Chertkov found a way out of the copyright problem over the Tolstoy Collected Works when Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) in March 1921. This allowed the temporary return of private enterprise in order to resuscitate the economy after the ravages of the Civil War, and the wily Chertkov turned the situation to his advantage. Alexandra had just been released from prison, and she renewed her association with Chertkov in an effort to move the Collected Works project along, but each still headed two distinct groups. As soon as it was legally possible, Chertkov and Alexandra formed a Co-operative Association for the Study and dissemination of the Works of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, and on 8 April the association invited Chertkov to become its chief editor.61 Chertkov was also busy at this time writing his own magnum opus about the story of Tolstoy’s final departure from Yasnaya Polyana. Sofya Andreyevna’s death had been a liberation for him, as it meant he could finally speak his mind. Naturally vindicating himself, he apportioned blame for the tragedy of Tolstoy’s last years to his ‘marital problems’. The book was published in 1922, and greatly upset Tolstoy’s children, even Alexandra.62 Lev Lvovich, who particularly detested Chertkov, immediately retaliated against the slur on his mother by publishing a book of his own the following year in Prague, where he was now based. It was entitled The Truth About My Father, and painted Sonya in glowing terms.63 Chertkov was undaunted, but whatever unease one might feel about his lack of tact in the years immediately following Tolstoy’s death must eventually give way to respect for his single-minded refusal to compromise his beliefs in the increasingly hostile atmosphere of high Stalinism in the 1930s.
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.64 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.65 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.66
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 inter-ceded 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.67 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’.68 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.69 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.70