Time well spent (2000)

Theatre Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three Days of Rain. Donmar Warehouse, London.

What lessons can we draw from the past? At a time when some academics, shamefully unaware of their unwitting attachment to the ideological apparatus of capitalism, claim that history is dead, contemporary playwrights are much concerned with the conclusions we draw from events long ago. In the last year or so I have seen plays by Tom Stoppard (Arcadia), Michael Frayn (Copenhagen—see Socialist Standard, September 1998), Peter Barnes (Dreaming—Socialist Standard, August 1999) and Stephen Poliakoff (Remember This—Socialist Standard, December 1999), all of which conclude that the past very much determines what takes place in the present. And now Richard Greenberg, a young American whose work has not previously been seen in Britain, offers us a splendid new play in which the past is ever present.

Three Days of Rain involves only three actors. In the first act we meet brother and sister, Walker and Nan, together with Pip, the son of their father’s business partner in an architects’ consultancy. In the second act the same actors play Walker and Nan’s father and mother, and Theo, their father’s business partner. And as the second act unfolds it becomes apparent why Walker, Nan and Pip are as they are. Not, I hasten to add, in any crude deterministic fashion, Greenberg’s imagination is far too subtle for that. Rather we are aware of the impact that one generation makes on the next: of the way in which behaviour is affected by the complex chemistry of both nature and nurture. Act 1 offers us a view of the past in which Walker, Ned and Pip strive to understand the behaviours of their parents trying to make sense of diaries and remembered anecdotes. And Act 2 shows, us with both drama and poignancy, that if you don’t have enough evidence and you don’t understand the context, you will reach the wrong conclusions.

The play is a warm, intelligent one, by turns touching, sensitive and funny, which is marvellously played in the small, 250-seater, Donmar Warehouse Theatre in Covent Garden. It is a play which points to the dangers of judging a person’s contribution on the basis of their family life, their relations with their children, and so on. If we are to understand people’s lives we need to have access to all the relevant evidence. The personal behaviour of the architect fathers of Walker, Nan and Pip cannot be inferred from their buildings, even though the latter command universal praise. Francis Wheen’s recent biography of Karl Marx makes much the same point. Marx’s contribution to the history of western though cannot be judged by his rather fey attempts to live a bourgeois life in mid-Victorian London.

Postscript

The following three plays—all of which have been reviewed in this journal—are still playing in London. All can be seen for less than half the cost of a ticket to a Premier League football match. All have something to say to socialists. All are highly recommended at the turn of the century.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (Duchess Theatre) “Michael Frayn has written one of the best plays about science and society that it has been my pleasure to see.”

Summerfolk by Maxim Gorki (National Theatre. Reviewed October 1999). “Summerfolk is as relevant today as it has ever been. I hope to find an early opportunity to see the play again and to marvel at the skill of the actors and the wonder of its staging.”

The Weir by Conor McPherson (Royal Court Theatre. Reviewed April 1998). “Valerie’s revelation serves both to underscore the emptiness at the heart of their lives and to offer an alternative which might be reached through honest, open discourse, about matters of real concern, managed in an empathetic manner . . . This is theatre at its most sublime.”

Michael Gill

Mixed Media: Children of the Sun (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Maxim Gorky play Children of the Sun directed by Howard Davies was performed last year at the National Theatre in London.

The play captures the unease and violence of what the historian Lionel Kochan called the ‘dress rehearsal for revolution’ in Russia in 1905. Gorky wrote the play while imprisoned for accusing the Tsar of the massacre of 1,000 workers on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in January 1905 outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. For Kochan ‘this was the spark that set alight the flames of revolution. In all social groups revolt flared up. By the end of January nearly half a million workmen were on strike. The professional intelligentsia joined in.’ A ‘soviet’ in St Petersburg ‘formed of some 500 delegates elected by about 200,000 workers, represented the peak of working-class achievement. It was a spontaneous creation. But it was a lesson in revolution, not the revolution itself’.

