Rocky Cape Christian Community

Excerpts from The Russians’ Secret, by Peter Hoover, Benchmark, 1999

Born on Yasnaya Polyana,[1] an estate not far from Tula, Leo Tolstoy’s earliest memories were of strolling the park-like grounds with long-skirted governesses while serfs at work among the gardens lifted their caps when he spoke to them in passing. He learned to swim and loved to ride horses. But no amount of wealth could keep his family together.

Leo’s mother died when he was two, and his father, Nikolai Tolstoy, seven years later. The aunt responsible for him died when he was thirteen and he moved to Kazan.

In Kazan on the Volga both Leo and his life changed. His brothers introduced him, as a young teenager, to what they knew of manhood: wine, women, and gambling. At sixteen he entered the university, got bad grades, and was soon taking treatment for venereal disease. After three years he dropped out, moved in with friends at Moscow and took to partying and seeing gypsies night after night. “I am living like a beast,” he wrote in his diary and disgust at his own behaviour finally drove him into the army.

In 1851 Leo joined his older brother Nikolai, fighting Muslims with Russian troops in the Caucasus. The mountain fighting was tough—ambushes and quick attacks. In one struggle Leo narrowly escaped capture. In another, a flying grenade whizzed past his ear. After three years he found himself at Sevastopol, surrounded by “blood, suffering, and death,” and sick of war.

Money and Power

Nothing struck Leo as a greater tragedy than the lives of the soldiers around him. He saw their simple sincerity. They wanted to be good and have friends. They did heroic things one for another. But wars—and politicians who plan but do not fight them—he came to see as unspeakably unheroic and evil.

The stories Leo wrote of the fighting at Sevastopol got accepted in a St. Petersburg paper and struck a responsive chord throughout Russia. He wrote more. Literary societies competed to gain him as a member. But he did not need nor want their acceptance. In 1857 he travelled through Germany, England, and France. In Paris he saw an opponent of the state on a guillotine. No sooner did the blade drop and the head fall into a bucket than something else fell into place in his life:

Money and power are the devils of the human race.

A Horse Story

On his return to Russia Leo wrote Kholstomer, a story written from the viewpoint of a highly principled horse comparing his situation to that of the ridiculous humans who depended on him. He also wrote a few other stories before turning his back on wickedness in high places and settling down to live among the Russian farm workers he had always known and loved at Yasnaya Polyana.

Leo began a school for the farm workers’ children. The joy he discovered among them—little boys and girls, curious, eagerly discussing great things, dressed in linen shirts, full skirts and brightly flowered head scarves like their parents—was mutual. They loved him for a teacher and he wrote simple attractive textbooks for them.

In his early thirties Leo met Sofya, the daughter of Heinrich Behrs, a Moscow doctor. When she was eighteen and he thirty-four they married and began to rebuild the old house at Yasnaya Polyana. (A man to whom Leo had lost a high-staked game of cards in his youth, had carried most of it away, piece by piece.) Then he dug into farming. Soil and crop management fascinated him and the Tolstoy estate, with what became its ninety-six acres of vegetable gardens and orchards, began to produce like never before. Leo kept bees and experimented with fruit trees while Sofya bore him thirteen children (eight of whom reached maturity) in fifteen years.

The story might have ended here, had not Leo’s urge to serve his fellow Russians through “irresistible education” driven him to write Voyna i mir (War and Peace) the novel that became one of the two or three most famous in world literature.

It took Leo seven years to write it. But after its publication he became a famous and wealthy man. Immediately after this, he wrote Anna Karenina.

Conflict

With their older children needing to study, and—in Sofya’s estimation—needing to meet the right people in the right kind of society, the Tolstoys moved to Moscow in 1881. They moved with their servants and staff into a small estate on the outskirts of the city, but Leo was not happy. From their new house he heard factory whistles calling shifts of bleary-eyed, shuffling multitudes—mothers and children among them—to work at bad hours. While the wealthy frisked about Moscow in furs and perfumed gowns, snuggling up in dimly lit theatres or feasting and dancing in lavish homes, the poor worked. And earned little.

Posing as a census-taker, Leo began to tramp the back streets of Moscow taking notes on how people lived. He found many sick and some who had not eaten for days. Everywhere he found filth, drunkenness, corruption (including child prostitution) and despair. His frustration and guilt—worsened by coming back every night to his own comfortable home—resulted in another book: What then shall we do?

Conversion

On top of the guilt he felt for his wealth and privilege, Leo felt hopelessly guilty for his personal sins. So dark and stormy had his struggle become at one point that he lived with lingering temptations to suicide. Then his farm workers at Yasnaya Polyana helped him. They said, “If you are unhappy turn to the Lord and stop living for yourself.” Everywhere he heard this among them, the older men making the simple comment, and the young men nodding agreement.

The Lord. Who was he?

Walking through the woods Leo turned to Jesus Christ, the one who overcame the world, and experienced his own “resurrection.”

“Joyful waves of life welled up inside me,” he wrote later, “Everything came alive and took on new meaning.”

Along with Christ came a simple understanding: “If one life changes, the world changes with it.”

It was simple but electrifying. Suddenly Leo understood what Christ had done. He did not force anyone or anything to change. He simply changed himself, and untold millions followed. 

Pravda (the true way of life) Leo suddenly knew, is within everyone’s reach. No matter how wicked we are, or how bad our situation, we know good and evil. Good is God. It is the Gospel. It is Christ. Living in its constant awareness our lives become transformed.

After his conversion Leo began every day with a walk he called his morning prayer. But his life did not become “pious” like many westerners would have expected. In true Russian fashion he threw himself into the kind of Christianity symbolized in bread and salt.

“Works of charity will not solve the world’s problems,” Leo now believed. “They are comparable to a man sitting on a tired worn-out horse who tries to lighten the beast’s burden by removing a few coins from his pocket when the essential thing is to dismount.” The solution is personal. Every man, every woman must change, one by one. And the change, Leo well knew, would have to start with him. “I take part in crime,” he wrote, “as long as I have extra food and someone else has none.” So he gave his extra food away.

Everyone should do what he can, Leo believed, and depend as little as possible on the labour of others. He divided his day into four parts. Before breakfast he worked hard—shovelling snow, sawing or splitting firewood to carry to the ten stoves in his house, or hauling water to the kitchen in a barrel on a sled. He began to wear peasant clothes (the linen shirt tied with a cord belt, over loose home-made trousers) and took to ploughing with oxen, cutting hay with a scythe or hauling manure at Yasnaya Polyana.

From breakfast to lunch he wrote. From lunch to the evening meal he worked with his hands, sometimes making leather boots. After that he spent time with his family. Sofya played the piano and he played chess with the boys.

Leo stopped drinking and smoking and wrote a tract against both: Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves? In a move toward the Spirit Christians, many of whose beliefs and practices he adopted, he stopped drinking coffee (an imported luxury) and became a vegetarian.

Private property, Leo came to feel, was wrong. He fully intended to give Yasnaya Polyana with everything on it to the people who had worked there for generations. But his wife interfered and he ended up deeding the estate to her and the children.[2]

New Friends and Critics

Among the teachings of Christ, Leo found none more enlightening than his command in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not resist evil.” Having seen the corruption of war and political violence it made perfect sense to him. He wrote on the subject and in the discussion that ensued he heard not only from Spirit Christians delighted with his new position, but  from Mennonites and Quakers as well. He read with great interest a letter from the son of William Lloyd Garrison (the non-resistant anti-slavery prophet of America), the testimony of Petr Chelcicky (forerunner of the Moravian Brethren) and a tract on non-resistance written by a Mennonite minister, Daniel Musser of Pennsylvania. In trips to the Ukraine, Leo made friends with both Spirit Christian and Mennonite colonists. The community of goods among the Dukhobors, the Molokan Preguny and the Hutterite brothers who had returned to it, fascinated him in particular.

