Tolstoy

By the time of the 150th anniversary of Tolstoy’s birth in 1978, Popovsky concluded there were probably only about fifty original Tolstoyans left alive in Russia, all aged between seventy-five and ninety. Hundreds had been thrown into prisons, concentration camps and lunatic asylums, and more than 100 had been shot for the sake of their beliefs. It was the lives of the Tolstoyans above all which provided Popovsky with a positive answer to the question he had continually asked in his books about Soviet scientists, as to whether it was possible to preserve a clear conscience living in a totalitarian society.¹⁰³ The real problems had started for the Tolstoyans with the commencement of collectivisation and the first Five-Year Plan in the centenary year of 1928. Communes began to be shut down one after the other, and increasing numbers of Tolstoyans were arrested. The young members of the intelligentsia (including artists, writers and doctors) who had set up a Tolstoyan commune in the countryside west of Moscow in 1923 were informed that their commune would be merged with another farm to form the ‘Red October’ collective farm, and a subsequent act of arson was blamed on them. Some 15,000 dukhobors and other sectarians had applied to re-emigrate by 1929, now bitterly regretting their decision to return home, but all their applications were turned down. Tolstoy’s old peasant friend Mikhail Novikov ingenuously sent the Soviet government an open letter in February 1929 in which he proposed practical measures for increasing the harvest. He was arrested for his pains, despite being sixty-nine, and he ended his life in the camps. Five Tolstoyans were arrested in Moscow in 1929 and exiled to five years of hard labour at the notorious concentration camp on the Solovetsky islands. This was the former monastery-prison in the White Sea which had served as the place of exile of Tolstoy’s great-great-great-grandfather in the eighteenth century. In February 1930 Chertkov sent a letter to Stalin, in which he tried to intercede on their behalf. He explained that the Tolstoyans were suffering from severe malnutrition due to being vegetarians, and also from hypothermia, since their winter clothes had been stolen by other prisoners.¹⁰⁴ In February 1929 the L. Tolstoy Moscow Vegetarian Society was forced to close when the authorities refused to prolong the lease on the premises it rented. There were by this time no other Tolstoyan organisations left.¹⁰⁵

The Tolstoyans simply refused to be collectivised, and began to think about moving far away to the edge of the country, where they would be free from further acts of repression and could live peaceful lives on their own terms. There was a historic precedent here, as this had been the tactic of huge numbers of Cossacks, sectarians and Old Believers down the centuries during tsarist times. The Soviet Union was different: despite the vastness of its terrain, there were no quiet corners for the Tolstoyans to retreat to, but the Tolstoyans only discovered that after the fact. Chertkov encouraged members of the Life and Labour commune to ask the government for land in Siberia, and he petitioned on their behalf himself, thinking this was indeed a good solution. Amazingly, the Soviet government gave its official approval in February 1930, and in March 1931 about 1,000 Tolstoyans from three communes set off on a 2,000-mile journey east to the town of Novokuznetsk (soon to be renamed Stalinsk). The new commune worked well, and in 1931 Anna Malorod managed to found the first and only Tolstoyan school in the history of the Soviet Union. Even though the Tolstoyans were willing to make compromises in order to cooperate with state institutions, the local Party organisations ensured its lifespan was short: the school was closed down in 1934. The Life and Labour commune celebrated its fifth anniversary in 1936, but arrests were already being made, and the regional authorities began to treat it like a regular collective farm. By the time it held its last general meeting in January 1939, there were barely any men left.¹⁰⁶ The remaining commune members were transferred to state farms. They lived lives of great poverty, but that was of minor importance, as material prosperity had never been their priority.

During his research, Mark Popovsky discovered that the Tolstoyans were quite a disparate group: not all were vegetarians, some smoked, and some had even gone off to the front in 1941, some never to return. But even if their views and way of life diverged, he was struck by what they all shared: a deep ethical sense, a heightened sensitivity to injustice and a profound desire to do no evil. And they had remained loyal to Tolstoy, despite being unable to follow his ideas in a practical way. On 20 November 1960 the former schoolteacher Anna Malorod noted in her diary: