From the beginning, Russia’s leading revolutionaries had disagreed about Tolstoy while acknowledging his seminal importance. Lenin had played a prominent role in the debate by writing seven articles on Tolstoy between 1908 and 1911. In 1908 he had directly attributed the failure of the 1905 Revolution to the influence of Tolstoy’s ideas of non-violence. His article ‘Lev Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution’ was widely reprinted after his death, and became the Soviet blueprint for the official view of Tolstoy. Trotsky, who wrote on Tolstoy in 1908 and 1910, had shone a more positive light on Tolstoy’s impact on the events of 1905, while Plekhanov had simply dismissed Tolstoy as a patriarchal, reactionary landowner with nothing to offer the revolutionary movement. Tolstoy’s name was inevitably invoked again at the time of the 1917 Revolutions, and continued to figure in public discourse, as the Bolshevik government struggled to find a way of exploiting his legacy.
It was not until the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth in 1928 that a clear policy was formulated, and twenty years of debate came to an abrupt end. What the Bolsheviks decided to do was separate Tolstoy from Tolstoyanism. despite the ‘contradictions’ in his teachings, the Bolsheviks decided the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth should be celebrated in grand style, and a government committee headed by Lunacharsky was formed in 1926, two years in advance of the anniversary.71 Alexandra was pinning great hopes on the Tolstoy Jubilee, and on the fact that it was being officially sanctioned at the very highest level. For her it was a form of self-defence against the dozens of local communists whom she described as buzzing around Yasnaya Polyana like flies, hoping to find fault and denounce her.72 Like Chertkov, she had calmly stuck to her apolitical Tolstoyan beliefs, and refused to capitulate to the anti-religious propaganda war being waged around her. In 1924 the Yasnaya Polyana school had become part of the revolutionary ‘experimental station’ schools network, which drew partly on Tolstoy’s ideas about education.73 But the situation grew increasingly hostile, with the local powers seeing Alexandra and her colleagues as representatives of the ‘loathed bourgeoisie’, and resenting their achievements. The hostility was not restricted to barbs from local officials: Alexandra was also publicly attacked in Pravda as a ‘former countess’ who continued to exploit the workers and live a life of luxury and depravity while disseminating religious propaganda to her pupils. Alexandra faced her critics by reiterating Lenin’s declaration that ‘Soviet power can afford the luxury of a Tolstoyan corner in the USSR’. She also responded by publishing a rebuttal of the criticisms on 2 July 1924 in Pravda, but she already felt extremely beleaguered.74
When the committee for the anniversary celebrations was formed in 1926, Alexandra submitted proposals for extensive renovation work at Yasnaya Polyana, including new buildings for the school and hospital there. She also proposed the reorganisation of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. Her sister Tanya had taken over the management of the Moscow museum from Bulgakov when he was sent into exile in 1923, but she herself had emigrated in 1925. Since Ilya, Lev and Mikhail were all already abroad, and Sergey had a job teaching at the Moscow Conservatoire, the seemingly indefatigable Alexandra now became director of the Tolstoy Museum as well. Lunacharsky, Chertkov, Gusev and the other members of the committee were receptive to Alexandra’s proposals, but were powerless to do anything, owing to the simple fact that there was no money: the Commissariat of People’s Enlightenment was always the poorest of all the Soviet ministries. Alexandra showed her mettle at this point, and decided to go to the top, and after making several visits to Moscow from Yasnaya Polyana she eventually obtained an audience with Stalin, who had assumed power after Lenin’s death in January 1924. The brief interview was chastening. Stalin flatly refused to pay the million roubles requested by the Jubilee Committee for its construction and renovation programme, and it quickly became apparent to Alexandra that he did not care about Tolstoy and the Tolstoy Jubilee at all. What he did care about was exploiting it as a felicitous opportunity for international propaganda, and doing so as cheaply as possible.75
The situation with the Tolstoy Collected Works was also bleak. In 1926, with just two years to go, there was still no contract signed for what was now pegged to the centenary year as the Jubilee Edition. Chertkov had also been having high-level meetings with the Soviet leadership. He had been forced to accept the idea of a ‘temporary’ state monopoly on Tolstoy’s manuscripts, which would at least be lifted with publication, but found himself constantly lobbying for funds to pay the editorial team. His first meeting with Stalin, which took place in the autumn of 1924, had produced results. In November 1925 the Soviet government finally approved the release of a million roubles to pay for the cost of the project. The money was very slow in materialising, however, and in June 1926 Chertkov was forced to write to Stalin to tell him he could no longer afford to pay the forty-three members of the editorial staff working on the project (most of their wages were still coming from his own pocket). Alexandra was still very much involved with the project, but she and Chertkov did not see eye to eye. Finally, in 1925, they reached an agreement: her group would prepare Tolstoy’s manuscripts written before 1880, and his team would work on the later writings. In december 1925 the two groups were united under Chertkov’s leadership.76
The Central Committee now decided it should form a special commission to investigate and monitor the Tolstoy Jubilee Edition, and in September 1926 a ‘troika’ was appointed, headed by Stalin’s deputy Vyacheslav Molotov. In March 1927 the state bank finally paid out a miserly 15,000 roubles, but meanwhile the contract had got lost in a morass of bureaucracy and ever-changing personnel at Gosizdat, the state publishing house. Chertkov wrote to Stalin again in March 1928 to protest that Gosizdat was refusing to sign the contract, despite the special commission having approved it. The contract was finally signed on 2 April 1928, but by then it was too late for even the first volume to appear in time for Tolstoy’s centenary.77 By this point, Alexandra had lost interest in an edition which was clearly going to be limited and expensive. There had been further disagreements with Chertkov over payment for editorial work, and Chertkov now took over as editor-in-chief.
The Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works was to set the standard for Soviet scholarly editions. Artistic works were designated for the first forty-five volumes, with separate volumes for the different versions of major works (War and Peace takes up four volumes, for example). Editors had to work painstakingly through thousands and thousands of pages of Tolstoy’s often illegible handwriting before presenting their volume for discussion at one of the 156 committee meetings which were held over the course of edition’s publication. More than 900 corrections were made to produce a definitive edition of Anna Karenina (although even that version was later superseded by the Academy of Sciences edition published in 1970). Tolstoy’s artistic works were to be followed by thirteen volumes of diaries and notebooks. Finally there would be thirty-one volumes of letters. Tolstoy had written at least 8,500 letters during his lifetime, with Chertkov by far and away his most frequent correspondent.78