But Leo drew more than friendly response.

Most people who wrote to him, or about him, thought him crazy.  Theodore Roosevelt, an American politician, called him a genius “with a complete inability to face facts” and described his writings as “revolting, appealing only to decadents.”

Frederic William Farrar, dean of Canterbury and author of The Life of Christ (a best seller through thirty editions) wrote that he did not think it necessary to “forsake all the ordinary conditions of life and take up the position of a common labourer” to follow Christ. To that he added:

With few and rare exceptions all Christians from the days of the Apostles down to our own, have come to the firm conclusion that it was the object of Christ to lay down great eternal principles, but not to disturb the bases and revolutionize the institutions of human society that rest on divine sanctions as well as on inevitable conditions. Were it my object to prove how untenable is the doctrine of community of goods taught by Count Tolstoy . . . something that can only be interpreted on historical principles in accordance to the whole method of the teaching of Jesus, it would require an ampler canvas than I have here at my disposal.[3]

“What a pity,” remarked Leo Tolstoy on reading this, “that Mr. Farrar’s canvas was not more ample!” In reply he wrote:

Without exception the criticisms of educated Christians are like this. Apparently they understand the danger of their position. Their only escape lies in the hope of overawing people with their church authority, the antiquity of their tradition, or the sanctity of their office. Using these they try to draw people away from reading the Gospels for themselves and forming their own conclusions. They can do this quite successfully, for how would it occur to anyone that what has been repeated from century to century with such earnestness and solemnity by so many important church officials is all a big lie, all an evil deception on their part to hang on to the money they must have to live luxuriously on the necks of other men. Yet it is a deception, and such a poor one, that the only way of keeping it up consists in overawing people by their earnest and conscientious words.[4]

Leo also wrote:

My foreign critics have implied that my “naive conviction” to live by the Sermon on the Mount comes from two things: my lack of common sense and my ignorance of history. They suppose I do not know about all the men have tried to apply the Sermon on the Mount to life and whose attempts have come to nothing. And they suppose I believe this way because I fail to appreciate the heights to which our civilization has come—with its Krupp cannons, smokeless powder, colonization of Africa, Irish Coercion Bill, parliamentary government, journalism, strikes, and the Eiffel Tower.

Robert G. Ingersoll, another important American, dismissed Leo Tolstoy’s newest books with the comment: “Christ’s teaching is of no use to us anymore. It is incompatible with our industrial age.”

To this Leo replied:

Robert Ingersoll has expressed with perfect directness and simplicity how refined and cultured people now look at Christ’s teachings. They consider the existence of this industrial age a sacred fact that should not and cannot be changed. It is just as though drunkards when advised how they could be brought to habits of sobriety should answer that the advice is incompatible with their habit of taking alcohol.

With the ever increasing circulation of his books, hundreds of people from all over the world came to see Leo Tolstoy. The extension table in their dining room, even though it seated fifty, could not always accommodate the guests. And some like Vladimir Chertkov—son of Yelena Chertkova and brother to Mikhail, the sick boy whose death brought about the rebirth of the St. Petersburg fellowship—actually moved in with the Tolstoys.

Vladimir Chertkov became one of Leo Tolstoy’s closest disciples and his secretary. He was also a friend to Ivan Prokhanov (a leader among the evangelical believers in Russia) and Fyodor Sakharov who on a trip to the Caucasus visited Yasnaya Polyana together.

Mushrooms and a Manuscript

Ivan Prokhanov described his visit:

In Tula we hired a cab to take us to Yasnaya Polyana. Among the trees on the estate grounds we first saw the white house and a group of ladies playing lawn tennis. Then we saw an old man with rough features, grey hair and a beard, walking toward the veranda. On his head he had a large white cap. He was dressed in a linen shirt, grey trousers and rough boots, looking like a gardener. But we recognized him as Count Tolstoy. He carried a walking stick and was eating a piece of dry bread.

 

When the Count saw us he came to meet us, and we introduced ourselves to him. He wondered from which school we came and asked us: “Would you like to walk with me on a trail through the woods?” Of course we eagerly agreed and explained our reason for coming: “We want to be Christ’s disciples and would like to hear what you say about following him.”

After our conversation Count Tolstoy asked us whether we preferred to go with him to look for mushrooms or to read the manuscript of his new book, Tsarstvo bozhiye vnutri vas (The Kingdom of God is Within You). We preferred to see the manuscript so he climbed through a window into his room, got his copy, gave it to us, and went to the woods with a basket to gather mushrooms.

In the manuscript Ivan and Fyodor came face to face at once with the reason why people stop short of walking with Christ.

Hypocrisy

People do not walk with Christ, Leo Tolstoy explained, because they convince themselves they are what they ought to be. A greedy man, a great landowner, “sends some soup and stockings by his wife or children to a few old widows” and convinces himself he is generous. The man who grows rich from the labour of the poor convinces himself he is doing it for their good. The church leader whose ego and control grows more oppressive by the day convinces himself he defends the truth. The rebel steals and lies convince him he does so for the sake of justice. Leo wrote:

We have come to where we are because of our disunity. Our disunity comes from not following the truth that is one, but falsehoods that are many. The only way to bring us all together is to all come to the truth. The more sincerely we struggle for the truth the closer we come to inner unity.

But how can we find unity in the truth or even come close to it, if we fear to come out in the open with the truth we already know—if we say there is no need to do so, and keep on pretending to regard as truth what we know is false?

If today’s hypocrisy will continue, if men do not profess the truth they know, but continue to feign belief in what they do not believe and venerate what they do not respect, their condition will remain the same, or even grow worse.

Fear

People stop short of following Christ because they fear the unknown. Leo Tolstoy shared an account from a friend:

A doctor, a psychiatrist, told me how one summer day when he left the asylum the lunatics accompanied him to the street door. “Come for a walk in town with me,” the doctor suggested to them. The lunatics agreed, and a small band followed him. But the further they walked down the street where healthy people moved freely about, the more timid they became, and pressed closer and closer to him, making it hard for him to walk. Before long they began to beg the doctor to take them back to the asylum, to their meaningless but customary way of life, to their keepers, to blows, strait jackets, and solitary cells.

  This is how men of today huddle in terror and draw back to their irrational manner of life, their factories, law courts, prisons, executions, and wars, when Christ calls them to liberty, to the free and sensible life of the coming age.

To shrink back from following Christ because we do not know where he will take us, Leo Tolstoy said, is as logical as an explorer refusing to enter new territory for lack of a detailed map.

Pride

People do not walk with Christ because they hold themselves superior to him. They think they know better than Christ how to put to practice what he taught. Leo wrote:

Even without bothering to discover what they mean, people refuse, if unfavourably disposed, to recognize any logic in Christ’s teachings. Or, if they want to treat them kindly, they condescend from the height of their superiority, to correct them, on the supposition that Christ meant to express precisely their own ideas, but did not succeed in doing so. They behave to his teaching much as self-assertive people talk to those whom they consider beneath them, often supplying their companions’ words: “Yes, you mean to say this and that.”

They usually say that the Christ’s moral teachings are fine, but exaggerated, and that to make them practical we must reject everything in them that is superfluous and unnecessary to our manner of life. . . . They think and say that to follow Christ’s teaching is impossible, because to take it all the way would put an end to life. “If a man were to carry out all that Christ teaches, he would destroy his own life, and if all men carried it out, the human race would come to an end. If we take no thought for tomorrow, what we shall eat, drink or wear, if we do not defend our life, nor resist evil by force, if we lay down our life for others, and observe perfect chastity, the human race cannot exist.”

