by Paul Cudenec

Leo Tolstoy, with his dreams of a free Russian peasantry, had realised before his death in 1910 that the communists aimed to launch an assault on traditional rural life.

Having analysed Karl Marx’s Capital and studied the new “scientific” socialism, he spoke out about what Pierre Thiesset calls the communists’ “industrialised, urbanised and technocratised horizon, where Progress becomes a new religion”. [45]

“He had felt that the revolutionaries were going to fool the people by leading them into a dead end: that of the modernisation of the country and the end of the peasantry.

“What is the point in socialising the means of production if it is to proletarianise the population, to send modern slaves to live in filthy cities and become appendages of machines?

“The writer called on people to resist this development, to struggle against this so-called ‘civilization’.” [46]

This, of course, made Tolstoy a “reactionary” in the eyes of the Bolsheviks, while those who supported his call for land and freedom were labelled “naive” and “retrograde”. [47]

Vladimir Lenin, while recognising that Tolstoy (pictured) was a spokesman for the ideas and desires of millions of Russian peasants, declared that his ideas were, as a whole, “harmful”. [48]

He announced, 15 years before his party came to power: “This patriarchal peasantry, which lives from its own work under the system of the natural economy, is condemned to disappear”. [49]

Even earlier, in 1899, Lenin had written a book called The Development of Capitalism in Russia [50] in which he described the mobility of the workforce and the extension of the market as representing “progress”.

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