The second lieutenant seemed to have risen slightly from his seat without leaving it and his face shone brighter although the stove was no longer red-hot and the lamp was burning with an even flame. Father Severyan kept his mind fixed on the same thought, resisting any temptation to digress.
“In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses—but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction—and that is war. So then, the dilemma of peace versus war is a superficial dilemma for superficial minds. ‘We only have to stop making war and we shall have peace.’ No! The Christian prayer says “peace on earth and goodwill among men.” That is when true peace will arrive: when there is goodwill among men. Otherwise even without war men will go on strangling, poisoning, starving, stabbing, and burning each other, trampling each other underfoot and spitting in each other’s faces.”
Meanwhile, carefree Chernega, who knew nothing of such problems, was snoring up above—the only sound to be heard anywhere on the Russo-German front.
The stove was no longer crackling. The coals were glowing noiselessly.
Father Severyan’s ready answer flowed effortlessly.
“War is not the vilest form of evil, not the most evil of evils. An unjust trial, for instance, that scalds the outraged heart, is viler. Or murder for gain, when the solitary murderer fully understands the implications of what he means to do and all that the victim will suffer at the moment of the crime. Or the ordeal at the hands of a torturer. When you can neither cry out nor fight back nor attempt to defend yourself. Or treachery on the part of someone you trusted. Or mistreatment of widows or orphans. All these things are spiritually dirtier and more terrible than war.”
Lazhenitsyn rubbed his brow. One of his ears, that nearer to the stove, was burning. He rubbed his brow, feeling somewhat easier, but still examining the priest’s words fastidiously. He could never answer quickly, or in monosyllables.
“Not the vilest form of evil? But the most wholesale form. The victims of individual murders, or individual miscarriages of justice, are individuals …”
“Multiplied by thousands! There are just as many of them. Only they are not assembled in one place in one short period of time, like those killed in war. Think of the great tyrants—Ivan the Terrible, Biron, Peter. Or—yes—the reprisals against the Old Believers. No need for war there—they were effectively suppressed without it. Over the years, and counting all countries, the sum of suffering is no less without war than with it. It may even be greater.”
Lazhenitsyn was livening up. Brightening. And the priest spoke with even greater ease, beginning to look his own age, thirty-five or thirty-six, again.
“The real dilemma is the choice between peace and evil. War is only a special case of evil, concentrated in time and space. Whoever rejects war without first rejecting the state is a hypocrite. And whoever fails to see that there is something more primitive and more dangerous than war—and that is the universal evil instilled into men’s hearts—sees only the surface. Mankind’s true dilemma is the choice between peace in the heart and evil in the heart. The evil of worldliness. And the way to overcome this worldliness is not by antiwar demonstrations, processions along the streets with signs bearing slogans. We have been granted not just one generation, not just an age, not just an epoch, to overcome it, but the whole of history from Adam to the Second Coming. And throughout history our combined forces have failed to overcome it. You could rightly reproach neither the student nor the priest who voluntarily joined the fighting army—they naturally went where so many others were suffering—but those who do not struggle against evil.”
But did Sanya mean to reproach anyone? Himself, yes—but no one else. He was thinking it over, easier in his mind but still uncertain, afraid to step too hastily on this new and crucial terrain.
An idea so wide-ranging would need lengthy consideration. But he would risk one obvious objection: “Does any of this make murder in battle more forgivable than murder with malice aforethought? Or murder by a torturer, or a tyrant. It’s just that here we have a ritual, it’s made to look like a matter of routine—‘everybody else is doing it, I can’t be the odd man out’—and this ritual deludes us. Gives us a false reassurance.”
“Yes, but if you think about it a ritual has to have some sort of basis in reality. Nobody has yet made a ritual of killing the defenseless. In fact, torturers sometimes go mad. There is no folklore about torture chambers, about unjust courts, about the general disharmony. But about war—there’s no end of it! War divides, yes—but it also creates comradely union, it calls on us to sacrifice ourselves—and how readily men answer the call! When you go to war, you risk being killed yourself. Say what you like, war is not the greatest of evils.”
Sanya was thinking.
Father Severyan gave him time to reply. He expected objections, but heard none.
If you knew Sanya you would know that it was difficult to change his mind, that he would never hastily adopt new beliefs and was slow to part with old ones. But when he did yield to an argument he seemed pleased rather than resentful. He was thinking it through carefully, so as not to make a mistake. There was a pause for reflection in every sentence.
“What you say … comes as a surprise to me. I hadn’t thought enough about it. It’s a great relief. But everybody should be told about these things. Nobody knows about them.”
He opened the stove and stirred the fire. In the warm light of the glowing coals he was silent. The priest’s arguments had hit home with him.
Chance, the quiet time of night, and like-mindedness had united them. There was probably no one else in the whole brigade for either of them to talk to.
“Yes, they need to be told.”