The Children of the Sun are a group of privileged, self-absorbed, middle class intelligentsia who are floundering and philosophising about the world, who sense revolution is in the air but lack vision, energy and dynamism. Geoffrey Streatfield is amiable as Protassov, the ‘student of natural science’ who is prescient about the role of science in the future but blind to romantic advances, and the philandering around him. Protassov’s sister Lisa played by Emma Lotfield is anguished by the harsh reality of the suffering peasantry while his wife Elyena played by Justine Mitchell knows something is wrong, of the need for action, and embodies the revolutionary spirit.

When the play had its premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre in October 1905, the atmosphere was tense, and ‘the audience panicked when they mistook the arrival of the protesting workers at the end of the play, for a real demonstration entering the theatre from the streets’ (Cynthia Marsh). Stanislavsky wrote that the role of the Moscow Art Theatre was ‘not a simple private affair but a social task. Never forget that we are striving to brighten the dark existence of the poor classes.’

Gorky’s father was a joiner, and Tolstoy called Gorky ‘a real man of the people.’ Gorky had worked as a skivvy in a shoe shop, in a bakery, as an errand boy, a stevedore, a dishwasher on a River Volga steamer, and a railway night-watchman before educating himself and becoming a jobbing journalist and a Marxist.

The 1905 Revolution was suppressed with 14,000 people executed and 75,000 imprisoned. Gorky wrote ‘our sick society will not become healthy until the sources of light, beauty and wisdom have become accessible to everyone.’

Steve Clayton

Not just a singer (1989)

Book Review from the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chaliapin. By Victor Borovsky. Hamish Hamilton.

This book is a study of the rise of Fyador Chaliapin from poor uneducated Russian peasant boy to the world's greatest opera singer and dramatic actor. Its interest from our viewpoint is in the light it throws on Russian life and conditions between 1873 and 1938.

On achieving fame on the Russian operatic stage Chaliapin established a close friendship with the writer Maxim Gorky, who was keen to help him write his autobiography. Both came from the same Volga district, both born to peasant status (a crippling handicap in old Russia) and experienced from an early age the appalling poverty and misery of the Russian casual labourer. Both had in fact been Volga boatmen (the barge hauliers epitomised in the famous song).

Gorky was up until 1917 a constant supporter and financier of Russian Social Democracy, especially Lenin's Bolshevik faction. It was in fact Gorky's money that financed the Party school on the Isle of Capri in Italy. But in 1917 Gorky was already disillusioned:

  The working class cannot fail to see that Lenin is only doing some experimenting with their living tissues, with their blood The working class must know that miracles don't exist, that they are going to face hunger, the complete disruption of industry, chaos in transport, a long term of bloody anarchy, followed by a no less bloody and dismal reaction. Aren't all those who disagree seized and dragged off to jail under the Lenin regime just as they were under the Romanovs.

Despite being sympathetically inclined to the revolutionaries before 1917 and certainly in favour of democratic freedoms. Chaliapin too became rapidly disillusioned with the Bolshevik regime and it was Gorky who advised him to leave Russia, which he did, never to return despite Stalin s blandishments.

At a time when thousands of Muscovites were living in “angles" (corners of rooms) Stalin offered Chaliapin a house in Moscow and a dacha in the country, almost anything in fact, to get him back to Russia. Chaliapin, to his credit, said. "He will give me money and a house but can he give me back my soul?". Which was one way of putting it.

After leaving Russia Chaliapin went on to consolidate a reputation as the greatest operatic bass singer of all time. He was not merely the possessor of a mighty voice but was also a great dramatic innovator, infusing old and encrusted stage traditions with new life. He toured the world electrifying audiences everywhere.

Early in his career after his first visits abroad he wrote:

  I have been all over Europe and have visited North and South America: everywhere I have seen Liberty, but nowhere greater freedom than exists in England. The meetings in Hyde Park surprised me especially. One hears Socialists and Anarchists speechifying almost side by side. The crowd listens with equal attention and respect to both of them. A Catholic defends his religion with fiery zeal, while not far away an atheist deprecates all faith no less ardently. I was very much astonished at some of the speeches that were translated for me by my Russian friends and my Russian habit of thought made me involuntarily wonder what the Police would say about it. At times I almost felt like asking the Park policeman how he could listen to such things unmoved. What an incredible phenomenon it seemed that a policeman should be the servant of free democracy.

This passage from his autobiography Pages from My Life, which, incidentally, was censored from the Soviet edition, shows Chaliapin to have been not merely a great musical artist and genius but an acute political observer.

It is regrettable that Dr. Borovsky (like so many Soviet-trained academics) is apparently ignorant of our existence and that we disowned the Bolshevik dictatorship in 1917—and that we still speak in Hyde Park.

Horatio

Religion and Reaction in Russia (1943)

From the November 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

The news that Stalin has approved the election of a Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in Russia and the formation of a Holy Synod is not the least surprising to Socialists, especially after the information published in the Daily Worker (see August Socialist Standard) about the increasing numbers of rouble millionaires. 

Perhaps one of the best comments is that of General de Gaulle's paper, La France. It compares the present developments in Russia to the end of the Robespierre regime in France in 1798, and further points out that the old official Greek Orthodox Catholic Church in Russia has energetically supported the war against Germany, openly threatening denunciation as a traitor and ex-communication for any priest guilty of failing to lead the people against the enemy. According to the Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald (September 6, 1943), "Since the war there has been an upsurge of religions feeling by no means confined to the older generation." This is simply one further aspect of the profound truth of the contention of the Socialist Standard 23 years ago that the people of Russia were not Socialists—but largely illiterate peasants. They still are— and are therefore priest-ridden.

  It is the development of industrial forces, and mankind's consequent growing control over nature, and increasing knowledge of her working, that provides a wider and firmer basis for science, and leaves less room for superstition in the minds of working men. (Socialism and Religion, S.P.G.B., p. 15-16.)

The position of the hapless British Communists becomes ever more ridiculous. One-time sponsors of the "League of the Godless" they are now forced to whitewash what is the most reactionary Church in Europe—the Russian Church— former organiser of pogroms against the Jews, spiritual managers of the Czar's public brothels, and breakers of strikes. Meantime, the British Archbishops and Deans of Canterbury, York, etc., have proved how astute they are and how well they understood that the backward conditions of Russia would serve religion.

According to the Daily Worker (September 16), the Dean of Canterbury welcomes the visit of the Archbishop of York to the Soviet Union. In an article in the same issue he states that "the Russian Church of to-day differs widely from the Russian Church of Tsarist days, proving itself by a whole series of acts, especially in war time, a loyal ally of the Soviet Regime." The Dean considers that this recognition of the Holy Synod in Russia makes it "the first great union of peoples to practise things which for 1,800 years the Church has been preaching."

When we recall the books written by these people, The Socialist Sixth of the World (extensively debunked in the Socialist Standard) and hear the statement of the Archbishop of Canterbury on the radio that they (the Church of England) have long been on the most friendly terms with the Greek Orthodox Church in Russia, and are now exchanging delegates, it becomes clear that the clergy are up to their age-old game, consistently played throughout the ages, of repainting their theological scenery to suit the political policy of the ruling clique of the day. In the same way that Ancient Rome and the Incas of Peru took the idols of conquered tribes and placed them in the Pantheon, so the Patriarch of the Holy Synod is quite willing to send greetings to Joseph Stalin so long as Stalin recognises the Church, or vice versa. Once Churchill "recognised" Stalin, the Church of England follows suit. Stalin has done this, as the Times indicates, because the Greek Church is the most suitable machinery for influencing Russian and Balkan peasants, not the Communist International, which it has superseded. Eleven years ago they said: —

   In all the Catholic Churches in the Liverpool diocese a pastoral letter from the Archbishop was read during the High Mass last Sunday. After stating that the abolition of religion is a fundamental tenet of Russian Communism, the Archbishop asserts, "Almost from the outset the price which the workers paid for the somewhat fictitious benefits of Communism was very real slavery; and slavery not merely of body but of mind, for the serfs of the soil in their misery soon discovered that the only free-thinkers in Russia were the despots who ruled them.
   Even at this late hour the world's ports should be closed to the commercial fleets of Russia and the plague of Bolshevism isolated within the Soviet State." (Daily Worker, November 29, 1932.) 

