He later went so far as to declare that the entire tragedy of mankind resulted from a racial incompatibility between Christ and St. Pauclass="underline" "I should like to write something to prove how the teachings of Christ, who was not a Jew, were replaced by the very different teachings of the apostle Paul, who was a Jew."3
At last, thanks to the initiative of Theodore Roosevelt, negotiations began at Portsmouth and the peace between Russia and Japan was signed in August (September 5) 1905. Russia lost Port Arthur and the southern part of the island of Sakhalin, and abandoned all claims to Korea and southern Manchuria. Receiving a telegram with the news, Tolstoy's features darkened and he muttered:
"Great news that is. I'm ashamed of myself, but I must confess that I have to struggle against my patriotism. I had always hoped the Russians would win."4
As was to be cxpected, there was trouble in the country even before the war had ended. The reverses suffered by the Russian army were proof to all of the improvidence of the government, incompetence of the administration and general weakness of a regime that merely looked as though it were solidly established, The extreme conservatism of the authorities no longer corresponded to the needs of the people or the aspirations of the most advanced class. Student demonstrations, workers' movements, strikes in industrial centers were violently suppressed by the ill-advised tsar, but his measures for restoring order not only failed to intimidate the revolutionary movements, they positively incited them to intensify their struggle. Secret societies sprang up everywhere, universities and factories were flooded with anti-government propaganda and, now and then, some political assassination of stupefying boldness was brought off to prove the real strength of the enemies of autocracy: murder of the Grand Duke Sergey, the governor general of Moscow; murder of the minister Plehvey . . .
On Sunday January 9, 1905, thousands of workers, led by a pope named Gaponc, made an orderly march upon the Winter Palace to present a petition to the tsar demanding an eight-hour day and a constitution. They were savagely dispersed by the guards, leaving many dead and wounded behind, and were hunted down and fired upon until late at night. The result of Bloody Sunday was to precipitate into the opposition all the liberals who had still been hanging fire, unwilling to speak out openly against Nicholas II. Foreign indignation at this senseless massacre encouraged the revolutionary leaders to take immediate advantage of the general discontent. There were more strikes, in factories and printing presses and on railways; there were barracks mutinies and rural insurrections; a few homes were burned down by the peasants; and on June 27, 1905 the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied in protest against their unpalatable rations, killed several of their officers and steamed into Odessa, where striking factory workers were battling with the government troops. The left-wing revolutionary violence was echoed at the other extreme by the pogroms of the reactionary League of the Black Hundreds.
In October, the nation was paralyzed by a general strike, which had spread from Moscow. No railways, no post, no telegraph, no newspapers, no public transport, no electricity. Under pressure of events, Nicholas II consulted Count Witte, the successful peace negotiator of Portsmouth, and on October 17 he published a manifesto granting his subjects freedom of conscience, speech and the press, freedom of assembly and freedom to form associations, and promising respect for human dignity and the individual. He also promised to liberalize the electoral system and announced that henceforth no law could become effective unless it was approved by a parliament elected by universal suffrage: the Duma. The public at large hailed this body of liberal measures with enthusiasm, but men of sharper political acumen greeted it with suspicion, and both arch-reactionaries and arch-revolutionaries were equally incensed by it, for opposing reasons. "There is nothing in it [the manifesto] for the people," wrote Tolstoy. And the disturbances resumed, more vehement than ever, with a round of strikes, mutinies at Kronstadt and Sevastopol, and police action to cripple the St. Petersburg workers' union.
A second revolt broke out in Moscow in December, and there was renewed fighting in the streets; regiments of the guards stormed the barricades, drove the rebels into corncrs and cut them down. Count Witte was considered too temperate and was replaced at the head of the government by a strong man: Stolypin. Six months later, the first Duma was dissolved.
At Yasnaya Polyana the news of these fratricidal conflicts disturbed Tolstoy even more than the war with Japan. lie was in favor of a certain amount of reform, but he condemned the violence of the left- wing terrorists and mocked at those who claimed they could make all men happy by removing the emperor and putting some equally ambitious and insignificant republican leader in his place. "All this fighting, imprisonment, hatred—it all recks of blood," he wrote on September 4, 1905.5 But he had attacked tsar and Church so often that he found himself, against his own will, co-opted into the ranks of the revolutionaries whose bloodthirsty methods appalled him. Aware of this anomaly, he struggled to justify himself at either end. After Bethink Yourselves'. he wrote an article entitled Present Events in Russia, a Letter to Nicholas II and a Letter to the Revolutionaries. He told both that they were wrong to try to settle their differences by a show of strength and that any social reform that was not preceded by a spiritual reform was doomed to fail. Neither oppressor nor oppressed paid any attention to him. He was preaching in the desert, and he did not really care. This was not the first time that being the only man to believe as he believed gave him a feeling of infallibility and supremacy. An aristocrat in revolt, a well-endowed Utopian, an anarchist capitalist, he was equally at home lashing out against the partisans of the imperial regime and the tsar's adversaries. For him, as he had so often reiterated, all forms of government were suspect because they were all founded on the submission of the masses to a pre-established order. The Marxists repelled him because their sole aim was to satisfy the people's material needs, and they were not above recourse to violence in achieving their ends; the monarchists infuriated him because they were defending social inequality and religious dishonesty; the liberals drove him wild because they were verbose intellectuals who claimed to be the peasants' brothers and did not even know how to hold a scythe. He stormed at his son Sergey, who supported the liberal, or "young men's," party:
"You want a constitution, they want monarchy, the revolutionaries want socialism, and you believe you can fix things for the people? Well, I can certify- to you that the lives of men in general will not improve until every single man strives to live well himself and not interfere in the lives of others!"®
His son-in-law Sukhotin had been elected to the first Duma; this provoked a caustic comment in his notebook: "The subjects of a constitutional State who believe they are free are like prisoners who
believe they are free because they have been allowed to chose their warden."7
On another occasion he wrote:
"The intellectuals have brought a hundred times more harm than good to the people's lives."8