Tolstoy and his theory about "Great Men"

I was reading the newspaper this weekend and trying to decide what makes it such a chore. It used to be my favorite part of the weekend. To sit on a quiet Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and pore over ripples of information, strange and interesting tidbits unfolding in unpredictable ways. Now it’s tedious. And I figured out why. Every newspaper, and I’m talking every one, has decided to attribute the tilt of the earth to one man. You know his name. And it’s so boring, so intellectually exhausting, to try to absorb news through this lens that I didn’t realize how boring and exhausting it was until I came upon Tolstoy again this summer, and on his theory of “Great Men.”

Tolstoy, who in 1869 gave us the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace, followed by the second greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina, 1878, was a careful observer of humans and how we operate in the joints and seams of history. Tolstoy took the position that the big events of history (for instance, the Napoleonic Wars and French invasion of Russia in 1812) do not depend on individual leaders. To the contrary, the so-called “Great Men” like Napoleon, who imagine they are in command of situations, are really pawns of powers entirely out of their control. Neither Napoleon nor Czar Alexander I “decided” the shape of those events. That the French tried to invade and occupy Russia in 1812 and failed miserably was simply not of their doing. Why? How? Tolstoy believed great historical events are so complex in character, so intricate and mysterious, if not overdetermined in their causes, that no one reason—certainly no one man—can be singled out to explain them.

And this is arguably one of Tolstoy’s greatest contributions to 19th-century thought. He both predicted and argued against the gobbledygook that was to come—that all there is, all there is, is the individual, the Great Man, and the earth’s resources should be turned into a factory for Great Men. It’s the Individual, stupid. Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead say it’s so; Tolstoy and War and Peace say it isn’t so, it can’t be so, and it never was so.

But how does the superior novelist know this?

Let’s go another Tolstoy idea. Everything passes. Sickness, old age, and death destroy the body. All human relationships are perpetual struggles of love and hate against indifference. Fame is a figment of the imagination. Wealth, power, prestige are as permanent as a moment of sunshine; they can disappear with a single cloud. To find the meaning of life in any of these conditions or all of them is the “vanity of vanities.” To look for meaning here is not to find it. And this notion—this line of reasoning— led Tolstoy to the verge of suicide in his fifties, which is an odd fact if you consider he’d already become the most famous novelist in Russia, arguably the world; he was named “the other Czar” (such was his popularity) and had achieved what few will ever achieve—the ultimate merging of ego, artistic will, and recognition. In short, Tolstoy was a Great Man. And the message he wanted to impart is that there is no such thing. Great Men are on the list of things that don’t exist, despite what the 21st and 20th centuries would have you believe.

And so, it always ends in a paradox. It takes the Great Man to tell us there is no such thing. This church we’ve built to the individual is a boring and tedious place to live. It’s full of shallow and confused ideas. To find a better one, we should go outside again and see how small we are in the landscape of things. To do this. To become humble again—to admit we don’t know and we don’t know, and we don’t know, and we don’t know—is the only place left to go. And then hopefully our newspapers become interesting again, and I can go back to enjoying my Saturday morning cup of coffee.

Pipelines, Dostoyevsky, Russia and the West

One could argue that the story of modern Russia and the West is a pipeline. Or broadly, a series of pipelines carrying the largest gas reserves in the world from Siberia and the Arctic shelf, to Europe. Russia, after all, holds more natural gas, oil, coal, uranium, nickel, copper, palladium, iron, gold, titanium, etc. than any other place on earth. Our attitudes about their wealth color every thought, every action, every exchange, every feeling we have about the Kremlin. You can admit that, or you can not admit that—depending on your motives—but one thing can’t be argued. Russia is rich. They are possibly richer than us.

To see the future between Russia and the West, you have to divorce yourself of this idea that Russian people have a desire to be like Europe and the United States. Because it’s not true. Let me see if I can explain.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, that greatest of Russian writers, was born on October 30, 1821, in a wing of Moscow’s Foundling Hospital where his father was a resident physician. He was markedly intelligent, literary, from a young age. He attended the School for Engineers in St. Petersburg and then upon graduation, in 1843, he served in the Engineering Corps before resigning to become a writer. His first work was a translation of Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet—and in fact he spent much of his twenties studying and translating France’s great thinkers. In 1849, the thing everyone knows about Dostoyevsky happened. He was part of a group that met periodically to read and discuss the utopian socialist, Fourier. During the reign of Nicholas I, this was forbidden. This innocuous activity was considered subversive. Dostoyevsky was imprisoned for eight months, then on the morning of December 22, he and the other “conspirators” were taken to a public square and sentenced to death. They were lined up to face a firing squad. At the last moment, a horse and rider galloped in with a message from Tsar Nicholas: it was all a joke, a mockery, to scare the wits out of these men. They would live, because the Tsar was merciful. One man went nearly insane. The rest, including Dostoyevsky, were sent to a Siberian prison camp for four years of hard labor, a hellscape which is described in many of his later novels (Notes from House of the Dead, 1861, etc.). He then conscripted for five years. It took Dostoyevsky almost a decade to regain his life, and when he did, he took his first trip to Europe. It’s useful to know the facts of Dostoyevsky’s life, to better understand what he thought, saw, and felt when he traveled.

