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131 “Microbes of the Mind” 4 In the secrets of the human soul, beyond the sphere of consciousness , there are hidden mental foundations, capable, in the presence of the necessary conditions, of manifesting themselves in life. —Vladimir K. Sluchevskii, 1893 Lev Tolstoi’s War and Peace, published in 1869, contains an arresting scene depicting the lynching of a young man. Vereshchagin stands accused of disseminating defeatist literature in Moscow as Napoleon’s army sweeps eastward . On the eve of the city’s fall in September 1812, a crowd of fearful and panicked Muscovites assembles in front of the residence of the city’s governor, Count Rostopchin. Disconcerted by the crowd’s unpredictable and riotous potential, Rostopchin pronounces the prisoner responsible for Moscow’s surrender and orders his dragoons to cut Vereshchagin down in front of the crowd. Yet events quickly run out of control: “Sabre him!” the dragoon officer almost whispered. And one soldier, his face all at once distorted with fury, struck Vereshchagin on the head with the blunt side of his sabre. “Ah!” cried Vereshchagin in meek surprise, looking round with a frightened glance as if not understanding why this was done to him. A similar moan of surprise and horror ran through the crowd. “O Lord!” exclaimed a sorrowful voice. But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from Vereshchagin he uttered a plaintive cry of pain, and that cry was fatal. The barrier of human feeling, strained to the utmost, that had held the crowd in check, suddenly broke. The crime had begun and must now be completed. The plaintive moan of reproach was drowned by the threatening and angry roar of the crowd. Like 132 | Renovating Russia the seventh and last wave that shatters a ship, that last irresistible wave burst from the rear and reached the front ranks, carrying them off their feet and engulfing them all. The dragoon was about to repeat his blow. Vereshchagin with a cry of horror, covering his head with his hands, rushed towards the crowd. The tall youth, against whom he stumbled, seized his thin neck with his hands and, yelling wildly, fell with him under the feet of the pressing struggling crowd. Some beat and tore at Vereshchagin, others at the tall youth. And the screams of those that were being trampled on and of those who tried to rescue the tall lad, only increased the fury of the crowd. It was a long time before the dragoons could extricate the bleeding youth, beaten almost to death. And for a long time, despite the feverish haste with which the mob tried to end the work that had been begun, those who were hitting, throttling, and tearing at Vereshchagin were unable to kill him, for the crowd pressed from all sides, swaying as one mass with them in the centre and rendering it impossible for them to either kill him or to let him go. “Hit him with an axe, eh! . . . Crushed? . . . Traitor, he sold Christ . . . Still alive . . . tenacious . . . serve him right! Torture serves a thief right. Use the hatchet! . . . What still alive?” Only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries changed to a longdrawn , measured death-rattle, did the crowd around his prostrate, bleeding corpse begin rapidly to change places. Each one came up, glanced at what had been done, and with horror, reproach, and astonishment, pushed back again.1 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, extensive citation and discussion of this scene became almost de rigueur in examinations by criminologists , psychiatrists, and psychologists of crowd psychology. In 1882, Nikolai Mikhailovskii cited the scene in full, declaring that he knew of “no other historical or artistic description of the moment when a crowd was stimulated by example that might be compared with these two pages in terms of the expressiveness and subtlety of the work.”2 A decade later, the criminologist Vladimir Konstantinovich Sluchevskii (1844–1926) similarly hailed “one of the most magnificent scenes, depicted in graceful prose, of the life of a crowd.” In an 1893 article entitled “The Crowd and Its Psychology,” Sluchevskii drew attention to “the powerful rendition of the excitability of the crowd, its credulity, and its bloodthirsty instincts, unleashed under the influence of the victim’s cry and the sight of suffering and blood.”3 In 1898, 1 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1993), 705. 2 Nikolai K. Mikhailovskii, “Geroi i tolpa” (1882), Sochineniia, 6 vols. (St...

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