Sanya again: “As it is, malicious people say that the Church sanctifies war. Anyway … forcing religion on young soldiers in barracks simply kills it.” He stirred the fire and stared into the embers. “Anyway … Mankind has lapsed from Christianity as water trickles through the fingers. There was a time when Christians, by their sacrifices, their martyrdoms, their incomparable faith, did indeed command the spirit of humanity. But, with their quarrels, their wars, and their complacency, they lost it all. And it is doubtful whether any power could restore it to them.”
“If you believe in Christ,” the priest said, remote in the darkening depths, “you don’t need to count his present-day followers. Maybe there are only two of us Christians left in the whole world. ‘Fear not, my little flock, for I have conquered the world!’ He has given us the freedom to go astray—and left us with the freedom to find our way home.”
Sanya poked the fire.
“Ah, Father Severyan,” he answered quietly, “there’s no shortage of reassuring quotations, but things are pretty bad all the same.” Sanya raked the coals into one last little heap. There was still a faint glow.
“And why, in this situation, when all the world is the loser, does every denomination insist on its unique and exclusive rightness? The Orthodox, the Catholics, and all the other Christians. They all say they’re the only ones, they’re superior. This can only accelerate the general decline.”
Should one rage against the apostates, the doubters, the seekers who refused to find? Should one not rather marvel at the way in which the idea of God is awakened even in those whom the Good News has not reached? For thousands of years the earth teems with mean and trivial creatures—then suddenly, like a blinding light, comes the realization. Hearken, fellow men! All this did not come into being of itself! It was not created by our own miserable efforts! There must be someone up there above us! …
Sanya stared fixedly into the dying embers.
How could anyone suppose that the Lord would withhold the true faith from all the remote races? That throughout the whole history of the planet Earth only one small people in one small place would
be allowed to see the light, then the neighbors apprised of it—and no one else? So that the yellow and black continents and all the islands would be left to perish? They had prophets of their own—were they not from the same, the one God? Were those peoples doomed to eternal darkness simply because they did not acquire from us our superior faith? Can a Christian really believe that?
“The one way for a religion to prove itself superior is to approach other religions without arrogance.”
“Yes, but no creed can command belief without the assurance that it is absolute truth.” There was a hint of steel in Father Severyan’s voice. “The exclusiveness of my creed does not demean the beliefs of others.”
“I … er … I don’t know …”
In fact, any sect, once it has broken away, starts insisting that it has a monopoly of truth. Exclusiveness and intolerance have marked all the movements in world history. The one way in which Christianity could have surpassed them was to forswear exclusiveness and grow into a tolerant and receptive creed. To accept that we have not cornered all the truth in the world. Let us curse no one for his imperfection.
It was getting dark in the dugout.
God’s truth was like “Mother Truth” in the folktale. Seven brothers rode out to look at her, viewed her from seven sides and seven angles, and when they returned each of them had a different tale to tell: one said that she was a mountain, one that she was a forest, one that she was a populous town … And, for telling untruths, they slashed each other with swords of tempered steel, and with their dying breaths bade their sons slash away at each other, to the death. They had all seen one and the same Truth, but had not looked carefully.
It was getting darker.
Outside, a loud, menacing noise warned of trouble to come.
It was … what do they call it? … that explosion … oh yes; an artillery shell.
[7]
(ORIGINS OF THE KADETS)
As two crazed horses harnessed together, but driverless, one pulling to the right, the other to the left, are bound to smash the cart, overturn it, drag it down a slope and perish with it, so did state and society, once mutual distrust, animosity, hatred had rooted and burgeoned in them, bolt and draw Russia toward the abyss. And there seemed to be no one with the reckless bravery to seize the reins and halt them.
Who now can say where and how it began? Who started it? Anyone who tries to halt the unbroken stream of history, take one cross section and say, “This is it! This is where it all begins!” will be proven wrong.
This irreconcilable hostility between the state power and society—did it really begin with the “reactionary” reign of Aleksandr III? Perhaps it would be truer to say with the assassination of Aleksandr II? Ah, but that was the seventh attempt—Karakozov’s being the first—on his life.
We cannot possibly date the beginning of this hostility later than the Decembrist conspiracy. But was it not the same dissension that doomed Paul? Some people like tracing the rift to the time when Peter first made us substitute German attire for our Russian dress—and there is a lot to be said for their view. But why not go still further back, to the Church Councils of the seventeenth century? It is enough for our purpose to stop at Aleksandr II.
Why, at the first stirring of that program of gradual reform which was to be more comprehensive than the most farsighted could have prophesied (reforms forced upon him, our countrymen call them, as though there were actually any useful reforms that were not enforced by life itself), were they in such a hurry? “Young Russia,” with its cry of “We can’t wait for reforms,” Chernyshevsky, the oracle of the age, summoning Russia to the ax, Karakozov with his flash in the pan? Why this coincidence, why did these people, so energetic, so sure of themselves, so ruthless, enter the Russian social arena in the very year that the serfs were set free? Who and what made them so sure that slow processes cannot change history, made them wreck gradual reform in their hurry to liberate by means of explosives?