Was Europe a breath of fresh air? A respite from all that he’d experienced in Mother Russia? Was Dostoyevsky, like the radical liberals of his homeland, enamored with everything he saw as he walked the streets of Paris and London? Was the physical location of reason, rationalism, and ceaseless striving producing better people and a better way of living? Was there visual evidence that “man acting to his own advantage” a form of progress that was absent inside Russia, because Russians were backwards thinkers? Was Europe better?

No. In fact, the opposite.

In Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, which Dostoyevsky wrote upon his return from Europe, he writes about what he saw there. Corruption and decay. These places, these people, the way of life they have chosen is corrupt, Dostoyevsky said. It is corrupt beyond anything he’d ever experienced. The civilizations of Western Europe are in decay, he thought, because corruption leads to decay.

Decay and corruption. That’s what Dostoyevsky said about the West.

Now keep in mind: this point of view won him nothing inside Russia. You may think it won him friends inside Russia, but that is not the case. He was roundly criticized by many respected writers and thinkers of his day. A slashing satire of Dostoyevsky’s views were published and circulated. After a second trip to Europe, he was so enraged and infuriated, he began publishing a journal. His rage drips from the pages of Notes from Underground, 1864. The entire work is a monologue. The narrator spews poison. What does the narrator say? What does he want you to know? He says this fashionable idea— Man is good, Man seeks his own advantage, Man will seek everyone’s communal advantage as he becomes more enlightened—is wrong. Dead wrong. A new golden age is not dawning in Europe. Eden is not around the corner. Man behaving according to scientific principles and only that, is not only a thin idea, it’s a wrong idea. Materialism is the worst form of striving.

And the narrator goes on, and on, and on.

He rails against every notion we have, every tawdry little idea, that we in the West put under that banner of “progress.”

Man is not rational and good. Man is, has always been, irrational, capricious, and desiring of things he can’t name. Dostoyevsky believes that to reduce the work of living to scientific truths like “two plus two equals four” and “the wall” and “the piano key” is a silly way to organize your time, let alone your nation. Dostoyevsky visited the Crystal Palace on one trip to London, and he walked away saying that marvel of materialism, that symbol of perfection and achievement is nothing more than mechanics. Material wealth satisfies Man’s physical needs. It doesn’t satisfy his spiritual needs.

And cities. Dostoyevsky was didactic about cities.

Recall, like Dickens and Balzac, Dostoevsky was a novelist who lived in a city. He visited all the great cities. But what he saw in Europe disgusted him. He believed the pseudo-psychological humanitarian ideas coming out of those diseased urban centers from the likes of Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, etc., formed the basis of much of what was wrong with the human condition. The cause of illness, Dostoyevsky says, is urbanism. Russians are happiest as “pochvenichestva”— or people of the soil. As we’re forced to live on top of each other in cities, as the impingement of society on the individual gets so heavy, so intense there’s nowhere to escape—Man grows miserable. “We have almost reached the point of looking at actual ‘real life’ as an effort,” Dostoyevsky writes, “almost as hard work, and we all privately agree that is it better in books.”

Suffering is the mainstay of Dostoyevsky’s novels. The irony of it is, he believed much of this suffering was coming from Europe. The winds of change were blowing West to East, not the other way around. Russians were being infected with the brain of cities in the West. With the brain of thinkers, living in those cities. Russians were losing themselves, their way of living, to ideals they didn’t hold. Once you crack the surface of Dostoyevsky thought, of his basic disagreement the prevailing ideas of his time—the ideas or our time—you have a glimpse into all of eternity.

This man has been declared one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Whether you agree with Dostoyevsky, or not, is an exercise for you and the librarian. All of his books are available. Grab a pencil and figure out where you disagree. But the point can’t be overlooked. By some accident of history, this Russian writer—who decried our thought, our way of living—is known as one of the best writers who ever lived. He is constantly referenced everywhere you go. It’s worth figuring out why. What’s in these stories that calls to a higher truth? What’s in Dostoyevsky’s words, that is truer than 150 years of so-called history?

