Tolstoy

When she was released from prison in 1921, Alexandra settled once again at Yasnaya Polyana, where she was still Commissar, but in June she was summoned to a meeting with Mikhail Kalinin, head of the Central Committee. After disembarking from the train in Moscow, Alexandra set off for the Kremlin on her bicycle. At this important meeting it was agreed that Yasnaya Polyana would now become the property of the Russian Federation, and would be run as a commune under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of People’s Enlightenment. The commune would include a school, a library, and later a hospital. Alexandra’s title was now changed from Commissar to ‘Custodian’, and she was given the duties of managing the estate as a museum, organising lectures and events and acting as head of the new school. The agricultural work was to be undertaken by Tolstoyans.⁶⁴ The commune lasted less than a year. The seventeen so-called Tolstoyans who took up residence at Yasnaya Polyana in March 1921 turned out to be a bunch of no-hopers, who either argued that they could not remove worms from the cabbages because they could not kill ‘anything living’, or were simply incapable of working. These ‘faux Tolstoyans’ thankfully soon left, some miraculously transforming themselves into devout Communist Party apparatchiks.⁶⁵ Alexandra then turned her energies to starting the village school at Yasnaya Polyana, and to restoring the estate to its pre-revolutionary condition.

Alexandra was not the only Tolstoyan to attract the attention of the secret police in the early 1920s. despite his political clout, Chertkov himself was the subject of several denunciations between 1920 and 1922. As he became more vociferous about his opposition to the Bolsheviks, informers from the Cheka were despatched to report on him, and also what went on at the headquarters of the Society of True Freedom, whose vegetarian cafeteria and library were popular haunts for Tolstoyans and those of like mind. Unlike the Chekist and part-time Futurist with the flowing locks and velvet jacket who had come to arrest Alexandra, not all the Bolshevik spies were well informed. In one report which mentioned discussion of someone called ‘Socrates’, the hapless agent noted in parentheses that he did not know him, apparently unaware that Socrates had been dead for some time.⁶⁶

Sixty Tolstoyans were arrested for ‘anti-Soviet’ activity in Vitebsk at the end of 1920, and it was only a matter of time before they caught up with Chertkov and Bulgakov, whose homes were raided by the Cheka in december 1922. Both were summoned to the Lubyanka for questioning. Chertkov defiantly refused to participate, and coolly and calmly demanded the return of the papers which had been confiscated. The Bolsheviks decided to send both Chertkov and Bulgakov into exile for three years. Bulgakov had earlier inter-ceded on Alexandra Lvovna’s behalf, and this time it was her turn to plead for clemency. In February 1923 she wrote to Lev Kamenev, chairman of the new all-important Politburo (its other members were Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Krestinsky), requesting that Bulgakov be allowed to stay in Moscow so that he could continue his important work at the Tolstoy Museum, where he was director. Chertkov wrote a dignified and pedantic letter meanwhile to Avel Enukidze, a another prominent Bolshevik and close friend of Stalin who was a member of the Central Committee. In his letter he argued wearily that he was now in his late sixties, and so did not have much time left; he could not possibly proceed with the important project of producing Tolstoy’s collected works if he was exiled abroad. Chertkov was allowed to stay, but it was in keeping with his nickname of ‘Iron Felix’ that dzerzhinsky refused to relent in Bulgakov’s case. A little more than a month later, Bulgakov left for Czechoslovakia with his family, and was only allowed to return to Russia twenty-six years later in 1949. When he came back he immediately resumed his job at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow.