Two Russians

RUSSIA … WE KNOW WHAT IT IS, ENCOMPASSING THE EAST OF EUROPE AND the north of Asia, an immense empire where the killings never stop. It is said that it’s a country of limitless plains, which legend affirms are white with eternal snows. People know almost nothing other than this, and yet they talk about the country often. Few subjects of conversation come up as often as does that of Russia and the Slavic character, the famous character that learned gentlemen dissect in just a few words: mystical, religious if not fanatical, as well as cold and impulsive (see the terrorists). None of this holds together very well. Nevertheless, people’s opinions are set, and the least occurrence in Russia becomes the theme for commonplaces.

I think it is desirable that at the very least the anarchists take an interest, a more serious one, in the painful life of the Slavic race. Firstly from simple human solidarity toward the valiant minority there that is carrying out the same combat as we here against the triple chain: lack of consciousness, the spinelessness of the crowd, and the ferocity of the masters.

But also because the Slavic race permits us to make precious observations and at times offers us magnificent examples. Younger than the Latin races because it came later to civilization (i.e., refined and artificial life, large-scale industry, intensive production, the reign of money), it was able to perhaps too hastily accept the good parts and attempt to reject the flawed. If letters, the arts, and the sciences have made astonishing strides, if artists and psychologists like Andreev, Kuprin, and Artzybachev, leave our Bourgets far behind them; if Russian intellectualism has greater value than the ridiculous supposed elite constituted here by the fast-living and arriviste youth of the universities, the Slavs have remained backward on other points. They live more simply, less depravedly, less debauched than the Latins. They are less cunning and more honest. And certain old words that in the West are nothing but old words have preserved some meaning there. Sincere individuals assert themselves, numerous and determined despite the horror of punishments. They know how to fight and act the way they think, even if they have to pay dearly for it, to carry things to the bitter end in the life they’ve chosen. A curious parallel with here, where repression is comparatively less ferocious, though the oppression of the individual is similar, the revolts are less clear, rarer, more incomplete than there, where repression is implacable, unimaginable …

Races live and die in the same way as individuals; they have successive periods of weakness and strength; they grow and decline. And perhaps the entire difference can be found there: the Slavs are young while it appears the Latins have already expended the bulk of their effort. The Slavs have both the defects and the qualities of the young. Accepting this is certainly simpler than splitting hairs over the obscure adjectives distributed by the spreaders of ignorance involved in conformist education. Let them explain the extreme logic of revolts by the mysticism they translate into hallucinations but which in reality is nothing but proof of new vigor and will. These are nothing but a few more howlers added to the existing jumble. But we free investigators don’t accept this silliness any more than we accept any other. Let us ask the facts, let us ask men to show us how races live, and we will unflinchingly say what we have seen.

Two men died there recently who are two symbols, who were essentially Slavic psychologies and individualities of a rare force. Their lives were two stubborn revolts and they never wavered in the face of the worst dangers. And though they were at opposite poles of thought, they both fell as defeated men worthy of admiration who remained themselves until death: Tolstoy, the new Christian, and I’m tempted to write the new anarchist Christ, though confined in his dream to such a point that he only saw the ideal, and Sazonov, a proud and upright intelligence who accepted reality as it was, who desired struggle in all its magnitude and got it.

They were at antipodes from each other, the apostle of kindness and the terrorist, the resigned man and the rebel. For centuries man has hesitated between these two extremes. Equally remarkable individuals, they lived as they wanted to live. Now that only their memories remain the question they posed is closer to being answered: How can man conquer the happiness of a life that is full and beautiful?

Tolstoy answered with the words of the Gospel that handed over the good, the gentle and the honest to the unscrupulous and the cruel. Tolstoy repeated the parables of the Galilean anarchist with which kings, popes, and inquisitions have been able to lull the deluded crowds: “Love each other …”

Love the brute who strikes you without knowing why; love the brute who despoils and beats you; love the base slave and the insolent lord. Ah, what naïveté was needed to affirm the doctrine of love. Alas, life doesn’t belong to those whose only weapon is their intact moral beauty. Life is a struggle, and force alone gives a right to it.

“Don’t resist the wicked, for resisting means rendering evil for evil …”

What a scathing denial life gave you, gentle, artless old man. When they don’t defend themselves the good are crucified by the wicked, or silently asphyxiated by constraints. The good and the weak who didn’t resist passed before your very eyes to be slaughtered in the mountains of Manchuria. The good and the weak who didn’t resist died of hunger around you, and you yourself, because you didn’t want to resist, could only offer them the promise of a paradise you had doubts about. Your eyes, which the ideal veiled with a beautiful mirage, didn’t see that the life of a man can only be a ceaseless resistance against nature, society, and himself. Passivity and resignation are synonymous with annihilation.

And yet, your great wisdom led you to say: “Salvation is within you … Live simply … Help yourself … Don’t judge …”

And these were living words that should not be forgotten. Man mustn’t expect his salvation from redeemers: he will only find it in his own ill, in his own power.

