Tolstoy

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 naïve 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.