Resurrection: prison and land reform

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A rather didactic and moralistic novel about fin de siècle prison conditions in imperial Russia. In many places it reads like a documentary. Tolstoy appears to be trying to do what Dickens did in a lot of his novels -- expose social evils -- but he has a heavier touch, and lacks Dickens's sense of humour.

Tolstoy's Resurrection has been sitting on our bookshelves for many years, along with a couple of other books of his, bought by my mother. I don't know if she read them, but I did not. The Covid-19 lockdown, however, with libraries and bookshops closed, drove me to look at the unread books on our shelves. I did try, once, about 30 years ago, to read War and Peace, but found it boring, as it opened with a conversation with a Freemason, and was all about the aristocracy. So much of what I knew of Tolstoy was other people's opinions. I had heard that he was a pacifist, which I liked, but other things that I had heard I liked less. So I began reading Resurrection without much hope that I would like it.

To begin with, I was pleasantly surprised. It seemed a much more interesting book than War and Peace. It includes the aristocracy, but the protagonist is an aristocrat with a social conscience, who takes an interest in the welfare of the peasants, and sees that many of their problems are caused by the lack of land. The land question is big in South Africa, and the way Tolstoy handles it I think makes it worth reading for South Africans, whatever one's view of land. Tolstoy's views were influenced by Henry George, an American who proposed a system of land reform not unlike advocated by the EFF in South Africa today, and in his novel Tolstoy looks at some of the pros and cons of that.

In this Tolstoy resembles Dickens, using his fiction to make his readers aware of social problems, but he lacks the humour of Dickens, and his light touch. At some points he goes in for rather heavy-handed moralising, analysing the spiritual failings of his characters at length rather than letting the reader see them through the story.

At some points Tolstoy could be commenting on current events. Last month the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, USA sparked off worldwide protests against police brutality. There was talking of "defunding the police" and the Minneapolis city council was thinking of abpolishing its police force. Tolstoy would have applauded.

At one point in the story the protagonist, Nekhlyudov, witnesses prisoners marching to the station in summer heat to board the train for Siberia to serve out their sentences there. Several collapse because of heat exhaustion, and some die. Nekhlyudov, thinking about this, attributes it to the official mentality of the police:

"All this comes," thought Nekhlyudov, "from the fact that all these people -- governors, inspectors, police officers, and policemen -- consider that there are circumstances when human relations are not necessary between human beings. All these men, Maslennikov, and the inspector, and the convoy officer, if they were not governor, inspector, officer, would have considered twenty times before sending such a mass of people out in such heat -- would have stopped twenty times on the way and seeing a man growing weak, gasping for breath, would have led him into the shade, would have given him water and let him rest, and if an accident had still occurred, they would have expressed pity. But not only did they not do this, but they hindered others from doing it, because they thought not of men and their duty towards them but only of the office they themselves filled, and considered the obligations of that office above human relations. That is the whole matter," Nekhlyudov continued. "If once we admit -- be it only for an hour or in some exceptional case -- that anything can be more important than a feeling of love for our fellows, then there is no crime which we may not commit with easy minds, free from feelings of guilt."

Tolstoy is sometimes described as a Christian pacifist and anarchist, the inspiration for Gandhi and Martin Luther King. I am inclined to be a Christian anarchist and pacifist, but I don't feel much inspired by Tolstoy. His factual information is interesting, his moralistic rants less so. Among Rusan novelists, I prefer Dostoevsky, who raises some of the same issues, but not in quite such a didactic and preachy way.

Shortly after the publication of Resurrection Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church, and after reading the book I am not surprised. Two chapters are devoted to a hostile parody of Orthodox worship, which Tolstoy says is "All lies",

Tolstoy says, not without justification, that what the prison system achieves is that

Ordinary simple men holding the social and Christian morality of the ordinary Russian peasant, lost this conception, and formed a new prison-bred one, founded chiefly on the idea that any outrage to or violation of human beings is justifiable if it seems profitable.

Yet the "social and Christian morality of the ordinary Russian peasant" came from the very worship that Tolstoy denounces and mocks in terms that nowadays would be called "hate speech".


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Not the last literary coffee klatsch

Four years ago a group of us gathered at Cafe 41 in Arcadia (Et in Arcadia ego) for a discussion of Christianity and literature, in imitation of the Oxford Inklings, except that they met in a pub, and we met in a cafe, so our gathering was more in the nature of a coffee klatsch, and for four years we met on the first Thursday of every month. Sometimes there were 3 or 4 of us, sometimes 8 or 10 -- the bigger numbers mainly during university vacations, when university lecturers (and students) could join us.

But one of our regular members was taken ill, and another died, and so it looked as though our fourth anniversary gathering today might be the last. So we had a "Meeting for Business", as the Quakers say, to discuss whether we should continue, and decided that we would. But we also thought that there must be more people in the Great City of Tshwane who liked the Oxford Inklings and their writings, and might like to chat about them, or the kind of things they talked about, over a cup of coffee. So if you are reading this and know anyone like that, please tell them about us.


