Epilogue

Patriarch of the Bolsheviks

I believe their example and their lives give an answer to the question which I have asked myself and my readers in my previous books: is it possible to withstand, and to preserve one's integrity intact while living in a Totalitarian regime? The Tolstoyans answered this question with their lives, both tragically and heroically.

Mark Popovsky, 1983¹

THE NATION'S ATTENTION was focused on Yasnaya Polyana at the time of Tolstoy's burial, and initially his widow was kept busy. On 17 December, forty days after her husband's death, Sonya walked to his grave in order to commemorate his memory according to Orthodox custom, and was joined by the entire population of the village - men, women and children. The grave was tidied up, fresh fir branches laid on it, and those present took off their hats and sank to their knees three times to sing 'Eternal Memory'.² There were frequent visitors in the first weeks after Tolstoy's death. In her now brief diary entries Sonya recorded the arrival of various journalists, a group of fifty-two female students from St Petersburg, a Muslim visitor from the Caucasus bearing a wreath, and her sister Tanya, who stayed on for a month. But as family and friends departed, Sonya was left alone to mourn. Yasnaya Polyana suddenly felt very empty.

Sonya had to get used to the idea of being a widow at the age of sixty-six, and she was inevitably racked by grief and guilt: her last years were ones of loneliness and self-recrimination. She feared with some justification what people would write - and were indeed already writing - about her, and at the same time she felt completely superfluous, as the curtain had now fallen on the drama in which she had starred. To some it seemed that she had at last become meek and acquiescent, as if she had undergone the spiritual transformation her husband had wished for; to others it seemed she was the only one to have emerged from the trauma as a better person.³ One of the few consolations for Sonya in the days following her husband's funeral was the beautiful wintry weather which at last descended after those bleak November days, bringing sub-zero temperatures, clear blue skies and lots of snow. Just before Christmas in 1910 she walked out with her camera to take photographs of Tolstoy's grave to send to her daughter Tanya, who was then in Rome, although, she confided to her diary, the beauty of the frost and the blue sky made her feel even more sad. Another consolation was the moral support of her sons, who had remained loyal to her throughout. She was still estranged from her daughter Sasha, and relations with her eldest daughter Tanya also remained quite tense.

In January 1911 the kind-hearted Dr Makovicky left for good, and Sonya felt another precious link to her husband had been lost. It was difficult for Sonya not to feel embattled. Sasha was still on the side of the 'hateful' Chertkov, despite a growing discord between them, while the profligate ways of three of her sons prompted them to bring up, with indecent haste, the uncomfortable question of their father's legacy and the future of Yasnaya Polyana. Since Vanechka Tolstoy's death, the estate had belonged to Sonya, Ilya, Misha, Andrey and Lev (Sergey having relinquished his share). They all wanted to be able to preserve Yasnaya Polyana as a cultural monument, but they did not have the necessary funds - indeed they seemed always to be short of cash, and dependent on handouts from their mother. Despite Sonya's unease, Ilya, Misha and Andrey hatched a plan to sell some of the land to a wealthy American (Lev was in Sweden at this point). This was not such a new idea, as Chertkov had been on the look-out for an American philanthropist to purchase Yasnaya Polyana back in 1908. The plan then had been for the land to be given to the local peasants, as Chertkov felt this would constitute the best possible eightieth birthday present for Lev Nikolayevich, but nothing had materialised. Alexander Kuzminsky, Sonya's nephew, was now deputised to move this project forward and he duly arrived in New York on 1 January 1911 armed with a list of American millionaires who had shown an interest in literature and the arts. Unfortunately, as he soon learned, Jews were still prohibited from buying land outside the Pale of Settlement in Russia, so most of the names on his list were ineligible. Tolstoy had made good copy during his lifetime, and American newspapers now pounced on the story of the disputes over this ill-conceived new proposal. Sonya persuaded her sons to give an interview to a Russian newspaper in order to explain that they had wanted to sell only the land, not the house.⁴

That was not the only scandal: journalists also had a field-day with the battle over Tolstoy's manuscripts, which were split between the two warring camps of Chertkov and Sasha on the one side, and Sonya on the other.⁵ When the provisions of Tolstoy's will had come into effect a lawyer had promptly appeared at the Historical Museum, where Sonya had kept those of Tolstoy's manuscripts in her possession, and ordered the archive to be sealed. Sonya was aghast, as she believed the manuscripts still belonged to her, and she used her connections at the Museum to refuse access to Chertkov and Sasha. Another edition of the Tolstoy collected works was underway, and she had invested large amounts of money already to have each of the twenty volumes typeset: she was not going to give up her rights easily. It was now open warfare. In January 1911 Chertkov published a very biased account of Tolstoy's last days, and he and Sasha published a joint letter shortly afterwards stating their grievances regarding the copyright issue. Tolstoy's name thus continued to appear frequently in the Russian press, and Tanya pleaded with her mother to give way and so restrain Sasha from engaging in an undignified and shameful public battle with her. The matter would not be resolved for another three years.⁶

In May 1911 Sonya went to Moscow to sort out what could be included in her latest edition ofTolstoy's collected works, since most of his later writings were still censored. She also began negotiations to sell the family's empty house to the City of Moscow for 125,000 roubles, planning to use the money to help her sons. She then travelled on to Petersburg for meetings at court and with Prime Minister Stolypin, in the hope of interesting the Tsar in purchasing Yasnaya Polyana for the nation. Initially the situation looked promising, and newspapers reported on 28 May that the government would buy Yasnaya Polyana for 500,000 roubles.⁷ Sonya put together detailed inventories of each of the rooms when she returned home, in preparation for receiving government officials and surveyors, but everything was still very raw for her. The meeting that summer with her sister-in-law, who came on a visit from her convent, was a particularly emotional one, since it was to Masha that Tolstoy had first gone after leaving Yasnaya Polyana for the last time. Maria Nikolayena would die the following April of pneumonia aged eighty-two, the same age as her brother.

Fortunately Sonya was kept busy that first summer by the huge numbers of visitors who wanted to make the pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana. Biryukov brought 200 village schoolteachers on 6 June to inspect the Tolstoy memorial rooms, for example, and on one day in July Sonya noted in her diary that there had been 140 visitors. On Tolstoy's birthday on 28 August, as many as 300 people gathered at his grave.⁸ Nevertheless, for Tolstoy's former secretary Nikolay Gusev, who returned after his two-year Siberian exile in the summer of 1911, Yasnaya Polyana felt deserted and empty.⁹ In October, soon after Stolypin was assassinated, Sonya learned that the government had now decided against buying Yasnaya Polyana. In debates at the Duma there had been some Church figures who objected very strongly to the state honouring the memory of an apostate who had been excommunicated.¹⁰ On 18 November, shortly after the first anniversary ofTolstoy's death, Sonya wrote to Nicholas II to warn him that her sons might soon have to sell Yasnaya Polyana, and she expressed the hope that he would not want to see 'the heart of the Russian nation' fall into private hands, but on 20 December Nicholas noted in a memo to his ministers that he regarded the purchase of Yasnaya Polyana by the government to be 'inadmissible'.¹¹

The estate gradually started coming back to life in 1912. When Valentin Bulgakov came back that summer he sensed an air of liberation about the place - there were games of croquet and tennis again, and no longer any need to be preoccupied with questions of death and immortality, serving the people, and moral self-improvement. Bulgakov wound up the gramophone and played a record of Strauss waltzes which Tolstoy had particularly loved.¹² Tolstoy's birthday that August was almost an occasion for celebration, with nineteen sitting at table, but there were mixed feelings on 23 September, when Sonya marked her fiftieth wedding anniversary by dressing all in white. It was a festive occasion, she told Bulgakov when he came to visit that day, but her face was tear-stained. Bulgakov was living at Telyatinki with the Chertkovs at this time, and he was appalled by their continuing hostility towards Sonya. Bulgakov had not really noticed anyone else while Tolstoy was alive as his huge, magnetic personality had involuntarily commanded his full attention. Now, however, as he started the mammoth task of compiling a detailed inventory of the Yasnaya Polyana library, for use as a scholarly resource, he got to know Sonya better. He enjoyed listening to her tell stories about the happy days of her marriage, but found her continuing anger and bitterness over the last years hard-going. Faced with the choice of either criticising her husband severely or concluding she had never understood him, she told Bulgakov she preferred to opt for the latter.¹³ A young priest brought Sonya a degree of peace in November 1912 when he arrived at Yasnaya Polyana soon after the second anniversary of Tolstoy's death, requesting permission to say prayers at Tolstoy's grave and perform a requiem in his room.¹⁴The following month the first Tolstoy Museum opened in Moscow under the aegis of the Tolstoy Society. With the support of Sonya and her children, Biryukov and Bulgakov had put together a permanent exhibition in a flat rented on Povarskaya Street on the proceeds of ticket sales and member subscriptions.

