By the time of the 150th anniversary of Tolstoy’s birth in 1978, Popovsky concluded there were probably only about fifty original Tolstoyans left alive in Russia, all aged between seventy-five and ninety. Hundreds had been thrown into prisons, concentration camps and lunatic asylums, and more than 100 had been shot for the sake of their beliefs. It was the lives of the Tolstoyans above all which provided Popovsky with a positive answer to the question he had continually asked in his books about Soviet scientists, as to whether it was possible to preserve a clear conscience living in a totalitarian society.103 The real problems had started for the Tolstoyans with the commencement of collectivisation and the first Five-Year Plan in the centenary year of 1928. Communes began to be shut down one after the other, and increasing numbers of Tolstoyans were arrested. The young members of the intelligentsia (including artists, writers and doctors) who had set up a Tolstoyan commune in the countryside west of Moscow in 1923 were informed that their commune would be merged with another farm to form the ‘Red October’ collective farm, and a subsequent act of arson was blamed on them. Some 15,000 dukhobors and other sectarians had applied to re-emigrate by 1929, now bitterly regretting their decision to return home, but all their applications were turned down. Tolstoy’s old peasant friend Mikhail Novikov ingenuously sent the Soviet government an open letter in February 1929 in which he proposed practical measures for increasing the harvest. He was arrested for his pains, despite being sixty-nine, and he ended his life in the camps. Five Tolstoyans were arrested in Moscow in 1929 and exiled to five years of hard labour at the notorious concentration camp on the Solovetsky islands. This was the former monastery-prison in the White Sea which had served as the place of exile of Tolstoy’s great-great-great-grandfather in the eighteenth century. In February 1930 Chertkov sent a letter to Stalin, in which he tried to intercede on their behalf. He explained that the Tolstoyans were suffering from severe malnutrition due to being vegetarians, and also from hypothermia, since their winter clothes had been stolen by other prisoners.104 In February 1929 the L. Tolstoy Moscow Vegetarian Society was forced to close when the authorities refused to prolong the lease on the premises it rented. There were by this time no other Tolstoyan organisations left.105
The Tolstoyans simply refused to be collectivised, and began to think about moving far away to the edge of the country, where they would be free from further acts of repression and could live peaceful lives on their own terms. There was a historic precedent here, as this had been the tactic of huge numbers of Cossacks, sectarians and Old Believers down the centuries during tsarist times. The Soviet Union was different: despite the vastness of its terrain, there were no quiet corners for the Tolstoyans to retreat to, but the Tolstoyans only discovered that after the fact. Chertkov encouraged members of the Life and Labour commune to ask the government for land in Siberia, and he petitioned on their behalf himself, thinking this was indeed a good solution. Amazingly, the Soviet government gave its official approval in February 1930, and in March 1931 about 1,000 Tolstoyans from three communes set off on a 2,000-mile journey east to the town of Novokuznetsk (soon to be renamed Stalinsk). The new commune worked well, and in 1931 Anna Malorod managed to found the first and only Tolstoyan school in the history of the Soviet Union. Even though the Tolstoyans were willing to make compromises in order to cooperate with state institutions, the local Party organisations ensured its lifespan was short: the school was closed down in 1934. The Life and Labour commune celebrated its fifth anniversary in 1936, but arrests were already being made, and the regional authorities began to treat it like a regular collective farm. By the time it held its last general meeting in January 1939, there were barely any men left.106 The remaining commune members were transferred to state farms. They lived lives of great poverty, but that was of minor importance, as material prosperity had never been their priority.
During his research, Mark Popovsky discovered that the Tolstoyans were quite a disparate group: not all were vegetarians, some smoked, and some had even gone off to the front in 1941, some never to return. But even if their views and way of life diverged, he was struck by what they all shared: a deep ethical sense, a heightened sensitivity to injustice and a profound desire to do no evil. And they had remained loyal to Tolstoy, despite being unable to follow his ideas in a practical way. On 20 November 1960 the former schoolteacher Anna Malorod noted in her diary:
Today it is fifty years since the death of L. N. Tolstoy, my dear father and teacher of life. He helped me purify Christ’s teaching from superstitions accreted over the centuries, he helped me find dear friends, a spiritual family if not related by blood, which is better, stronger, and more genuine. Thanks to Tolstoy I moved from the city to the country, to be amongst those working the earth, and I started manual labour myself in the vegetable plot and in the garden, and learned to love it. Tolstoy helped me find true goodness in life. He showed the true way in love and unity for the whole world. He showed the shortcomings which divide people, and even sometimes destroy human life altogether. The great, still underrated Tolstoy!107
The Soviet Tolstoyans had a great attachment to the written word: without it their stories would have never come to light. From the 1950s onwards they tried to donate their memoirs and correspondence to the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, but archivists refused to accept them, through understandable fear of political reprisals.108 The Tolstoyans also zealously defended Tolstoy from what they regarded as slander by Orthodox Soviet literary critics. Boris Mazurin followed publications on Tolstoy particularly closely, even from the remote Siberian village where he lived, and made it a point of principle to pen carefully written and robustly argued letters whenever he felt something needed to be corrected. He tackled Party member Boris Meilakh, for example, after the publication in 1961 of his book about Tolstoy’s departure and death. ‘You often talk in your book about the “weak” places in Tolstoy’s worldview, calling them weak in view of their incompatibility with Marxist views, particularly as regards the possibility of changing life for the better through violence …’, he wrote in his letter to Meilakh. To his credit, Meilakh replied, but Mazurin was still not satisfied, and wrote again to take issue with him about the idea that Tolstoy had been involved in any kind of political struggle to acquire power over people: ‘It’s impossible to imagine Tolstoy as a government figure leading and organising people by means of the necessary instruments of state power. And it is equally impossible to imagine Tolstoy remaining silent in such awful years as 1937 and 1938.’ 109 It is indeed hard to imagine Tolstoy remaining silent, but it is harder still to imagine that he would have survived the Purges. It is more likely that he would simply have been shot at the first opportunity.
The Tolstoyans were disappointed to see Chertkov’s name now blackened, both in Meilakh’s book, and also in the new edition of Valentin Bulgakov’s memoir of Tolstoy, which was published in 1964. But most painful of all to them was the speech given by the establishment writer Leonid Leonov to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death at the Bolshoi Theatre on 19 November 1960. It was reprinted in all the major Soviet newspapers, and issued as a separate publication the following year. Leonov, recipient of Stalin and Lenin prizes, a Hero of Socialist Labour and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, parroted the standard view on Tolstoy, implying it was shortcomings in his philosophical and religious views which explained why there were no longer any apostles or ardent acolytes around to continue his ideas except for a few sectarians scattered about the globe. After much discussion with fellow Tolstoyans, who were understandably indignant, Mazurin wrote Leonov a lengthy riposte in February 1962, then travelled all the way to Moscow with it, only to be rebuffed by officials when seeking to find his address. Eventually he got his letter to Leonov, however, and in September 1962 he actually received a reply. Rather predictably, Leonov failed to answer any of Mazurin’s criticisms.110 Many other Tolstoyans vigorously proclaimed their existence, and challenged untruths. In 1975 dmitry Morgachev sent an open letter to Alexander Klibanov, with copies to leading newspapers, after the latter published a book about religious sectarianism in which he alleged, for example, that the Tolstoyans had refused to join collective farms because they were essentially kulaks.111