The official Church of England, through the Dean of Canterbury and others, will try to pass this off as "Socialism," and surely, if Hitler and Stalin can call themselves "Socialists," so can the Dean of Canterbury and the Russian Church. Yelping at his heels, the Daily Worker and Russia Today announce that the modern Russian Church, like the new Soviet millionaires, is " quite different."

Unfortunately for them, information is not lacking to the contrary. In the Daily Mirror for September 17 is a report from Moscow by Marion Sinclair entitled "An exhausting time was had by all," on the reception of the Patriarch by Stalin and his enthronement in Moscow Cathedral.

  "Never in the history of Soviet Russia has there been such a blaze of colour, jewels, candles, velvets, brocades—or such a concourse of people in an ecstasy of religious fervour."

The Cathedral Dean was fussing about like the stage-manager before the opening performance.

   "Don't forget those candles, line up the beggars at the door—they're blocking the entrance. Where are the people who are to line the path to keep back crowds? "
   Sergei (the Patriarch) put on the golden mitre blazing with rubies, sapphires, amethysts and pearls. One girl whispered "they can't all be real." But they were, for canonical law forbids the wearing of false jewels. (Italics ours.)

So we see. It is almost the same old superstitious Russia in spite of everything. Great wealth for priests—based on crowds of beggars at the door as they always were, with "modern" rouble millionaires and masses of pauper-workers added. And yet not quite the same, for somewhere in the back streets of Moscow there are working men and women who recall the words of one of Russia's outstanding sons : —

   Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weigh upon the masses who are crushed by continuous toil for others, by poverty and deprivation. The helplessness of all the exploited in their struggle against the exploiters inevitably generates a belief in a better life after death, even as the helplessness of the savage in his struggle with nature gives rise to a belief in gods, devils, miracles, etc.
  Religion teaches those who toil in poverty all their lives to be resigned and patient in this world, and consoles them with the hope of reward in heaven. As for those who live upon the labour of others, religion teaches them to be "charitable"—thus providing a justification for exploitation and, as it were, also a cheap ticket to heaven likewise."Religion is the opium of the people." Religion is a kind of spiritual intoxicant, in which the slaves of capital drown their humanity, and blunt their desire for a decent human existence.
  But a slave who has become conscious of his slavery, and who has risen to the height of fighting for his emancipation, has half-ceased to be a slave. The class-conscious worker of to-day, brought up in the environment of a big factory, and enlightened by town life, rejects religious prejudices with contempt. He leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois hypocrites. He fights for a better life for himself, here on earth. The modern proletariat ranges itself on the side of Socialism, which, with the help of science, is dispersing the fog of religion and is liberating the workers from their faith in a life after death, by rallying them to the present-day struggle for a better life here upon earth.

The same Russian writer went on :—

  Marx said : "Religion is the opium of the people"—and this postulate is the corner-stone of the whole philosophy of Marxism with regard to religion. Marxism always regarded all modern religions and churches, and every kind of religious organisation as instruments of that bourgeois reaction whose aim is to defend exploitation by stupefying the working-class.

And finally perhaps Josef Stalin ponders these words written to Maxim Gorky : —

   By redecorating the idea of God you actually repaired the chains by which the ignorant workers and peasants are bound. "There!"—Messrs. Parson & Co. will say—"see what a fine and wise idea (idea of God) this is ! Even ' your ' democrats, your leaders, admit it; and we (Messrs. Parson & Co.) are the ministers of this idea." . . . Now in Europe, just as in Russia, every defence or justification of the idea of God, even the most refined and well intentioned, is a justification of reaction.

