Tolstoy

As well as being appointed Commissar of Yasnaya Polyana by Lunacharsky in 1919, Alexandra was also 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 Tolstoy-ans 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 two only 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