Who is the Master? Who is the Man? : Tolstoy's great ambiguous short story

Tolstoy's Master and Man is truly one of his great stories - everything about it is smart and credible and provocative and slyly ambiguous, starting with the title itself: it's a story about two men, yes, one obviously the master, Vasily, who more or less commends the muzhik/serf/peasant, Nikolai, to come with him on a foolish journey to a nearby village to try to get a bargain price on some woodlands. Yes, Vasily is mean and selfish and though he thinks he's smart he's actually stupid - nobody should have set out on a journey like that in a Russian blizzard, and when he had an opportunity to stay overnight at a friend's home in a village he stupidly and cruelly pushed onward into the storm, toward misery and death. It would be easy to make him a caricature, a truly hateful man, but Tolstoy has that great capacity to create, even in the limited space of a story it seems, fully rounded characters. Vasily has some redeeming qualities, and the story puts him to the test. So actually, who is the master? The peasant Nikolai turns out to be much more in control, and (spoiler here) - he is the sole survivor. But that would be too easy and irony. Nikolai himself isn't perfect, though he is trying to overcome his faults. It seems to be a story almost entirely about these 2 characters, but there are also two others: the very intelligent horse, who becomes a kind of barometer for human sensibilities, anyone who mistreats a horse is of a lower order, regardless of his social caste; and, at the end, God - as Vasily discovers God when on the verge of death and at last redeems himself and does something noble to save Nikolai's life - and I have to think that Tolstoy slyly meant the "master" of the title to refer to God or a spiritual presence - who really is the master of our fate? My concerns about some other Tolstoy stories in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories," more than abated when we see once again that Tolstoy can express his grand ideas even within the confines of the short (for him) story.