It’s about a pipeline now. All we hear about is pipelines. And natural gas. And oil. But there’s a rich history of opposing thought; and it’s worth going there, visiting Dostoyevsky, at least for the view.

Discovering Warren Buffett likes Pipelines

If you’ve spent any time in the professional investor universe—you know—the landscape is chock-a-block with liars. Professional investors speak to other professional investors about companies they like, when they don’t own a single share of that company. They claim to be building a position, when really, they’ve just dumped their entire position. They say they’re short something when they’re actually long, long when they’re short; they own at-the-money options when they wouldn’t even put up money for the tails. They think Japanese Yen is undervalued, but they’re still selling. The bond wears an attractive coupon, but they’d never touch it. It goes on and on. The lies. The subterfuge. The dialectic angling.

Enter the exception: Warren Buffett.

Is it the investing track record that makes the man? Is it the fact that he spends all day reading quietly, by himself, in a room? Is it the five 12-ounce cans of Coke-a-cola he drinks a day? Regular Coke at work. Cherry Coke at home? Anyone who has read the books and watched the documentaries on Warren Buffett knows he’s an unusual bird. Why is he unusual?

Warren Buffett is unusual because he tells the truth.

By the way: how do you know when someone is telling the truth? I submit: you read what they’ve written. You read everything they’ve written. It’s easy to lie when speaking to a TV camera. It’s easy to lie when speaking to a crowd. It’s easy to lie in a conference room, when it’s clear the meeting will be over sooner, the goal will be achieved, if the expedient thing is uttered. It’s harder, actually, it’s impossible, to write your thoughts down on paper for 56 years (1970-2025) and do anything other than tell the truth. Let me explain.

Warren Buffett writes an annual letter. These annual letters detail his thoughts and his actions over the course of his career. You can audit these thoughts and actions, but you don’t need to, because unlike 99.9% of the world, he does it for you. Buffett is famous for admitting mistakes. The most fun part of reading his annual letters is phrases like this one, from the 2011 annual letter. “I’ve run out of good news. Here are some developments that hurt us…. I spent about $2 billion buying several bond issues of Energy Future Holdings, an electric utility operation serving portions of Texas. That was a mistake – a big mistake…. The company’s prospects were tied to the price of natural gas, which tanked shortly after our purchase and remains depressed.” Or, “Last year I told you that a housing recovery will probably begin within a year or so. I was dead wrong.”

The man was dead wrong.

Warren Buffett, arguably the most successful investor of all time, tells you when he’s dead wrong. In fact, he makes a practice of admitting his mistakes. And if you read enough of his work, it’s patently clear he’s not writing for you per se. He’s writing for himself. He’s writing as a way to continue a thought thread, a chain of logic, that he’s been working on for nearly a century. Does it matter what the chain of logic is? What it touches? That it stems from Benjamin Graham’s Intelligent Investor? Or could it be anything? Could it be about trees? Or the sky? Or about bombs over Iraq? Or about the zebra longwing butterfly, which has black and white strips and a wingspan of 3.9 inches?

This summer, I’ll be spending more time in Warren Buffett’s annual letters. By the way, the nugget that led me here was pipelines. Oddly, I was looking to see which pipelines Warren Buffett has owned over the years when I noticed something. Buffett doesn’t just “like” pipelines as an investment proposition (he’s compared them to owning railroads); he likes them so much that upon retirement last year, he picked as his successor a man who began his career at CalEnergy, which then became MidAmerican Energy Holdings, which was then acquired by Berkshire Energy. Buffett is entrusting his life’s work, his beloved Berkshire Hathaway, to a man from a pipeline company. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, so it goes.

The Secret Pipeline and the Business of Enemies

It’s always interesting when two nations who are sworn enemies engage in commerce that benefits both. It’s the cornerstone of Capitalist peace theory; trade between nations precludes bloodshed. And it might be true. It might work, for a time. Like picking fleas from a massive wild snarling dog, we can point to the flitting things and say, “This theory is alive. Trade between nations works. It creates peace and prevents them from going to war.” Time and the snarling dog sprint forward. A disagreement erupts, and the peace evaporates. Then we’re left to wonder about our theory.

Israel. Iran. The Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline.

