Life in a Penal Battalion of the Imperial Russian Army: The Tolstoyan N. T. Iziumchenko's Story

Peter Brock and John L. Keep, eds. Life in a Penal Battalion of the Imperial Russian Army: The Tolstoyan N. T. Iziumchenko's Story. York, England: William Sessions Limited, 2001. Distributed in North America by Syracuse University Press. xiv, 63 pp. Notes. $15.95, paper.

Nikolai Trofimovich Iziumchenko was a semi-educated peasant from Kursk province who, under the influence of his school teacher, Yevdokim Nikitich Drozhzhin, became a follower of Leo Tolstoy's philosophy of non-resistance to evil. In 1899, at the age of twenty-two, Iziumchenko was conscripted into the Russian Army. Two years later, in accordance with his Tolstoyan beliefs, he deserted his unit and openly refused to serve further in the army. In consequence, he was arrested and sentenced to two years in a penal battalion. There he once again met his mentor, Drozhzhin, who had also been arrested for refusing to undertake military service. Iziumchenko's memoirs of his time in the penal battalion have now been published in English for the first time, with an introduction by Peter Brock and John Keep (both retired from the University of Toronto).

Only sixty-three pages long, Iziumchenko's memoirs are short and often engrossing to read, written in a light and colloquial fashion. Much of the content is a fairly standard description of the brutality and mindlessness of military life, made worse by the fact that the author was in prison. Of itself, this description is unremarkable. The treatment of prisoners in the penal battalion was often brutal, and by modern standards seems shocking, but given the time and place, the conditions that Iziumchenko describes are not particularly harsh. As Brock and Keep point out in their introduction, life in the penal battalion "was benign and mild" compared with conditions in Stalin's labour camps. For this reason, the main value of the book lies not in its description of the prison system, but in the story of the behaviour and beliefs of the main protagonist. This is not Iziumchenko himself, but rather his mentor Drozhzhin, who died in the prison of tuberculosis. Unlike Iziumchenko, who agreed to perform some military duties, Drozhzhin refused to undertake any. As a result he was sentenced to a second term of three years in the penal battalion, despite his obvious bad health. His good cheer in the face of the persecution he suffered and his refusal to submit are held up as ideal examples of Tolstoy's philosophy of nonresistance to evil being put into practice.

Iziumchenko ends his memoir on what seems to be a positive note, commenting that after Drozhzhin's death the number of conscientious objectors in Russia had risen. He clearly hoped that the example of non-resistance would spread. This naivety is fairly representative of the thinking of both Iziumchenko and Drozhzhin. Ultimately their struggle against military authority proved futile. Nevertheless, Brock and Keep are to be thanked for making this memoir available in English. It is a lively portrayal of life in a punishment unit of the late Imperial Russian Army, and provides insight into the philosophy of Russian conscientious objectors, as well as into their treatment by the Imperial authorities.

[Author Affiliation]

Paul Robinson, University of Hull