In December 1913 the dispute over the rights to Tolstoy's pre-1881 manuscripts was finally decided in Sonya's favour and she was at last free to proceed with publishing and selling her final edition of the collected works. She also sold to the Moscow publisher Ivan Sytin all remaining copies from previous editions for 100,000 roubles, which meant she could give another handout to her sons, as well as keep some money by for her beloved daughter Tanya. She was also, at last, getting on much better with her other daughter, Sasha, who, following a further deterioration in her relations with Chertkov, had sold her house at Telyatinki in order to buy a small farmhouse near Yasnaya Polyana (which she called New Polyana).¹⁵ Sasha proposed using the proceeds of a three-volume edition of Tolstoy's works edited by Chertkov to buy from the family the most westerly part of the estate, closest to the Yasnaya Polyana village, which she would then immediately give to the peasants. Sonya and her sons readily agreed, and received 400,000 roubles. The peasants also agreed to Tolstoy's behest, namely that they would not sell or rent out their newly acquired land. From the total of 2,230 acres, 1,620 acres now belonged to the peasants. Sonya next sold what remained of the land to Sasha, so that it too could be handed over to the peasants, and then she bought out her sons' shares of the Yasnaya Polyana house.¹⁶ Sonya now began to pass control of her publishing operation to Sasha, and took pleasure in celebrating her daughter's thirtieth birthday in June 1914. The peaceful co-existence did not last long, however, as on 1 August Russia entered World War I. Misha was drafted into the army, Lev went to work for the Red Cross, and Sasha went to the front as a nurse. Bulgakov and twenty-six other conscientious objectors were arrested and spent thirteen months in the Tula jail (they were eventually exonerated when their case was heard at the Moscow military court in 1916).¹⁷

Sonya spent her last years essentially copying out the past and endeavour-ing to provide for her descendants, as she always had. In preparation for publication, she made copies of Tolstoy's old diaries, and his letters to her, as well as various of his artistic works. She also carried on writing the story of her life, and showed visitors round the house (one summer's day, eleven bicyclists from St Petersburg had turned up), but there were few joys. When her sons pressed her again for money, she wrote a new letter to the Tsar about selling Yasnaya Polyana, but there were still many members of the Russian government who balked at the idea of the home of that notorious heretic Tolstoy becoming part of the national heritage. In the end, Nicholas II awarded Sonya a 10,000-rouble annual state pension, but held firm on his refusal to buy Yasnaya Polyana.¹⁸ There were personal losses for Sonya to endure during her last years: the deaths of her sister-in-law Maria Nikolayevna, her son-in-law Mikhail Sukhotin and, most painfully of all, her son Andrey from pleurisy in February 1916. Lev accompanied his mother to Petrograd (as Petersburg became when the war began) on a packed train, and they arrived just before Andrey died. After she returned home, Sonya steadily lost interest in life; she took to sitting for hours in the old Voltaire chair that Tolstoy had particularly liked because it had been in his family since before he was born.

Where Sonya's life was now empty and static, Chertkov's was congested with activity. He was a man with a mission, and had become even busier after Tolstoy's death. It had been Chertkov who was in control of the situation during his friend's last days, and it was to him that people turned afterwards. There were interviews and lectures to give, and a mass of manuscripts to put into order and prepare for publication. Chertkov published his first book on Tolstoy's last days in 1911, and that was followed in 1912 by a volume of Tolstoy's diaries. Next came the editing of the three volumes of posthumous fiction, whose proceeds enabled Sasha to buy the Yasnaya Polyana farmland from her family to give to the peasants.¹⁹ But Chertkov's main task now was to produce a canonical edition of Tolstoy's complete collected works, which he knew would be an enormous project. He had been entrusted with all of Tolstoy's late manuscripts, and in 1913 he brought them from storage in England and took them to the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg for temporary safe-keeping.²⁰

When Russia was drawn into World War I, the Tolstoyans were placed in a difficult position. Despite Tolstoy's baleful predictions about large-scale bloodshed and violence, and his warnings about the false allure of patriotism, Chertkov supported the war effort. He arranged for his 1909 article about pacifism to be republished in 1914 and 1917, but in this extreme situation, his pacifism could ultimately not stand up against his patriotism (he had, after all, once been an officer in the Imperial Guard). He also felt a deep allegiance to England, which he declared was his 'second fatherland', not least because he had spent about eleven years of his life there.²¹ Biryukov was now in Switzerland, so it was left to Bulgakov to become the chief spokesman for the Tolstoyans. Bulgakov typed up and distributed copies of an article he wrote about the war in September 1914, after being released from jail, and the following month he started gathering signatures for a collective anti-war petition which was entitled 'Come to Your Senses, Brothers!' Russian soldiers at the front were exhorted to love all of their fellow human beings in uniform regardless of their nationality. The tsarist government moved swiftly to arrest those who signed the petition, three of whom were rounded up at Chertkov's house in Moscow at six in the morning one cold January day in 1915. Fortunately, Sasha and Tanya were able to step in to post bail for Bulgakov and Makovicky, and Chertkov called on his influential British contacts to dissuade the Russian government from sending them to prison or to do hard labour along with other conscientious objectors. Most of the Tolstoyans were later acquitted.²²

The atrocities of World War I served to make Tolstoy's ideas even more relevant and topical, and then suddenly, in 1917, it finally became possible to publish all of his banned writings in Russia. The collapse of the Romanov dynasty and the February Revolution brought the end of censorship, and Tolstoy's followers lost no time. The board of the Tolstoy Society in Moscow could at last seriously discuss publishing a truly complete edition of the collected works, and in April 1917 Sergey and Sasha, as representatives of the Tolstoy family, became members of a new committee charged with overseeing editorial matters and raising the necessary funds for publication.²³ They were joined by Valentin Bulgakov and Nikolay Gusev. Between 1917 and 1918 the old Intermediary publishing house produced sixty-three editions of Tolstoy's writings, but a new publishing house called Zadruga was also set up now, to publish all those Tolstoy essays that had previously been banned. In the heady days of June 1917 a new Tolstoyan organisation was also formed. The Society of True Freedom quickly launched a journal, Voice of Truth and Unity, which had a print run of 10,000 and established a network of affiliated branches in cities across Russia.²⁴ It was estimated there were between 5,000 and 6,000 Tolstoyans active in Russia at this time.²⁵

The situation was less optimistic in 1917 at Yasnaya Polyana. The February Revolution unleashed widespread looting, and in particular the indiscriminate destruction of former gentry estates. Chertkov later likened the situation to the bursting of a dam. After centuries in which the Russian people had existed 'under the heel of autocratic oppression', the pent-up water was now bearing down 'in a wild, irresistible torrent, relentlessly flooding and ruining all that it encounters'.²⁶ Blinded by the propaganda of class hatred unleashed by the Bolsheviks, the peasants and demobbed soldiers who went on the rampage did not see why Count Tolstoy's estate was deserving of exemption. And the aggressors were not all male. In September 1917 Sasha received a postcard from her sister Tanya informing her that hundreds of local women and children had broken into the extensive orchards at Yasnaya Polyana and stolen all the apples - around 16,500 kilograms' worth by her reckoning.²⁷ When Bulgakov read newspaper reports that autumn about marauding peasants breaking into Yasnaya Polyana and wreaking havoc not just in its orchards, but also in its apiaries and its fields of crops, he came down from Moscow straight away to meet with villagers to arrange the provision of some kind of security. Sonya meanwhile also appealed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for help, and the writer Pyotr Sergeyenko, who had known Tolstoy and was also known to the local peasants, was appointed to help protect Yasnaya Polyana from future raids. When it became known that a group of young peasants and demobbed soldiers were inciting the locals to wreck Yasnaya Polyana at the end of 1917, a Red Army unit was eventually assigned to the estate to provide security. Bulgakov was soon able to report that a telephone had been installed for the first time at Yasnaya Polyana, so that there could be regular communication with local political organisations in Tula, who were aware this landed estate was not like the others, and needed special safeguarding.²⁸

The Tolstoyans had welcomed the February Revolution, and they continued to feel a certain camaraderie with the Bolsheviks. This was not only because the Bolsheviks had attempted to sabotage the war effort by persuading rank-and-file soldiers that their real enemy was their own military hierarchy, but also because both groups rejoiced to see both Church and landowners being divested of their lands (albeit for completely different reasons).²⁹ The events of October 1917 and the violence of the ensuing weeks and months filled the Tolstoyans with horror, however. 'Stop the Fratricide!' was the title of the leaflet distributed on the streets in Moscow by the Tolstoyans three days after the Bolsheviks seized power. The desire to get their message across outweighed their fears of exposing themselves to mortal danger while doing so.³⁰ The Peace concluded with Germany in March 1918 was followed by yet more bloodshed. Despite his initial support of the imperial army, Chertkov was proud that Russian soldiers had eventually left the ranks in great numbers and returned home in 1917, 'disgusted and physically exhausted by the international carnage' and no longer willing to be treated as 'cannon fodder'. A similar idea was argued by émigré intellectuals in Paris, who saw the situation in a far less favourable light. In a 1918 article Nikolay Berdyaev argued that the Russian Revolution was in its way a victory for Tolstoyanism, while Dmitry Merezhkovsky declared that Bolshevism was the 'suicide' of Europe: 'Tolstoy began it, and Lenin finished it off.'³¹Berdyaev argued that spiritual regeneration would entail overcoming Tolstoyanism.³²

It was not only Russians who associated Tolstoy directly with the Bolshevik Revolution immediately after it took place. Tolstoy's English translator and biographer Aylmer Maude was also under no doubt that Tolstoy's 'courage and intellectual force', his outspokenness and deep love of the people, had played a cardinal role in bringing about the fall of the Romanovs. An American article published in 1919 quoted Maude extensively:

Tolstoy's condemnation of the very foundations of civilized life and of all established government must be effectively met, or a growing spirit of anarchy, challenging, indicting and disparaging every effort to secure any definiteness in human relations or to establish any fixed law, will undermine the bases of all our social efforts, and sooner or later the whole structure will crash down as it has done in Russia. Merely to deny or deride Tolstoy's opinions will not do. His themes are too important, his statement of them is too masterly, and his sincerity is too apparent.

The article described Tolstoy as the 'Great Patriarch of the Bolsheviki Family'.³³

Sasha came back from World War I with the rank of colonel, and two St George medals awarded for bravery (the decoration which had once eluded her father). She had served on the Western Front, and also in the Caucasus, where she set up orphanages and ran a field hospital, but the situation became dangerous after the February Revolution and she returned home.³⁴ It was Sasha, or Alexandra, as we should call her, since she was now stepping out of the role of daughter, who took over the running of Yasnaya Polyana from her ailing mother at the end of 1917. She took up residence in the old family home again along with her aunt Tanya, her sister Tanya (both now widowed) and her niece Tanya, and now began to turn her attention back to her father's legacy. It was now that Sonya finally handed over the keys to the twelve chests of Tolstoy's manuscripts under her jurisdiction to Alexandra, removing the last bone of contention between them. Sonya's eldest and youngest children (Sergey was now fifty-five, Alexandra was thirty-four) were thus at last able to start serious work on preparing their father's manuscripts for the projected complete scholarly edition.

