Leo. N. Tolstoy. Article It is time to understand

«A state based on calculation and held together by fear is a structure that is both vile and fragile», - Amiel says somewhere. One cannot but agree with this in general, and one can understand it with reason, but besides this understanding, one can also experience with one;s whole being a feeling of disgust and horror before such a structure when one lives in it, and all the vileness and fragility of this structure of this structure is not covered by anything. And this same feeling is now being experienced in Russia by the vast majority of 150 million people.
It is good when the vileness and fragility of this structure is skillfully hidden from people by complex, cunning sophism, rooted in generations of people, they can see all madness, injustice, cruelty of this structure and, stagnant in they slavery, imagine that all the devices of this structure: courts, police, troops, ministers, chiefly parliament, are necessary and beneficent institutions that ensure they security and freedom.
Such people sincerely believe that they are free as people totally can be free, and surely that the institutions that keep they in slavery are the inevitable conditions of life for all people, and that if anything need to be changed in them, then only a few details, and only in general, everything is as it should be and cannot be otherwise.
This is how the British, Americans, French, Germans think and can think, but we Russians, unfortunately, or rather unfortunately, especially at the present time, no matter how hard we try, cannot think and feel like that.
We Russians now in the vast majority, with all our being we are aware and feel that al the state system that holds, oppressed and corrupts us, not only is not necessary for us, but is something hostile, disgusting and completely superfluous and not needed for anything.
For every person in Russian now. Not only a slightly thinking person. But for the most thoughtless, illiterate person, it is completely clear that, in addition to all usual troubles that disturb a person;s calm life. He constantly experiences deprivation and suffering, the cause of which is one thing - the activity of the government,
For every person in Russia now, not only a slightly thinking person, but for the most thoughtless, illiterate person, it is completely clear that, in addition to all the usual troubles that disturb a person’s calm life, he constantly experiences deprivation and suffering, the cause of which is one - the activity of the government, which most different sides with inexorable rudeness and cruelty, unnecessarily, without ceasing, torments and crushes him, unless he himself enters the number of those certain people, who crush everyone.
On the one hand, the Russian people of our time especially vividly feel this pressure because the government, no longer encountering obstacles, with complete impudence, crushes, strangles, kills, locks up, exiles everyone who dares not only oppose, but to raise a protesting voice against him.