A Cup Already Full

People do not walk with Christ because they think they are already “Christian” and know all about the Gospel. Leo wrote:

Even in these days when the Gospel has penetrated the darkest corners, Christ’s teaching is not understood in its true, simple, and direct sense. This would be inexplicable if there were not several causes to account for it.

One of these causes is that believers and unbelievers alike are firmly persuaded that they have understood Christ’s teaching a long time, that they understand it so completely, beyond doubt, and conclusively that it can have no other significance than the one they have given it. They believe this because their false interpretations and misunderstandings of the Gospel have been around for such a long time. Even the strongest current of water cannot add a drop to a cup that is already full.

Inertia

“We all sense the great difference between how things are and how they ought to be,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “but everything is set up to keep things going the way they do.” Society operates on a great law of inertia. People keep doing what is wrong even though they know it is wrong, because they all believe change would bring trouble. That is why ordinary people, when they hear Christ’s words, think not how to obey them but how to get around them.

To portray the “social inertia” he saw, Leo Tolstoy described a group of soldiers on a train from Moscow to Ryazan.

A nobleman had decided to cut down a patch of woods, but his peasants refused to help him. Their crops had failed and they were starving. On top of that it was fall and they  depended on this patch of woods for their winter’s heating supply. The nobleman, with high connections in St. Petersburg, had called for troops. Now they came—and Leo Tolstoy happened to meet their train at the Tula station. He wrote:

The train I saw on the 9’th of September going with soldiers, guns, cartridges, and rods, to confirm the rich landowner’s possession of the woods he had taken from the starving peasants (the woods they needed badly and he did not need at all) was striking proof of how men can do things directly opposed to their principles and their conscience without perceiving it.

The special train consisted of one first-class car for the governor, the officials, and officers, and several luggage cars crammed full of soldiers. The latter, smart young fellows in their clean new uniforms, stood about in groups or sat swinging their legs in the wide open doorways of the luggage cars. Some were smoking, nudging each other, joking, grinning, and laughing. Others were munching sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks with an air of dignity. Some of them ran along the platform to drink water from a tub, and when they met the officers they slackened their pace, made their stupid gesture of salutation, raising their hands to their heads with serious faces as though they were doing something of the greatest importance. They kept their eyes on them till they had passed, then set off running still more merrily, stamping their heels on the platform, laughing and chattering after the manner of healthy, good-natured young fellows, travelling in lively company.

They were going to assist at the murder of their fathers or grandfathers just as if going on a party of pleasure, or at any rate on some quite ordinary business.

At the same time Leo Tolstoy observed the soldiers, he saw their authorities:

The governor sat at a table eating something while he chatted tranquilly about the weather with some acquaintances he had met, and on all sides, officers bustling noisily about in red uniforms trimmed with gold. One sat finishing his bottle of beer. Another stood at the buffet eating a cake and brushing the crumbs off his uniform before he threw his money down with a self-confident air. Another sauntered before the carriages of our train, staring at the faces of the women.

All these men on their way to murder or to torture the famishing and defenceless ones who provide them their sustenance had the air of men who knew very well that they were doing their duty, and some were even proud, they “gloried” in their work.

How can this be?

All these people are within half an hour of reaching the place where, in order to provide a wealthy young man with three thousand rubles stolen from a whole community of famishing peasants, they may be forced to commit the most horrible acts one can conceive, to murder or torture innocent people, their brothers. And they see the place and time approaching with untroubled serenity.

How can this be?

I know all these men. If I don’t know them personally, I know their characters pretty nearly, their past, and their way of thinking. They certainly all have mothers, some of them wives and children. They are certainly for the most part good, kind, even tender-hearted fellows, who hate every sort of cruelty, not to speak of murder. Many of them would not kill or hurt an animal. Moreover, they are all professed Christians and regard violence directed against the defenceless as base and disgraceful.

Leo Tolstoy felt deeply the tragedy of well-meaning people caught in wrong  situations not of their own making. But he also recognized that everyone, finally, is responsible for what he does:

A man cannot be placed against his will in a situation opposed to his conscience. . . . If you find yourself in such a position, it is not because anyone has forced you into it, but because you wish it.

For this reason, if what you do disagrees with what you believe and your heart tells you, you must ask yourself—if you keep on doing it and justifying yourself—whether you are doing what you ought to do.

The Crowd

Multitudes do not walk with Christ simply because no one has made a start in doing so. Everyone waits on everyone else and thinking everything must be done together. About this, Leo wrote:

The idea is promoted that men should not walk on their own legs where they want and ought to go, but that a kind of floor under their feet will be moved somehow, so that on it they can reach where they ought to go without using their legs. For this reason all their efforts ought to be directed, not to going so far as their strength allows in the direction they ought to go, but to standing still and constructing such a floor. . . .

Men in their present condition are like a swarm of bees hanging in a cluster from a branch. The position of bees on the branch is temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They must start off and find themselves a habitation. Every one of the bees knows this, and desires to change her own and the others’ position, but no one of them can do it until the rest of them do it. They cannot all start off at once, because one hangs on to another and hinders her from separating from the swarm. Therefore they just continue to hang.

It would seem that the bees could never escape from their position, just as it seems that worldly men, caught in the toils of their wrong conception of life, can never escape. And there would be no escape for the bees, if every one of them was not a living, separate creature, endowed with wings of its own. Similarly there would be no escape for men, if every one of us were not a living being capable of seeing life like Christ saw it.

If no bee tried to fly, no others would stir themselves, and the swarm would never move. In the same way if no man tried (without waiting for other people) to live like Christ told us to live, humanity would never change. But only let one bee spread her wings, start off, and fly away, and after her another, and another, and the clinging, inert cluster becomes a freely flying swarm of bees. In the same way, let one man look at life as Christ taught him to see it, and after him let another and another do the same, and the spell of wickedness upon them will be broken.

Men seem to think that to set the whole world free like this takes too long and they must find some other way to set everyone free at once. That is as if the bees who wanted to fly away would think it took too long to wait for all the swarm to start one by one, and as if they thought they had to find some way for every bee to spread her wings at the same time and fly at once to where the whole swarm wanted to go.  But that is not possible. Until a first, a second, a third, a hundredth bee spreads her wings and flies on its own accord, the swarm will not take off and find a new life. Till every man makes the teaching of Christ his own and begins to live in accord with it, there can be no solution of the problem of human life, and no discovery of a better way.

Wickedness

After discovering the Sermon on the Mount, Leo rejected violence. He came to see that mob action and coercion lead to violence, and that all three are wicked.

Good people mistreat one another simply because “everyone else does it,” he wrote. No one remembers who started it and no one takes it upon himself to stop it. “Social wickedness is like a wicker basket, all woven together. One cannot tell where anything starts or anything ends. We all know it is made of individual reeds but we cannot tell where they come from nor where they go.” Because of this, Leo concluded, societies as a whole become guilty for the violence and injustice they tolerate. “Even the bystanders are guilty for not saying anything.”

Submission

Wickedness, Leo came to see, is tightly bound to submission. Men, too cowardly to act on what they believe and know, find societies just as cowardly and irresponsible to submit to. They hope submission will make up for their lack of moral sincerity.

At the same time, authorities out to advance themselves at the expense of the helpless, wickedly appeal to religious sentiment to get what they want. “Submitting to us,” they tell the people, “is submitting to God. If we all work together (that is, if you do as we say) everyone will be the better for it.” But that is a lie. Submission itself can be the basest wickedness and sooner or later, someone must rise to challenge it.

