Tolstoy

In 1960 the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death was celebrated with official pomp by the Soviet establishment, which organised another, albeit more sedate, commemorative evening at the Bolshoi Theatre. And on 9 September 1978, to mark the 150th anniversary of Tolstoy’s birth, the ‘Museum-estate Yasnaya Polyana’ was awarded the Order of Lenin by order of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for ‘major work in the aesthetic education of workers, and the study and propaganda of the creative legacy of the great Russian writer L. N. Tolstoy’ (the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow was awarded the Order of the Red Banner). After she had left Russia in 1929 and become a vociferous critic of the Soviet regime, Alexandra’s name had been erased from history as a ‘traitor to the motherland’, as Nikolay Rodionov had been forced to put it in his 1961 article about the Jubilee Edition, but at least he had mentioned her name. In an article about Yasnaya Polyana in the first years of the Revolution published in 1962, her name does not appear at all.⁹⁹ In 1977 Alexandra was partially rehabilitated and invited back to Russia to take part in the forthcoming celebrations, but by this time she was bedridden and gravely ill, and she died the following year in the United States, where she had been resident since the 1930s. The rehabilitation was partial, because even a book about the history of Yasnaya Polyana as a museum published as late as 1986 makes no mention of Alexandra; the fact that its author was Ilya Tolstoy, the grandson of her brother Ilya, is all the more dismaying.¹⁰⁰

The almost total ignorance of Soviet citizens about the extent to which Tolstoy’s ideas also continued to send powerful reverberations across Russia deep into the twentieth century is witness to the Communist Party’s success in eliminating Tolstoyanism as a movement. At the same time that the Soviet regime firmly placed Tolstoy the novelist in its pantheon of model artists by reissuing his works with print runs running into the hundreds of thousands, it had unleashed a systematic campaign against his doctrines and all who followed them. The publication in the West in 1983 of a remarkable book about the Soviet followers of Tolstoy by a respected dissident writer and advocate of human rights based in Moscow called Mark Popovsky, however, pays tribute to the indomitable spirit of those who continued to be inspired by Tolstoy even in the face of unbelievable adversity and hardship. It was at the end of the 1970s when Popovsky, author of numerous books about Soviet scientists, both published and unpublished, was handed a copy of a letter from a peasant called dmitry Morgachev. Writing at the age of eighty-four from the town of Przhevalsk in far-away Soviet Kirghizia to the USSR Public Prosecutor on 24 July 1976, Morgachev requested rehabilitation, and an acknowledgement from the Soviet government that he and his comrades had not committed any crime.

Popovsky discovered to his surprise that Morgachev was a follower of Tolstoy, who had been arrested along with other Tolstoyans at their commune in Siberia in 1936. Morgachev explained in his letter to the Public Prosecutor that the following year, the Soviet government had decided the three-year sentence was too mild, and in 1940 had increased it to seven years, with an additional three years of hard labour at the end of the term. Morgachev told the Public Prosecutor that he was one of the few who had survived, and counted himself lucky. Resolutely believing that he had never committed any crime, he explained that he had requested rehabilitation in 1963, by which time he was already seventy-one and an invalid, but had been flatly refused. Morgachev went on to explain in his letter that his Tolstoyan commune had transferred from central Russia to Siberia in 1930, in accordance with the decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Since it had operated as a model communist farm based on joint ownership, he argued that it should have been protected by law, but its few years of peaceful existence were instead paid for by many of its members with their lives. Morgachev stated that he still shared Tolstoy’s views on life, and wished to be rehabilitated before he died. ‘I don’t need rehabilitation now,’ he added in a handwritten postscript to his letter, ‘but young prosecutors should learn what was done to the friends and followers of Lev Tolstoy.’ Morgachev was officially rehabilitated in december 1976. As Popovsky noted drily, the Soviet Supreme Court had now effectively exonerated Tolstoy’s followers from the earlier allegation that they were Tolstoyans.¹⁰¹