Tolstoy (78 page)

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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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.
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She was released a few months later in February 1921,
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.