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deep debasement. On this sentence The Moscow Gazette, the
principal organ of fanatical and autocratic “obscuration,”
fastened, making the meaning to appear as “the peasants
must be roused against the authorities.” Prince Stcherbatoff,
father-in-law of a former editor of The Moscow Gazette, wrote
a bitter article, which that paper published, the purport of
which was that “this evil” (i.e., Tolstoi and his work) “must
be exterminated.” This led to other attacks in the press, and
if Countess Tolstoi had not journeyed to St. Petersburg and
obtained a private audience with the Tsar, matters would
probably have been pushed to extremities. To one holding
Tolstoi’s faith, and it is faith, not mere opinion or sentiment,
there could hardly be a more cruel mode of attack. Many
letters came to him from all quarters after the article appeared
in The Moscow Gazette, from university men down to simple
peasants who could scarcely frame a legible letter, asking “Is
it possible that our dear Count, who has taught us by word and
deed to follow the teaching and example of Christ in not
resisting evil, but blessing those that curse us, and doing good
unto those that hate us, has fallen so far, as The Moscow
Gazette says, as to proclaim the doctrines of hate and bloody
revolt, instead of the Gospel of love, self-sacrifice, and patient
endurance?” But the Count paid no attention to these attacks,
and during my stay with the family I never heard from him or
any of its members a word about the matter, or even the
names of his persecutors.
For some time the local authorities and the Government
disputed as to the very existence of the famine, the former
asserting and the latter denying it, until the matter was placed
beyond denial by authentic accounts of numerous deaths from
starvation in different provinces. In England, however, we
can hardly throw stones at the Russian Government, since we
have had our own authorities gravely asking whether there
were actually men who had real difficulty in finding work, and
regarding the negative “information” of their own red-tape
bound bureaus as more reliable than the statements of those
who passed their lives among the workers and knew their
circumstances intimately.
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