I Cannot Be Silent

On 9 May 1908 the newspaper Tolstoy read reported that twenty peasants had been hanged that day at Kherson for an armed raid on a landowner's estate. The item stood in a column of death sentences and executions; by Tolstoy's count they had now gone on without a pause for two or three years, in a Russia whose law, as he put it, had until lately known no death penalty. He began the article within days. It opens on that newspaper column and then describes, step by step, how such a hanging is carried out: the priest in his vestments speaking of God and Christ, the executioners soaping the nooses so that they tighten better, the doctor walking among the bodies to certify that the work has been done properly. Tolstoy's argument is that the executions were carried out in the name of order and the common good, and therefore in his name too. He saw a plain connection between his spacious room, his dinner and his leisure and the killing done to protect them, and he would not go on living with it. He meant to spread what he had written in Russia and abroad until one of two things happened: the executions stopped, or his own connection with them was broken — by prison, or, better, by a shroud and a soaped noose like the peasants'. The papers later corrected the report: twelve men had been hanged, not twenty. Tolstoy changed the number in a note of his own and left everything else as it stood, since what he had said applied to all the thousands killed. He dated the article 31 May 1908, at Yasnaya Polyana. Newspapers across much of Europe printed the full text in July. At home, excerpts appeared on 4 July in several papers, Russkiye Vedomosti and Rech among them, and every one of them was fined; in Sevastopol a publisher who pasted his paper's excerpts up around the town was arrested.