It was thanks to Lenin's personal initiative that the gargantuan project of Tolstoy's collected works was moved to the top of the agenda in the cultural sphere and viewed as a matter of state importance. An article to this effect appeared in the Bolshevik newspaperSovetskaya pravda at the end of January 1918, when the figure of sixty volumes was mentioned.³⁵ (It was also at Lenin's personal behest that Sonya's state pension was reinstated in March 1918, having been reduced in 1917.³⁶) The archives in the Rumyantsev Museum, which had once again become the repository of Tolstoy's early manuscripts, became a hive of activity in the winter of 1918. Pashkov House, the elegant mansion that housed the Rumyantsev Museum, located a short walk from the Kremlin, was still the home of Moscow's most important library, and would later become the nucleus of the Lenin Library. In the harsh post-revolutionary conditions of 1918, however, no one cared much for well-appointed surroundings, particularly in winter when there was no heating. Alexandra, Sergey and their colleagues were forced to work in their overcoats and hats, with regular bursts of gymnastics in order to survive the freezing temperatures. They had formed a Society for the Study and Dissemination of the Works of L. N. Tolstoy, chaired by Alexandra, but it soon became clear to them that Chertkov and other key followers of their father would be instrumental in the preparation of any authoritative edition. Chertkov was not a member of their society, as he was preparing a rival edition. Having appointed himself as chief editor of the Complete Collected Works, he started negotiations with Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the new Commissar of People's Enlightenment, for the publication of an edition which he now projected would comprise ninety volumes. By December 1918 he had won assurances that 10 million roubles would be allocated by the Bolshevik government to fund the entire enterprise, but until the money became a reality, he paid the thirty-strong editorial team he assembled out of his own pocket.³⁷ Bulgakov had been effective in setting up and running the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, but the situation remained bleak at Yasnaya Polyana, which the family still owned and ran as an unofficial museum. Sovnarkom, the administrative arm of the new Soviet government, formally took over the estate in May 1918, and stipulated that Tolstoy's widow should be able to reside there for the rest of her life, but provided no money at this point for its upkeep. Pride disinclined the Tolstoys from asking the Bolsheviks for money, but the estate had begun to go into such decline that in February 1919 Tanya proposed handing it over to the local society which had been formed to provide security. In a letter to her brother Sergey in Moscow that April, Tanya described the desperate conditions she and the other thirteen members of the family had to endure at Yasnaya Polyana. They had so little to eat they were unable to provide for their staff, let alone the animals. For the staff the situation was even worse: some of them had to endure effluent from the next-door pigsty seeping into their accommodation and rotting the floorboards. Roofs leaked, the belt from the threshing machine had been stolen, books were disappearing from Tolstoy's library, and the furnishings in the house were becoming very worn. Tanya had to resort to knitting scarves, to sell along with Yasnaya Polyana honey in Tula. We have the KGB to thank for preserving Tanya's letter to her brother - it was confiscated and copied when their sister Alexandra was arrested the following year - and we have the stubborn efforts of the Moscow writer Vitaly Shentalinsky to thank for gaining access to its previously impregnable archive in the 1980s.³⁸

In May 1919 the Soviet government approved the proposal for the Yasnaya Polyana Society to take over the running of the estate, with the family continuing to act as guides for visitors. The society would retain control until June 1921, when Yasnaya Polyana was finally nationalised and placed under the aegis of the Soviet government. By this time, the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow had also been nationalised and allotted a handsome mansion on the former Prechistenka, renamed Kropotkinskaya. It now became the central repository for the 2.5 million pages in Tolstoy's archive. The formal opening took place on the tenth anniversary of Tolstoy's death, which was now 20 November 1920 (Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar after the October Revolution).³⁹ Tolstoy's former Moscow house was also nationalised, and opened as a 'museum-estate' on 20 November 1921. Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Lane was also renamed Tolstoy Street.

In the meantime, the Tolstoy family decided to do something about Pyotr Sergeyenko, who had been appointed as the head of the Yasnaya Polyana Society. He had alienated them all with his rudeness and patronising manner, and they all loathed him; it was particularly upsetting for Sonya to be treated in such an offhand manner. Alexandra took matters into her own hands by going to Moscow to see Lunacharsky, who promptly appointed her Commissar of Yasnaya Polyana. Sergeyenko could now be given his marching orders.⁴⁰ It was a difficult year, and at the end of 1919, bruised by Sergeyenko's brusque and imperious manner, a shadow of her former self, Sonya died. In the touching letter she wrote to her children and sister Tanya before her death she said her farewells and asked her daughters to forgive her for the pain she had caused them. But she ended on a bright note of loving gratitude to her granddaughter Tanyushka for bringing her so much joy and affection.⁴¹ As well as being appointed Commissar of Yasnaya Polyana by Lunacharsky in 1919, Alexandra was arrested for the first time in July of that year at her flat in Moscow. On this occasion her stay in the Lubyanka was short lived. Chertkov at this point wielded considerable power, and he immediately wrote to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder and head of the Cheka, the first incarnation of what eventually became the KGB. Presuming her detainment was surely due to a misunderstanding, Chertkov was successful in his impeccably polite request that Alexandra be released.⁴² In February 1920 Alexandra shored up her position by formally confirming her appointment as Commissar with the Ministry of People's Enlightenment, and the following month, the Ministry of Agriculture also placed her in charge of farming at Yasnaya Polyana.⁴³ A few days later, however, she was arrested by the Cheka again, and this time accused of counter-revolutionary activities. Her father had foreseen the Russian Revolution back in 1905, and had been under no illusion about the violence which would be used to bring about this inevitable upheaval, while heartily deploring its application.⁴⁴ But even he could not have predicted that ten years after his death his beloved daughter and devoted follower Alexandra would be sitting in a rat-infested cell in the notorious Lubyanka awaiting interrogation by the secret police.⁴⁵

Alexandra spent two months in the Lubyanka before her fellow Tolstoyans successfully petitioned for her to be released on bail until her case came to trial in August 1920. There is no doubt that her father would have been proud of her defiant final statement in court:

I am not using my final statement to defend myself, because I do not consider myself guilty of anything. But I would just like to say to the citizens judging me that I do not recognise human judgement and consider that it is a misunderstanding that a person has the right to judge another. I consider that we are all free people, and that this freedom is within myself - no one can deprive me of it, neither the walls of the Special division, nor internment in a camp. This free spirit is not the freedom which is surrounded by bayonets in free Russia, but is the freedom of my spirit, and it will stay with me...⁴⁶

For putting on the samovar for members of an alleged counter-revolutionary organisation, whom she had unwittingly allowed to meet in her flat, the Commissar of Yasnaya Polyana was sentenced to three years at the Novospassky Monastery in Moscow, which had recently been converted by the Bolsheviks into a concentration camp. From her cell, Alexandra drafted a letter to Lenin:

Vladimir Ilyich! If I am harmful to Russia, send me abroad. If I am harmful there, then in acknowledgement of the right of a person to deprive another of life, kill me as a harmful member of the Soviet republic. But do not force me to lead the miserable existence of a parasite, locked up in four walls with prostitutes, thieves and bandits...⁴⁷

Alexandra was in fact released after only two months, on the proviso that she attended no public events, but was almost immediately arrested again after she was spotted at the lecture Bulgakov gave to mark the tenth anniversary of her father's death.⁴⁸ She was released a few months later in February 1921,⁴⁹ thanks partly again to the intervention of friends, but mostly due to a petition signed by the peasants at Yasnaya Polyana and neighbouring villages. She endured one further arrest in August 1921, but was detained only briefly.⁵⁰

All the Tolstoyans began to encounter difficulties with the Soviet government in 1919. Back in 1917, the Provisional Government had granted the Tolstoyans an amnesty from conscription, but after the October Revolution the Bolsheviks started a new mobilisation offensive against them. They were determined to conscript Tolstoyans into the Red Army along with other conscientious objectors, some of whom were only now beginning to return home from serving their sentences. Chertkov was naturally implacably opposed to this idea, and neither would he accept the compromise suggested by the Bolshevik leadership, which would have seen Tolstoyans working in medical units. It is testament to Chertkov's authority at this point that he won this particular battle, and his impressive ability to give the Bolsheviks to understand that he was the figurehead of an enormous international organisation catapulted him into high-profile positions. In 1918 he became the head of a United Council aimed at protecting pacifist religious communities in Russia. This was the first time that Tolstoyans had been grouped together with sectarians and religious minority groups such as Baptists and Mennonites. Chertkov continued his opposition to the Bolsheviks, and only partially backed down after a meeting with Lenin forced another compromise, so that an official decree could be agreed in 1919.⁵¹

Chertkov found himself writing hundreds of testimonials for Tolstoyans at this time. He also longed for the Civil War to come to an end, and in October 1919 wrote an impassioned 'Letter to English Friends' in which he pleaded for foreign involvement in Russia, covert or otherwise, to stop, leaving the country to proceed with social reconstruction on its own. Tolstoy had a great role to play in this task, he argued, for in him 'the people find a clear and powerful expression of their own most sacred beliefs and highest aspirations'. Tolstoy's religious writings, accessible to the masses for the first time, were in enormous demand, he wrote. In the wake of World War I, which had confirmed all Tolstoy's predictions, Chertkov was sure that working people everywhere would draw inspiration from his writings, but it was the Russian people, he argued, 'as yet uncontaminated by European civilisation', who were pre-eminently in a position to understand and appreciate the teaching of Christ 'in the pure undefiled aspect in which it is expounded by Tolstoy'.⁵²

In many ways, the Civil War period was actually the 'golden age of Tolstoyanism', when Tolstoyan ideas were put into practice at the new Tolstoyan communes that began to spring up, and also vigorously debated as a matter of life importance. The Tolstoyans entered into a series of passionate debates with Lunacharsky and other luminaries in front of huge audiences at the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow. On 5 March 1920, for example, Bulgakov appeared alongside the erudite Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, a rabbi and an Orthodox priest.⁵³ In November 1920 an audience of 2,000 crowded the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire to take part in an event commemorating the tenth anniversary of Tolstoy's death. Bulgakov, who was already highly critical of the Bolsheviks, was unable to finish his speech amidst the raucous applause and whistling.⁵⁴ Tolstoy's name was also still on everybody's lips in the huge émigré community which had formed in Paris immediately after the Revolution, and there were many who still wanted to pin the blame for the Bolshevik victory directly on his influence. In vain did the former statesman Vasily Maklakov insist that Tolstoy had nothing in common with Bolshevism in the speech that he gave in Paris to mark the tenth anniversary of Tolstoy's death - numerous others were ready to argue that Tolstoy's ideas about non-resistance to violence had exerted a profoundly pernicious effect, and should be opposed with a show of strength.⁵⁵