“What drives us to the false conclusion that the existing order is unchanging and that we must therefore support it,” Leo asked, “when it is so obvious that the only thing making it unchanging is our continual support?” He fervently hoped that more individuals would soon dare to disobey false authorities to walk with Christ. “Finally conscience does speak and it must speak. Surely some soldier will be the first one to drop his gun and say, “I will not shoot!” Referring again to the soldiers on the way to Ryazan, he wrote:

It is true, they have all passed through that terrible, skilful education, elaborated through centuries, that kills all initiative in a man. They are so trained to mechanical obedience that at the word of command: “Fire!—All the line!—Fire!” and so on, their guns will rise of themselves and the habitual movements will be performed. But “Fire!” now does not mean shooting into the sand like in military school. It means firing on their broken-down, exploited fathers and brothers whom they see in the crowd, with women and children shouting and waving their arms. Here they are—one with his scanty beard and patched coat and plaited shoes of reed, just like the father left at home in Kazan or Tambov province, one with grey beard and bent back, leaning on a staff like the old grandfather, one a young fellow in boots and a red shirt, just as he was himself a year ago—he, the soldier who must fire upon him. There, too, a woman in reed shoes and panyova (kerchief), like his mother left at home.

Is it possible they must fire on them? No one knows just what each soldier will do at the last minute. . . .

Christ’s Greatest Opponent: The Church

The success of Christian churches, Leo Tolstoy believed, has not been in bringing Christ to the people. It has been in obscuring Christ:

“Strange as it may seem, churches have always been institutions not only alien in spirit to Christ’s teaching, but even directly antagonistic to it. . . . With good reason have all or almost all so-called sects of Christians recognized the church[5] as the scarlet woman foretold in the Apocalypse. With good reason is the history of the church the history of the greatest cruelties and horrors. . . .

Churches are not, as many people suppose, institutions with Christian principles as their basis that have just strayed somewhat from the correct path. As bodies asserting their own infallibility they are institutions opposed to Christianity. Such churches and Christianity not only have nothing in common. They represent two principles fundamentally opposed and antagonistic to one another. One represents pride, violence, self-assertion, stagnation and death, the other, meekness, penitence, humility, progress, and life.

Leo Tolstoy had no time for churches who claimed infallibility (like the Russian Orthodox Church) or who disputed among themselves whose church was right and whose was wrong. Nothing to him looked less Christlike. He wrote:

Every church traces its creed through an uninterrupted transmission from Christ and the Apostles. And truly every Christian creed that comes from Christ must have come down to the present generation through a certain transmission. But that does not prove that it alone, of all that has been transmitted and excluding all the rest, is the only truth.

Every branch in a tree comes from the root in unbroken connection. But the fact that every branch comes from one root, does not prove that every branch is the only one. It is precisely the same with the church. Every church presents exactly the same proofs of the succession and even the same miracles, in support of its authenticity, as every other so that there is in the end only one definition of what is a church: A church is a body of men who claim for themselves that they are in complete and sole possession of the truth.

Proud churches that have become Christ’s enemies call the friends of Christ heretics. Leo wrote:

Strange as it may seem to us who have been brought up in the erroneous view of the Church as a Christian institution, and in contempt for heresy, the fact remains that only in what was called heresy has any true movement, that is, true Christianity, existed. And that only as long as those movements did not petrify into the fixed forms of a church as well.

Heresy is the obverse side of the Church. Wherever there is a church, there must be the conception of heresy. A church is a body of men who assert that they are in possession of infallible truth. Heresy is the opinion of the men who do not admit the infallibility of the church’s truth.

Heresy makes its appearance in the church. It is the effort to break through its petrified authority. All striving after a living understanding of Christ’s teaching has been done by heretics. . . . It could not be otherwise.

Not only do churches call true believers heretics. They promote heresy (the heresy of division) themselves. Leo wrote:

While believers were agreed among themselves and the body was one, it had no need to declare itself a church. It was only when believers split into opposing parties, renouncing one another, that it seemed necessary to each party to confirm their own truth by ascribing to themselves infallibility. The conception of one church only arose when there were two sides divided and disputing, who each called the other side heresy, and recognized their own side only as the infallible church.

Not only have churches never bound men together. They have always been one of the principal causes of division between men—of their hatred for one another, of wars, battles, inquisitions, massacres of St. Bartholomew, and so on. And certainly, churches have never served as mediators between men and God. Such mediation is not wanted, and was forbidden by Christ who revealed his teaching directly to every man.

Not the least of the church’s wiles against the Gospel is its maintenance of un-Christ-like traditions. Leo Tolstoy wrote:

Far from revealing Christ, churches obscure him from the sight of man by setting up dead forms in his place. . . . To expect to know what Christ taught by looking at churches who only keep outward forms of Christianity is like expecting a deaf man to know how music sounds from watching the musicians’ movements.”

The Church’s Greatest Opponent: Christ

The Gospel, if left to itself, will undo the church. Leo wrote:

A man has only to buy a Gospel for three kopeks and read its plain words to be thoroughly convinced that the church leaders who call themselves teachers in opposition to Christ’s commands, and dispute among themselves, constitute no kind of authority, and that what the churchmen teach us is not Christianity.

Let the church stop its work of hypnotizing the masses and deceiving children, even for the briefest interval of time, and men would begin to understand Christ’s teaching. But this understanding will be the end of the churches and all their influence. For this reason they will not for an instant relax their zeal in hypnotizing grown-up people and deceiving children. This is their work: To keep themselves going (and this they believe their religious duty) the churches continue to force misconceptions of Christ’s teaching on men, and do what they can to prevent the majority of people from understanding what he said.

The churches cannot but persecute and refuse to recognize all true understanding of Christ’s words. They try to hide this fact, but in vain, for every step forward in following Christ is a step toward their destruction.

An Incomplete Understanding

“The less men understand what they are talking about,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, “the more confidently and unhesitatingly they pass judgment on it.”

Everything we understand from the Bible, he believed, is partial. But only true followers of Christ will admit that:

The follower of Christ does not claim for himself or for any other that he understands Christ’s teaching fully and fulfils all of it. Still less does he claim it for any group of people.

To whatever degree of understanding and perfection the follower of Christ may have come, he always feels his imperfection and strives toward understanding and living out the teachings more completely. To claim that one (or the group to which one belongs) is in possession of the perfect understanding and fulfilment of Christ’s word, is to renounce the spirit of Christ himself.

False Authority

The easiest way to get around Christ, Leo Tolstoy believed, is to make claims of antiquity and authority. But much authority (for as ancient and well established as it may be) is totally false. He illustrated this with the story of a Molokan boy before a military tribunal:

At a table before the zertzal—the symbol of the Tsar’s authority—in the seat of honour under the life-size portrait of the Tsar, sit dignified old officials, wearing decorations, conversing freely and easily, writing notes, summoning men before them, and giving orders. Here, wearing a cross on his breast, near them, is a prosperous-looking old priest in a silken cassock, with long grey hair flowing onto his cope, before a lectern adorned with a cross and a Gospel bound in gold.

They summon Ivan Petrov. A young man comes in, wretchedly, shabbily dressed, and in terror, the muscles of his face working, his eyes bright and restless, and in a broken voice, hardly above a whisper, he says: “I . . . by Christ’s law . . . as a Christian . . . I cannot.”

“What is he muttering?” asks the president, frowning impatiently and raising his eyes from his book to listen.

“Speak louder,” the colonel with shining epaulets shouts at him.

“I . . . I as a Christian . . . ” And at last it appears that the young man refuses to serve in the army because he is a Christian.

“Don’t talk nonsense. Stand to be measured. Doctor, may I trouble you to measure him? He is alright?

“Yes.”

“Reverend father, administer the oath to him.”

No one is the least disturbed by what the poor scared young man is muttering. They do not even pay attention to it. “They all mutter something, but we’ve no time to listen to it. We have to enrol so many.”