The Russian writer from whose work the above quotations are taken is N. Lenin (Lenin on Religion, Lawrence & Wishart, 1943, 1s.), and Mr. Harry Pollitt has been so busy at the back of the Second Front lately that he hasn't got round to suppressing it yet.

Horatio.

A Question of Class Identity (1999)

Theatre Review from the October 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Summerfolk, by Maxim Gorki. National Theatre.

Summerfolk is a compelling, exciting, entertaining, hugely relevant play, that was written in 1904; that is, in the same year that the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed. Like Philistines and Barbarians, two of Gorki's other plays written at about the same time, it is about the emergence, in significant numbers, of the "professional people"—lawyers, doctors, engineers, administrative civil servants, etc—who were needed to service the emerging capitalist state. Today's chattering classes jet round the world for their extended holidays, but in turn-of-the-century Russia the practice was to rent summer villas in the country. Summerfolk follows the lives of one group of such people and their dependants, over a period of several weeks.

Anyone familiar with the plays of Chekov and Turgenev (see, for example, the review of Turgenev's A Month in the Country, Socialist Standard, April 1999) will recognise the terrain. Indeed Chekov's The Cherry Orchard describes the sale of land which is to be divided into building lots for summer villas. Most of the new breed of professionals and their partners, are the sons and daughters of serfs. Most of them, as once of the characters puts it "knew poverty in our youth", but now it is many of their lives which seem impoverished, listless, and apparently lacking in point and purpose.

Whilst Chekov and Turgenev frequently seem content to describe the behaviour of their characters and to acknowledge their collective ennui, Gorki is concerned to understand the roots of that behaviour and to speculate about its consequences. One critic argues that Chekov has more "symphonic mastery", by which he presumably means that Chekov handles his plots with greater panache and subtlety. But then Chekov seems intent on accounting for human behaviour in terms of individual traits and characteristics which make no reference to people's social experience. For Chekov it seems, the psychological domain is not only prime, it is often, in practice, all that there is.

Gorki takes a contrary view. His characters behave differently, firstly, because they are attached to different views of the world; and secondly, because these opinions are socially constructed. At the heart of the play is a dilemma. Are newly-rich professionals entitled to "a good meal and a drink", content with the justification of "My right to live any way I want"? Or should they, as a matter of loyalty to the class from which they come, strive "to improve and regenerate and illuminate the lives of our own people—people who toil and toil, till the day they die, trapped in dirt and darkness"? This is the question that Gorki would have us face and interestingly, the more enlightened, humanistic perspective is voiced predominantly by the female characters. The gossip, the drinking, the conflicting points of view—the talk of evolution or revolution, despotism or democracy, pessimism or optimism—are all finally tied to this central question.

Whether Gorki has "symphonic mastery" of his material may be a moot point. I can only report that three minutes listening to a reformist politician has often felt infinitely longer than the spell-binding three-and-a-half hours during which the drama unfolds across the vast expanses of the Olivier stage.

I frequently meet people who accept both the legitimacy of the socialist case and its implications for their status as workers. But, like some of the characters in Summerfolk, they argue that given their professional salaries, health benefits, share options and alike, they feel little sense of identity with the more deprived members of the working class in this country, let alone the wider world. For them, and for people like me who would have them think otherwise, Summerfolk is as relevant today as it has ever been. I hope to find an early excuse to see the play again, and to marvel at the skill of the actors and the wonder of its staging. Thoroughly recommended.

Michael Gill

Leo Tolstoy: author and anarchist (1987)

From the May 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leo Tolstoy is famous not only for his novels but for his moral and political beliefs which have inspired, and continue to inspire, both anarchists and pacifists.

He was born on 9th September, 1828 into a family of rural aristocrats at their estate at Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula in Russia. His mother, a princess, died when he was barely eighteen months old and his father, a count, died when he was nine. A distant relative, Tatyana Yergolskava, brought up Tolstoy, his sister Maria and his three brothers.