This is the famous secret pipeline that runs through Israel, transporting crude oil from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Why is it called the Secret Pipeline? Well, let’s go back to the 1950s when Israel was struggling to exist and needed resources, more than anything, to stay alive. What resources? Oil, of course. Israel had plenty of friends (I won’t name them here) to negotiate supply from Iran. What it didn’t have was a way to transport the oil from port to desert and back again; so first a channel was built, then storage tanks were built, then a 16-inch pipeline, then a booster station followed by a 42-inch pipeline and more storage tanks, and so on and so on, until the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline was miracle-in-the-making. This pipeline was miraculous for many reasons, not the least of which is: it carried Iranian oil across Israel.

Also, it was owned 50:50 by Iran and Israel.  

To avoid embarrassing Iran in the eyes of the Muslim world, the corporate structure was kept secret. Then, as now, there were ways to do this involving shell companies formed in special economic zones like Liechtenstein, Canada, Panama, etc. If anyone went digging to see who owned the Secret Pipeline, they’d run into a mess of legal documents that pointed to nothing. Those in the know (anyone in the oil business) knew that Iran was the “silent partner” in a 49-year franchise established under the Oil Pipeline Franchise Law of 1968, exempting the partnership from income tax, municipal rates, lease fees and from the requirement to hold public tenders.

So, the two nations were cooperating. Kind of.

1970 was a banner year; at peak, the pipeline transported 10 million barrels of Iranian oil through Israel. Things might have continued this way; the wheels of commerce might have kept spinning, had it not been for the Iranian revolution. The revolution severed Israel-Iran relations entirely. The first drop in oil supply sent Israel into a tailspin; it needed to find other suppliers quickly. Fortunately, men like Marc Rich (who I have written about extensively, who I will discuss in a follow-up post) were able to broker new deals for Israel. Compensatory infrastructure was built. While the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline existed, the trust, the relationship between buyer and seller, was fractured. This began a legal battle that spans decades, that continues today, about who owns this pipeline really and what international court is willing (or able) to enforce the law.

If you want to bore yourself to tears, study the history of arbitration (Israel’s claims versus Iran’s claims) on the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline. The media prefers to ignore this dispute between two nations, which, unlike the other disputes, is rooted in law, papered by legal documents, and doesn’t take us into a religious spiritual war that can’t be won by either side.

Decades later, the pipeline remains a “secret.”

In 2014, when workers were moving a section of the pipeline running through the desert in Israel’s southern tip, where it meets Egypt and Jordan at the Red Sea, the pipe ruptured and oil began to gush. After 5,000 cubic meters of crude oil was spilled onto Route 90 and fumes from the oil wafted into Jordan (at which point Jordan deployed soldiers to the border, fearing chemical attack) when the full extent of the disaster was clear—when a nature preserve with gazelles and centuries-old acacia groves became slick rivers of oil—when Israeli citizens began demanding accountability, demanding answers, filing lawsuits, they found themselves running headfirst into a wall. A stone wall. “Everything about the pipeline is secret, even the direction the oil is flowing,” said an Israeli lawyer representing an environmental group, the plaintiff. Why? The Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline has operated since its founding under a blanket decree that shrouds its affairs in secrecy for reasons related to national security. Then, as now, the important thing to understand about national security is that it eclipses the possibility of anything else. Including a pipeline that connects two nations, that benefits both.     

Divers with a vendetta, and two weeks to train

Here’s the craziest part of The Nord Stream Conspiracy. In great detail, we are told how a group of regular men and women—expert at diving, but nothing else—are taught to blow up underwater infrastructure.

Initially, it was thought, they would need dive to the bottom of the Baltic Sea with prohibitively large explosive charges. Nord Stream was, after all, a powerfully built pipeline. This was a mistake in thinking; it was a mistake made by many experts after the explosions had taken place. The insanely devastating effect the blasts had on the pipelines was not caused by large explosives, but rather, tiny ones. Let’s call them bottle rockets. An old, wizened, explosives engineer, a Ukrainian in a wheelchair (a great character for a TV show) was hired to advise these divers on the operation. He noted the pipelines were highly pressurized. Punching even a tiny hole in a pressurized pipeline at the bottom of the sea would unleash a reaction that would rip the pipes wide open, not unlike piercing a balloon. “Make a small incision in the shell, and the pressure will do all the work,” he told them.

