In 1949, as The Red Scare was grabbing the minds and nerves of the American people, a concerted effort was taking place to give explanation as to what Soviet Russia was all about and how formidable an enemy the Russian people actually were.
Among all the people who sought to sow seeds of fear and destruction, there were some who were pragmatic; who explained the differences between Eastern and Western ideologies, put a face on the regime of Stalin and sought to create a better understanding of what America was facing.
One of those who tried putting things in perspective was a woman who was the daughter of one of Russia’s most celebrated authors, Leo Tolstoy.
The youngest daughter of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) and of his wife Sophia (1844–1919), Alexandra Tolstoy was close to her father. In 1901, at the age of seventeen, she became his secretary. He appointed her as executor of his will, a task she had to undertake in 1910. Although Alexandra shared her father’s belief in non-violence, she felt it was her duty to take part in the events of the First World War and served as a nurse on the Turkish and German fronts. This led to her being gassed and admitted to hospital herself. After the war, she worked on an edition of her father’s writings. However, after allowing White Russians to meet in her Moscow home, she was arrested five times by the Bolsheviks and in 1920 was sent to prison for a year.
In 1921 she became the director of the Tolstoy museum at Yasnaya Polyana. She was given permission to leave the Soviet Union in 1929 and went to Japan in the same year. Originally given permission to stay for six months to study schools, she ultimately stayed in the country for 18 months. She worked as a lecturer on Tolstoy and as a Russian teacher, and was supported by Japanese literary and academic circles.
In 1931 she left Japan and settled in the United States, where she gave lectures and worked as a chicken farmer. Some years into this life, she was visited by Tatiana Schaufuss, an old friend who had spent several years in prison and in exile in Siberia. Together, in 1939 they founded the Tolstoy Foundation.
In 1934, she authored a book about her life entitled “I Worked for the Soviet” and it was published by Yale University Press. The book details the difficulties she faced living in Russia during and after the revolution.
Alexandra Tolstaya became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1941, abandoning the use of the title of countess.
In the summer of 1948, Tolstaya met 18 year old future United States Senator Mike Gravel, who had intended to volunteer for the Israeli forces in a fight to defend the state of Israel, and she allegedly told him to instead “go on back home and finish school”, to which he complied.
In 1974, at the age of ninety, Tolstaya received birthday greetings from President of the United States Richard Nixon, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and others, and was interviewed by The New York Times.
Here is a lecture Alexandra Tolstoy gave at the University Of Illinois on April 4, 1949.