From 1844 to 1847 Tolstoy studied oriental languages and law at the university of Kazan but failed to take a degree. He returned to his estate, his health in decline because of dissipation, where he stayed until 1851 when he went to live with a brother in the Caucasus who persuaded him to join the army.

In 1852 Tolstoy's first story, Childhood, met with considerable success and was followed by Boyhood in 1854 and Youth in 1857. His account of the fighting at Sebastopol made him a national celebrity and on the orders of the Czar he was sent back from the front to St Petersburg where his literary fame enabled him to meet the most distinguished writers and poets of that period.

From 1857 to 1861 Tolstoy traveled abroad, visiting Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland and England. During his travels he met the anarchist Proudhon, the author Auerbach (known for his stories of peasant life) and the Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen.

His return home in February 1861 saw the emancipation of the serfs and, encouraged by the reforms of the times, he attempted to carry out educational experiments on his estate which ended in failure after two years.

On September 23rd in 1862 Tolstoy married Sophia Andreyevna Behrs and for nearly twenty years he lived a settled life on his estate, raising thirteen children and writing some of his best known novels such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, until the end of his life, Tolstoy became preoccupied with moral and ethical questions and much of his later works such as My Confession (1879); The Gospel in Brief (1880); What I Believe (1884) What Shall We Do Then? (1885); On Life (1887); The Kingdom of God is Within You (1889); What is Religion? (1902) increasingly concentrated on putting across his idiosyncratic theological views.

His last long novel, Resurrection (1899), written on behalf of the religious sect, the Doukhobres, was instrumental in ending their persecution and gaining permission for them to emigrate to Canada, but its hostile and outspoken criticisms of Church and State led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. But even during this period of his Iife when Tolstoy the propagandist had largely taken over from Tolstoy the novelist, he was still able to produce such masterpieces as The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (1886); The Power of Darkness (1886); Master and Man (1895); Father Sergius (1898); Nedji Murat (1904); The False Coupon (1905.

Finally, on 28th October 1910, in a dramatic flight from his home, Tolstoy went to the convent of Shamardino near Kaluga, where his sister Maria was a nun. He then traveled towards Novo-Cherkask but developed pneumonia and died at Ostapovo railway station on 7th November, 1910.

Toistoy's political and ethical views developed partly as a result of his experiences in the Crimean war, his later pacifism resulting from his participation in the siege of Sebastopol. But it was the witnessing of a public execution in Paris in 1857 that led to his opposition to organised state rule. Woodcock states:

"The cold, inhuman efficiency of the operation aroused in him a horror far greater than any scenes of war had done, and the guillotine became for him a frightful symbol of the state that used it. From that day he began to speak politically - or anti-politically - in the voice of an anarchist." (Woodcock, G. 'Anarchism' 1963, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.)

Tolstoy was influenced by the French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his ideal of the free peasant life; on a trip to Western Europe he made a detour to visit him in Brussels. They talked mainly about education, a subject which had interested Tolstoy from an assiduous reading of his childhood hero, Rousseau. He was also impressed by Proudhon's book 'La Guerre et la Paix' which was nearing completion, the title of which he was to borrow for his longest and best known novel.

The years of Tolstoy's youth coincided with the economic and political changes arising from the ending of serfdom and the development of capitalism in Russia, which threatened to change the way of life for the landed gentry who found themselves dependent on hired labour in competition with industry.

Besides the economic threat to the landed gentry Tolstoy saw encroaching industrialisation as a threat to the simple life, close to nature, which he loved and which is described in The Cossacks, written in 1852 but not published until ten years later:

"Oleninm had entered into the life of the Cossack village so fully that his past seemed quite foreign to him. As to the future, especially a future outside the world in which he was now living, it did not interest him at all. When he received letters from home, from re1atives and friends, he was offended by the evident distress with which they regarded him as a lost man, while he in his village considered those as did not live as he was living."