A key figure during these years was Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, who had worked with Tolstoy and Chertkov to help the Dukhobors emigrate before the Revolution. He now occupied a prominent position in the Bolshevik government, and it was he who helped Chertkov obtain meetings with Lenin in the early years.⁵⁶ Widespread famine during the Civil War caused the Bolsheviks to remember that the Dukhobors and other sectarians were good farmers, and in 1921 Lenin responded enthusiastically to a request from some Dukhobors in Canada who requested permission to return home to Russia so they could help revive the national economy. Taking heart from these developments, and reassured by the respect in which Chertkov was held, Tolstoyans began meeting in the cafeteria of the Vegetarian Society in Moscow and organising communes, too naive to see the cynicism behind Bolshevik official policy. The Tolstoyans were mostly peasants from rural areas, but their numbers also included teachers, doctors and urban office workers who now consciously became peasants on the Tolstoyan model. The 'Life and Labour' commune, for example, which began life in December 1921 in the southern outskirts of Moscow (roughly where the metro station Belyaevo is located), was founded by a geologist called Boris Mazurin, who turned to Tolstoyanism after being sickened by the endless violence he saw around him. By 1925 the commune was totally self-sufficient. There were disagreements amongst the Tolstoyans who formed communes, as they did not all share the writer's aspirations to a spiritual life untainted by any intrusion from the state, but they did all agree on the importance and nobility of work in the fields as the prerequisite for their independence and autonomy.

On one level it seemed that the Tolstoyans were truly a force to be reckoned with. Chertkov was not only the coordinator of the Congress of Religious Sects held in June 1920, but also head of the largest delegation: twenty Tolstoyans took part in the congress. On another level, however, the Bolsheviks soon started to become more hard-line. When complaints that the decree on conscientious objection was already being frequently violated were investigated, it turned out that both armies, Red and White, were indeed flouting it. Indeed, the Bolsheviks were responsible for executing by firing squad more than 100 Tolstoyan objectors, the first eight by December 1919.⁵⁷ At the end of 1920 the Bolsheviks altered the 1919 decree, then they simply disbanded the council over which Chertkov presided. It had considered applications from some 40,000 conscious objectors. Finally, in November 1923, the People's Commissar for Justice decided to remove Tolstoyans from the list of bona fide conscientious objectors altogether, now deciding that they did not belong to a religious sect, and objected to military service on ethical grounds.⁵⁸ Fortunately pressure had already been eased on those who opposed military service, because by this time the Civil War had finally come to an end.

Opposition to military service was not the only problem Chertkov had to deal with, as he soon also started to clash with the Bolsheviks over the projected edition of Tolstoy's Complete Collected Works, which was taking a long time to get off the ground. In July 1919, when Alexandra's flat was being searched for evidence of sedition, the Bolsheviks had decided to nationalise the manuscripts of all Russian writers held in state libraries. That meant they also had a monopoly on publication, and since Tolstoy had famously surrendered the copyright on all his works, Chertkov naturally opposed this.⁵⁹ He argued that Tolstoy would never have agreed to his writings becoming the property of any person or institution, particularly a state, and rightly viewed the idea of a state monopoly as a form of censorship.⁶⁰ In September 1920 he was finally granted an audience with Lenin to discuss the matter, along with the issue about the Tolstoyans' refusal to serve in the Red Army, but the discussions ended in stalemate.

Chertkov found a way out of the copyright problem over the Tolstoy Collected Works when Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) in March 1921. This allowed the temporary return of private enterprise in order to resuscitate the economy after the ravages of the Civil War, and the wily Chertkov turned the situation to his advantage. Alexandra had just been released from prison, and she renewed her association with Chertkov in an effort to move the Collected Works project along, but each still headed two distinct groups. As soon as it was legally possible, Chertkov and Alexandra formed a Co-operative Association for the Study and Dissemination of the Works of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, and on 8 April the association invited Chertkov to become its chief editor.⁶¹ Chertkov was also busy at this time writing his own magnum opus about the story of Tolstoy's final departure from Yasnaya Polyana. Sofya Andreyevna's death had been a liberation for him, as it meant he could finally speak his mind. Naturally vindicating himself, he apportioned blame for the tragedy of Tolstoy's last years to his 'marital problems'. The book was published in 1922, and greatly upset Tolstoy's children, even Alexandra.⁶² Lev Lvovich, who particularly detested Chertkov, immediately retaliated against the slur on his mother by publishing a book of his own the following year in Prague, where he was now based. It was entitled The Truth About My Father, and painted Sonya in glowing terms.⁶³ Chertkov was undaunted, but whatever unease one might feel about his lack of tact in the years immediately following Tolstoy's death must eventually give way to respect for his single-minded refusal to compromise his beliefs in the increasingly hostile atmosphere of high Stalinism in the 1930s.

When she was released from prison in 1921, Alexandra settled once again at Yasnaya Polyana, where she was still Commissar, but in June she was summoned to a meeting with Mikhail Kalinin, head of the Central Committee. After disembarking from the train in Moscow, Alexandra set off for the Kremlin on her bicycle. At this important meeting it was agreed that Yasnaya Polyana would now become the property of the Russian Federation, and would be run as a commune under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of People's Enlightenment. The commune would include a school, a library, and later a hospital. Alexandra's title was now changed from Commissar to 'Custodian', and she was given the duties of managing the estate as a museum, organising lectures and events and acting as head of the new school. The agricultural work was to be undertaken by Tolstoyans.⁶⁴ The commune lasted less than a year. The seventeen so-called Tolstoyans who took up residence at Yasnaya Polyana in March 1921 turned out to be a bunch of no-hopers, who either argued that they could not remove worms from the cabbages because they could not kill 'anything living', or were simply incapable of working. These 'faux Tolstoyans' thankfully soon left, some miraculously transforming themselves into devout Communist Party apparatchiks.⁶⁵ Alexandra then turned her energies to starting the village school at Yasnaya Polyana, and to restoring the estate to its pre-revolutionary condition.

Alexandra was not the only Tolstoyan to attract the attention of the secret police in the early 1920s. Despite his political clout, Chertkov himself was the subject of several denunciations between 1920 and 1922. As he became more vociferous about his opposition to the Bolsheviks, informers from the Cheka were despatched to report on him, and also what went on at the headquarters of the Society of True Freedom, whose vegetarian cafeteria and library were popular haunts for Tolstoyans and those of like mind. Unlike the Chekist and part-time Futurist with the flowing locks and velvet jacket who had come to arrest Alexandra, not all the Bolshevik spies were well informed. In one report which mentioned discussion of someone called 'Socrates', the hapless agent noted in parentheses that he did not know him, apparently unaware that Socrates had been dead for some time.⁶⁶

Sixty Tolstoyans were arrested for 'anti-Soviet' activity in Vitebsk at the end of 1920, and it was only a matter of time before they caught up with Chertkov and Bulgakov, whose homes were raided by the Cheka in December 1922. Both were summoned to the Lubyanka for questioning. Chertkov defiantly refused to participate, and coolly and calmly demanded the return of the papers which had been confiscated. The Bolsheviks decided to send both Chertkov and Bulgakov into exile for three years. Bulgakov had earlier interceded on Alexandra Lvovna's behalf, and this time it was her turn to plead for clemency. In February 1923 she wrote to Lev Kamenev, chairman of the new all-important Politburo (its other members were Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Krestinsky), requesting that Bulgakov be allowed to stay in Moscow so that he could continue his important work at the Tolstoy Museum, where he was director. Chertkov wrote a dignified and pedantic letter meanwhile to Avel Enukidze, a another prominent Bolshevik and close friend of Stalin who was a member of the Central Committee. In his letter he argued wearily that he was now in his late sixties, and so did not have much time left; he could not possibly proceed with the important project of producing Tolstoy's collected works if he was exiled abroad. Chertkov was allowed to stay, but it was in keeping with his nickname of 'Iron Felix' that Dzerzhinsky refused to relent in Bulgakov's case. A little more than a month later, Bulgakov left for Czechoslovakia with his family, and was only allowed to return to Russia twenty-six years later in 1949. When he came back he immediately resumed his job at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow.

If Chertkov thought NEP was going to bring about greater freedom for the dissemination of Tolstoyan ideas, he was mistaken. In 1923 the Bolsheviks shut down the new independent Tolstoyan publishing house Zadruga as part of its drive to bring all publishing under state control. Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya also demanded that all of Tolstoy's religious writings be removed from municipal libraries.⁶⁷ Tolstoy's ideas had been considered heretical by the tsarist government, and within five years they had become also unacceptable to the regime which replaced it. The Bolsheviks now had the upper hand with nonconformists, but they clearly still saw Tolstoyanism as a threat. As a world-famous writer-turned-anarchist who preached non-resistance to violence, Tolstoy had exasperated the tsarist government during his lifetime, and the Bolsheviks found it no easier to deal with his legacy. On the one hand they revered him for attacking the Russian tsarist state and exposing the moral flaws of all its institutions, but on the other they could not countenance his uncompromising rejection of the state in any form. The problem was that Tolstoy was not just the 'greatest novelist of any age and of any country', as the prominent Belgian political writer Charles Sarolea commented after a sobering visit to the Soviet Union in 1923, but also 'one of the greatest teachers and preachers of modern times'.⁶⁸ Sarolea was, of course, not alone in coming to the apparently paradoxical conclusion that there was a direct connection between Tolstoy and Bolshevism. This was still a topic on the lips of many in the early 1920s, both in Russia and abroad.⁶⁹ The extent to which the Bolsheviks still regarded Tolstoyanism as one of the greatest threats facing the fledgling Communist state may be gauged by the fact that Lunacharsky gave a lengthy lecture on the subject in 1924, which was also disseminated in book form. The basic ideologies dividing Russians at that time, he stated categorically, were Marxism and Tolstoyanism.⁷⁰

From the beginning, Russia's leading revolutionaries had disagreed about Tolstoy while acknowledging his seminal importance. Lenin had played a prominent role in the debate by writing seven articles on Tolstoy between 1908 and 1911. In 1908 he had directly attributed the failure of the 1905 Revolution to the influence of Tolstoy's ideas of non-violence. His article 'Lev Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution' was widely reprinted after his death, and became the Soviet blueprint for the official view of Tolstoy. Trotsky, who wrote on Tolstoy in 1908 and 1910, had shone a more positive light on Tolstoy's impact on the events of 1905, while Plekhanov had simply dismissed Tolstoy as a patriarchal, reactionary landowner with nothing to offer the revolutionary movement. Tolstoy's name was inevitably invoked again at the time of the 1917 Revolutions, and continued to figure in public discourse, as the Bolshevik government struggled to find a way of exploiting his legacy.