The recruit tries to say something still: “It’s opposed to the law of Christ.”

“Go along! Go along! We know without your help what is opposed to the law and what’s not, and you soothe his mind, reverend father, soothe him. Next: Vasily Nikitin.”

And they lead the trembling youth away. And it does not strike anyone—the guards, or Vasily Nikitin whom they are bringing in, or any of the spectators of this scene, that these inarticulate words of the young man, suppressed at once by the authorities, contain the truth, and that the loud, solemnly uttered sentences of the calm, self-confident official and the priest are a lie and a deception.

Conviction

No matter how cruelly false authorities oppress it, Leo Tolstoy believed that as long as some people walked with Christ, conviction for truth would survive. He wrote:

They may subject the follower of Christ to all manner of external violence. They may deprive him of bodily freedom. But they cannot force him, by any danger or threat of harm, to perform an act against his conscience.

They cannot compel him to do this, because the deprivations and sufferings which form such a powerful weapon against other men have not the least power to compel him.

Deprivations and sufferings take from other men the happiness for which they live. But far from disturbing the happiness of the follower of Christ, they only make him more conscious of doing God’s will. . . . Therefore the Christian, who is subject only to inner divine law, not only refuses to obey external laws when they disagree with the divine law of love (as is usually the case with state obligations), he cannot even recognize the duty of obedience to anyone or anything whatever. He cannot recognize the duty of what others call “allegiance.”

Allegiance

For the follower of Christ the oath of allegiance to any government whatever—the act on which men build political states—is to renounce Christ. Everyone renounces Christ who promises unconditional, ongoing, obedience to human laws, made or to be made. The follower of Christ, in contrast, commits himself only to obeying in every circumstance the divine law of love within him.

 

The follower of Christ not only stops short of promising allegiance to any other man (because he does not know what that allegiance will require of him), he cannot promise to do anything definite at a certain time, or to abstain from doing anything for a certain time. He never knows in advance what Christ’s law of love may suddenly require of him. To obey that high law is the purpose of his being alive. If he would make any other unconditional commitment to the laws of men he would plainly show that the law in his heart is not the only one in his life.

For a follower of Christ to promise obedience to men, or the laws of men, is just as though a workman bound to one employer would promise to carry out the orders of others. One cannot serve two masters.

The follower of Christ is independent of human authority, because he acknowledges God’s authority alone. His law, revealed by Christ, he recognizes in himself, and voluntarily obeys it.

Patriotism

Patriotism, Leo Tolstoy believed, is a terrible farce. It moves men to loyalty to something that does not exist. He wrote:

In countries that have a state religion, they teach children the senseless blasphemies of church catechisms, together with the duty to obey their superiors. In republican states they teach them the savage superstition of patriotism and the same pretended obedience to governing authorities.

Even if we must suffer, it is better to get sent into exile or prison for the cause of common sense and right than to suffer for defending such foolishness and wrong.  It is better to run the risk of banishment, prison, or execution, than to choose to live in bondage to the wicked. It is better to suffer for right than to be destroyed by victorious enemies, and stupidly tortured and killed by them in fighting for a cannon, a piece of land of no use to anyone, or for a senseless rag called a banner.

Signs of Spring

Leo Tolstoy’s fascination with coming to life from death (as portrayed in his book Voskresenye, “Resurrection) involved far more than what most Russians thought. He wrote:

There are times when a higher truth, revealed at first to a few persons, gradually gains ground until it has taken hold of such a number of persons that the old public opinion, founded on a lesser order of truth, begins to totter and the new is ready to take its place, but has not yet been firmly established. It is like the spring, this time of transition, when the old order of ideas has not quite broken up and the new has not quite gained a footing. Men begin to criticize their actions in the light of the new truth, but in the meantime they continue to follow, through inertia and tradition, what once represented the highest point of their understanding.

These men are in an abnormal, wavering condition, feeling the necessity of following the new ideal, yet not bold enough to break with the old established traditions.

Such is the attitude in regard to truth, Leo Tolstoy believed, of most who profess to believe in Christ. But he felt certain that great changes, either for better or worse, would soon come: 

No one can stand still when the earth is shaking under his feet. If we do not go forward we must go back. And strange and terrible to say, the cultivated men of our time, the leaders of thought, are in reality drawing society back with their subtle reasonings—not back to paganism even, but to a state of primitive barbarism.

The Truth

Christ’s doctrine rests on nothing earthly, Leo believed. No one, let alone the church, needs to go about “proving” it or making it powerful. It is powerful on its own (even if no one believes or follows it) simply because it is true:

In regard to the truth everyone finds himself in the position of a man walking in the dark with a lantern. He does not yet see what the light from the lantern has not reached. He does not see what he has passed, already hidden in darkness. But at every stage of his journey he sees what the lantern’s light shows and he can always choose one side of the road or the other.

There are always truths not yet revealed to us, and others already outlived, forgotten and assimilated. . . . For this reason we cannot set up lists of rules for all to obey. The one who is moving toward perfection carries Christ’s teachings out more fully than the one on a much higher level of morality who is not moving at all.

The Dare

Most people simply have not dared to follow Christ. “Everyone waits on everyone else,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “but let us accept the truth that surrounds us on every side and forces itself upon us. Let us stop lying and pretending that we do not see this truth and we would find at once that hundreds, thousands, millions of men are in the same position as we—that they see the truth we do, and dread as we do to stand alone in recognizing it. Like us they are only waiting for others to recognize it too!

Only let men cease to be hypocrites and we would see at once that what holds us in bondage, and is represented to us as something stable, necessary, and ordained of God, is already tottering and is only propped up by the falsehood of hypocrisy with which we, and others like us, support it.”

We fear to let go of what we have because we do not know what we will get. We fear to walk with Christ because we do not know where he will take us. But regarding fear, Leo Tolstoy wrote:

If Columbus had thought like this he would never have weighed anchor. It was madness to set out to sea, not knowing the route, on an ocean no one had sailed, to reach a land whose existence was doubtful. But by this madness he discovered a new world.”

The Seed Was The Word

After several hours spent at Yasnaya Polyana, Ivan and Fyodor felt like their heads were spinning. Leo Tolstoy returned with the mushrooms he had picked and they ate together before the boys set out, in evening sunlight streaming through the poplar trees, for Tula. They questioned some of what they had heard and read, but Ivan wrote:

After our conversation with Leo Tolstoy I became more firmly convinced that the salvation of the world is in the simple teaching of Christ—not in parts of his teaching but in his teaching as a whole. I became convinced that salvation is not in the highest and most clever interpretation of what Christ said, but in his teachings themselves. I became convinced that the wonderful content of the Gospel will be understood not by philosophers but as it is revealed to humble childlike hearts by the Holy Spirit—and it struck me as never before that the teachings of Christ cannot be separated from the example of his life as a man.

Thanks to Leo Tolstoy, and numberless seekers stirred by visiting him or reading his books, Russia’s “underground” church became stronger than ever. The Spirit Christians in particular (both Molokans and Dukhobors), and those among them who like Ivan Prokhanov had gotten baptized, took his call to walk in Christ’s Way seriously.  With Christ, they dared withstand every false authority—church, tsar, and society—to survive persecution and shine like the sun in their Father’s kingdom.

The Seed Sprouts and Grows

Joyful community, all creatures great and small living in peace with one another, with the earth, and with God—Leo Tolstoy’s vision captured the imagination of Russian believers and numberless seekers around the world. Among them was a boy named Pyotr.

A son of Prince Aleksey Kropotkin, Pyotr served as a page in the tsar’s court at St. Petersburg. Then, on reaching maturity he began a military career.

