Tolstoy

On one level it seemed that the Tolstoyans were truly a force to be reckoned with. Chertkov was not only the coordinator of the Congress of Religious Sects held in June 1920, but also head of the largest delegation: twenty Tolstoyans took part in the congress. On another level, however, the Bolsheviks soon started to become more hard-line. When complaints that the decree on conscientious objection was already being frequently violated were investigated, it turned out that both armies, Red and White, were indeed flouting it. Indeed, the Bolsheviks were responsible for executing by firing squad more than 100 Tolstoyan objectors, the first eight by december 1919.⁵⁷ At the end of 1920 the Bolsheviks altered the 1919 decree, then they simply disbanded the council over which Chertkov presided. It had considered applications from some 40,000 conscious objectors. Finally, in November 1923, the People’s Commissar for Justice decided to remove Tolstoyans from the list of bona fide conscientious objectors altogether, now deciding that they did not belong to a religious sect, and objected to military service on ethical grounds.⁵⁸ Fortunately pressure had already been eased on those who opposed military service, because by this time the Civil War had finally come to an end.

Opposition to military service was not the only problem Chertkov had to deal with, as he soon also started to clash with the Bolsheviks over the projected edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works, which was taking a long time to get off the ground. In July 1919, when Alexandra’s flat was being searched for evidence of sedition, the Bolsheviks had decided to nationalise the manuscripts of all Russian writers held in state libraries. That meant they also had a monopoly on publication, and since Tolstoy had famously surrendered the copyright on all his works, Chertkov naturally opposed this.⁵⁹ He argued that Tolstoy would never have agreed to his writings becoming the property of any person or institution, particularly a state, and rightly viewed the idea of a state monopoly as a form of censorship.⁶⁰ In September 1920 he was finally granted an audience with Lenin to discuss the matter, along with the issue about the Tolstoyans’ refusal to serve in the Red Army, but the discussions ended in stalemate.

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.