Tolstoy

If Chertkov thought NEP was going to bring about greater freedom for the dissemination of Tolstoyan ideas, he was mistaken. In 1923 the Bolsheviks shut down the new independent Tolstoyan publishing house Zadruga as part of its drive to bring all publishing under state control. Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya also demanded that all of Tolstoy’s religious writings be removed from municipal libraries.⁶⁷ Tolstoy’s ideas had been considered heretical by the tsarist government, and within five years they had become also unacceptable to the regime which replaced it. The Bolsheviks now had the upper hand with nonconformists, but they clearly still saw Tolstoyanism as a threat. As a world-famous writer-turned-anarchist who preached non-resistance to violence, Tolstoy had exasperated the tsarist government during his lifetime, and the Bolsheviks found it no easier to deal with his legacy. On the one hand they revered him for attacking the Russian tsarist state and exposing the moral flaws of all its institutions, but on the other they could not countenance his uncompromising rejection of the state in any form. The problem was that Tolstoy was not just the ‘greatest novelist of any age and of any country’, as the prominent Belgian political writer Charles Sarolea commented after a sobering visit to the Soviet Union in 1923, but also ‘one of the greatest teachers and preachers of modern times’.⁶⁸ Sarolea was, of course, not alone in coming to the apparently paradoxical conclusion that there was a direct connection between Tolstoy and Bolshevism. This was still a topic on the lips of many in the early 1920s, both in Russia and abroad.⁶⁹ The extent to which the Bolsheviks still regarded Tolstoyanism as one of the greatest threats facing the fledgling Communist state may be gauged by the fact that Lunacharsky gave a lengthy lecture on the subject in 1924, which was also disseminated in book form. The basic ideologies dividing Russians at that time, he stated categorically, were Marxism and Tolstoyanism.⁷⁰

From the beginning, Russia’s leading revolutionaries had disagreed about Tolstoy while acknowledging his seminal importance. Lenin had played a prominent role in the debate by writing seven articles on Tolstoy between 1908 and 1911. In 1908 he had directly attributed the failure of the 1905 Revolution to the influence of Tolstoy’s ideas of non-violence. His article ‘Lev Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution’ was widely reprinted after his death, and became the Soviet blueprint for the official view of Tolstoy. Trotsky, who wrote on Tolstoy in 1908 and 1910, had shone a more positive light on Tolstoy’s impact on the events of 1905, while Plekhanov had simply dismissed Tolstoy as a patriarchal, reactionary landowner with nothing to offer the revolutionary movement. Tolstoy’s name was inevitably invoked again at the time of the 1917 Revolutions, and continued to figure in public discourse, as the Bolshevik government struggled to find a way of exploiting his legacy.

It was not until the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth in 1928 that a clear policy was formulated, and twenty years of debate came to an abrupt end. What the Bolsheviks decided to do was separate Tolstoy from Tolstoyanism. despite the ‘contradictions’ in his teachings, the Bolsheviks decided the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth should be celebrated in grand style, and a government committee headed by Lunacharsky was formed in 1926, two years in advance of the anniversary.⁷¹ Alexandra was pinning great hopes on the Tolstoy Jubilee, and on the fact that it was being officially sanctioned at the very highest level. For her it was a form of self-defence against the dozens of local communists whom she described as buzzing around Yasnaya Polyana like flies, hoping to find fault and denounce her.⁷² Like Chertkov, she had calmly stuck to her apolitical Tolstoyan beliefs, and refused to capitulate to the anti-religious propaganda war being waged around her. In 1924 the Yasnaya Polyana school had become part of the revolutionary ‘experimental station’ schools network, which drew partly on Tolstoy’s ideas about education.⁷³ But the situation grew increasingly hostile, with the local powers seeing Alexandra and her colleagues as representatives of the ‘loathed bourgeoisie’, and resenting their achievements. The hostility was not restricted to barbs from local officials: Alexandra was also publicly attacked in Pravda as a ‘former countess’ who continued to exploit the workers and live a life of luxury and depravity while disseminating religious propaganda to her pupils. Alexandra faced her critics by reiterating Lenin’s declaration that ‘Soviet power can afford the luxury of a Tolstoyan corner in the USSR’. She also responded by publishing a rebuttal of the criticisms on 2 July 1924 in Pravda, but she already felt extremely beleaguered.⁷⁴