Leo Tolstoy Salutes the Student Movement in Russia

Leo Tolstoy with Russian peasants (1909) | Public Domain

Some lines written very long ago seem to have been written for the current moment. At the University of St. Petersburg in the spring of 1899, students protested the government’s policies and their pressure on university administration. Upon learning about student unrest and being urged by student delegates who were paying him visits, Leo Tolstoy could not remain silent. In April 1899, he jotted down the lines that appear below. Tolstoy did not have time to edit the note (he might have toned down his impatience with buying or designing fashion) because he was working against time to finish his political novel Resurrection (1899). The proceeds of the novel would be used to rescue over seven and a half thousand religious dissenters, who would be taken out of Russia into safety in North America. This first translation of Tolstoy’s note into English of the note on students’ heroism honors all students protesting for democracy.

—Inessa Medzhibovskaya
May, 2025

Leo Tolstoy Salutes the Student Movement in Russia (1899)

Something extraordinary is taking place in Russia now, something novel, something indecent and revolting to the utmost degree. Otherwise concerned with keeping the public informed about this and that and the sundry interesting things worth knowing, the press has not uttered a word about this. And the people of Russia go on living as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Street police are standing at attention in the capitals. They honor the authorities with a salute and curse coachmen who hustle around, driving them brutally out of sight.

The cabriolets are whooshing past at a fast trot. They are carrying noble ladies who—on their prowl for fashion—will be splurging left and right from the illicit lucre of their husbands and lovers. The ministers and directors sit around in their committees and inspections in anticipation of a paycheck with an extra for overtime. The tsar and his royal kin parade the troops on their resplendent horses and fantasize about a redesign for uniforms. Meantime, some of the moujik peasants and their wives squelch their way through wet mud in their bast shoes, scavenging for food scraps under melting ice. Others are seeking justice against their oppressors. But neither the former nor the latter shall find what they have been looking for.

But here are the two very important things that have been happening simultaneously. The first thing is that the populace came to the point of complete stupefaction and destitution after having been systematically stupefied and disinherited from the baseline necessary to sustain living. Having reached the nadir of stupefaction and depredation, the situation is no longer profitable for the government. The second thing is that the very same young people whom the government is prepping in the specialty of stupefaction and depredation of the populace have refused to continue in this vocation of serving the government’s demands. In this training of human beings and rendering them amoral for the fulfillment of the demands of the government, the threshold of depersonalization and callous heartlessness has also been overstepped.

Instead of the former academic rules of order to which they used to be subject, the students became subject to the police measure, which found expression in the thrashing of students by whips. The students took offense, bethought themselves, and, their own measure of patience already driven beyond the limit, they went on strike. That is, they decided to stop studying at the institutions where they get educated by the knout.

Students in the rest of the educational institutions in Petersburg and other cities who had been likewise finding the moral demand of the time to disagree with their condition followed suit. Across all Russia thirty thousand young people, if not more—in other words, the entire generation of young people studying for active state service—now refuse to continue their training for this service, should the law and order of things that result in the trouncing of students, the way it happened in Petersburg, persist. These two developments were very important for the government and special measures that ought to have been taken were taken indeed.

To redress the stupefaction and impoverishment of peasants that result in their dying out from famine, it is customary to regard this as isolated paucity of the harvest in the regions where one thousandth of what gets expropriated from the peasants and their properties would be dispatched in aid. To redress student strikes across all of Russia it is customary to regard these strikes as political agitation and to take the most decisive coercive measures against students.

Translated and introduced by Inessa Medzhibovskaya. The translation is based on the most intact version of the note in Volume 31 of Tolstoy’s Complete Works in 90 volumes (Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii)(Gosudastvennoe Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1928–1958). The text of the note appears in volume 31, pages 199–200. Volume 31 was published in 1954 and edited by scholars N. V. Gorbachev, L. P. Grossman, and V. S. Mishin.