He will realize one day, when he will count more on himself, the insane lies and hypocrisy that surround him. He will remember that beauty is simple, and that in order to live in beauty he’ll live simply.

He will aid his neighbor, finding an advantage in doing so, and also because his effort will be generous. And knowing the complexity of causes he won’t have the presumptuousness to judge, and also because he doesn’t himself want to be judged.

Tolstoy was a Slav in both the errors and truths of his doctrine, with a willful and bold temperament, stumbling under the hold of religious heredity and an environment of sadness where consolation and love are vital necessities.

But his strength only shows itself in its entirety when revealed in his acts. Being basically skeptical, the civilized don’t know how to be intransigent. They are unable to be faithful to their will, being weakened by the intensity of a refined existence. Being noble and rich, in order to renounce nobility and wealth, in order to refuse glory and honors, it was necessary to accept anathema and demand prison, to be one of those extraordinary individualities that only new races produce.

The death of Tolstoy was the death of a man of strength, of an ascetic and a primitive. To die in a final movement of will, breaking the final fetter, the family, is a sign of will. But in this there is also the ascetic’s desire for solitude and the primitive’s ferocious intransigence.

But the man having died, his doctrine remains. And it denies itself, it condemns itself. The salutary words it contains were stifled under the weight of error, because in confronting brutal life the absolute dream is an error. Tolstoy, who condemned the corrupt and those who govern, received the homage of the French Chamber of Deputies. He, the author of “I Can No Longer Remain Silent,” was saluted on his death bed by the Czar. His determination to be alone was frustrated, and those he disavowed insult him by honoring him. His doctrine of liberation has become a tool of enslavement. Like that of Christ, it is condemned by its results.

The other doctrine is summed up in one word: resist.

Once the petty squabbles of parties, the disputes over tactics are closed, one essential idea remains: resist. It’s not a moral doctrine, but a notion that must impregnate the mind. Not to resist means not to exist. Opposing the passive resistance of the Christian to violence is a form of suicide. There is no individual life outside the struggle. Resist: this is the individualist motto par excellence, a program of action more than a doctrine.

While Tolstoy peacefully died, sickened at seeing himself admired against his will, another man was, like him, dying in a final burst of will: Sazonov.

He only counted on his own strength, knowing that force is the final argument. His bravery and desire not being able to accommodate themselves to a peaceful existence, he was active. Around him was the tyranny of the knout and the gallows. And then there were the factories that crushed energy, and oppression by hunger and oppression by the law, the final forms of violence promoted to the level of necessary institutions.

In such an atmosphere a man cannot fold his arms. A strong man can’t limit his revolt to simply lightening the weight of his own chains.

With all his virile youth, the man who just poisoned himself in the penal colony of Zarontovy became, in doing so, an enemy of society, but not a moral enemy, thinker, critic, or apostle, but an enemy in act, by his life, which was that of an outlaw, by his private acts and his terrorist attitude.

It is appropriate to contrast such fighters with Tolstoy. Not to praise their personalities. We respect neither the dead nor heroes. But they are symbols. Tolstoy is the man of the past who seeks refuge in God, who believes and is resigned. Sazonov is the modern man, an unbeliever, determined.

On July 15, 1904, he killed Plehve in the middle of St. Petersburg by throwing a bomb under his landau. With a few friends he had spent months preparing this act. He knew he probably wouldn’t return from it, but he preferred this to resignation or to an attitude of revolt limited to himself alone. Wounded by the same bomb, tortured on his hospital bed, he somehow survived, and it’s inexplicable how he escaped the death sentence. In these times of “moral complicity” the eight years of forced labors the judges gave him seem almost an act of friendship. So Sazonov only had survive two more years in the penal colony when he committed suicide.

Being young and wanting to again take up his unfinished task he wanted to live, but the prison administration of Zarantovy, having several times provoked the anger of the prisoners with persecutory measures and attacks, the political detainees decided to act on a new round of attacks on their dignity. To continue resisting. But they only have two means of protesting and moving public opinion: hunger strikes and mass suicide. Several of them decided on this final method, hunger strikes doing nothing but provoke new harassments. And so, toward the end of November, Sazonov, along with five other revolutionary prisoners, killed himself in protest.

The facts are simple. But such as they are, they are as eloquent as a doctrine.

I wanted to show these two individualists side by side in order to better illustrate the ideological conflict between defunct Christianity and nascent revolt. I wanted to place these two extreme types of a young race, in whose psychology is mixed both the dizziness of an unfathomable past of mysticism and the boldest desire for life that can be formulated. Tolstoy and Sazonov are worth being understood.

We anarchist individualists no longer have anything to choose between. We no longer need to refute the Christian thesis, which its partisans have refuted through their defeat. We only conceive of individualism as a doctrine of revolt. Sazonov is one of us, and though we don’t erect statues it pleases us to see such individualities arise from time to time.

(l’anarchie, December 29, 1910)