Tolstoy (81 page)

By the time the war was over, Tolstoy's entire corpus of anti-war writings had quietly been forgotten. In the 1950s Tolstoy was firmly entrenched in the Soviet imagination as a symbol of Russia, and as her most ardent patriot. Generations of Russian schoolchildren now grew up with the officially approved novels and stories that had become a fixture on the national curriculum, completely unaware of Tolstoy's enormous legacy of religious and political writings. Tolstoy's 'official' status was cemented by the number of new streets named after him in cities across the country, from Penza to Vladivostok, and in time his legacy was also tainted by the exigencies of the command economy which bred corruption and cynicism. Like all major Soviet literary museums, the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow was founded to be a centre for cutting-edge scholarship as much as a tourist destination, and it had been initially placed under the jurisdiction of the Academy of Sciences, along with the Tolstoy estate-museum. In 1953, however, that jurisdiction passed to the Soviet Ministry of Culture, and three years later there was a further 'demotion' to the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, which placed more emphasis on meeting targets for visitor numbers. Scholars battled on valiantly, already hampered by the Soviet censorship, but standards inevitably slipped in some areas.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Popovsky was astonished to discover not only that Tolstoyans still existed in Russia, but that they had remained true to their beliefs through thick and thin. Like every Soviet citizen, he was reminded every day of the 'cult' of Tolstoy in his country - streets and squares were named after him, his fiction was permanently on the syllabus in schools and universities and there were several museums dedicated to him in different parts of the country. But also like every Soviet citizen, Popovsky had only ever had access to Tolstoy's literary works. As to forming an opinion about Tolstoy's philosophical views, he had, of course, been guided by Lenin's essay 'Lev Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution', which was required reading, even ahead of
Anna Karenina.
Thus Popovsky had grown up with the notion that Tolstoy had no talent as a thinker, and was certainly no prophet, that his philosophical ideas were actually harmful, that his followers were pathetic and that self-perfection and vegetarianism were ridiculous nonsense. All these ideas were reinforced in articles, commentaries and encyclopaedias. Days after Morgachev was rehabilitated, moreover, the Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev left a long rambling entry in the VIP guest book at Yasnaya Polyana, later reproduced in
Pravda,
which discussed Tolstoy exclusively as the author of
War and Peace}
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When Popovsky canvassed some of his Moscow friends (who were all typical members of the Russian intelligentsia), he discovered that none of them knew anything about the Tolstoyans either. His curiosity piqued, he set out to do some research. This was not straightforward in the Cold War climate of phone-tapping, room-bugging and perlustration of personal correspondence. It was certainly not possible to talk about Tolstoyanism publicly, or write about it at that time. But with the help of the many sympathetic people who went out of their way to provide assistance, Popovsky eventually obtained addresses for thirty-two Tolstoyans scattered all over the Soviet Union, and along the way acquired an extensive archive of manuscripts by and about Tolstoyans. Some were self-penned memoirs by Tolstoyans, some were accounts of Tolstoyan communes, while others comprised correspondence, including with the Communist Party Central Committee regarding the Tolstoyans' aspiration to publish Tolstoy's philosophical and religious writings in the Soviet Union. These manuscripts had been carefully hidden from the authorities, and the threat of persecution was very real: a few months after the General Prosecutor officially exonerated Dmitry Morgachev, his flat was searched by the KGB, who threatened the now eighty-five-year-old invalid not to cause trouble. After successfully managing to bring out to the West 3,000 pages of materials covering the period from 1918 to 1977, Popovsky emigrated to the United States, and immediately got to work on putting together an extraordinary story of belief and survival. With the support of the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, his book about the Soviet peasant Tolstoyans was published in London in 1983.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:

Today it is fifty years since the death of L. N. Tolstoy, my dear father and teacher of life. He helped me purify Christ's teaching from superstitions accreted over the centuries, he helped me find dear friends, a spiritual family if not related by blood, which is better, stronger, and more genuine. Thanks to Tolstoy I moved from the city to the country, to be amongst those working the earth, and I started manual labour myself in the vegetable plot and in the garden, and learned to love it. Tolstoy helped me find true goodness in life. He showed the true way in love and unity for the whole world. He showed the shortcomings which divide people, and even sometimes destroy human life altogether. The great, still underrated Tolstoy!
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