Pyotr began his career at a time when all Russia was waking up from centuries of isolation and backwardness. New centres of trade and industry—Tsaritsyn on the Volga, Orenburg, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Irkutsk—sprang up all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Oil wealth from Baku on the Caspian Sea and wheat from seemingly limitless plains, newly opened to colonization in Siberia, lined the pockets of the wealthy with yet more wealth. But Russia’s poor (always in frightening majority) stayed poor, if not hungry.

Pyotr Kropotkin saw this, and considered. As a tsarist army officer in Siberia, with time on his hands, he observed and wrote much. His careful notes on geography and wildlife won him national fame and the offer of a post in Russia’s National Geographical Society. But once the St. Petersburg elite discovered the rest of his observations, their praise turned to fear.

In Siberia Pyotr Kropotkin met exiled Christians and became fascinated with them—the Bezpopovtsy (priestless Old Believers) in particular.  “Who needs priests?” he began to ask himself. “Or for that matter, anyone to tell him what to do or believe? Anyone to stand between him and God, or between him and his conscience?”

The longer Pyotr thought about human beings, all on one level before God, the more the lifting up of any kind of authority seemed wrong. Even God, when he walked among men as Jesus Christ, did not lift himself up above the rest.

In his careful way, Pyotr began to research society as far back as one can go. Everywhere he saw that Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory was a lie. Societies (and consequently life, both animal and human) have only survived where co-operation, not individual advancement, was a priority. Pyotr made notes on the Russian communities he came across, not only of the nonconformists, but of the ordinary peasant villages, of primitive tribes, and of communal societies among nomads. “Cooperation, not conflict, must become our goal,” he wrote. And after a trip to Switzerland where he visited a watch-makers’ commune in the Jura Mountains, he concluded, “Our hope lies not in correct nor powerful government. All forms of government and coercion are evil.[6] Our hope lies in decentralized, non-political, cooperative societies after the example of Christ and his disciples where everyone may develop his creative faculties without the interference of rulers, priests, or soldiers.”

 

“Scientific anarchy,” he named his understanding of the Gospel and promptly landed in jail.

For two years, tsarist officials kept Pyotr Kropotkin in strictest confinement. Then, in a daring plot his friends and secret supporters in high places helped him escape. In exile he wrote Words of a Rebel, Mutual Aid (his masterpiece), and Conquest of Bread.

Shared Lives at Vertograd

While Pyotr Kropotkin wrote books, Ivan Prokhanov drew similar conclusions and put them to practice. The widow of a poet and social reformer (Nikolai Alekseyevich Nekrasov) and two of her nieces joined the St. Petersburg fellowship. She was a friend of Leo Tolstoy,[7] and with Fyodor Sakharov and others, joined in Ivan’s enthusiasm for living like the Christians described in Acts two and four. Then the Lord opened a door.

         

Through his Mennonite friends in St. Petersburg Ivan learned of a tract of land for sale at Vertograd in the Crimea.[8] After serious discussion and prayer the Nekrasovs, Fyodor with his new wife, and Ivan settled there in great joy. Ivan wrote:

We let the account of the early Christians guide us and tried to live according to the example of the Apostles: “No one said that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common.” At Vertograd all we had belonged to everyone. Our spirits strangely rose as this knowledge—even as persons we belonged to others—grew upon us. In a sense we lost our “selves,” our freedom, and individuality. But as we did this in accordance with the early Christians’ example and with Jesus’ teaching on self denial (Matt. 16:24) great joy filled our hearts and we were in the brightest spiritual state imagineable, all the time.[9]

From the beginning, a stream of visitors converged upon the community at Vertograd. Some stayed and much work got accomplished between daily meetings for worship and prayer. But renewed persecution, and Ivan’s return to the Caucasus after his father got arrested, forced everyone to leave. Under threat of arrest, Ivan himself left Russia secretly, through Finland, in the winter of 1895.[10]

A Weed Flowing Upstream

While Ivan traveled west, Leo Tolstoy, taking a break from his writing projects at Yasnaya Polyana, traveled north. There, in Russian prison camps, he saw with his own eyes what he had heard of torture, starvation, and forced labour under inhuman conditions. For hardened criminals this would have been bad enough. But to Leo’s consternation, he found many of the prisoners humble, innocent people—like Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin of the Molokan Pryguny, who had survived nine years in a dungeon at Solovets on the White Sea.

Leo and Maksim talked to one another. They discovered their common beliefs about voluntary poverty and nonviolence. For the first time in years Maksim could talk freely with someone who understood him and when the time came for the two men to part it was hard. But good news came soon. Through Leo’s influence Maksim got transferred to a somewhat better prison at Suzdal, in Central Russia.

In the north, Leo Tolstoy also met a Dukhobor leader in exile: Pyotr Vasilyevich Verigin, of an old Spirit Christian family from the Molochna River. A man over six feet tall with black hair and a full beard, Pyotr impressed Leo Tolstoy with his sincerity and common sense. “We are like the plakun trava,” Pyotr told him. “No matter what they do to us we will keep on going the direction we have chosen. We will follow Christ.”

Leo Tolstoy knew at once what Pyotr meant. The Russians had a legend about the plakun trava, a weed that floats against the current, upstream. “You are right,” he answered. “And if you keep on doing so, more will follow until the world turns around and goes the other way.”

In his places of exile in Shenkursk and Kola, Pyotr Vasilyevich, not only read Leo Tolstoy’s books with interest, particularly The Kingdom of God is Within You. He wrote instructive letters to his family and fellow believers in Armenia. He encouraged them in brotherly community, urging them to overcome the last remnants of selfish ambition, and to stop hiring non-members to work for them. “Whatever those labourers produce, they deserve to take home with them,” he said. “If you make a profit on their labour the accusation of James 5:4 stands against you. If you do not make a profit on their labour, why hire them at all?”

Pyotr also wrote about self denial and abstaining from foods:

All creatures get their life from the same power that gives life to man. Why should they not have the same right to live? To destroy those creatures for the sake of gluttony is reprehensible. . . . Drinking alcoholic beverages and smoking tobacco is not only unnatural for a Christian, but is also unnatural for any man. . . . In the Gospel it is said: “Do not live oneself up to drinking wine because it leads to dissolution.” And about smoking tobacco and the harm it does, I have no need to explain. It is one of the lowest levels to which a man can fall.[11]

But by far the most of Pyotr Vasilyevich’s instructions had to do with alternative military service. During Aleksandr III’s rule the Mennonites and Spirit Christians who remained in Russia gradually agreed (against their true desire) to do Red Cross or forestry duty instead of going to war. They might not have disliked it as much had their boys not been forced to wear uniforms and carry guns, even though it was said they did not have to use them.

Pyotr Vasilyevich wrote:

In his teaching, Christ condemned and destroyed the basis for military duty. That is how I understand the life and teaching of Christ. And I believe that we as Christians should refuse military service altogether. I find it my responsibiliity to tell you that you should refuse to serve as soldiers and take no part in any military actions, even if it they are noncombatant. Whatever weapons you have acquired while drifting away from Christ’s teaching—rifles, revolvers, swords, daggers—should be gathered in one place and, as a sign of nonresistance to evil by evil means, and to obey the commandment “You shall not kill” they should be destroyed by burning.

The Spirit Christians in the Caucasus took Pyotr’s counsel seriously—and suffered the consequences.

On April 2, 1895, on a Day of Resurrection, a young believer in noncombatant service, Matvey Lebedov, refused to parade as commanded. Ten boys serving with him, immediately dropped their guns and followed his example. Their officer was furious. “We will show you who is in charge,” he screamed at them. “Go fetch the rosgiy!”