This time we discussed quite an eclectic range of books, yet there also seemed to be a common theme. I had read one called The Horse Road (review here) about a horse-mad girl in Central Asia in the first century BC whose mother would not allow her to keep slaves as she herself had been a slave. They were nomadic horse breeders, and we talked about the Khoi of the Western Cape, who were originally nomadic pastoralists and moved around.

Janneke Weidema had been reading a book about the Sovietising of outer Mongolia, which she thought had similarities to the enclosure movement in England, perhaps related to a verse:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The Mongols too were nomadic pastoralists and the Soviet Russians had tried to force them to settle on collective farms and grow crops. I had not long ago read a book that dealt with the other end of that process, The last disco in Outer Mongolia.

Nick Middleton visited Mongolia in 1987 and in 1990, shortly before and shortly after the switch from Communist bureaucracy to a more liberal and democratic society. As a geographer on his first
visit he was working on hydrography, on his second he was planning for ecotourism. He catches a society in transition from one mode to another.

So Janneke had read a book relating to the beginning of the Bolshevik period, and I read read a couple relating to the end of it. But I had also read one relating to the middle of it, and that tied up a lot of loose ends. The book relating to the middle of it was Journey into Russia by Laurens van der Post -- see my review here, especially the last couple of paragraphs.

There was a common thread running through all of them -- in both communism and capitalism it was the common people who were being screwed by the bureaucrats, the apparatchiks, the managers, the MBAs. Whether it's the goose on the common, the pastures of the Khoi in the Western Cape or the Mongolian nomads, or the people who are being called on to pay ever more for electricity because of the follies of Eskom and the modern equivalent of enclosures -- land reform in South Africa. It's basically the same at root.

Van der Post put his finger on it when he wrote about the state and the collective farms of the USSR:

The revolution had worked a confidence trick on them all. They had revolted in order to have the land to themselves. But no sooner was the revolution consolidated than a far more inflexible landlord, the State, had taken it away from them again in the name of collectivization. And, judging by the show pieces I saw, there were few farmers in charge of farms. Party secretaries, accountants and factory foremen were the types one usually found in positions of command.

Back in the old days, when Eskom was Escom, the ESC, the Electricity Supply Commission, it was mainly run by engineers. In those days, the 1960s and 1970s, most electricity was generated from coal, and rather than transporting coal to the power stations, they built the power stations where the coal was, in what is now the Highveld of Mpumalanga, which came to be called "Kragveld" for that reason.

Then in the 1980s came the mania for privatisation (the Reagan/Thatcher years).  Escom was privatised and became Eskom, a State-Owned Enterprise (SOE), though since it was still owned by the State one could say it was semi-privatised. But the coal mines that the power stations were built on were fully privatised -- some of them ended up in the hands of the Guptas -- and they found it was more profitable to sell the coal overseas than to sell it to Eskom, and so Eskom had to buy coal where they could, often of the wrong quality and at vastly inflated prices. And the privatised Eskom was run by managers, by bureaucrats, not by engineers, just like the Soviet state and collective farms that Van der Post wrote about.

And so, as George Orwell wrote at the end of his fable Animal Farm, the ordinary animals looked from men to pigs, and from pigs to men, from capitalists to communists and from communists to capitalists, and could no longer tell the difference.

Cows Come Home Shock Horror

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a fundi on agricultural economics and marketing, but this piece in Bishop Alan's blog makes a lot of sense to me, and I suspect that the behaviour of supermarket chains in South Africa is not all that much different.

Bishop Alan’s Blog: Cows Come Home Shock Horror:

Let’s zoom in on the dirty truth about dairy. The Blue is the farm gate price [click on the link to Bishop Alan's blog to see the graphs]. The Purple is the distributor/ processor element. The Cream, in every sense, is Lord Tesco’s Cut. In 1995, the farmer got about 24 pence a litre, the distributors got about 18, and Lord Tesco and chums got 1 and a bit. That may sound low, but of course he sold many litres compared to the farmer, so he wasn’t exactly short of a few bob. Can you believe it, but these days the farmer gets a bit less, and the distributor much the same, whilst UK supermarkets are taking a huge cut — 10 times as much as back then! The argument for going local is to try and bring some of that margin back to the people who actually do the work. Otherwise some are actually being paid less than 10 years ago. Cut out supermarket Shareholders and for roughly the same price, the farmer gets a living wage.

There's been quite a bit of talk about land reform in South Africa, but with the example of Zimbabwe's utterly botched attempt (because its concern was not with the land or the people, but with the political fortunes of ZANU-PF and its leader, Mad Bob Mugabe) many people are understandably somewhat nervous about it. But it goes beyond land and agriculture and political gain, and Bishop Alan's comments seem to be applicable, mutatis mutandis, to our situation too.