To what was Karakozov’s bullet the answer? Surely not to the liberation of the peasants, however late in the day it was?
Two years after Karakozov, the Bakunin-Nechaev alliance was sealed and there would be no more intermissions: the People’s Will Party was crystallizing among Nechaev’s followers.
Dostoevsky was the only one to ask them at the time why they were in such a hurry. Was it to frustrate at the outset Aleksandr’s move toward a constitution? On the day of his assassination he approved the creation of reform commissions with zemstvo participation, and the terrorists had literally only a few days left to abort a Russian constitution.
In 1878, Ivan Petrunkevich tried in the Kiev discussions to persuade the revolutionaries not (of course) to renounce terror but to suspend the use of it: wait a while, stop shooting for a bit, and let us, in the zemstvos, openly and loudly call for reform. The answer came from St. Petersburg—Zasulich’s shot at Trepov. Within a year the People’s Will Party had matured, and in somebody’s head the wording of a future ultimatum was already taking shape:
Regicide is very popular in Russia. It is greeted with joy and sympathy.
The social atmosphere was becoming overheated, and no one dared cross the bombers any longer.
Without patient small print we cannot reach an understanding about the period of history stolen from us. We invite only selfless readers, in the first place our fellow countrymen, to follow us so far into the past. This quite voluminous and by now rather cold material may seem only tenuously connected with what is promised in the title November 1916, and it will be wearisome to any readers except those to whom the tense nineteenth century of Russian history is still alive and who can draw from it lessons for today.
FROM PREVIOUS KNOTS
November 1904
July 1906
What were they counting on? How could they expect to earn concessions from a monarch by killing his predecessor? The new ruler would have to be a spineless creature. No normal person can forgive the murder of a father. In fact, Aleksandr III did not sign a single important enactment in the thirteen years of his reign without remembering: my father gave them freedom, gave them reforms, and they killed him, so his path was the wrong one. It was tit for tat. In return for the bombers Russian society got the reactionary 1880s, got thrown back to the time before Sevastopol. Only then, by way of an answer, was the Okhrana established. (Not that it amounted to much by our standards!)
The group now planning the assassination of Aleksandr III (for 13 March 1887) explained its program as follows.
Aleksandr Ulyanov: At the present time the Russian intelligentsia can defend its right to think only by terrorist means. Terror was created by the nineteenth century as the only form of defense to which a minority, strong only in its spiritual strength and the consciousness that it is right, can resort. I have given much thought to the objection that Russian society shows no sympathy for terror, and is indeed hostile to it. But that is a misconception.
And he was shown to be right ten to fifteen years later, when Russian society greeted an outbreak of terrorism as the coming of spring.
Osipanov: Our hope is that if we apply terror systematically the government will give way. We hope by the use of terror to awaken an interest in domestic politics among the masses. The people are forming combat groups of their own to fight this or that body of oppressors, and gradually all of them will merge in a general uprising. Once it comes, we shall try as far as possible to limit the number of casualties and the violence.
Tit for tat. The Ulyanov-Osipanov group was formed in response to the breaking up of a meeting in memory of Dobrolyubov. (You can, if you like, go back to Dobrolyubov himself. He too breathed this poisonous hatred into the air about him.)
There was no lull in the expression of hatred with weapons for half a century afterward. And hapless Russian liberalism, caught between two fires, raced frantically from one to another, prostrating itself, dropping its spectacles, raising its head again, throwing up its hands, urging moderation, and generally maki
ng itself a laughingstock. Let us note, however, that liberalism was not an honest broker, it was not impartial, it did not react in the same way to shots and menaces from each of the two sides. It was not in fact really liberal. Educated Russian society, which had long ago ceased to forgive the regime for anything, joyfully applauded left-wing terrorists and demanded an amnesty for all of them without exception. Through the 1890s and the early decades of this century the rhetoric directed at the government by liberals grew more and more wrathful, but it was thought impermissible to reason with the revolutionary young, when they knocked their lecturers down and prohibited academic activity.
Just as the Coriolis effect is constant over the whole of this earth’s surface, and the flow of rivers is deflected in such a way that it is always the right bank that is eroded and crumbles, while the floodwater goes leftward, so do all the forms of democratic liberalism on earth strike always to the right and caress the left. Their sympathies always with the left, their feet are capable of shuffling only leftward, their heads bob busily as they listen to leftist arguments—but they feel disgraced if they take a step to or listen to a word from the right.
Kadet liberalism (and liberalism the world over), if both of its eyes and both of its ears had developed evenly, if it had been capable of following a firm line of its own, would have escaped its inglorious defeat and its wretched fate (and might not have been labeled “rotten liberalism” by the left).
November 1916 Page 11