It was not until the centenary of Tolstoy's birth in 1928 that a clear policy was formulated, and twenty years of debate came to an abrupt end. What the Bolsheviks decided to do was separate Tolstoy from Tolstoyanism. Despite the 'contradictions' in his teachings, the Bolsheviks decided the centenary of Tolstoy's birth should be celebrated in grand style, and a government committee headed by Lunacharsky was formed in 1926, two years in advance of the anniversary.⁷¹ Alexandra was pinning great hopes on the Tolstoy Jubilee, and on the fact that it was being officially sanctioned at the very highest level. For her it was a form of self-defence against the dozens of local communists whom she described as buzzing around Yasnaya Polyana like flies, hoping to find fault and denounce her.⁷² Like Chertkov, she had calmly stuck to her apolitical Tolstoyan beliefs, and refused to capitulate to the anti-religious propaganda war being waged around her. In 1924 the Yasnaya Polyana school had become part of the revolutionary 'experimental station' schools network, which drew partly on Tolstoy's ideas about education.⁷³ But the situation grew increasingly hostile, with the local powers seeing Alexandra and her colleagues as representatives of the 'loathed bourgeoisie', and resenting their achievements. The hostility was not restricted to barbs from local officials: Alexandra was also publicly attacked in Pravda as a 'former countess' who continued to exploit the workers and live a life of luxury and depravity while disseminating religious propaganda to her pupils. Alexandra faced her critics by reiterating Lenin's declaration that 'Soviet power can afford the luxury of a Tolstoyan corner in the USSR'. She also responded by publishing a rebuttal of the criticisms on 2 July 1924 in Pravda, but she already felt extremely beleaguered.⁷⁴

When the committee for the anniversary celebrations was formed in 1926, Alexandra submitted proposals for extensive renovation work at Yasnaya Polyana, including new buildings for the school and hospital there. She also proposed the reorganisation of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. Her sister Tanya had taken over the management of the Moscow museum from Bulgakov when he was sent into exile in 1923, but she herself had emigrated in 1925. Since Ilya, Lev and Mikhail were all already abroad, and Sergey had a job teaching at the Moscow Conservatoire, the seemingly indefatigable Alexandra now became Director of the Tolstoy Museum as well. Lunacharsky, Chertkov, Gusev and the other members of the committee were receptive to Alexandra's proposals, but were powerless to do anything, owing to the simple fact that there was no money: the Commissariat of People's Enlightenment was always the poorest of all the Soviet ministries. Alexandra showed her mettle at this point, and decided to go to the top, and after making several visits to Moscow from Yasnaya Polyana she eventually obtained an audience with Stalin, who had assumed power after Lenin's death in January 1924. The brief interview was chastening. Stalin flatly refused to pay the million roubles requested by the Jubilee Committee for its construction and renovation programme, and it quickly became apparent to Alexandra that he did not care about Tolstoy and the Tolstoy Jubilee at all. What he did care about was exploiting it as a felicitous opportunity for international propaganda, and doing so as cheaply as possible.⁷⁵

The situation with the Tolstoy Collected Works was also bleak. In 1926, with just two years to go, there was still no contract signed for what was now pegged to the centenary year as the Jubilee Edition. Chertkov had also been having high-level meetings with the Soviet leadership. He had been forced to accept the idea of a 'temporary' state monopoly on Tolstoy's manuscripts, which would at least be lifted with publication, but found himself constantly lobbying for funds to pay the editorial team. His first meeting with Stalin, which took place in the autumn of 1924, had produced results. In November

1925 the Soviet government finally approved the release of a million roubles to pay for the cost of the project. The money was very slow in materialising, however, and in June 1926 Chertkov was forced to write to Stalin to tell him he could no longer afford to pay the forty-three members of the editorial staff working on the project (most of their wages were still coming from his own pocket). Alexandra was still very much involved with the project, but she and Chertkov did not see eye to eye. Finally, in 1925, they reached an agreement: her group would prepare Tolstoy's manuscripts written before 1880, and his team would work on the later writings. In December 1925 the two groups were united under Chertkov's leadership.⁷⁶

The Central Committee now decided it should form a special commission to investigate and monitor the Tolstoy Jubilee Edition, and in September

1926 a 'troika' was appointed, headed by Stalin's deputy Vyacheslav Molotov. In March 1927 the state bank finally paid out a miserly 15,000 roubles, but meanwhile the contract had got lost in a morass of bureaucracy and ever-changing personnel at Gosizdat, the state publishing house. Chertkov wrote to Stalin again in March 1928 to protest that Gosizdat was refusing to sign the contract, despite the special commission having approved it. The contract was finally signed on 2 April 1928, but by then it was too late for even the first volume to appear in time for Tolstoy's centenary.⁷⁷ By this point, Alexandra had lost interest in an edition which was clearly going to be limited and expensive. There had been further disagreements with Chertkov over payment for editorial work, and Chertkov now took over as editor-in-chief.

The Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy's Complete Collected Works was to set the standard for Soviet scholarly editions. Artistic works were designated for the first forty-five volumes, with separate volumes for the different versions of major works (War and Peace takes up four volumes, for example). Editors had to work painstakingly through thousands and thousands of pages of

Tolstoy's often illegible handwriting before presenting their volume for discussion at one of the 156 committee meetings which were held over the course of edition's publication. More than 900 corrections were made to produce a definitive edition ofAnna Karenina (although even that version was later superseded by the Academy of Sciences edition published in 1970). Tolstoy's artistic works were to be followed by thirteen volumes of diaries and notebooks. Finally there would be thirty-one volumes of letters. Tolstoy had written at least 8,500 letters during his lifetime, with Chertkov by far and away his most frequent correspondent.⁷⁸

The hundreds of events marking the centenary of Tolstoy's birth in 1928 were the first to be undertaken by the Soviet government in honour of a pre-revolutionary writer on a nationwide scale. Because of the ambivalence surrounding the Jubilee, the Bolsheviks were concerned to use the occasion to educate Soviet citizens on how to approach Tolstoy. Thus, along with the issue of commemorative stamps, there were guides providing instructions on how the Tolstoy centenary should be celebrated. Pride of place in all writing on Tolstoy, from now until the end of the Soviet regime, was taken by Lenin's 1908 article.⁷⁹ The main centenary celebrations began on Tolstoy's birthday on 9 September (as 28 August had become according to the new calendar), and they lasted a week. According to Lunacharsky in the speech he made, such was the 'gigantic interest' in Tolstoy in the new Soviet state that the writer was not dead at all.⁸⁰ Tolstoy was, in fact, the most widely read author in Russia at this point according to data compiled by the Bolshevik journal Red Librarian, and the only writer to have maintained his pre-revolutionary popularity. Even in the countryside, readers often had to queue up for months to read the one copy of War and Peace held by their local library.⁸¹

As a fervent admirer of Tolstoy, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was one of the distinguished foreign visitors invited to Russia to take part in the centenary celebrations in 1928. The celebrations were launched with a commemorative evening at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on 9 September. Like everything else at that time, it was held up by Soviet bureaucrats who fussed over memoranda and permits. 'The principal event which was announced for six o'clock began at 9.30,' Zweig later recollected. 'When I left the opera house exhausted at three in the morning, the speakers were still hard at it.'⁸² The festivities then transferred to Yasnaya Polyana. At 7.00 a.m. on 12 September, in pouring rain, Alexandra made her way to the Yasnaya Polyana railway station (as Zaseka was now called) along with journalists, photographers and curious locals. There they greeted the official delegation of eighty guests who had travelled down from Moscow, and included the actress Olga Knipper (Chekhov's widow), esteemed professors and foreign guests, who were easy to spot because they were not shabbily dressed.⁸³ On the train down, Zweig had chatted to Lunacharsky about whether Tolstoy was a revolutionary or a reactionary, and whether the great writer had even known himself. Lunacharsky suggested that in his eagerness to change the whole world 'in a flick of the wrist', Tolstoy was an ingrained Russian, just like the Bolsheviks who wanted to modernise their country overnight.⁸⁴

As the minister responsible for Soviet culture in the 1920s, Lunacharsky played a key role in orchestrating the assimilation of Tolstoy into Bolshevik ideology in the early Stalinist years, and he published a volume of his writings on Tolstoy in 1928. A cultured and educated man, he did not always find his task easy, and since there was no place for even Lunacharsky's comparatively moderate views in the Soviet regime, he lost his job the following year. Both sides of his personality were on show on 12 September at Yasnaya Polyana. First he produced the standard official peroration, cutting off attempts by a Slovak guest and Alexandra to speak out about their harassment by Communist Party militants, but then gave an impassioned, personal and sincere speech about how much Tolstoy meant to him. After a day of speeches, a choir of 250 Yasnaya Polyana schoolchildren sang the 'Ode to Joy' from Beethoven's 9th Symphony (later condemned by a Pravda correspondent, who thought they had been singing a psalm), and village women dug out old embroidered blouses and coloured sarafans from their trunks and sang folksongs.⁸⁵

