Tolstoy

That first autumn Tolstoy began to travel further afield, including to the Russian fortress at Groznaya (current-day Grozny), a new outpost built in 1818 by General Alexey Ermolov. The forbiddingly named Groznaya (which means ‘threatening’) was one of a number of new forts he built and named with the intention of terrorising the locals, such as Vnezapnaya (‘Sudden’) and Burnaya (‘Stormy’). It was also Ermolov who in 1817 had completed major improvements to the 126-mile-long Georgian Military Highway which served as a vital artery for Russian troops over the mountains. It was the only passable road crossing the Caucasian range, and one of the highest in the world – higher than the Simplon Pass. When Pushkin had shared his impressions of the Highway in his Journey to Erzerum (1829) it was still extremely dangerous: travellers had to go with a convoy of 500 soldiers and a cannon, and sometimes covered only ten miles a day. By Tolstoy’s time it had become both safer and faster.⁵² He travelled along it for the first time with his brother when they went to Tiflis in October 1851, and now he was finally rewarded with the spectacular views of the snow-capped peaks which Pushkin and Lermontov had found so exhilarating before him.

Resigning his civil-service post and joining the army proved to be a lengthy bureaucratic procedure, and Tolstoy was forced to remain in Tiflis for over two months, where he also lost all his money at billiards and fell ill. During that solitary time, when he carried on working on Childhood and tried to stop himself womanising, he wrote fond, homesick letters to Aunt Toinette, who was his only regular correspondent. He told her how glad he was to be able to play the piano again, as it was the only thing he missed in his new life at the Starogladkovskaya camp (around this time he also decided to give his grand piano at Yasnaya Polyana to his sister Masha, knowing he would not soon return home). Tolstoy was also able to hear some music at the Tiflis Opera House which had just opened. For that, and for the city’s new tree-lined streets and its first Russian newspaper, Tolstoy had Prince Mikhail Vorontsov to thank. Commander-in-chief of the Caucasian army from 1844 to 1854, and the first imperial viceroy in the region, the British-educated Vorontsov was a moderniser who had previously transformed Odessa, and he had now brought his enlightened city-planning ideas to Tiflis.⁵³

Following his formal application to join the artillery regiment in which his brother served, Tolstoy need to sit an exam. Passing it entitled him to call himself a cadet, or, to use the Russian term, a yunker (a corruption of the German ‘Jung Herr’, the rank for junior under-officers from the nobility). On 3 January 1852 Tolstoy was appointed Feierverker (Bombardier), 4th class, in the 4th Battery of the Russian Army’s 20th Artillery Brigade – though his appointment would not become official until his resignation from the Tula government was formalised. Two weeks later he was back in Starogladkovskaya, but left again immediately to take part in a month of raids against the Chechens for the first time as a full-time soldier, often side by side with his brother. It was relentless, intense and very dangerous, but after decades of successful guerrilla warfare from the Chechens and other mountain tribes, the Russians were beginning to gain the upper hand.

To begin with, Russian military strategy in the Caucasus was designed with a conventional European army in mind as the enemy, but this was no ordinary theatre of war. The Russians were not fighting large numbers of conventional troops with bayonets on a plateau, but small, heterogeneous bands of rebels on heavily wooded mountain slopes. Their enemies knew every inch of the land and were adept at knowing how to take cover. Eventually the Russian army changed its tactics. under Vorontsov, who was as ruthless as Ermolov, the new strategy was to cut back forests and decimate villages so as to undermine the Chechen defence system.⁵⁴ It began to produce results. Tolstoy relished the opportunity to prove his mettle in his first raids against the Chechens, and his valour should have been rewarded with the St George Cross, but since his papers had not come through from Tula, he was still technically a volunteer, and so not officially eligible. He was bitterly disappointed. His papers finally arrived at the end of March.⁵⁵