The rosgiy, bundles of prickly acacia rods appeared at once, and the soldiers laid Matvey face down on the ground without his shirt. Working in rhythm, one man on either side, they flogged him fifty times, until bits of flesh flew with the blood. Then they threw him into an unheated cell for the night.

The next boy, Mikhail Sherbinin, they flogged the same way, but like Matvey he showed no sign of weakening. The officer, rapidly losing face, grew desperate. “Flog him on the other side, the brute!” he shouted. The soldiers turned him face up and gave him another fifty lashes. But Mikhail would not give up. The officer, in blind rage, threw him against a nearby gymnasium horse, breaking his ribs. Then they hurled him into a cell where he got a high fever and died.

The other boys suffered likewise, but the Spirit Christian communities sensed more clearly than ever the challenge to let the light of Christ shine above the darkness of war and violence. On June 28, 1895 believers gathered from every direction to a high place above the village of Orlovka in the Caucasus. It was the time of the yearly love feast but everyone sensed that this gathering would be unusual. From all the villages men and boys brought the guns and other weapons they had acquired. On top of the hill they piled them up and covered them with twenty wagon loads of wood and coal, soaked in five hundred litres of kerosene.

At the stroke of midnight, with more than two thousand believers standing in a circle around the “mountain of arms” they threw a burning torch onto the pile and a great flame roared up amid the sound of victory songs and joyful prayers to Christ.

The fire, strategically placed, lit the summer night, and could be seen from many hours’ travel in every direction.

The Spirit Christians had made their point and retribution was immediate.

Persecuted But Not Forsaken

After the burning of arms at Orlovka (and shortly afterward at two other locations) tsarist troops arrested five thousand Spirit Christians. On horseback, Cossack soldiers swept into their villages, rounded them up, and drove them into exile.

The Spirit Christians sang as they left all their earthly possessions behind:

For your sake, Lord, we enter the narrow gate.

We leave our worldly lives, our fathers and our mothers.

We leave our brothers and sisters,  our  people and tribes.

We bear hardness and persecution, scorn and slander.

We are hungry and thirsty. We walk with nothing,

For  your  sake Lord.

The Cossacks tried to drown out the Spirit Christians’ singing with obscene songs of their own. Wherever they could they captured more and mistreated them. One of their many victims who described to Leo Tolstoy’s investigators what happened, Aksenya Strelayeva, said:

Four of us women were walking from Spaskoye to Bogdanovka when a hundred Cossacks overtook us. They brought us to the village and led us one by one into the yard of the coach house. There they stripped us (throwing our skirts over our shoulders) and flogged our bare bodies. In the yard stood some Cossacks and many other people. They flogged us so, you could not count the strokes. Two of them held us and four flogged. Three of us stood through it but one they dragged about so that she could not stand. We received many insults.

An old woman, Anna Posnyakov said:

The soldiers came to us during the day—twenty of them. They called my son Vasya, twenty-four years old, into the yard . . . and brought a whip. After they had flogged him three times they raised him up and when they saw he was still breathing they flogged him more. When they stopped he was barely alive. His whole body was jerking. Then they flung him into the coach house.

At midnight they came to arrest my other son. We said, “We are all the same. Arrest us all! We will not let him alone.” Two of the women in our house had little children whom they took up in their arms. . . . The soldiers almost strangled the children by trying to tear us from them. Then they dragged my son and us along with him. . . . They also flogged Vasya Kolesnikov until his boots filled with blood.

Even unconverted Russians looked on in dismay. A military officer stationed in the Caucasus wrote on March 7, 1897:

Having heard that some Dukhobors were being transferred from the Elisavetpol prison to that of Nukhin, I went out to meet them at the military post. I shall never forget how they looked. Along the high road, muddy with the melting snow, moved a crowd of well-grown, healthy, men in sturdy clothes. They slung their sacks and coats in soldier-fashion over their shoulders. Their faces were calm and good-tempered, their movements measured, and their conversation peaceful.

Surrounded by an escort of soldiers with rifles, there were thirty-six of them, for the most part middle-aged men, though some were quite old and grey, and others young beardless boys. The expanse of steppe and fields which for a long time they had not set eyes on, the bright sunshine, the open air, and the sight of other men and of free life evidently had a cheering effect on the captives. The stifling city prison was forgotten for the moment and each was glad merely to breathe fully and freely, to stretch his cramped limbs, to enjoy the new scene, with the walls of the prison court no longer around him.

It was just this that went through my heart as I looked at them. . . . Other bystanders also stared at the captives in astonishment and consternation, for everyone in that part of Russia knows the Dukhobors well. “Why are they taking these people to prison?” they asked one another. “What have they done? What is their crime? . . . I took leave of them and returned home pensive and sorrowful.

All told, tsarist authorities banished four hundred families to swampy lowlands along the Black Sea, or to Yakutsk in Siberia, seven thousand kilometres away. Under torture and brutal mistreatment, many of them perished within a year. But they did not lose faith and the Lord Christ in whom they trusted did not forsake them. Through the efforts of Pyotr Kropotkin (who had visited Russian Mennonites in Canada) Vladimir Chertkov, and English Quakers, more than seven thousand five hundred Spirit Christians got permission to leave Russia and made their way through British Cyprus to Canada. Leo Tolstoy paid for their way with the sales of his latest book, Resurrection (printed in England).

Cast Down But Not Destroyed

Tsar Nikolai II (married to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter) censured Resurrection and made it illegal to distribute it in Russia. The Orthodox church excommunicated Leo Tolstoy and “delivered him unto Satan” for the book’s criticism of “God-ordained authority.” But Leo remained serene. He had “left the church” at his conversion years before, not bothering to discuss it with church officials because he neither saw them as “officials” nor what they represented as “the church.” He wrote: “I believe in God whom I understand as Spirit, as Love, as the Source of all. I believe He is in me and I in Him.”

At the same time, as repression grew worse, the numbers of believers mushroomed. Ten years after the burning of arms in Caucasia a million and a half Spirit Christians lived there. In secret they circulated the Book of Spirit and Life written by Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin (presumed to have died in jail at Suzdal) and other Pryguny leaders. Like Pyotr Vasilyevich’s writings, it encouraged believers to free themselves from violence, even senseless violence against animals, and called them to live in brotherly community.[12]

The Plant Matures and bears Fruit

Leo Tolstoy died 20 November 1910 at Yasnaya Polyana. Four years later Russia entered the Great War (World War 1). During that time the monarchy collapsed, the Bolsheviks took over, and an atheistic communist government came to control the new “Soviet Union.”

Central Russia, after its Revolution and Civil War, lay in shambles. But in joyful contrast to its devastation, Boris Mazurin, Yefim Serzhanov, a Zavadsky family, two girls from Ryazan, and a handful of others discovered new life at Shestakovka, near Moscow, in 1921. Like Leo Tolstoy, they believed in peace and life together. Like him they wanted to live simply. And that, under the circumstances, was not difficult.

The “Tolstoyan” community at Shestakovka began in a huddle of abandoned buildings. Without tools, without seeds, without money, and nothing to start farming with than a team of seventeen-year-old horses and a dilapidated military cart the future could have looked grim. It did look grim, in fact, to everyone but the serious-minded, dedicated young people who set out to turn the teachings of Jesus Christ into action.

The Shestakovka people began by dismantling an old log building, cutting it up for firewood, and trading it on the streets of Moscow for food and supplies. From this they went to raising vegetables, cutting hay, and eventually selling milk to a government hospital. The community prospered at once. Within a few years dozens of others like it took shape and soviet officials noted with alarm how they surpassed in every way—in production, in morale, and in self sufficiency—what their collective farms had accomplished.  

