Resistance Is Futile, but Nonresistance Might Work: The East and Russia in Tolstoi’s Political Imagination, 1905–10

I dreamed that I was dressed up like a peasant, and Mother didn’t recognize me.

—Lev Tolstoi¹

During the last few years of his life, at the zenith of his popularity and influence, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi rethought the activist strands of his interpretation of Christianity, specifically the practical function of his cornerstone moral-theological concept of nonresistance to evil.² How, he mused, could quiescence, absolute submission to state authority and violence, be used as a strategic means for political and economic change?

He was prompted to this revisiting of nonresistance, and to a contingent acceptance of what many scholars and contemporaries incompletely or incorrectly have identified as Slavophile principles, by geopolitical forces and events that broadly circulated about the East–West political, economic, and cultural dichotomy. He addressed these events and forces directly in numerous articles written between 1904 and 1907: the Russian naval defeat at Port Arthur in 1904, Russia’s loss to Japan in 1905, the militarism preceding World War I, the colonializing and modernizing process in China following the Boxer Rebellion, and the 1905 revolution in Russia, which was itself fueled by the broadly held public assumption that Russia needed to modernize (again) if it wished to maintain its place in the hierarchy of colonizing nation-states.³

These articles reflect Tolstoi’s decades-long fascination with Asia, which emerged in the 1880s and lasted until the end of his life in 1910. During this period, he published, in Russia and abroad, numerous influential and popular works on the spiritual practices and cultures of China, India, and Japan.⁴ With increasing clarity and focus over these decades, he argued that Taoism and Buddhism—and, to a lesser extent, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Shintoism—rightly understood not just as metaphysical traditions but as enacted life practices with attendant modes of labor and social organization, were profoundly similar to “Tolstoian” Christianity. These practices offered the only means of resisting integration into what Tolstoi called “state organization”—political organizations that he identified as explicitly European and non-Russian.⁵

At the beginning of the 20th century, in the face of rapid modernization and the rapid spread by colonization, revolution, and adoption of Western state-organizing principles, Tolstoi reimagined the geopolitical map of the world. He aligned the Russian narod with Asian nations and more generally with what we would now call the “developing” or unmodernized nations of the world. (Tolstoi called them “uncivilized” nations, for him a positive term.)

These same political events and forces that moved Tolstoi to relocate Russia in his imagined geography also prompted official and semiofficial political movements, official policies, and political philosophies among Russians during the first decades of the 20th century. The movements and policies were underwritten by a shared, emerging sense that Russia had, if not a racial, then at least a social and economic kinship with Asia. This moment or movement has been called Russia’s “Asian temptation”; at the time, the movement went by the name of Easternism (vostochnichestvo) among intellectuals, artists, and politicians.⁶ This intellectual flirtation with the East blossomed at the beginning of the 20th century among intellectuals and politicians, matured among the Russian émigré culture in Prague in the 1920s and 1930s as Eurasianism (evraziistvo), and reemerged around the breakup of the Soviet Union. It directly and explicitly underpins Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union project.⁷ This turn to the east was initially and complicatedly an offshoot of nationalistic Slavophilism, for it was equally a turn away from Western Europe and the North Atlantic world. It was prompted during the fin de siècle in no small part by the emergence of a “new world order” that was economically, politically, and culturally dominated by the West, and that sought actively to exclude the Russian Empire. Intellectual historians need to consider how Tolstoi was influenced by, and exerted influence on, Russia’s “Asian temptation” and its political and cultural imagination of the East.

Power as Burden: Tolstoi and Contingent Slavophilism

Tolstoi’s attentiveness to Asia in 1905, his belief...