators even, who took no part in the affair, how could
they, who are indignant at the sight of any cruelty in private
life, even the overtaxing of a horse, allow such a horrible deed
to be perpetrated? How was it they did not rise in indignation
and bar the roads, shouting, "No; flog and kill starving men
because they won't let their last possession be stolen from them
without resistance, that we won't allow!" But far from anyone
doing this, the majority, even of those who were the cause of the
affair, such as the commissioner, the landowner, the judge, and
those who took part in it and arranged it, as the governor, the
ministers, and the Tzar, are perfectly tranquil and do not even
feel a prick of conscience. And apparently all the men who are
going to carry out this crime are equally undisturbed.

The spectators, who one would suppose could have no personal
interest in the affair, looked rather with sympathy than with
disapproval at all these people preparing to carry out this
infamous action. In the same compartment with me was a wood
merchant, who had risen from a peasant. He openly expressed aloud
his sympathy with such punishments. "They can't disobey the
authorities," he said; "that's what the authorities are for. Let
them have a lesson; send their fleas flying! They'll give over
making commotions, I warrant you. That's what they want."

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