The most dangerous people have been hanged, or are serving sentences in penal battalions, fortresses and prisons; tens of thousands of others, less dangerous, have been driven out of the capital cities and big towns and are wandering around Russia, bedraggled and hungry; the ordinary police arrest, the secret police pursue; all books and newspapers dangerous to the government are withdrawn from circulation. In the Duma debates go on between various party spokesmen as to how to protect the welfare of the people: should or should not fleets be built? Should peasant land-ownership be organized in this way or that way? How and why a Council of Churches should, or should not, be held. There are leaders who dally in lobbies, there are quorums, blocs, premiers and everything else down to the last detail, exactly as in all civilized nations. It would seem that we need nothing more. And yet, the collapse of the existing structure is drawing closer and closer, precisely here and precisely now, in Russia.

Fine then, you government people, hang and shoot another five, ten, or thirty thousand, as imitating former repressions of revolutions in Europe you clearly intend to do. Fine then, go ahead. But you know, as well as the noose, the gallows, spies, prisons, rifles, rifle-butts, etc., there are spiritual forces that are extremely strong and far more powerful than any sort of gallows or prison. You see, all those you strangle with ropes and shoot above graves dug out by men still living had and have fathers, brothers, wives, sisters, friends and like-minded followers, and if these executions spare you from those who are buried in the graves they generate, not only among those who were close to them, but among strangers too, twice as many enemies, twice as pernicious as those you have killed and buried in the earth. The more people you murder, the smaller the chance of saving yourselves from your chief enemy: the hatred people feel towards you. By your crimes you only increase this hatred tenfold and make it more dangerous to yourselves.

Apart from increasing the number of your enemies and their hatred, through those you execute, these very executions increase, even among men who are perfect strangers to yourselves and your enemies, that feeling of cruelty and immorality you think you are combating with these executions. For these executions are not performed automatically by the papers which you write in your law courts and ministries. People are executed by other people. A young man, a former soldier, evidently perplexed as to how he should react to this, told me of how he was made to dig a trench, a grave for ten people sentenced to be shot, and how some soldiers were forced to shoot these condemned men, while others had to stand with loaded rifles behind the executioners ready to shoot them should they hesitate in fulfilling the ghastly, inhuman task demanded of them. Can the performance of such awful acts, at the command of authorities whom men have been inspired to honor and consider sacred, pass without affecting men’s souls?

The other day I read a newspaper report about some unfortunate governor-general who issued an edict expressing his praise and approval for two ‘fine young chaps’, as he called them, who had shot an unarmed prisoner as he leaped off a cart and tried to escape; he rewarded them with twenty-five rubles each. I did not believe this dreadful story of the governor’s behavior and wrote to the editor of the newspaper asking him to confirm it. I was sent the original copy of the edict, and it was explained to me that this sort of praise for murder was an everyday thing and that the most high-ranking personages uttered these approbations.

Can these sort of words and deeds really disappear without trace? Thoughts and feeling so perverted and so audaciously expressed cannot but leave terrible traces of corruption, immorality and cruelty in the hearts of those who participate in them and read such orders. These deeds and injunctions must make people feel distrust and contempt for those who prescribe such terrible deeds, so offensive to the human conscience, and praise and reward them. So that if thousands are executed, how many tens of thousands, who have in one way or another taken part in these deeds, have been perverted by this participation and deprived of the last remnants of their religious and moral principles? Have they not been made ready, if not yet to hate, then to despise those who force them to perform these evil deeds, and to commit against them the very same deeds at the first opportunity?

The newspaper reports, printed daily and read by millions, on the number of people executed and sentenced to death, have an effect similar to news of changes in the weather – something that is bound to change continually, by the day. Even if those who read this sort of news every day do not ask themselves how to reconcile such deeds, committed under orders from the highest authorities with, let us say, not the Gospels, but the sixth commandment of Moses, at least the contradictions must evoke contempt in their hearts for the commandments, for religion in general, and for the authorities who perform deeds so evidently contrary to both the religious laws and conscience.

Surely it is apparent that evil deeds committed by the governing powers in order to rid themselves of their visible enemies gather twice or even ten times as many invisible enemies, who are far more angry.

One would think it were obvious to every thinking person that such behavior from the government cannot improve the situation. It should be obvious not only to outsiders but to the rulers themselves. They must see the evident futility of what they are doing, and they must see the criminality of it. They must see this, for Christ’s teaching of love for one’s enemy, so carefully concealed by those who live according to violence, has penetrated the consciousness of the people of the Christian world, albeit not in the entirety of its complete and real meaning. I believe I am not mistaken in saying that this teaching has been particularly keenly adopted by the simple Russian working people, whom the government are now so fiercely perverting.

Even if Marcus Aurelius could, despite his gentleness and wisdom, conduct wars and condemn people to death with a clear conscience, the people of today’s Christian world can no longer do so without an inner awareness of their guilt. No matter what hypocritical and stupid Hague conferences and conditional punishments are invented, all these superficial absurdities not only fail to conceal their crimes, but on the contrary, point to the fact that these men already know themselves that what they are doing is wrong. However much they may assure themselves and others that various higher considerations dictate these dreadful violations of all human and divine laws, which are continually committed, they cannot hide, either from themselves or from decent people, the utter criminality, immorality and baseness of their conduct. For nowadays everyone knows that murder of whatever kind is vile, criminal and wrong; all the czars, ministers and generals know this, however much they hide behind some invented superior considerations.

It is the same with revolutionaries of whatever party, if they permit murder for the attainment of their aims. No matter what they say about the fact that when power is in their hands they will have no use for the violent means they now employ, their crimes are just as immoral and cruel as the activities of the government. And they therefore lead to the same awful consequences as do the evil-doings of the government: the animosity, bestialization and corruption of the people.

Their activity only differs in this (which is why it appears less criminal), that the futility of the activities of the government in power is apparent, while the activity of the revolutionaries – which is manifested for the most part in theory and only occasionally put into practice during revolutions, such as we have now in Russia – is not so evident.

The means and the method of struggle of both sides are equally alien to the human soul and to the tenets of the Christian teaching. Both embitter people, leading them to extreme levels of irrationality and brutality, while failing to attain the declared aim, and distancing others from any chance of attaining it.

The position and the activity of both warring parties – the government and the revolutionaries – here in Russia, as in the rest of the world, with their violent methods of improving human existence, is similar to that of people who, in order to warm themselves, break down the walls of the house they live in and chop it up for firewood.