The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗
- Author: Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
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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
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