But even though the simple life is eulogised in 'The Cossacks', Tolstoy's natural exuberence breaks through the narrative:

"It's all nonsense what I have been thinking about - love and self-sacrifice and Lukaska. Happiness is the one thing. He who is happy is right", flashed through Olenin's mind, and with a strength unexpected to himself he seized and kissed. tbe beautiful Maryanka on her ternple and her cheek."

These two opposing tendencies were to plague Tolstoy for the greater part of his adult life. On he one hand was the sensualist; the lover of life; the dissipated youth who failed to obtain a degree at university; the father of thirteen children, with a strong sexual appetite. On other hand was the brooding moralist; the relentless critic of organised religion; the puritanical advocate of celibacy; the anarchist, castigating the rule of law, privilege and power.

Tolstoy put his own moral doubts into his characters in 'Anna Karenina' which was completed in 1877. The country-loving, goodhearted Levin, after a Titanic struggle to find meaning and purpose to life, eventually finds happiness and contentment with Kitty, whilst the lovers Anna Karenina and Vronsky are crushed by their adulterous relationship, which ends in despair and disaster with Anna's suicide.

In 'Anna Karenina' Tolstoy put political opinions into the mouths of his characters in addition to his moral views, in the character of Levin:

"You know that capitalism oppresses the workers. Our workmen the peasants bear the whole burden of labour, but are so placed that, work as they may, they cannot escape from their degrading condition. All the profits on their labour, by which they might better their condition, give themselves some leisure, and consequently gain some education, all this surplus value is taken away by the capitalists. And our society has so shaped itself that the more the people work the richer the merchants and landowners will become, while the people will remain beasts of burden for ever. And this system must be changed."

His views on education are also voiced by Levin:

"Schools are no remedy, but the remedy would be an economic organisation under which the people would be better off and have more leisure. Then schools would come."

But although 'Anna Karenina', 'The Cossacks' and also 'War and Peace' portray Toistoy's love of the countryside. a life' close to nature, his distrust of industrialisation and an occasional attack on capitalism they are not anarchist novels or propagandist novels in the same way that most of his later books were.

In 'What Shall We Do Then?' published in 1885, he attacked money:

"Money is the new form of slavery, distinguished from the old solely by its impersonality, by the lack of any human relation between the master and the slave.
..the essence of all slavery consists in drawing the benefit of another's labour force by compulsion, and it is founded upon property in the slave or upon property in money which is indispensable to the other man."

In his last long novel Tolstoy enlarged upon moral attacks under capitalism:

"People usually imagine a theief, a murderer, a spy, a prostitute, knowing their occupation to be evil, must be ashamed of it. But the very opposite is true. Men who have been placed by fate and their own sins in a certain position, however irregular that position may be, adopt a view of life as a whole which makes their position appear to them good and respectable. In order to back up their view of life they instinctively mix only with those who accept their ideas of life and their place in it. This surprises us when it is a case of thieves bragging of their skill, prostitutes flaunting their depravity or murderers boasting of their cruelty. But it surprises us only because their numbers are limited and - this is the point - we live in a different atmosphere. But can we not observe the same phenomenon when the rich boast of their wealth, i.e. of robbery; when commanders of armies pride themselves on their victories, i.e. on murder; and when those in high places vaunt their power - their brute force? We do not see that their ideas of life and of good and evil are corrupt and inspired by a necessity to justify their position, only because the circle of people with such corrupt ideas is a larger one and we belong to it ourselves."

In 'The Kingdom of God is Within You' Tolstoy's anarchist ideas and his opposition to organised religion is clearly stated:

"Christianity in its true significance abolishes the state, annililates all governments.
Revolutionary enemies fight the government from outside; Christianity does not fight at all, but wrecks its foundation from within."

