Leo Tolstoy doctrine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine

For the last three weeks or so, I have had a rough time watching television. The breaking news on CNN and BBC has always been about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and whenever they have shown those gory scenes depicting the killing of innocent civilians, I have had to fight back my tears.

As I compose this essay, I am thinking of my nine grandchildren. So, to say that I empathise with the Ukrainian grandparents who have lost their grandchildren in this brutal war would be an understatement.

But the question that has been bothering me, and which has stubbornly refused to go away is: what happened to the land of Leo Tolstoy, that incomparable writer and thinker who argued so eloquently for pacifism and non-violence?

I have never been to any of the two countries which are now at war. But I do know that Tolstoy’s philosophy of peace and non-violence has had a profound effect on world affairs and the fate of humanity as a whole. Mahatma Gandhi, who led the struggle for the independence of India, was influenced by the Russian thinker.

And the idea that even in the struggle for justice and equality you don’t shed human blood - this idea crossed oceans and became an integral part of the world view of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. This means, therefore, that the Civil Rights Movement in America is in part indebted to Leo Tolstoy. Of course, the irony is that the man who championed peace and non-violence in the United States was himself a victim of violence.

When I was a visiting professor at Soka University in Tokyo in 2000, I was privileged to meet and interact with the Founder Daisaku Ikeda, who is also Japan’s foremost pacifist. Ikeda was also the president of Soka Gakkai International, a Buddhist organization whose mission is to promote world peace and which has members in 192 countries, including Kenya.

On one occasion, Ikeda invited me to a meeting he had with the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, who at the time was heading a peace institute in the United States. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, the Buddhist thinker and peace activist asked me to co-author a literature book with him. The book, which is in Japanese, is called Dialogue on World Literature, and one of the subjects of our discussion was Leo Tolstoy’s writings. My takeaway from our conversation was that Ikeda was a great admirer of the Russian writer, and that the two were on the same page with respect to the peace and welfare of the human race.

Just in case the reader is wondering why Leo Tolstoy is such a big deal to me, let me briefly tell the story of how I discovered him and what his writings mean to me.

In the 1960s, I was in a Quaker school called Friends School Kamusinga. Quakers are pacifists who believe there is that of God in everyone. If you kill somebody, you kill that of God in them. So, this Christian religious group, also called the Society of Friends, is strongly opposed to violence and war.

In those days, the majority of our teachers were British Quakers, and, because of their theological affinity with Leo Tolstoy, they stocked our school library with his books. During the Sunday service, the teachers would occasionally read passages from these books.

However, the idea of non-violence was not easy to sell to us, Kenyan students. We had just attained our independence and our politicians, led by President Jomo Kenyatta, seized every opportunity to tell us that we had shed blood for our uhuru. But as for me personally, what our teachers told us about peace and non-violence was reinforced by a decision I made, namely, to read Tolstoy’s writings, starting with the shorter ones.

During my A levels, I borrowed Anna Karenina, a huge novel of about 1,000 pages. This book was longer than our set books combined, so my classmates thought I was crazy when they saw me reading it. But for me, this novel was simply unputdownable. I was amazed at the depth of Tolstoy’s understanding of human nature, and I would walk alone on the school compound ruminating on the fact that once upon a time such a genius walked on our planet.

In December of 1969, after my Cambridge Higher School Certificate, I came to Nairobi to look for a job. I lived in Kangemi with my cousin and namesake, the late David Indangasi. One day, he gave me Sh10 for bus fare. I came to the City Centre and then I walked into a bookshop. And what did I find? Two massive volumes of War and Peace, each going for Sh5. Believe it or not, I spent the Sh10 on the novel. And after this sensational purchase, I would just walk from Kangemi to the City Centre and back.

I didn’t tell my cousin what I had done with the money he gave me, and I hid from him the fact that I was trekking daily to the CBD. He would see me reading a brand new book, but since he wasn’t the curious type he didn’t ask any questions about it.

War and Peace questions the morality of war. Why do humans, including Napoleon, start wars? And why do individuals participate in this barbarism? In this novel, there is a line I have never forgotten these 50-plus years. Tolstoy says that when they are not fighting, members of the military are idle, and then he observes: “Our moral nature is such that we cannot be happy and idle at the same.” A blinding insight indeed, and which explains why men who are not trained to think but only to obey orders rush to the battlefield to kill their fellow humans when they are told to do so. And they do this supposedly in search of happiness and adventure.

The Russian writer had an unrivalled capacity for empathy. He emotionally reached out to the underdogs of the Russian Society. He wrote sympathetically about the non-Russians such as the Cossacks. And towards the end of his life, he not only embraced the peasants of his country, he joined them and became one of them and dressed like them. This Russian aristocrat had come to the conclusion that the ownership of private property was immoral and to actualise this belief, he renounced his claim to the land he had inherited from his parents. In other words, he committed class suicide.

Back to my story with Tolstoy.

By the time I joined the University of Nairobi in September of 1970, I had read all of his works in English translation. The then head of the Department of Literature, Andrew Gurr, did not know this when, in one of his lectures to first-year students, he referred to Anna Karenina as the best novel that had ever been written. “I take it that none of you has read this work,” he added. I was sitting at the back of the lecture theatre, smiling to myself.

