In 1960 the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death was celebrated with official pomp by the Soviet establishment, which organised another, albeit more sedate, commemorative evening at the Bolshoi Theatre. And on 9 September 1978, to mark the 150th anniversary of Tolstoy’s birth, the ‘Museum-estate Yasnaya Polyana’ was awarded the Order of Lenin by order of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for ‘major work in the aesthetic education of workers, and the study and propaganda of the creative legacy of the great Russian writer L. N. Tolstoy’ (the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow was awarded the Order of the Red Banner). After she had left Russia in 1929 and become a vociferous critic of the Soviet regime, Alexandra’s name had been erased from history as a ‘traitor to the motherland’, as Nikolay Rodionov had been forced to put it in his 1961 article about the Jubilee Edition, but at least he had mentioned her name. In an article about Yasnaya Polyana in the first years of the Revolution published in 1962, her name does not appear at all.99 In 1977 Alexandra was partially rehabilitated and invited back to Russia to take part in the forthcoming celebrations, but by this time she was bedridden and gravely ill, and she died the following year in the United States, where she had been resident since the 1930s. The rehabilitation was partial, because even a book about the history of Yasnaya Polyana as a museum published as late as 1986 makes no mention of Alexandra; the fact that its author was Ilya Tolstoy, the grandson of her brother Ilya, is all the more dismaying.100
The almost total ignorance of Soviet citizens about the extent to which Tolstoy’s ideas also continued to send powerful reverberations across Russia deep into the twentieth century is witness to the Communist Party’s success in eliminating Tolstoyanism as a movement. At the same time that the Soviet regime firmly placed Tolstoy the novelist in its pantheon of model artists by reissuing his works with print runs running into the hundreds of thousands, it had unleashed a systematic campaign against his doctrines and all who followed them. The publication in the West in 1983 of a remarkable book about the Soviet followers of Tolstoy by a respected dissident writer and advocate of human rights based in Moscow called Mark Popovsky, however, pays tribute to the indomitable spirit of those who continued to be inspired by Tolstoy even in the face of unbelievable adversity and hardship. It was at the end of the 1970s when Popovsky, author of numerous books about Soviet scientists, both published and unpublished, was handed a copy of a letter from a peasant called dmitry Morgachev. Writing at the age of eighty-four from the town of Przhevalsk in far-away Soviet Kirghizia to the USSR Public Prosecutor on 24 July 1976, Morgachev requested rehabilitation, and an acknowledgement from the Soviet government that he and his comrades had not committed any crime.
Popovsky discovered to his surprise that Morgachev was a follower of Tolstoy, who had been arrested along with other Tolstoyans at their commune in Siberia in 1936. Morgachev explained in his letter to the Public Prosecutor that the following year, the Soviet government had decided the three-year sentence was too mild, and in 1940 had increased it to seven years, with an additional three years of hard labour at the end of the term. Morgachev told the Public Prosecutor that he was one of the few who had survived, and counted himself lucky. Resolutely believing that he had never committed any crime, he explained that he had requested rehabilitation in 1963, by which time he was already seventy-one and an invalid, but had been flatly refused. Morgachev went on to explain in his letter that his Tolstoyan commune had transferred from central Russia to Siberia in 1930, in accordance with the decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Since it had operated as a model communist farm based on joint ownership, he argued that it should have been protected by law, but its few years of peaceful existence were instead paid for by many of its members with their lives. Morgachev stated that he still shared Tolstoy’s views on life, and wished to be rehabilitated before he died. ‘I don’t need rehabilitation now,’ he added in a handwritten postscript to his letter, ‘but young prosecutors should learn what was done to the friends and followers of Lev Tolstoy.’ Morgachev was officially rehabilitated in december 1976. As Popovsky noted drily, the Soviet Supreme Court had now effectively exonerated Tolstoy’s followers from the earlier allegation that they were Tolstoyans.101
Popovsky was astonished to discover not only that Tolstoyans still existed in Russia, but that they had remained true to their beliefs through thick and thin. Like every Soviet citizen, he was reminded every day of the ‘cult’ of Tolstoy in his country – streets and squares were named after him, his fiction was permanently on the syllabus in schools and universities and there were several museums dedicated to him in different parts of the country. But also like every Soviet citizen, Popovsky had only ever had access to Tolstoy’s literary works. As to forming an opinion about Tolstoy’s philosophical views, he had, of course, been guided by Lenin’s essay ‘Lev Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution’, which was required reading, even ahead of Anna Karenina. Thus Popovsky had grown up with the notion that Tolstoy had no talent as a thinker, and was certainly no prophet, that his philosophical ideas were actually harmful, that his followers were pathetic and that self-perfection and vegetarianism were ridiculous nonsense. All these ideas were reinforced in articles, commentaries and encyclopaedias. days after Morgachev was rehabilitated, moreover, the Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev left a long rambling entry in the VIP guest book at Yasnaya Polyana, later reproduced in Pravda, which discussed Tolstoy exclusively as the author of War and Peace.102
When Popovsky canvassed some of his Moscow friends (who were all typical members of the Russian intelligentsia), he discovered that none of them knew anything about the Tolstoyans either. His curiosity piqued, he set out to do some research. This was not straightforward in the Cold War climate of phone-tapping, room-bugging and perlustration of personal correspondence. It was certainly not possible to talk about Tolstoyanism publicly, or write about it at that time. But with the help of the many sympathetic people who went out of their way to provide assistance, Popovsky eventually obtained addresses for thirty-two Tolstoyans scattered all over the Soviet Union, and along the way acquired an extensive archive of manuscripts by and about Tolstoyans. Some were self-penned memoirs by Tolstoyans, some were accounts of Tolstoyan communes, while others comprised correspondence, including with the Communist Party Central Committee regarding the Tolstoyans’ aspiration to publish Tolstoy’s philosophical and religious writings in the Soviet Union. These manuscripts had been carefully hidden from the authorities, and the threat of persecution was very reaclass="underline" a few months after the General Prosecutor officially exonerated dmitry Morgachev, his flat was searched by the KGB, who threatened the now eighty-five-year-old invalid not to cause trouble. After successfully managing to bring out to the West 3,000 pages of materials covering the period from 1918 to 1977, Popovsky emigrated to the United States, and immediately got to work on putting together an extraordinary story of belief and survival. With the support of the Kennan Institute in Washington dC, his book about the Soviet peasant Tolstoyans was published in London in 1983.