Bulgakov had been effective in setting up and running the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, but the situation remained bleak at Yasnaya Polyana, which the family still owned and ran as an unofficial museum. Sovnarkom, the administrative arm of the new Soviet government, formally took over the estate in May 1918, and stipulated that Tolstoy’s widow should be able to reside there for the rest of her life, but provided no money at this point for its upkeep. Pride disinclined the Tolstoys from asking the Bolsheviks for money, but the estate had begun to go into such decline that in February 1919 Tanya proposed handing it over to the local society which had been formed to provide security. In a letter to her brother Sergey in Moscow that April, Tanya described the desperate conditions she and the other thirteen members of the family had to endure at Yasnaya Polyana. They had so little to eat they were unable to provide for their staff, let alone the animals. For the staff the situation was even worse: some of them had to endure effluent from the next-door pigsty seeping into their accommodation and rotting the floorboards. Rooves leaked, the belt from the threshing machine had been stolen, books were disappearing from Tolstoy’s library, and the furnishings in the house were becoming very worn. Tanya had to resort to knitting scarves, to sell along with Yasnaya Polyana honey in Tula. We have the KGB to thank for preserving Tanya’s letter to her brother – it was confiscated and copied when their sister Alexandra was arrested the following year – and we have the stubborn efforts of the Moscow writer Vitaly Shentalinsky to thank for gaining access to its previously impregnable archive in the 1980s.38
In May 1919 the Soviet government approved the proposal for the Yasnaya Polyana Society to take over the running of the estate, with the family continuing to act as guides for visitors. The society would retain control until June 1921, when Yasnaya Polyana was finally nationalised and placed under the aegis of the Soviet government. By this time, the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow had also been nationalised and allotted a handsome mansion on the former Prechistenka, renamed Kropotkinskaya. It now became the central repository for the 2.5 million pages in Tolstoy’s archive. The formal opening took place on the tenth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, which was now 20 November 1920 (Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar after the October Revolution).39 Tolstoy’s former Moscow house was also nationalised, and opened as a ‘museum-estate’ on 20 November 1921. dolgo-Khamovnichesky Lane was also renamed Tolstoy Street.
In the meantime, the Tolstoy family decided to do something about Pyotr Sergeyenko, who had been appointed as the head of the Yasnaya Polyana Society. He had alienated them all with his rudeness and patronising manner, and they all loathed him; it was particularly upsetting for Sonya to be treated in such an offhand manner. Alexandra took matters into her own hands by going to Moscow to see Lunacharsky, who promptly appointed her Commissar of Yasnaya Polyana. Sergeyenko could now be given his marching orders.40 It was a difficult year, and at the end of 1919, bruised by Sergeyenko’s brusque and imperious manner, a shadow of her former self, Sonya died. In the touching letter she wrote to her children and sister Tanya before her death she said her farewells and asked her daughters to forgive her for the pain she had caused them. But she ended on a bright note of loving gratitude to her granddaughter Tanyushka for bringing her so much joy and affection.41
As well as being appointed Commissar of Yasnaya Polyana by Lunacharsky in 1919, Alexandra was also arrested for the first time in July of that year at her flat in Moscow. On this occasion her stay in the Lubyanka was short lived. Chertkov at this point wielded considerable power, and he immediately wrote to Felix dzerzhinsky, the founder and head of the Cheka, the first incarnation of what eventually became the KGB. Presuming her detainment was surely due to a misunderstanding, Chertkov was successful in his impeccably polite request that Alexandra be released.42 In February 1920 Alexandra shored up her position by formally confirming her appointment as Commissar with the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment, and the following month, the Ministry of Agriculture also placed her in charge of farming at Yasnaya Polyana.43 A few days later, however, she was arrested by the Cheka again, and this time accused of counter-revolutionary activities. Her father had foreseen the Russian Revolution back in 1905, and had been under no illusion about the violence which would be used to bring about this inevitable upheaval, while heartily deploring its application.44 But even he could not have predicted that ten years after his death his beloved daughter and devoted follower Alexandra would be sitting in a rat-infested cell in the notorious Lubyanka awaiting interrogation by the secret police.45
Alexandra spent two months in the Lubyanka before her fellow Tolstoy-ans successfully petitioned for her to be released on bail until her case came to trial in August 1920. There is no doubt that her father would have been proud of her defiant final statement in court:
I am not using my final statement to defend myself, because I do not consider myself guilty of anything. But I would just like to say to the citizens judging me that I do not recognise human judgement and consider that it is a misunderstanding that a person has the right to judge another. I consider that we are all free people, and that this freedom is within myself – no one can deprive me of it, neither the walls of the Special division, nor internment in a camp. This free spirit is not the freedom which is surrounded by bayonets in free Russia, but is the freedom of my spirit, and it will stay with me …46
For putting on the samovar for members of an alleged counter-revolutionary organisation, whom she had unwittingly allowed to meet in her flat, the Commissar of Yasnaya Polyana was sentenced to three years at the Novospassky Monastery in Moscow, which had recently been converted by the Bolsheviks into a concentration camp. From her cell, Alexandra drafted a letter to Lenin: