The atrocities of World War I served to make Tolstoy’s ideas even more relevant and topical, and then suddenly, in 1917, it finally became possible to publish all of his banned writings in Russia. The collapse of the Romanov dynasty and the February Revolution brought the end of censorship, and Tolstoy’s followers lost no time. The board of the Tolstoy Society in Moscow could at last seriously discuss publishing a truly complete edition of the collected works, and in April 1917 Sergey and Sasha, as representatives of the Tolstoy family, became members of a new committee charged with overseeing editorial matters and raising the necessary funds for publication.23 They were joined by Valentin Bulgakov and Nikolay Gusev. Between 1917 and 1918 the old Intermediary publishing house produced sixty-three editions of Tolstoy’s writings, but a new publishing house called Zadruga was also set up now, to publish all those Tolstoy essays that had previously been banned. In the heady days of June 1917 a new Tolstoyan organisation was also formed. The Society of True Freedom quickly launched a journal, Voice of Truth and Unity, which had a print run of 10,000 and established a network of affiliated branches in cities across Russia.24 It was estimated there were between 5,000 and 6,000 Tolstoyans active in Russia at this time.25
The situation was less optimistic in 1917 at Yasnaya Polyana. The February Revolution unleashed widespread looting, and in particular the indiscriminate destruction of former gentry estates. Chertkov later likened the situation to the bursting of a dam. After centuries in which the Russian people had existed ‘under the heel of autocratic oppression’, the pent-up water was now bearing down ‘in a wild, irresistible torrent, relentlessly flooding and ruining all that it encounters’.26 Blinded by the propaganda of class hatred unleashed by the Bolsheviks, the peasants and demobbed soldiers who went on the rampage did not see why Count Tolstoy’s estate was deserving of exemption. And the aggressors were not all male. In September 1917 Sasha received a postcard from her sister Tanya informing her that hundreds of local women and children had broken into the extensive orchards at Yasnaya Polyana and stolen all the apples – around 16,500 kilograms’ worth by her reckoning.27 When Bulgakov read newspaper reports that autumn about marauding peasants breaking into Yasnaya Polyana and wreaking havoc not just in its orchards, but also in its apiaries and its fields of crops, he came down from Moscow straight away to meet with villagers to arrange the provision of some kind of security. Sonya meanwhile also appealed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for help, and the writer Pyotr Sergeyenko, who had known Tolstoy and was also known to the local peasants, was appointed to help protect Yasnaya Polyana from future raids. When it became known that a group of young peasants and demobbed soldiers were inciting the locals to wreck Yasnaya Polyana at the end of 1917, a Red Army unit was eventually assigned to the estate to provide security. Bulgakov was soon able to report that a telephone had been installed for the first time at Yasnaya Polyana, so that there could be regular communication with local political organisations in Tula, who were aware this landed estate was not like the others, and needed special safeguarding.28
The Tolstoyans had welcomed the February Revolution, and they continued to feel a certain camaraderie with the Bolsheviks. This was not only because the Bolsheviks had attempted to sabotage the war effort by persuading rank-and-file soldiers that their real enemy was their own military hierarchy, but also because both groups rejoiced to see both Church and landowners being divested of their lands (albeit for completely different reasons).29 The events of October 1917 and the violence of the ensuing weeks and months filled the Tolstoyans with horror, however. ‘Stop the Fratricide!’ was the title of the leaflet distributed on the streets in Moscow by the Tolstoyans three days after the Bolsheviks seized power. The desire to get their message across outweighed their fears of exposing themselves to mortal danger while doing so.30 The Peace concluded with Germany in March 1918 was followed by yet more bloodshed. despite his initial support of the imperial army, Chertkov was proud that Russian soldiers had eventually left the ranks in great numbers and returned home in 1917, ‘disgusted and physically exhausted by the international carnage’ and no longer willing to be treated as ‘cannon fodder’. A similar idea was argued by émigré intellectuals in Paris, who saw the situation in a far less favourable light. In a 1918 article Nikolay Berdyaev argued that the Russian Revolution was in its way a victory for Tolstoyanism, while dmitry Merezhkovsky declared that Bolshevism was the ‘suicide’ of Europe: ‘Tolstoy began it, and Lenin finished it off.’31 Berdyaev argued that spiritual regeneration would entail overcoming Tolstoyanism.32
It was not only Russians who associated Tolstoy directly with the Bolshevik Revolution immediately after it took place. Tolstoy’s English translator and biographer Aylmer Maude was also under no doubt that Tolstoy’s ‘courage and intellectual force’, his outspokenness and deep love of the people, had played a cardinal role in bringing about the fall of the Romanovs. An American article published in 1919 quoted Maude extensively:
Tolstoy’s condemnation of the very foundations of civilized life and of all established government must be effectively met, or a growing spirit of anarchy, challenging, indicting and disparaging every effort to secure any definiteness in human relations or to establish any fixed law, will undermine the bases of all our social efforts, and sooner or later the whole structure will crash down as it has done in Russia. Merely to deny or deride Tolstoy’s opinions will not do. His themes are too important, his statement of them is too masterly, and his sincerity is too apparent.
The article described Tolstoy as the ‘Great Patriarch of the Bolsheviki Family’.33
Sasha came back from World War I with the rank of colonel, and two St George medals awarded for bravery (the decoration which had once eluded her father). She had served on the Western Front, and also in the Caucasus, where she set up orphanages and ran a field hospital, but the situation became dangerous after the February Revolution and she returned home.34 It was Sasha, or Alexandra, as we should call her, since she was now stepping out of the role of daughter, who took over the running of Yasnaya Polyana from her ailing mother at the end of 1917. She took up residence in the old family home again along with her aunt Tanya, her sister Tanya (both now widowed) and her niece Tanya, and now began to turn her attention back to her father’s legacy. It was now that Sonya finally handed over the keys to the twelve chests of Tolstoy’s manuscripts under her jurisdiction to Alexandra, removing the last bone of contention between them. Sonya’s eldest and youngest children (Sergey was now fifty-five, Alexandra was thirty-four) were thus at last able to start serious work on preparing their father’s manuscripts for the projected complete scholarly edition.
It was thanks to Lenin’s personal initiative that the gargantuan project of Tolstoy’s collected works was moved to the top of the agenda in the cultural sphere and viewed as a matter of state importance. An article to this effect appeared in the Bolshevik newspaper Sovetskaya pravda at the end of January 1918, when the figure of sixty volumes was mentioned.35 (It was also at Lenin’s personal behest that Sonya’s state pension was reinstated in March 1918, having been reduced in 1917.36) The archives in the Rumyantsev Museum, which had once again become the repository of Tolstoy’s early manuscripts, became a hive of activity in the winter of 1918. Pashkov House, the elegant mansion that housed the Rumyantsev Museum, located a short walk from the Kremlin, was still the home of Moscow’s most important library, and would later become the nucleus of the Lenin Library. In the harsh post-revolutionary conditions of 1918, however, no one cared much for well-appointed surroundings, particularly in the winter months when there was no heating. Alexandra, Sergey and their colleagues were forced to work in their overcoats and hats, with regular bursts of gymnastics in order to survive the freezing temperatures. They had formed a Society for the Study and dissemination of the Works of L. N. Tolstoy, chaired by Alexandra, but it soon became clear to them that Chertkov and other key followers of their father would be instrumental in the preparation of any authoritative edition. Chertkov was not a member of their society, as he was preparing a rival edition. Having appointed himself as chief editor of the Complete Collected Works, he started negotiations with Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the new Commissar of People’s Enlightenment, for the publication of an edition which he now projected would comprise ninety volumes. By december 1918 he had won assurances that 10 million roubles would be allocated by the Bolshevik government to fund the entire enterprise, but until the money became a reality, he paid the thirty-strong editorial team he assembled out of his own pocket.37