Tolstoy

I bought trucks of corn, beans, onions, cabbage, everything needed for the feeding centres where the famine-stricken poor from the villages were fed. To pay for this, I received money which was sent to me in considerable sums. From the material sent to me by textile manufacturers I had [bed linen] made by poor women for small wages, and I sent it to the places where it was needed most, chiefly for those suffering from typhoid.¹⁵⁰

From her Moscow base, Sonya coordinated donations, and published regular bulletins over the next few months detailing the contributions received. She also spent days sewing shirts from the fabric supplied by the great textile magnate Savva Morozov, together with Dunyasha Popova, the family housekeeper, the nanny and the English governess.¹⁵¹

Tolstoy’s mind was naturally taken back to the events of 1873 in Samara, when he first had seen the effects of famine in Russia. Ever since writing his article about the Moscow census back in 1882, Tolstoy was adamant that just throwing money at such a deep-rooted problem was no remedy: what was needed above all was practical action. After settling in at Rayevsky’s estate in the village of Begichevka, Tolstoy wrote another article on the famine. ‘A Terrible Question’ (the question being whether could Russia feed itself) was duly published in the Russian Gazette on 6 November. Thus began months of getting up early every day, setting up and operating free soup kitchens, supervising volunteers and buying provisions with the donations received (Tolstoy himself took 600 roubles of his own money with him). By the end of November there were thirty soup kitchens up and running, and by the end of December there were seventy. They were vitally needed. Tolstoy wrote to tell Sonya that he had been to a village where there was only one cow for every nine households, and to another where nearly all the inhabitants were destitute. By January 4,000 peasants were receiving free food every day.¹⁵²

The government had initially discouraged ordinary Russians from becoming involved in famine relief, but they were obliged to change policy in the face of their own helplessness. Nevertheless they were alarmed by Tolstoy’s activities, and sent out a circular to all Russian newspapers forbidding them to publish any articles by him. The editor of the Russian Gazette had received a reprimand for publishing ‘A Terrible Question’, but on 10 December he went ahead and published its sequel: ‘About Ways to Help the Population Suffering from the Failed Harvest’. Chekhov exclaimed the next day in a letter to Suvorin that Tolstoy was no longer just a man, but a ‘giant, a Jupiter’, and immediately contributed an article of his own to the collection of essays put together by the newspaper. Tolstoy’s friend Nikolay Grot, meanwhile, called him a ‘spiritual tsar’ on whom all of Russia’s hopes were pinned at this difficult time.¹⁵³ But an enormous scandal was brewing. ‘About the Famine’ had now finally been approved for publication after drastic editing, and it was published in The Week in early January 1892. Tolstoy also wanted his uncensored text to be known abroad, and he now got in touch with various foreign acquaintances to ask them to translate it. Isabel Hapgood produced a translation for publication in America, and she printed an announcement in the New York Evening Post that she was setting up a campaign to raise funds to help those starving in Russia (contributions had already started arriving from England, France and Germany).¹⁵⁴ Emile Dillon, an English academic who had been teaching at the University of kharkov, placed his translation of Tolstoy’s article in the Daily Telegraph on 14 (26) January. It was given the inflammatory title ‘Why Are Russian Peasants Starving?’. As Tolstoy had hoped, extracts were then translated back into Russian for the press at home, but his words were twisted by right-wing publications, and immediately denounced by the more reactionary journalists as the most dangerous revolutionary propaganda. Tolstoy found himself being branded as the Antichrist, and as someone inciting the peasants to revolt.¹⁵⁵