Tolstoy

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 real: 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.