Tolstoy

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 Makovický, 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