The plan was so simple, they didn’t believe him at first. He advised them to fill a diver’s bottle with octogen and hexagon, stable and easily handled explosives. He told them to attach the bottle to the joints in the pipeline, where the structure is weakest. Use a small piece of reinforced metal to direct the blast. He added, if a silicon cushion is inserted between pipeline surface and bottle, the impact will be bigger. The bottle should wear a timer. It should be detonated remotely. The goal, to direct the energy of the blast narrowly, enough to crack the pipe, can be accomplished with a bottle weighing just over 60 pounds. This was so unbelievable, they needed to test it.

Because the Baltic Sea is the most heavily-surveilled ocean in the world (who knew) they took their device to a granite quarry outside Kieve, Ukraine. The old engineer promised them, depth makes no difference for explosive effect. They could test their bottle rocket near the surface of the water. After several attempts, they got it right. They were able to achieve nice, big geysers. The tricker part of the operation, they knew, was submerging to 330 feet and placing the mines in the correct location. This would require practice, and practicing in the right conditions. They needed a body of water that mimicked the Baltic; low salinity, low visibility, and freezing near the bottom. They found another quarry to do the testing. For two weeks, that’s all they did. They tied a buoy to an anchor, and attached a string between the two. The male and female divers used the shot line to guide their descent, carrying 60-pound steel bottles filled with explosives to the bottom, placing them, and returning to the surface. They practiced in pairs, and often made the training more difficult by choosing spots where compasses didn’t work, or removing the heating device from their diving suits. At night, they got drunk. In the morning, they’d practice again. This went on until the group was ready to do the incredible. What can be learned from an explosives engineer in a wheelchair, what can be learned by people with a thirst for destruction… well, it’s more than incredible. They caused a 2.3 Richter scale tremor. The power of the blast equaled the thermal output of a major nuclear reactor. In Germany, where gas is more expensive than America, the leaked gas was worth $2 billion. The amount lost could power two million German households for a whole year. All this, from a group of divers with a vendetta. And two weeks to train. 

Why all the fuss over a simple pipeline?

The Chicago Times ran this cartoon in 1982. The cartoonist, Bill Maldin, captured the enormity of the debate (by depicting it as a joke).

The Reagan administration firmly opposed the massive West Siberian pipeline project, which was designed to bring natural gas from the Urengoy gas field to Western Europe. France and Germany supported it. The critical takeaway is: this debate has been raging for decades. There’s nothing new under the sun in 21st-century politics. Western Europe needs energy. Russia has it. It is natural and reasonable that Russia would recycle that revenue into its military, and the mystery is why we don’t use diplomatic channels to do the hard work of keeping the peace.   

The Mystery of the Nord Stream Pipeline Explosion

Life is short and it’s a sin to waste your time. That’s a direct rip from the notebooks of Albert Camus (1913-1960) which I’ve been reading, and heeding, this first week of July. I’m working on a TV project about pipelines—oil and gas pipelines—and my research has brought me to a book called The Nord Stream Conspiracy by Wall Street Journal reporter Bojan Pancevski. It’s an interesting book. It’s not particularly well-written, but it is packed with information on Ukrainian spies who have until this moment not appeared (not really) in the Western press’s coverage of this war. Why that is is anyone’s guess. If you don’t know what the Nord Stream explosion is, you’d be forgiven for not knowing. It’s been called a “conspiracy” from the beginning, despite the fact, there’s nothing conspiratorial about the outcome; in September 2022, seismologists detected an undersea earthquake near the Danish island of Bornholm, which turned out to be a series of detonations along a $20 billion pipeline transporting Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Within a minute, Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline ruptured and when Danish fighter jets were sent to survey the scene, pilots saw geysers three thousand feet in diameter, spewing methane into the ocean. They guessed, immediately, the underwater blasts were an act of sabotage. But who had done it? They didn’t know. In the days following the explosion, five hundred thousand metric tons of methane—the largest ever human-caused gas release—spread over the Baltic and killed more marine life than anyone can measure. When you read this book, the mystery isn’t “who did this” but rather, “who didn’t stop them?” It is abundantly clear the Russians did not blow up their own pipeline. Any 3rd grade child would guess the Ukrainians or the Americans (probably both) worked to achieve this outcome, and this is all to say, have we not learned this lesson? War is absurd. War is inflationary. To destroy things that were already built, to need to rebuild them is—if nothing else—an inflationary event. Vonnegut taught us this in Slaughterhouse Five, Camus’ entire philosophy is built on this idea. War is absurd. Stop doing it. If your ally or enemy is about to do something absurd, something inflationary, tell them to take a hike. Literally. Go into the mountains and take a twenty or thirty or forty-mile hike alone. At some point during that walk, they will exhaust themselves of stupid notions. Then we can return to some better, earlier, version of how to live with each other. On this earth.