Yevangelsk

What soviet officials watched with growing uneasiness, Ivan Prokhanov saw with unbounded delight. Travelling through Russia he visited new communities and house churches everywhere—in the Don region, in the Caucasus, and in the far south along the border with Iran. “Everywhere,” he reported, “I heard people praying in their own language. They confessed that they had been robbers, immoral sinners or atheists. But everywhere they rejoiced for having found Christ.” In Odessa and Kiev, congregations of believing Jews took shape. And in Turkestan, Christian believers were asked to speak in mosques.

Only one thing troubled Ivan. Hundreds of new believers lived and sought to bring up their families in Russian cities. With this in mind, and remembering what had begun to happen at Vertograd, he wrote:

I feared it would be impossible for believers to realise the Christian way of life in the cities, with their many vices and irregularities and their fixed way of doing things. Perhaps some time the Holy Spirit will enable us to fully conquer and reshape these cells of the old life, but in the beginning it seemed to me that a suitable place should be found where our ideal of a new life could be realised in the form of a standard city, with standard villages and standard agricultural and industrial enterprises.

In a careful plan to be published in Khristianin, Ivan (making use of his skills as an engineer) described what he had in mind: a new city for believers in Russia. He proposed to call it Yevangelsk, City of the Gospel, or for its novel plan, City of the Sun.

From a large round park, over a mile in diameter, the streets of Yevangelsk were to radiate like sunbeams through surrounding urban and agricultural areas. Its only law was to be the Sermon on the Mount. Its only residents, members of the evangelical Church. Along the wide streets of Yevangelsk, bordered with fruit trees and many flowers, hospitals, schools, meetinghouses and dwelling places—all neat but modest, and none more showy than the rest—would stand. No firearms, no guns of any kind should ever enter Yevangelsk. Its people would live from the industry of their own hands, sharing what they produced, and in the land around it, believers would farm. If Christ would truly remain in the centre of the city, and the life of its society would revolve around him, their example would lead to more and more Christian cities throughout Russia and, Ivan believed, throughout the world.

Some Soviet officials, remembering Pyotr Kropotkin and perhaps feeling a touch of remorse for their bloody revolution, showed interest in Yevangelsk. They had already allowed a group of Molokans, returning from America, to begin an obshina in Central Russia. And since the idea did not seem incompatible with their ideals they even suggested a site for Yevangelsk at the foot of the Altai Mountains near the border between Siberia and Mongolia.

In August, 1927, Ivan left with great anticipation for Siberia. He met crowds of believers in every city along the way: Kazan, Yekaterinburg (later Sverdlovsk), Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Novonikolayevsk (later Novosibirsk) and Barnaul. Everywhere the believers rejoiced with him as he showed them the officially approved plans for Yevangelsk. From Barnaul two brothers accompanied him south to great empty plains at the foot of the mountains where the Katun River flows into the Biya. There, with the brothers and local Soviet officials at his side he dedicated the centre of the great Sun City to Christ and planted three oak trees.[13]

It was September 11, 1927. Ivan felt lightheaded. Was this the greatest moment of Christianity in Russia? The beginning of a new dispensation for Christ’s Kingdom? But the sun, a ball of red, was going down. 

A New Law

Not nearly all Soviet officials felt pleased about Yevangelsk and the fast-growing Christian community interest in Russia. They were not afraid of it being “visionary” or “impractical.” They were afraid it would work!

In a few years nonconformed believers had grown to perhaps five hundred thousand baptised members. (Some thought more.) All over Russia, they had become a familiar sight—neatly but modestly dressed families, women with their heads covered and bright-eyed well-trained children, singing on the streets, holding open air meetings or passing out literature. They did not drink or smoke. They lived frugal lives and worked hard.

“Are these people already doing what enlightened atheism is to accomplish?” Russians began to wonder. Particularly the “League of the Militant Godless” and the head of the Communist party, Josef Stalin, looked at nonconformed Christianity with alarm. Then, on April 8, 1929, the Communist party passed a new law to govern religion.

Under the new law, Muslims, Christians, and Jews could meet as “religious societies” and the state would provide them with buildings—only after twenty or more people had applied and the local soviet had given its approval. Unregistered meeting places would be closed down. Minors could no longer be baptised nor subjected to religious propaganda. Pastors and teachers could speak only in the registered building of the congregation to which they belonged.

Sixteen of Leningrad’s seventeen evangelical meeting places closed down at once. Food and ration cards for ministers were withdrawn. Raduga fell into state hands and got closed down. All evangelism became illegal. And as in times that Russians remembered only too well, streams of people flowed east and north into prison camps in Siberia.

After the Communist takeover several million people (including twenty-five thousand Mennonites) had emigrated from Russia. Now emigration was impossible. People simply became “un-people” as they disappeared into the Gulag (the prison camp system) and their relatives feared to speak of them lest they get in trouble and sent off too.

Tens of thousands of believers died in the camps. Working unreasonable hours, without proper food or clothes, taking turns to lie on one another to keep warm in concrete rooms without toilets or beds, the camps were meant to kill. Separated parents and children usually did not hear from one another again.

During the dry years of 1932 and 1933 some Spirit Christians escaped on foot, by night, into Persia. From there they walked the full length of Turkey, found their way from Constantinople to Argentina, and walked across the Andes to Chile. But most could not escape. Perhaps as many as seven million people starved to death in the drought, but the Soviet government refused to admit a state of famine or accept relief from the outside.

On October 6, 1935 Ivan Prokhanov died in exile, in Berlin.

Purged

After Sergey Kirov a Communist leader got assasinated in the mid1930s, a great purge began. Josef Stalin’s officials arrested, interrogated, tortured and sent to prison camps perhaps as many as twenty-five million people. In some camps officials shot a dozen, or as many as thirty people a day, to keep the rest fearful. Possibly ten million died—among them train loads of people set loose in far northern meadows “to graze”—while those at home applauded (out of fear) the end of the “enemies of the people.”

Children learned to spy on parents, husbands and wives on each other. Some who dared keep Bibles hidden did so with the knowledge of no one else in the house.  Ten or twelve-year sentences for “religious offence” were rare. Believers usually got twenty-five years in the Gulag, and that was a death sentence. Even to pray silently before a meal could bring it upon one.

After a Mennonite funeral on the Molochna where an ex-minister dared to speak to the family about God in their back bedroom (a legal activity), he was reported by a neighbour for having left the door open a crack for others to hear. Neighbours reported one another if they heard a snatch from a Christian song. Only in registered meeting places could God be mentioned, and those in most Russian towns had disappeared.

Then things got worse.

Another War

On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler’s army invaded Russia. During the first two days the Germans shot down two thousand Soviet planes. They sprayed retreating troops with machine gun fire, and under incessant bombing, city after city fell. . . . By 1941 the Germans had cut off supplies from Leningrad. Perhaps a million died from starvation in that city alone.[14] Then, as tanks rolled in from Axis-controlled Poland and Austria-Hungary, Stalin ordered the evacuation of the German colonists from the Ukraine. Soldiers hustled six hundred and fifty thousand people, Lutherans, Catholics, and Mennonites east to Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of young men from Tolstoyan communities still existing in Siberia lost their lives for refusing to carry guns. But the tide turned at Stalingrad. Not only the Red army, but its factory workers, women and children struggled to defend the city against the Germans. The battle lasted seven months, until General Friedrich Paulus (disobeying Hitler) surrendered in February 1943 and the Germans, like Napoleon years before, began a hasty retreat. Winter roads were bad. They suffered from hunger and disease. . . . On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide and Germany fell.

Russia had not fallen, but its suffering was comparable. Newspapers said twenty million Russians had died in the war. The number was too large to comprehend. The people were stunned. Silent among the ruins.

Silent enough to hear the voice of Leo Tolstoy—and of Jesus—again. . . .