Tolstoy (79 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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 interceded 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.

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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When the committee for the anniversary celebrations was formed in 1926, Alexandra submitted proposals for extensive renovation work at Yasnaya Polyana, including new buildings for the school and hospital there. She also proposed the reorganisation of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. Her sister Tanya had taken over the management of the Moscow museum from Bulgakov when he was sent into exile in 1923, but she herself had emigrated in 1925. Since Ilya, Lev and Mikhail were all already abroad, and Sergey had a job teaching at the Moscow Conservatoire, the seemingly indefatigable Alexandra now became Director of the Tolstoy Museum as well. Lunacharsky, Chertkov, Gusev and the other members of the committee were receptive to Alexandra's proposals, but were powerless to do anything, owing to the simple fact that there was no money: the Commissariat of People's Enlightenment was always the poorest of all the Soviet ministries. Alexandra showed her mettle at this point, and decided to go to the top, and after making several visits to Moscow from Yasnaya Polyana she eventually obtained an audience with Stalin, who had assumed power after Lenin's death in January 1924. The brief interview was chastening. Stalin flatly refused to pay the million roubles requested by the Jubilee Committee for its construction and renovation programme, and it quickly became apparent to Alexandra that he did not care about Tolstoy and the Tolstoy Jubilee at all. What he did care about was exploiting it as a felicitous opportunity for international propaganda, and doing so as cheaply as possible.
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The situation with the Tolstoy
Collected Works
was also bleak. In 1926, with just two years to go, there was still no contract signed for what was now pegged to the centenary year as the Jubilee Edition. Chertkov had also been having high-level meetings with the Soviet leadership. He had been forced to accept the idea of a 'temporary' state monopoly on Tolstoy's manuscripts, which would at least be lifted with publication, but found himself constantly lobbying for funds to pay the editorial team. His first meeting with Stalin, which took place in the autumn of 1924, had produced results. In November

1925 the Soviet government finally approved the release of a million roubles to pay for the cost of the project. The money was very slow in materialising, however, and in June 1926 Chertkov was forced to write to Stalin to tell him he could no longer afford to pay the forty-three members of the editorial staff working on the project (most of their wages were still coming from his own pocket). Alexandra was still very much involved with the project, but she and Chertkov did not see eye to eye. Finally, in 1925, they reached an agreement: her group would prepare Tolstoy's manuscripts written before 1880, and his team would work on the later writings. In December 1925 the two groups were united under Chertkov's leadership.
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The Central Committee now decided it should form a special commission to investigate and monitor the Tolstoy Jubilee Edition, and in September

1926 a 'troika' was appointed, headed by Stalin's deputy Vyacheslav Molotov. In March 1927 the state bank finally paid out a miserly 15,000 roubles, but meanwhile the contract had got lost in a morass of bureaucracy and ever-changing personnel at Gosizdat, the state publishing house. Chertkov wrote to Stalin again in March 1928 to protest that Gosizdat was refusing to sign the contract, despite the special commission having approved it. The contract was finally signed on 2 April 1928, but by then it was too late for even the first volume to appear in time for Tolstoy's centenary.
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By this point, Alexandra had lost interest in an edition which was clearly going to be limited and expensive. There had been further disagreements with Chertkov over payment for editorial work, and Chertkov now took over as editor-in-chief.

The Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy's
Complete Collected Works
was to set the standard for Soviet scholarly editions. Artistic works were designated for the first forty-five volumes, with separate volumes for the different versions of major works
(War and Peace
takes up four volumes, for example). Editors had to work painstakingly through thousands and thousands of pages of

Tolstoy's often illegible handwriting before presenting their volume for discussion at one of the 156 committee meetings which were held over the course of edition's publication. More than 900 corrections were made to produce a definitive edition of
Anna Karenina
(although even that version was later superseded by the Academy of Sciences edition published in 1970). Tolstoy's artistic works were to be followed by thirteen volumes of diaries and notebooks. Finally there would be thirty-one volumes of letters. Tolstoy had written at least 8,500 letters during his lifetime, with Chertkov by far and away his most frequent correspondent.
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The hundreds of events marking the centenary of Tolstoy's birth in 1928 were the first to be undertaken by the Soviet government in honour of a pre-revolutionary writer on a nationwide scale. Because of the ambivalence surrounding the Jubilee, the Bolsheviks were concerned to use the occasion to educate Soviet citizens on how to approach Tolstoy. Thus, along with the issue of commemorative stamps, there were guides providing instructions on how the Tolstoy centenary should be celebrated. Pride of place in all writing on Tolstoy, from now until the end of the Soviet regime, was taken by Lenin's 1908 article.
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The main centenary celebrations began on Tolstoy's birthday on 9 September (as 28 August had become according to the new calendar), and they lasted a week. According to Lunacharsky in the speech he made, such was the 'gigantic interest' in Tolstoy in the new Soviet state that the writer was not dead at all.
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Tolstoy was, in fact, the most widely read author in Russia at this point according to data compiled by the Bolshevik journal
Red Librarian,
and the only writer to have maintained his pre-revolutionary popularity. Even in the countryside, readers often had to queue up for months to read the one copy of
War and Peace
held by their local library.
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