There was a good deal of press coverage of the Tolstoy Jubilee. An unsigned editorial in Pravda published on 9 September may well have been written by Stalin himself. After questioning whether the Bolsheviks, who had 'chosen revolutionary violence', and regarded religion as the 'opium of the people', should honour a writer who 'did not understand' the proletarian movement, and to whom the revolution was alien, the conclusion was that they should.⁸⁶ Nevertheless, a list of twenty acceptable works of fiction by Tolstoy was now drawn up, Lenin's articles criticising Tolstoy were continually cited, and the writer's philosophical views were roundly condemned. Some important advances in Tolstoy scholarship had been made in the 1920s by literary scholars (such as the Formalists Boris Eikhenbaum and Viktor Shklovsky), but the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers played safe by basing their interpretation of Tolstoy on Lenin's literary criticism, namely his famous 1908 characterisation of Tolstoy's method as the 'tearing off of masks', which was proffered as a good model for budding Soviet writers to follow. It was, in fact, political figures like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg who dominated publications on Tolstoy around the time of the centenary. One volume published in 1929 may have included the very last Russian publication by Trotsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union that year.⁸⁷ The chapter headings for one of the many centenary volumes about Tolstoy published in 1928 reflect the efforts that were made by the Soviet government to render the great writer acceptable to the regime:

Part 1: The Jubilee and Our Tasks

Part 2: Tolstoy as a Thinker
Tolstoy and his Epoch
The Lack of Synthesis; The Social Reasons for This
Dialectical Materialism and Religious Idealism
Class war/Struggle and Non-Resistance to Evil
Tolstoy's Criticism of Capitalism
Tolstoy's Criticism of Patriotism and Militarism

Part 3: Tolstoy as Artist

Part 4: Tolstoy and the Soviet Public⁸⁸

In the face of this ideological onslaught, Alexandra's work at Yasnaya Polyana became more and more difficult. Once the Jubilee was over, she was once again subjected to harassment by local Party officials when she refused to comply with their demands. Eventually she was forced to accept as her deputy at the estate-museum an anonymous Soviet writer who proposed using Tolstoy's teachings as a weapon in the anti-religious campaign. The requirement by the 'League of the Godless' that pupils at the Yasnaya Polyana school were to have lessons on Easter Sunday, in keeping with Stalin's calendar 'reforms', was the last straw. In the autumn of 1929 Alexandra got on a train for Vladivostok, en route for Japan, where she had been invited to lecture. She never returned to Russia.⁸⁹

By 1930, only two volumes of the Jubilee Edition had appeared, and there were still problems with obtaining funds to keep going. Chertkov was seventy-six and very ill by this time, but this was his life's work and he plodded resolutely on, despite having exhausted all his savings to fund the enterprise. In February 1934 he wrote about the lack of funds to Molotov, who had been head of Sovnarkom (Council of Ministers) since 1930, but he received no answer. On 27 May he wrote to Stalin:

The situation of our editorial team is now completely hopeless as a result of the lack of funds to complete our work, the release of which, to the tune of 75,000 roubles, I requested from Sovnarkom. Meanwhile, my requests to accelerate the publication and fund the editing work to the end, as I have been informed by Sovnarkom, have not met with any objections in principle, and the entire delay is to do with the paperwork, which has been going on for four months already. I am not writing again to Comrade Molotov, because I have already written to him twice, and having not received a reply, I am not sure that he has the time to turn his personal attention to my appeal to him amongst many complex governmental affairs. But I am being so bold as to appeal to you, esteemed Iosif Vissarionovich, as the comrade on whose initiative this project was essentially launched following the lead of the late V. I. Lenin. I think that just one word from you would be enough to bring an immediate conclusion to the formal side of the protracted satisfaction of my requests, as set out in my letter of 23 February 1934 to Comrade Molotov...⁹⁰

There was again no response, nor to a letter Chertkov wrote in July 1934, by which time he was so ill he was no longer in full control of his faculties, but in August that year the money started to trickle through at last.

Lenin had supposedly expressly stipulated that the edition should include everything ever written by Tolstoy, without any changes, and should restore cuts made by tsarist censors. His word was law, but the Stalinist government soon realised how subversive some of the material was. There was indeed a good deal of criticism by Tolstoy of the revolutionary movement in his late writings, and Chertkov, as chief editor, came in for criticism himself now from the Bolsheviks for not compiling the commentaries to Tolstoy's texts from a Marxist point of view.⁹¹ Chertkov, of course, ever the aristocrat like Tolstoy, had never deigned to pay obeisance to contemptible Bolshevik ideology, and his persistently apolitical stance is all the more remarkable - and brave - given the militant rhetoric and coercive policies of the times. The Soviet government certainly came to regret giving Chertkov so much autonomy.

The great irony of the Tolstoy Jubilee Edition was that it made Tolstoy's works no more accessible than they had been during his lifetime. Not only was each volume extremely expensive, as Alexandra feared, but the print run was tiny: 5,000 or at the most 10,000. By the time that Nikolay Rodionov took over as chief editor when Chertkov died in 1936 at the age of eighty-two (the same age that Tolstoy had been when he died), seventy-two volumes were ready to be printed, but only twenty-nine had been published. They were appearing, moreover, in a strange order. Volume fifty-nine was published in 1935, for example, but it would not be until 1952 that volume thirty-four was published.⁹² Eight volumes appeared in 1937, the year after Chertkov died, but this was the height of the purges, and Solomon Lozovsky, the new head of the state publishing house, now restyled as the acronym Goslitizdat, literally feared for his life. He had been appointed in 1936, having already been arrested once on Stalin's orders. The editorial team, whose office by a strange quirk of fate was located near the Lubyanka, now lost its independence, and were forced to take orders from Goslitizdat. In such fearful times there was no chance that Lozovsky could even contemplate approving the volumes in the Jubilee Edition which included Tolstoy's principal religious writings (volumes 23, 28, 48, 49, for example).

Between 1939 and 1949 publication ground to a complete halt, with staff working without a salary and Rodionov courageously seeking new ways to continue by trying to play the apparatchiks at their own game, and by empha-sising Lenin's imprimatur on the whole enterprise. In the late thirties, under constant threat of arrest, the team doggedly prepared for publication more innocuous volumes, such as those containing Tolstoy's correspondence to his wife (83, 84), and they flagged up quotations by Lenin at the expense of their own commentary. The Tolstoy scholar Inessa Medzhibovskaya is right to liken Rodionov's dealings with Soviet bureaucracy during the purges to the literature of the absurd. In her review of a book published in 2002 by Lev Osterman, which has been one of the many important post-Soviet sources to explode the myth of Tolstoy's hallowed status after 1917, she gives an amusing abridged version of the transcript Osterman provides of Rodionov's encounter in 1939 with Pyotr Pospelov, deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee:

RODIONOV: I have been so insistently trying to gain a chance to see you in order to seek your advice, receive your guidance for action as to how we may resolve this painful situation without violating the will of L. N. Tolstoy and, at the same time, act in accordance with the current guidelines that the Central Committee of the Party has in mind.

POSPELOV: You have committed serious errors. The first one is your lengthy commentaries. Tolstoy's Complete Works are replaced with the complete works of his commentators. The second error is your method of commentary. You do not observe the contract and the contract stresses the need to be objective. Yet who could be more objective than Lenin? Why don't you enlist this most objective of sources? Why do you write long biographies about the most insignificant people, even about those who ended up being counter-revolutionary?⁹³

The Jubilee Edition was only properly resuscitated after Stalin's death in 1953. The last volumes were eventually all published by 1958, by which time the heroic scholars of the original editorial team had been relegated to assistant status by Goslitizdat, and the names of Chertkov and Alexandra Tolstaya were no longer mentioned on the masthead. It had taken thirty years. The scholarship in the volumes published later inevitably suffered, and fresh rounds of 'editing' were so drastic that some volumes had to double up with others. The much-touted total of ninety volumes, in fact, comprises only seventy-eight separate books.⁹⁴ Once Tolstoy's religious works had appeared in the Jubilee Edition, they were banned from future publication. Nevertheless, in the 'official' history of the publication of the Jubilee Edition which Rodionov published in 1961, he could with justification point to it being compared to the 143 volumes of the benchmark Weimar Goethe edition, despite the necessary political accommodation with the regime.⁹⁵ Forty years later, in a very different political climate, Osterman's book Srazhenie za Tolstogo (The Battle for Tolstoy) would reveal the true story behind the publication of this extraordinary edition.

Over the course of the first few decades of Soviet power, Tolstoy was successfully transformed by the Bolsheviks from a 'socially alien' writer into one whose name was 'synonymous with Russia herself', as has been pointed out by Alexander Fodor in a valuable book which explores the history of Russia's relationship with Tolstoy.⁹⁶ A key role in this process of transformation was played by World War II. During the celebrations to mark the October Revolution in besieged Leningrad in 1941, Tolstoy's stories about the defence of Sebastopol were broadcast via loudspeaker in Palace Square. War and Peace also became a vitally important work while Russians fought to defend their country from the Nazi invasion. By this time, twenty-five trunks from the archive at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow had been evacuated to Tomsk in Siberia, with other precious items directed to Tashkent. Tomsk was also the destination for the most valuable exhibits at Yasnaya Polyana, which was invaded by the Nazis on 30 October 1941, two days after the last party of tourists had been shown round its empty rooms.⁹⁷

By the time the war was over, Tolstoy's entire corpus of anti-war writings had quietly been forgotten. In the 1950s Tolstoy was firmly entrenched in the Soviet imagination as a symbol of Russia, and as her most ardent patriot. Generations of Russian schoolchildren now grew up with the officially approved novels and stories that had become a fixture on the national curriculum, completely unaware of Tolstoy's enormous legacy of religious and political writings. Tolstoy's 'official' status was cemented by the number of new streets named after him in cities across the country, from Penza to Vladivostok, and in time his legacy was also tainted by the exigencies of the command economy which bred corruption and cynicism. Like all major Soviet literary museums, the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow was founded to be a centre for cutting-edge scholarship as much as a tourist destination, and it had been initially placed under the jurisdiction of the Academy of Sciences, along with the Tolstoy estate-museum. In 1953, however, that jurisdiction passed to the Soviet Ministry of Culture, and three years later there was a further 'demotion' to the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, which placed more emphasis on meeting targets for visitor numbers. Scholars battled on valiantly, already hampered by the Soviet censorship, but standards inevitably slipped in some areas.⁹⁸

In 1960 the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy's death was celebrated with official pomp by the Soviet establishment, which organised another, albeit more sedate, commemorative evening at the Bolshoi Theatre. And on 9 September 1978, to mark the 150th anniversary of Tolstoy's birth, the 'Museum-estate Yasnaya Polyana' was awarded the Order of Lenin by order of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for 'major work in the aesthetic education of workers, and the study and propaganda of the creative legacy of the great Russian writer L. N. Tolstoy' (the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow was awarded the Order of the Red Banner). After she had left Russia in 1929 and become a vociferous critic of the Soviet regime, Alexandra's name had been erased from history as a 'traitor to the motherland', as Nikolay Rodionov had been forced to put it in his 1961 article about the Jubilee Edition, but at least he had mentioned her name. In an article about Yasnaya Polyana in the first years of the Revolution published in 1962, her name does not appear at all.⁹⁹ In 1977 Alexandra was partially rehabilitated and invited back to Russia to take part in the forthcoming celebrations, but by this time she was bedridden and gravely ill, and she died the following year in the United States, where she had been resident since the 1930s. The rehabilitation was partial, because even a book about the history of Yasnaya Polyana as a museum published as late as 1986 makes no mention of Alexandra; the fact that its author was Ilya Tolstoy, the grandson of her brother Ilya, is all the more dismaying.¹⁰⁰

The almost total ignorance of Soviet citizens about the extent to which Tolstoy's ideas also continued to send powerful reverberations across Russia deep into the twentieth century is witness to the Communist Party's success in eliminating Tolstoyanism as a movement. At the same time that the Soviet regime firmly placed Tolstoy the novelist in its pantheon of model artists by reissuing his works with print runs running into the hundreds of thousands, it had unleashed a systematic campaign against his doctrines and all who followed them. The publication in the West in 1983 of a remarkable book about the Soviet followers of Tolstoy by a respected dissident writer and advocate of human rights based in Moscow called Mark Popovsky, however, pays tribute to the indomitable spirit of those who continued to be inspired by Tolstoy even in the face of unbelievable adversity and hardship. It was at the end of the 1970s when Popovsky, author of numerous books about Soviet scientists, both published and unpublished, was handed a copy of a letter from a peasant called Dmitry Morgachev. Writing at the age of eighty-four from the town of Przhevalsk in far-away Soviet Kirghizia to the USSR Public Prosecutor on 24 July 1976, Morgachev requested rehabilitation, and an acknowledgement from the Soviet government that he and his comrades had not committed any crime.

Popovsky discovered to his surprise that Morgachev was a follower of Tolstoy, who had been arrested along with other Tolstoyans at their commune in Siberia in 1936. Morgachev explained in his letter to the Public Prosecutor that the following year, the Soviet government had decided the three-year sentence was too mild, and in 1940 had increased it to seven years, with an additional three years of hard labour at the end of the term. Morgachev told the Public Prosecutor that he was one of the few who had survived, and counted himself lucky. Resolutely believing that he had never committed any crime, he explained that he had requested rehabilitation in 1963, by which time he was already seventy-one and an invalid, but had been flatly refused. Morgachev went on to explain in his letter that his Tolstoyan commune had transferred from central Russia to Siberia in 1930, in accordance with the decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Since it had operated as a model communist farm based on joint ownership, he argued that it should have been protected by law, but its few years of peaceful existence were instead paid for by many of its members with their lives. Morgachev stated that he still shared Tolstoy's views on life, and wished to be rehabilitated before he died. 'I don't need rehabilitation now,' he added in a handwritten postscript to his letter, 'but young prosecutors should learn what was done to the friends and followers of Lev Tolstoy.' Morgachev was officially rehabilitated in December 1976. As Popovsky noted drily, the Soviet Supreme Court had now effectively exonerated Tolstoy's followers from the earlier allegation that they were Tolstoyans.¹⁰¹

Popovsky was astonished to discover not only that Tolstoyans still existed in Russia, but that they had remained true to their beliefs through thick and thin. Like every Soviet citizen, he was reminded every day of the 'cult' of Tolstoy in his country - streets and squares were named after him, his fiction was permanently on the syllabus in schools and universities and there were several museums dedicated to him in different parts of the country. But also like every Soviet citizen, Popovsky had only ever had access to Tolstoy's literary works. As to forming an opinion about Tolstoy's philosophical views, he had, of course, been guided by Lenin's essay 'Lev Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution', which was required reading, even ahead of Anna Karenina. Thus Popovsky had grown up with the notion that Tolstoy had no talent as a thinker, and was certainly no prophet, that his philosophical ideas were actually harmful, that his followers were pathetic and that self-perfection and vegetarianism were ridiculous nonsense. All these ideas were reinforced in articles, commentaries and encyclopaedias. Days after Morgachev was rehabilitated, moreover, the Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev left a long rambling entry in the VIP guest book at Yasnaya Polyana, later reproduced inPravda,which discussed Tolstoy exclusively as the author of War and Peace}¹⁰²

When Popovsky canvassed some of his Moscow friends (who were all typical members of the Russian intelligentsia), he discovered that none of them knew anything about the Tolstoyans either. His curiosity piqued, he set out to do some research. This was not straightforward in the Cold War climate of phone-tapping, room-bugging and perlustration of personal correspondence. It was certainly not possible to talk about Tolstoyanism publicly, or write about it at that time. But with the help of the many sympathetic people who went out of their way to provide assistance, Popovsky eventually obtained addresses for thirty-two Tolstoyans scattered all over the Soviet Union, and along the way acquired an extensive archive of manuscripts by and about Tolstoyans. Some were self-penned memoirs by Tolstoyans, some were accounts of Tolstoyan communes, while others comprised correspondence, including with the Communist Party Central Committee regarding the Tolstoyans' aspiration to publish Tolstoy's philosophical and religious writings in the Soviet Union. These manuscripts had been carefully hidden from the authorities, and the threat of persecution was very real: a few months after the General Prosecutor officially exonerated Dmitry Morgachev, his flat was searched by the KGB, who threatened the now eighty-five-year-old invalid not to cause trouble. After successfully managing to bring out to the West 3,000 pages of materials covering the period from 1918 to 1977, Popovsky emigrated to the United States, and immediately got to work on putting together an extraordinary story of belief and survival. With the support of the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, his book about the Soviet peasant Tolstoyans was published in London in 1983.

By the time of the 150th anniversary of Tolstoy's birth in 1978, Popovsky concluded there were probably only about fifty original Tolstoyans left alive in Russia, all aged between seventy-five and ninety. Hundreds had been thrown into prisons, concentration camps and lunatic asylums, and more than 100 had been shot for the sake of their beliefs. It was the lives of the Tolstoyans above all which provided Popovsky with a positive answer to the question he had continually asked in his books about Soviet scientists, as to whether it was possible to preserve a clear conscience living in a totalitarian society.¹⁰³ The real problems had started for the Tolstoyans with the commencement of collectivisation and the first Five-Year Plan in the centenary year of 1928. Communes began to be shut down one after the other, and increasing numbers of Tolstoyans were arrested. The young members of the intelligentsia (including artists, writers and doctors) who had set up a Tolstoyan commune in the countryside west of Moscow in 1923 were informed that their commune would be merged with another farm to form the 'Red October' collective farm, and a subsequent act of arson was blamed on them. Some 15,000 Dukhobors and other sectarians had applied to re-emigrate by 1929, now bitterly regretting their decision to return home, but all their applications were turned down. Tolstoy's old peasant friend Mikhail Novikov ingenuously sent the Soviet government an open letter in February 1929 in which he proposed practical measures for increasing the harvest. He was arrested for his pains, despite being sixty-nine, and he ended his life in the camps. Five Tolstoyans were arrested in Moscow in 1929 and exiled to five years of hard labour at the notorious concentration camp on the Solovetsky islands. This was the former monastery-prison in the White Sea which had served as the place of exile of Tolstoy's great-great-great-grandfather in the eighteenth century. In February 1930 Chertkov sent a letter to Stalin, in which he tried to intercede on their behalf. He explained that the Tolstoyans were suffering from severe malnutrition due to being vegetarians, and also from hypothermia, since their winter clothes had been stolen by other prisoners.¹⁰⁴ In February 1929 the L. Tolstoy Moscow Vegetarian Society was forced to close when the authorities refused to prolong the lease on the premises it rented. There were by this time no other Tolstoyan organisations left.¹⁰⁵

The Tolstoyans simply refused to be collectivised, and began to think about moving far away to the edge of the country, where they would be free from further acts of repression and could live peaceful lives on their own terms. There was a historic precedent here, as this had been the tactic of huge numbers of Cossacks, sectarians and Old Believers down the centuries during tsarist times. The Soviet Union was different: despite the vastness of its terrain, there were no quiet corners for the Tolstoyans to retreat to, but the Tolstoyans only discovered that after the fact. Chertkov encouraged members of the Life and Labour commune to ask the government for land in Siberia, and he petitioned on their behalf himself, thinking this was indeed a good solution. Amazingly, the Soviet government gave its official approval in February 1930, and in March 1931 about 1,000 Tolstoyans from three communes set off on a 2,000-mile journey east to the town of Novokuznetsk (soon to be renamed Stalinsk). The new commune worked well, and in 1931 Anna Malorod managed to found the first and only Tolstoyan school in the history of the Soviet Union. Even though the Tolstoyans were willing to make compromises in order to cooperate with state institutions, the local Party organisations ensured its lifespan was short: the school was closed down in 1934. The Life and Labour commune celebrated its fifth anniversary in 1936, but arrests were already being made, and the regional authorities began to treat it like a regular collective farm. By the time it held its last general meeting in January 1939, there were barely any men left.¹⁰⁶ The remaining commune members were transferred to state farms. They lived lives of great poverty, but that was of minor importance, as material prosperity had never been their priority.

During his research, Mark Popovsky discovered that the Tolstoyans were quite a disparate group: not all were vegetarians, some smoked, and some had even gone off to the front in 1941, some never to return. But even if their views and way of life diverged, he was struck by what they all shared: a deep ethical sense, a heightened sensitivity to injustice and a profound desire to do no evil. And they had remained loyal to Tolstoy, despite being unable to follow his ideas in a practical way. On 20 November 1960 the former schoolteacher Anna Malorod noted in her diary:

Today it is fifty years since the death of L. N. Tolstoy, my dear father and teacher of life. He helped me purify Christ's teaching from superstitions accreted over the centuries, he helped me find dear friends, a spiritual family if not related by blood, which is better, stronger, and more genuine. Thanks to Tolstoy I moved from the city to the country, to be amongst those working the earth, and I started manual labour myself in the vegetable plot and in the garden, and learned to love it. Tolstoy helped me find true goodness in life. He showed the true way in love and unity for the whole world. He showed the shortcomings which divide people, and even sometimes destroy human life altogether. The great, still underrated Tolstoy!¹⁰⁷

The Soviet Tolstoyans had a great attachment to the written word: without it their stories would have never come to light. From the 1950s onwards they tried to donate their memoirs and correspondence to the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, but archivists refused to accept them, through understandable fear of political reprisals.¹⁰⁸ The Tolstoyans also zealously defended Tolstoy from what they regarded as slander by Orthodox Soviet literary critics. Boris Mazurin followed publications on Tolstoy particularly closely, even from the remote Siberian village where he lived, and made it a point of principle to pen carefully written and robustly argued letters whenever he felt something needed to be corrected. He tackled Party member Boris Meilakh, for example, after the publication in 1961 of his book about Tolstoy's departure and death. 'You often talk in your book about the "weak" places in Tolstoy's worldview, calling them weak in view of their incompatibility with Marxist views, particularly as regards the possibility of changing life for the better through violence...', he wrote in his letter to Meilakh. To his credit, Meilakh replied, but Mazurin was still not satisfied, and wrote again to take issue with him about the idea that Tolstoy had been involved in any kind of political struggle to acquire power over people: 'It's impossible to imagine Tolstoy as a government figure leading and organising people by means of the necessary instruments of state power. And it is equally impossible to imagine Tolstoy remaining silent in such awful years as 1937 and 1938.' ¹⁰⁹It is indeed hard to imagine Tolstoy remaining silent, but it is harder still to imagine that he would have survived the Purges. It is more likely that he would simply have been shot at the first opportunity.

The Tolstoyans were disappointed to see Chertkov's name now blackened, both in Meilakh's book, and also in the new edition of Valentin Bulgakov's memoir ofTolstoy, which was published in 1964. But most painful of all to them was the speech given by the establishment writer Leonid Leonov to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy's death at the Bolshoi Theatre on 19 November 1960. It was reprinted in all the major Soviet newspapers, and issued as a separate publication the following year. Leonov, recipient of Stalin and Lenin prizes, a Hero of Socialist Labour and a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet, parroted the standard view on Tolstoy, implying it was shortcomings in his philosophical and religious views which explained why there were no longer any apostles or ardent acolytes around to continue his ideas except for a few sectarians scattered about the globe. After much discussion with fellow Tolstoyans, who were understandably indignant, Mazurin wrote Leonov a lengthy riposte in February 1962, then travelled all the way to Moscow with it, only to be rebuffed by officials when seeking to find his address. Eventually he got his letter to Leonov, however, and in September 1962 he actually received a reply. Rather predictably, Leonov failed to answer any of Mazurin's criticisms.¹¹⁰ Many other Tolstoyans vigorously proclaimed their existence, and challenged untruths. In 1975 Dmitry Morgachev sent an open letter to Alexander Klibanov, with copies to leading newspapers, after the latter published a book about religious sectarianism in which he alleged, for example, that the Tolstoyans had refused to join collective farms because they were essentially kulaks.¹¹¹

When James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, asked Mark Popovsky in the early eighties why he had chosen to research the history of a small group whose influence had been negligible, he answered that he had been impressed with the intelligent way the Tolstoyans had protested against the status quo, by simply living individual lives in accordance with their moral principles.¹¹² Their patience and determination to bear witness was finally rewarded a few years later. Russian scholarship on Tolstoy entered a new phase with the publication in May 1988 of Vladimir Lakshin's article 'The Return of Tolstoy the Thinker'. It was obvious that Tolstoy could no longer be seen as just a mirror reflecting the contradictions of the 1905 Revolution, he wrote, since Tolstoy was a laser - a laser of humanity.¹¹³ With the onset of perestroika and glasnost, the story of the Tolstoyans' tenacious struggle to establish communes and till the land in the communist Eden of the Soviet Union could finally be told in Russia as well as in the West. Everything changed in Russia in the late 1980s with the arrival of Gorbachev's reforms and the lifting of censorship. Mazurin, at the age of eighty-seven years, lived to witness the sensation produced by the publication of his memoirs in Russia's most prestigious literary magazine Novy mir, which in 1988 had a subscription of well over a million.¹¹⁴ Many other articles and books followed.

Tolstoy did not believe in the idea of an afterlife in the Christian sense; indeed, the prospect of death summarily curtailing his existence, at a time which he had no control over, was the biggest problem he ever wrestled with. He did not believe his works would be remembered for very long after his death, nor did he believe he had all that many followers. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the final liberation of literary and cultural historians from the shackles of ideology, an important position in the wealth of new publications about Tolstoy's legacy in Russia has been occupied by materials shedding light on the lives of those who sought to put his ideas into practice after his death. Not only have they made it possible to piece together the complex and fascinating story of Tolstoy's 'afterlife', but they have shown how just how deeply Tolstoy's ideas continued to resonate well into the twentieth century.

In April 1990 an application was made by a group of scholars to the Tula educational authorities to found an L. N. Tolstoy School research institute, with the aim of reintroducing Tolstoy's pedagogical ideas into teaching and learning in contemporary Russian education.¹¹⁵ In 1998 its achievements in developing a three-stage educational programme from kindergarten to university entrance were recognised when the Russian government awarded it the status of a 'Federal Experimental Platform', and by 2010 there were already hundreds in Russia and abroad using Tolstoy's methods.¹¹⁶ The revival of Tolstoyan schools was the brainchild of Vitaly Remizov, who became director of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow in 2001. In an interview in 2005 he explained that the schools aimed to nurture independence in their pupils above all, in an atmosphere of freedom, using at the primary level the texts developed by Tolstoy in the 1870s.¹¹⁷

In November 1991, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the religious association 'Spiritual Unity (the Church of Lev Tolstoy)' was registered in Moscow with the Russian Ministry of Justice, a step that would have been unthinkable in the Soviet era. Its statutes proclaimed its goal to be the dissemination of a Tolstoyan understanding of religion and spiritual life.¹¹⁸ Its umbrella organisation was named as the Unity Church, which was initially founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in Kansas City in 1889 under the inspiration of Tolstoy's teachings. The Unity Church describes itself as 'a positive, practical, progressive approach to Christianity based on the teachings of Jesus and the power of prayer' which honours 'the universal truths in all religions and respects each individual's right to choose a spiritual path'.¹¹⁹ In 1996 a new Department of Tolstoy's Spiritual Heritage with eight faculty members opened its doors at the L. N. Tolstoy Tula State Pedagogical Institute.

In 2000, three years before she died at the age of seventy-eight, the distinguished Tolstoy scholar Lidiya Gromova-Opulskaya published the first volume in the new Academy of Sciences edition of Tolstoy's Complete Collected Works. Drawing on the many new materials which have come to light since the publication of the Jubilee Edition, this edition will run to 100 volumes, and, as the editors take pains to note, will be the first to be truly complete; it will not be marred by 'omissions or constraints', unlike the Jubilee Edition.

When the project was first conceived in the late 1980s, Gromova-Opulskaya commented on its aims:

Tolstoy is published and re-published in our country with print runs running into the millions. The 90-volume Complete Collected Works, published between 1928 and 1958, is so significant and monumental a publication that we continue to be proud of it. Nevertheless, Russian textual scholarship has not completely fulfilled its duty. The texts of many of the works of this great world writer remain unverified, manuscripts have been published incomplete and unsystematically. These are the main tasks in the new, probably ioo-volume, genuinely academic edition on which work has now begun.¹²⁰

While Tolstoy scholarship may no longer be hostage to political mandates, the harsh realities of the market economy in contemporary Russia dictate that the progress of the new edition may well be slow.

It seems the only institution in Russia still refusing to open its doors as far as Tolstoy is concerned is the Orthodox Church. In 1994 Tolstoy's great-great-grandson Vladimir Ilyich Tolstoy was appointed as the new director of Yasnaya Polyana, which is still one of the most famous museums in Russia. In early January 2001 he wrote to the Moscow Patriarch with a suggestion that the Church reflect on the significance of the excommunication which had taken place 100 years earlier. Patriarch Alexy's refusal to discuss the issue created a stir. Vladimir Tolstoy certainly never doubted the importance of the excommunication. 'I am deeply convinced,' he declared in an interview at the time, 'that it was one of the most important historical events in the history of the Russian state, which either obliquely or directly affected future developments, and divided Russian society along both vertical and horizontal axes.'

Just how great the reverberations of Tolstoy's excommunication were with regards to Russian national life is perhaps most eloquently expressed by the fact that the first official meeting between the Orthodox Church and the Tolstoy estate took place in 2006 - 105 years after the event. The occasion was a special conference held in March 2006 at Yasnaya Polyana, when scholars met representatives from the Orthodox Church to debate the significance of the excommunication. As well as re-examining the sources of the original conflict and the legal aspects of the Holy Synod's decree, delegates discussed its moral, spiritual and social dimensions and consequences, including its continuing public resonance today. The conference was widely reported in the Russian press, which noted that the unprecedented debate between the Church and literary community was 'heated, to say the least'. As the writer Alexey Varlamov remarked in one paper, the conflict between Tolstoy and the church was one of the most painful points of the twentieth century, and crucial to the cause of the Russian Revolution. Another delegate, Father Georgy Orekhanov, who spoke on the spiritual aspect of Tolstoy's death, defended the Church's actions in 1901, but acknowledged that it was important to understand why so many people had immediately supported the writer at this 'significant moment' in Russian history. In the light of the collapse of communism and the subsequent resurgence of Christianity, he added, the question of the relationship between the Russian people and the Orthodox Church was just as topical now.¹²¹ Father Orekhanov gave another conference paper on Tolstoy in January 2009 at a panel devoted to topical problems in the history of the Orthodox Church,¹²² but it is unlikely that discussion will move beyond the academic sphere. To a church and state once again forging close bonds in today's authoritarian Russia, Tolstoy's teachings must seem as problematic and as dangerous as ever.