Vladimir Ilyich! If I am harmful to Russia, send me abroad. If I am harmful there, then in acknowledgement of the right of a person to deprive another of life, kill me as a harmful member of the Soviet republic. But do not force me to lead the miserable existence of a parasite, locked up in four walls with prostitutes, thieves and bandits … 47
Alexandra was in fact released after two only months, on the proviso that she attended no public events, but was almost immediately arrested again after she was spotted at the lecture Bulgakov gave to mark the tenth anniversary of her father’s death.48 She was released a few months later in February 1921,49 thanks partly again to the intervention of friends, but mostly due to a petition signed by the peasants at Yasnaya Polyana and neighbouring villages. She endured one further arrest in August 1921, but was detained only briefly.50
All the Tolstoyans began to encounter difficulties with the Soviet government in 1919. Back in 1917, the Provisional Government had granted the Tolstoyans an amnesty from conscription, but after the October Revolution the Bolsheviks started a new mobilisation offensive against them. They were determined to conscript Tolstoyans into the Red Army along with other conscientious objectors, some of whom were only now beginning to return home from serving their sentences. Chertkov was naturally implacably opposed to this idea, and neither would he accept the compromise suggested by the Bolshevik leadership, which would have seen Tolstoyans working in medical units. It is testament to Chertkov’s authority at this point that he won this particular battle, and his impressive ability to give the Bolsheviks to understand that he was the figurehead of an enormous international organisation catapulted him into high-profile positions. In 1918 he became the head of a United Council aimed at protecting pacifist religious communities in Russia. This was the first time that Tolstoyans had been grouped together with sectarians and religious minority groups such as Baptists and Mennonites. Chertkov continued his opposition to the Bolsheviks, and only partially backed down after a meeting with Lenin forced another compromise, so that an official decree could be agreed in 1919.51
Chertkov found himself writing hundreds of testimonials for Tolstoyans at this time. He also longed for the Civil War to come to an end, and in October 1919 wrote an impassioned ‘Letter to English Friends’ in which he pleaded for foreign involvement in Russia, covert or otherwise, to stop, leaving the country to proceed with social reconstruction on its own. Tolstoy had a great role to play in this task, he argued, for in him ‘the people find a clear and powerful expression of their own most sacred beliefs and highest aspirations’. Tolstoy’s religious writings, accessible to the masses for the first time, were in enormous demand, he wrote. In the wake of World War I, which had confirmed all Tolstoy’s predictions, Chertkov was sure that working people everywhere would draw inspiration from his writings, but it was the Russian people, he argued, ‘as yet uncontaminated by European civilisation’, who were pre-eminently in a position to understand and appreciate the teaching of Christ ‘in the pure undefiled aspect in which it is expounded by Tolstoy’.52
In many ways, the Civil War period was actually the ‘golden age of Tolstoyanism’, when Tolstoyan ideas were put into practice at the new Tolstoyan communes that began to spring up, and also vigorously debated as a matter of life importance. The Tolstoyans entered into a series of passionate debates with Lunacharsky and other luminaries in front of huge audiences at the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow. On 5 March 1920, for example, Bulgakov appeared alongside the erudite Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, a rabbi and an Orthodox priest.53 In November 1920 an audience of 2,000 crowded the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire to take part in an event commemorating the tenth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death. Bulgakov, who was already highly critical of the Bolsheviks, was unable to finish his speech amidst the raucous applause and whistling.54 Tolstoy’s name was also still on everybody’s lips in the huge émigré community which had formed in Paris immediately after the Revolution, and there were many who still wanted to pin the blame for the Bolshevik victory directly on his influence. In vain did the former statesman Vasily Maklakov insist that Tolstoy had nothing in common with Bolshevism in the speech that he gave in Paris to mark the tenth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death – numerous others were ready to argue that Tolstoy’s ideas about non-resistance to violence had exerted a profoundly pernicious effect, and should be opposed with a show of strength.55
A key figure during these years was Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, who had worked with Tolstoy and Chertkov to help the dukhobors emigrate before the Revolution. He now occupied a prominent position in the Bolshevik government, and it was he who helped Chertkov obtain meetings with Lenin in the early years.56 Widespread famine during the Civil War caused the Bolsheviks to remember that the dukhobors and other sectarians were good farmers, and in 1921 Lenin responded enthusiastically to a request from some dukhobors in Canada who requested permission to return home to Russia so they could help revive the national economy. Taking heart from these developments, and reassured by the respect in which Chertkov was held, Tolstoyans began meeting in the cafeteria of the Vegetarian Society in Moscow and organising communes, too naïve to see the cynicism behind Bolshevik official policy. The Tolstoyans were mostly peasants from rural areas, but their numbers also included teachers, doctors and urban office workers who now consciously became peasants on the Tolstoyan model. The ‘Life and Labour’ commune, for example, which began life in december 1921 in the southern outskirts of Moscow (roughly where the metro station Belyaevo is located), was founded by a geologist called Boris Mazurin, who turned to Tolstoyanism after being sickened by the endless violence he saw around him. By 1925 the commune was totally self-sufficient. There were disagreements amongst the Tolstoyans who formed communes, as they did not all share the writer’s aspirations to a spiritual life untainted by any intrusion from the state, but they did all agree on the importance and nobility of work in the fields as the prerequisite for their independence and autonomy.
On one level it seemed that the Tolstoyans were truly a force to be reckoned with. Chertkov was not only the coordinator of the Congress of Religious Sects held in June 1920, but also head of the largest delegation: twenty Tolstoyans took part in the congress. On another level, however, the Bolsheviks soon started to become more hard-line. When complaints that the decree on conscientious objection was already being frequently violated were investigated, it turned out that both armies, Red and White, were indeed flouting it. Indeed, the Bolsheviks were responsible for executing by firing squad more than 100 Tolstoyan objectors, the first eight by december 1919.57 At the end of 1920 the Bolsheviks altered the 1919 decree, then they simply disbanded the council over which Chertkov presided. It had considered applications from some 40,000 conscious objectors. Finally, in November 1923, the People’s Commissar for Justice decided to remove Tolstoyans from the list of bona fide conscientious objectors altogether, now deciding that they did not belong to a religious sect, and objected to military service on ethical grounds.58 Fortunately pressure had already been eased on those who opposed military service, because by this time the Civil War had finally come to an end.
Opposition to military service was not the only problem Chertkov had to deal with, as he soon also started to clash with the Bolsheviks over the projected edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works, which was taking a long time to get off the ground. In July 1919, when Alexandra’s flat was being searched for evidence of sedition, the Bolsheviks had decided to nationalise the manuscripts of all Russian writers held in state libraries. That meant they also had a monopoly on publication, and since Tolstoy had famously surrendered the copyright on all his works, Chertkov naturally opposed this.59 He argued that Tolstoy would never have agreed to his writings becoming the property of any person or institution, particularly a state, and rightly viewed the idea of a state monopoly as a form of censorship.60 In September 1920 he was finally granted an audience with Lenin to discuss the matter, along with the issue about the Tolstoyans’ refusal to serve in the Red Army, but the discussions ended in stalemate.