On the 18th of February 1884 Russian police seized all copies of Leo Tolstoy’s book, What I Believe In. Tolstoy was born to an aristocratic family. In 1844 he began studying law and oriental languages at Kazan University, where his teachers described him as unable and unwilling to learn. He was an artillery officer in the Crimean War where Russia fought an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France and Great Britain. The death and destruction he saw turned him into a pacifist and anarchist.
Tolstoy received four nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature and three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. He wasn’t awarded even one Nobel Prize, despite Virginia Woolf describing him as the greatest of all novelists. His ideas on non-violent resistance in his book, The Kingdom of God is Within You, inspired Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Russia has produced some exceptional writers: Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, and numerous others. Yet the ability of Russia to peacefully debate and resolve challenging ideas, seems always to have been flawed, as the recent death in custody of Alexei Navalny shows us yet again.
Winston Churchill said in 1947 that “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
I’ve written recently about Abraham Lincoln. The closing of his Gettysberg Address tells us, I believe, everything that we need to know about government – “that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Of the people, by a dictator, for the dictator and his criminal cronies, doesn’t carry the same weight somehow, does it?
At some point the people of Russia will have to, once again, take control of their government. Who knows what will start it? Queues for bread? Mothers mourning their sons lost in Ukraine? People arrested for placing flowers on a monument? A book? Well books spread ideas, that’s why dictators burn them.