My American friends

Let me now turn to the Americans and how they relate to the war in Ukraine. And in the interests of full disclosure, I must say I regard America as my second home and the Americans I interacted with as members of my extended family. You will soon understand why.

I get very emotional when I talk about my life in America. The late Prof Philip Bell bought me a plane ticket; I didn’t have to call a harambee. Bell had taught economics at the University of Nairobi and had also been Director of the University of California Education Abroad Programme. He and his wife came to meet me at the San Francisco Airport and drove me to U.C. Santa Cruz. That night, my newly appointed advisor, Prof John Jordan, gave me blankets for my use in the guest house.

The Americans had awarded me a scholarship to do a PhD from 1974 to 1977, and in addition they gave me a job as a teaching assistant. The professors later linked me to a charitable organization called the Grub Foundation which used to send me $200 a month. With the money I was getting, I was able to spare some to pay fees for my brothers back in Kenya. And when I submitted my doctoral thesis on Conrad, U.C Santa Cruz, on the recommendation of my supervisors, awarded me a tuition waiver, and the salary advance I had received from the University of Nairobi was returned.

Professors often forget their students, even the ones they supervise. I am one of them, so I know. But my professors and supervisors did not forget me. When in 1992, I visited U.C Santa Cruz as a Fulbright scholar based at the University of Iowa, they sent Prof Diane Gifford to meet me at the San Francisco Airport. Prof Gifford took me to my first supervisor, Prof Priscilla Shaw, who warmly received me. I remember her taking me to a conference where they were discussing the depiction of women in literature. I was the only black person in the room.

And then at one point, during the break, this youngish beautiful white lady comes to me and shakes my hand and says: “I don’t know who you are, but, whoever you are, you are very handsome.” Then she goes away without asking for my name. I was taken aback because I had never, ever thought of myself as handsome. That evening, my second supervisor, Prof John Jordan, and his wife invited me to spend a night in their house.

So, you can see why I regard my American friends as my distant relatives, and why I have such fond memories of them. But I want to express my reservations about their political leaders in connection with the war in Ukraine.

1992 was the year of the presidential campaign in America, and the contest was between Bill Clinton and George Bush. There was a third candidate called Ross Perot. The Soviet Union had just collapsed and George Bush was claiming credit for it, while Bill Clinton was seeing it as a historical inevitability. In that campaign, Bill Clinton was being ridiculed by the Republicans as a draft dodger in reference to the American war in Vietnam.

That was when I learnt that to many Americans pacifism is a dirty word. You are called names if you refuse to join an institution whose mission is to kill people. And when you fight in a war in distant lands you become a hero who “protected our country.”

Many Americans were surprised when Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because for them it was paradoxical for an American president to be seen as a peace maker. American presidents have historically invaded other countries and taught them lessons in democracy.

Later when President Assad of Syria reportedly used chemical weapons on his own people, and Obama refused to intervene, the mainstream media saw him as weak. His argument “I was elected to stop wars, not to start them” fell on deaf ears.

Let me relate this obsession with war in America to the fate of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union. I want to argue that although he might have been too trusting and politically naïve, Gorbachev had the Tolstoyan peace-loving sensibility and outlook. He withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan. He stopped support for Mengistu in Ethiopia. He tore down the Berlin wall and agreed to the reunification of Germany. He announced that the class struggle, otherwise called proletarian internationalism, was no longer going to be the cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy. He did this as he tried to implement the twin policies of perestroika and glasnost – that is restricting and openness. Part of the restructuring was the introduction of the market economy. Gorbachev forged ahead with these reforms in spite of criticism from his own Communist Party members that he was socialism’s “gravedigger.”

Most fundamentally, the Soviet president presided over the breakup of the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Created in 1949, NATO was originally targeted against the Soviet Union and was therefore a counterweight to the Warsaw Pact. The West did not reciprocate by disbanding NATO.

In the meantime, Gorbachev faced fierce opposition from Boris Yeltsin who had been elected president of Russia. Yeltsin, with the support of the West, not only fought against Gorbachev, he wanted the Soviet Union dismantled. With the dissolution of the USSR, Gorbachev was going to be rendered jobless.

When he was still in power, Gorbachev, the believer in Leo Tolstoy’s pacifism, was dreaming about Europe as “our common home.” The West didn’t listen, and instead, after the fall of the Soviet Union, they embarked on what many analysts call a reckless expansion of NATO. This military alliance was moving its boarders eastward, with the obvious intention of threatening Russia.

As I end this discussion of the role America and the West have played in this conflict, let me ask a rhetorical question: If Canada signaled a desire to join an enemy camp, wouldn’t the United States go to war with their northern neighbor? We all remember what happened during the Cuban missile crisis.

With respect to Putin, I want to say this. If I were in his shoes, I would not have invaded Ukraine. In this day and age, you cannot occupy a sovereign country. Both the Russians and the Americans should have learnt that lesson in Afghanistan. Colonialism is a thing of the past.

But as they say, the glass is half full. When I saw this girl with a placard reading NO WAR behind the newscaster on Russian TV, I said to myself: somebody somewhere in that vast country has read Leo Tolstoy.

Henry Indangasi is a Professor of Literature.