He attacked power in the same book:

"All men find themselves in power assert that their power is necessary in order that the wicked may not do violence to the good, and regard it as self-evident that they are the good and are giving the rest of the good protection against the bad. But in reality those who grasp and hold the power cannot possibly do the better.
In order to obtain and retain power, one must love it. But the effort after power is not apt to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities, pride, craft and cruelty. Without exalting self and abasing others, without hypocrisy, lying, prisons, fortresses, penalties, killing, no power can arise or hold its own."

In response to the inequalities of wealth and the injustices of the capitalist system Tolstoy proposed that the remedy should be:

"If you are a landlord, to give your land at once to the poor, and, if you are a capitalist, to give your money and your factory to the working-man; if you are a prince, a cabinet minister, an official, a judge or a general, you ought at once to resign your position, and, if you are a soldier, you ought to refuse obedience without regard to any danger." ('The Kingdom of God is Within You')

Three years earlier, in 1890, Tolstoy had tried to put his principles into practice by renouncing his property, although he continued to live in comfort on his estate, the management of which passed to his wife. In the following year he gave up the posthumous rights on his books written after 1881.

To the end of his life Tolstoy continued to propagate his views regardless of his personal safety, for it must be remembered that the Czarist government frequently imprisoned political opponents without trial for periods of twenty years more. The reason why Tolstoy remained unscathed is unclear but it is possible that the police did not wish to make a martyr of a writer of such international fame. Whatever the reason, Tolstoy took advantage of the situation to attack the government at every opportunity.

In 'Christianity and Patriotism'(1894) he stated:

"Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable mneaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's ambitious and mercenary, aims, and a renunciation of. human dignity. common sense. and conscience by!the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold-power, That is what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery."

And in his 'Address to the Swedish Peace Congress' in 1909 when he was turned eighty, he was still able (despite the emotional turmoil of his domestic life) to write eloquently in support of his views:

"...the military profession and calling, not withstanding all the efforts to hide its real meaning, is as shameful a business as an executioner's and even more so. For the executioner only holds himself in readiness to kill those who have been adjudged harmful and criminal, while a soldier promises to kill all whom he is told to kill, even though they be dearest to him or the best of men."

Tolstoy's influence is difficult to sum up: he advocated giving up one's personal wealth to help the poor in spite of having realised that it is the exploitation of workers' labour power which is the cause of poverty; he was a pacifist, but in practising non-violence his supporters were slaughtered and imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in the years following the Russian revolution; he wrote of "Christian love" but had a chauvinistic attitude to women and advocated celibacy which would lead to the extinction of the human race instead of its advancement; his simple, rural existence may be to the taste of some people but it avoids the problems of capitalism instead of solving them.

The most enduring Tolstoyan community has been the Catholic Worker group which was established in the USA in the 1930s. And in Britain the Christian anarchists who held meetings at St. Paul's Church, Bow, in East London in 1967 all belonged to established churches. And though this may seem surprising in view of Tolstoy's hostility towards organised religion, his own rationalist religious beliefs were so individualistic that they have been accepted less readily than his other teachings.

Socialists wish to end capitalism, only it will not be done by individuals withdrawing from society, but by the mass of workers understanding, wanting, and working for socialism.

Socialists reject religious beliefs because they postpone the struggle to achieve a better life in the hope of finding rewards in a mythical after-life. Such practices stop workers from questioning their exploitation, hence their enthusiastic endorsement by the state.

The literary gifts of Tolstoy have assured him of a place in history. His work is rightfully admired by all who appreciate good literature, and will continue to do so for generations to come. But Tolstoy, the pamphleteer. is rapidly being forgotten and already many of his religious and political tracts are unobtainable.

Towards the end of his life Tolstoy said to Gorky:

"I write a lot and that's not right because I do it from senile vanity, from the desire to make everyone think as I do."

Perhaps that is why his pamphlets are being forgotten, because the imperious aristocrat in Tolstoy's personality dominated how he would have wished to be, and people do not like being bullied.

Nearly eighty years after his death we can admire the moral courage of Tolstoy and his literary genius, and continue to do so long after Tolstoy the prophet has been forgotten.

Carl Pinel