Imraan Coovadia - Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela

In a well-known letter to Gershom Scholem dated 3 December 1964, Hannah Arendt argued that evil is never radical it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension That is its banality. Only the good has depth and can be radical. The superficiality of evil is a matter of controversy, but Arendts sense of the depth of good is borne out by three modern iconsLeo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. They embody a paradox: the closeness of practices of violence and non-violence in the search for social change. Their thought and conduct, which show their deep relation with one another, illustrate the radical nature of the good, asking us to rethink boundaries between literature and politics, economy and the body, and individual and collective identity.

They shared the experience of mass violence: wars and revolutions, according to Arendt, determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century [despite having] outlived all their ideological justifications. They were familiar with violence. Tolstoy was a soldier before he was a writer, and many of his greatest stories drew on his memories of serving in the Caucasus and Crimea. The title of War and Peace suggests a partnership between violence and non-violence. This strange correlation is embodied in the character who embodies the novels historical visionField Marshal Mikhail Illarionovich Golenishchev-Kutuzov (17451813), who was Tolstoys version of the real-life commander of Russian forces during the French invasion of 1812. (In the aristocratic fashion the Tolstoys and the Kutuzovs were related by marriage.)

Mikhail Kutuzov had been shot in the head twice, in 1774 and again in 1788, in Russias clashes with the Ottomans, leaving him one good eye. According to a study in the Journal of Neurosurgery, he may have lost the full use of his frontal lobe.

Kutuzovs strategic vision reduces the overall level of violence during the campaign. The Russian commander believes that mounting a conventional defence to the invasion would be counterproductive, given the intense pressures acting on Napoleons Grande Arme, so he prevents battles rather than seeking them out. Because he expresses the national feeling of the Russian people, according to Tolstoy, Kutuzov has the leeway to forestall any unnecessary resort to arms:

the recognition of that feeling in him made the people choose him as representative of the national war. And only that feeling placed him on that loftiest human height, from which he, the commander in chief, directed all his powers, not at killing and destroying people, but at sparing and pitying them.(emphasis added).

The element of mercy is not incidental. Sparing and pitying is, in the terms of the novel, the essence of the successful Russian campaign. Kutuzov is an embodiment of both violence and non-violence, in other words. A paradoxical figure at the heart of Tolstoys radicalism, he expresses the authors scepticism regarding rational models of causality, human action, and social change.

Tolstoys vision stands outside the traditional frameworks used by historians and political scientists. He ignored the cherished liberal distinction between the private and public sphere, while undermining conservative reverence for the state and religious establishment. He valued outcomes over procedures, yet showed a particular concern for restraining political methods. On the one hand, he sought changes which were more sweeping than those demanded by Communists and socialists. On the other hand, he was set against the use of force to achieve them, an attractive view given the decades of political murder and economic disturbance following his death in 1909.

Tolstoy considered late imperial Russia an illegitimate regime, sustained by killing on a vast scale, and by the ideological hegemony of the church and army (what he called hypnotism). Unlike many on the left, he did not advise seizing the power of the state. On the contrary, the great revolution which I hope will begin at once everywhere will consist in the annihilation of state power. It is difficult not to hear a premonition of the Bolshevik revolution in these words, although Tolstoy was rejecting the terrorist methods employed by anarchist cells. The question he raisedhow to confront injustice without mirroring its methodsis perennial. It was an urgent matter for Gandhi and Mandela also, one which ran through the whole of their lives.

Inequality was a sister to political violence, as Tolstoys investigations of poverty revealed. In 1881, as his radical convictions deepened, the writer moved to Moscow where city poverty was new and incomprehensible.

Considering his day at Khitrov Market four years later, Tolstoy compared it with an execution he had attended in Paris as a young man: by my presence and non-interference, I had lent my approval to that crime, and had taken part in it. Poverty and inequality were the equivalent of everyday violence: the existence of tens of thousands of such [poor] people in Moscow, while I and other thousands dined on fillets and sturgeon was a crime, not perpetrated a single time, but one which was incessantly being perpetrated over and over again. Deprivation was kept out of sight by high society, but Tolstoy was determined to return it to mind. (A decade earlier in