What Leo Tolstoy wrote to Stolypin

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Why was Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy one of the critics of Stolypin's actions as prime minister? It got to the point that in one of his letters he called him "the most wretched person"

Contemporaries of those years wrote that not only the princes opposed Stolypin, who refused to enter his office of the "dispersal of the Duma", as puppets and participate in the Stolypin pogroms and thinning out of the European part of Russia, expelling Russian villages beyond the Urals, he was also hated by the Fabricants and breeders, "market people", and "traditionalists", "statist-communists" and of course the entire Russian long-suffering people.

Counting on ignorance and misunderstanding of the historical moment, modern liberals tried to raise the banner of the robber Stolypin. They began to erect monuments, to remove all the negative from the archives. On all channels they tried to convince people that the usurper Stolypin is loved by everyone. But they were not allowed to do this. Monuments were poured with paint, and sometimes they were simply demolished with tractors …

Tolstoy responded with criticism of Stolypin, pointed out two main, in his opinion, mistakes:

1. - began to fight violence with violence and continue to do so

2. - to reassure the population so that, by destroying the community, to form small land ownership.

With this letter the controversy ended, or rather, began to be one-sided. Tolstoy wrote accusatory letters and articles, of which the most famous and angry became

I can not be silent

In general, thanks to the activities of the government, which admits the possibility of murder in order to achieve its goals. So everything that you do now, with your searches, spies, expulsions, prisons, hard labor, gallows - all this not only does not lead the people to the state in which you want to lead them, but, on the contrary, increases irritation and destroys all the possibility of calming.

Stolypin migrants at the Tomsk railway station. From the funds of TOKM

What you are doing, you are doing not for the people, but for yourself, in order to hold on to what you consider to be beneficial by your delusion, but in essence the most miserable and disgusting position that you occupy.

Do not say that what you are doing, you are doing for the people: this is not true. All those nasty things that you do, you do for yourself, for your selfish, ambitious, vain, vindictive, personal goals, in order to live a little more yourself in that corruption in which you live and which seems good to you.

I appeal to all the participants in the crimes that are incessantly committed under the false name of the law, to all of you, starting with those who cocked to the gallows and put on caps and loops on brothers, women, children, and up to you, the two main secretive executioners, who, by their connivance, participate in all these crimes: Peter Stolypin and Nikolai Romanov.

Come to your senses, come to your senses. Remember who you are and understand what you are doing

After all, you, before being executioners, prime ministers, kings, first of all, people and brothers of people, now looked out into the light of day, tomorrow you will not be. (You, who have provoked and aroused to yourself, both the executioners and you, special hatred, you especially need to remember this.)

Can it really be for you, who for this one short moment looked out into the light of day - after all, death, even if you are not killed, here it is always behind us, - can your vocation in life be only to kill, torture people, by yourself tremble with fear of murder and lie to yourself, to people and to God, that you are doing all this out of duty for some invented non-existent purpose, for an invented purpose just for you, precisely so that, being a villain, you can consider yourself an ascetic fictional Russia.

At first I thought about Pyotr Stolypin, when I had the naivete to offer him a speech with a project to free the land from property, that he was only limited and confused by his position, I also thought about Nikolai Romanov, that by his birth, education, environment he had been brought to the stupidity that he manifested and manifests in his actions, but the longer the current situation continues, the more I am convinced that these two people, the perpetrators of the atrocities and corruption of the people, are consciously doing what they are doing, and what exactly they are, who are in the environment where they, due to their ability to satisfy the desires of the people around them, they live in a constant atmosphere of flattery and lies that these two people more than any others need exposure and reminder.

Yes, all of you, from the first executioner to the last of them, Nicholas II, come to your senses, think about yourself, about your soul. Understand that everything that prompts you to do what you do is one human, pitiful human deception, and that the truth is in yourself, and in that voice that, at least occasionally, but probably speaks in you and calls you to one thing, what a person needs in this world, to something that is incompatible with anger, revenge, causing suffering, not to mention executions, for love alone, for love and love for people. Only this one thing is needed, only this will give you good in this life and in that soon forthcoming transition for each of us from this life into that state that we do not know.

Help you in this, all of you, like you, unfortunate, lost, mostly young men who think by violence and murder to save themselves and the people from violence and murder, and you dog to the unfortunate executioners from that watchman in Moscow and the deputy for 15 rubles. from head to Stolypin and Nick. Romanova, help you all that God who lives in all of you to come to your senses before death and throw off all that prevents you from eating, the true blessing of life that is open to all of us in love.

Later, already in 1909, Leo Tolstoy prepared another message to the premier. It began with words

“I am writing to you about a very miserable person, the most miserable of all whom I know now in Russia. You know this man and, strange to say, you love him, but you do not understand the full extent of his misfortune and do not pity him, as his position deserves. This man is you yourself."

The first attempt on Stolypin's life was made in August 1906. Russian and foreign newspapers of that time publish eerie details of the explosion that thundered on August 12 (25 in a new style) on Aptekarsky Island in St. Petersburg at the dacha of Prime Minister Stolypin:

“… At about 4 pm, the surroundings of Aptekarsky Island were shocked by a terrible roar. A second later, the rumble of the explosion was repeated with tremendous force. The commotion among the townsfolk instantly turned into a formidable panic … " ("Petersburg leaf");

"… The entire front facade of the house was literally torn apart by the explosion … The wounded were rescued from the rubble, the corpses of the dead were taken out … The panic had already passed, but horror was written on all faces … It seems that no catastrophe in St. Petersburg made such a painful impression." ("New time").

Only Stolypin himself did not suffer.

The government's response to the attack was the introduction of a system of martial courts with the aim of "fairly quick repression for crimes that go beyond the ordinary."

People quickly christened these courts' hanging executions. "Stolypin ties" and the gallows themselves - "Stolypin swings".

The new courts were formed from officers of local garrisons and were invested with extraordinary powers: their decisions were not subject to appeal, and the execution of sentences followed no later than a day after they were passed.

The most common verdict of these courts, which were surrendered in different localities for 24-48 hours and which sometimes lasted for several minutes, the death penalty became, for which the townsfolk called these courts "rapid-fire".