Hippies 5: Tolstoy and Anti-War Spirituality, Precursors to Vietnam

At about the same time that William James was knocking at the doors of consciousness, on the other side of the world, another writer was moving towards a different frontier. James had wanted to know what happened when the mind slipped beyond its ordinary boundaries. And in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James would include an account of a severe depressive episode, as a case study of someone who had arrived at spirituality through crisis and was remade from within.

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The writer's crisis had not been mild. After achieving universal acclaim, wealth, and with a large family settled on a sprawling estate, he had fallen into a deep depression. He became suicidal, to the point that he hid any rope in his house, afraid he might hang himself. He stopped going out shooting, lest the gun make suicide too easy.

Eventually, he recovered and became a devout Christian. He was Leo Tolstoy. After undergoing a spiritual transformation brought on by his depression, Tolstoy began reading the Bible intensely, especially the Sermon on the Mount. He was also reading Henry David Thoreau. In his last novel, Resurrection, he has the main character restate Thoreau's ideas of civil disobedience while visiting a prison. Then, in 1894, he published a book called The Kingdom of God Is Within You. It was quickly banned in Russia.

The book was a direct attack on both the state and the church. In it, Tolstoy argued that, in exchange for a comfortable life, ordinary people had been persuaded to accept living in a society based on violence: war, imprisonment, force. He had become convinced that elite society, the state, and the Orthodox Church were built on lies and coercion. They told people they were living in a Christian society, but in fact their society was the exact opposite of what Christ had taught.

Tolstoy was deeply disturbed by this state of affairs, and in his book he advocated “non-resistance to evil by force.” 

This advice seemed like the total opposite of what any reasonable person would do. But then, fifteen years later in 1910, Gandhi would write to Tolstoy about this idea. Gandhi was inspired by Tolstoy and named his ashram in South Africa “Tolstoy Farm.” And the ideas of nonviolent resistance would become central to his effort to free India from British colonialism. 

But that was still in the future. Back in the 1890s, after publishing his book, Tolstoy began applying his principles in the real world almost immediately.

In 1895, the year after the book had been published, in a town in the southern Caucasus, a group of villagers carried their guns out of their houses, into a field, and burned them. They were called Doukhobors, and they were radical Christians who also believed in total nonviolence. The guns they were burning were their personal firearms, used for protection on the Russian frontier to which they had been exiled decades earlier. But by then many Doukhobors had come to believe that even keeping a weapon in the house was a betrayal of Christianity.

The Doukhobors also believed in refusing to swear oaths to the state or performing military service. They had been persecuted by the Russian government for decades. Then, after they publicly burned their guns, the government took harsh action. Cossacks were sent into the Doukhobor villages, where people were beaten, arrested, and entire communities were broken up.

Tolstoy heard about the Doukhobors. Almost everywhere else he looked, he saw corruption and hypocrisy. The Doukhobors, by contrast, seemed to him one of the few groups in Russia, perhaps even in the world, actually trying to live according to the Sermon on the Mount. He began corresponding with one of their leaders.

He learned that about twelve thousand of them were in distress, that four hundred families had been expelled from their homes, and that within three years about a quarter of those exiles, mostly children and old people, had died from want and disease. Tolstoy decided to take up their cause. He began writing to the authorities and to influential friends. He did not yet know how to save the Doukhobors, but he understood one thing clearly: before anything else, their suffering had to be made visible.

Then, in 1898, the Doukhobors were granted an audience with the dowager empress of Russia. There they made a deal. The Russian state would not exempt them from military duty. But it would let them leave. They would, however, have to pay their own way, obtain foreign passports, and agree never to return. On April 1, 1898, Tolstoy published his appeal, “The Emigration of the Doukhobors.” He asked for money and for practical help. The vast majority of the Doukhobors knew no foreign languages and had never left Russia. Now thousands of them had to be moved across the world.

Tolstoy helped finance their move with royalties from Resurrection, the last novel he would write. He gave the cause his full effort: his name, his money, his friends, and his social network. He wrote to officers. He wrote to newspapers. He raised funds. He mobilized Quakers. He showed their suffering to a network strong enough to move them.

Soon, offers of help began to come in. English Quakers took up the cause. Peter Kropotkin proposed that the Doukhobors immigrate to Canada. Prompted by letters from Tolstoy and Kropotkin, James Mavor, an economics professor at the University of Toronto, approached his contacts in government, and in December 1898 the Canadian cabinet agreed to admit the Doukhobors and exempt them from military service. With the help of Tolstoy's son, Sergey, they made the voyage to North America, and today, there are roughly 50,000 people in Canada and the United States descended from those Doukhobor refugees.

Tolstoy had done more than help to save the Doukhobors. He had developed a template for how to gain independence and freedom through non-violence. It was an example that would be followed by millions of people over the course of the next century.