Tolstoy

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.’³¹ Berdyaev 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