Red Count

Writer Alexei Varlamov in the magazine "Gorky" - about the multidimensionality of Alexei Tolstoy:

“Starting work on the biography of Tolstoy, who seemed to me a notorious villain, I was sure that I would have a revealing pamphlet. I saw in him a cynic walking on the heads and corpses. But, when I began to get acquainted with the sources <...>, a completely different person appeared before me. <...>

Russian emigration saw in Alexei a fat manner. The fact that in 1923 he returned to the USSR and switched to the side of the Soviet regime was regarded as a betrayal. <...> I did not seek to become his lawyer and was rather an investigator who collects the testimony of witnesses, trying to draw up an honest picture of the crime. <...>

Akhmatova called Tolstoy a villain and anti -Semite, who ruined Osip Mandelstam. Despite this, Tolstoy loved her very much and helped her. <...> He helped the son of Tsvetaeva, George Efron, supported the director and the head of the Jewish anti -fascist committee of Solomon Mikhoels. Alexey Tolstoy was not an indifferent person, but helped only those whom he considered talented. <...> The personality of Tolstoy is much more complicated than the described by Solzhenitsyn.

<...> His main claim to the Bolsheviks was that they gave the Germans huge territories. Communist ideology and red terror did not bother him. When, during the civil war, the Bolsheviks managed to conquer Ukraine and Belarus, Tolstoy began to understand that these bandits have to become the builders of the new country. He still did not like the Bolsheviks, but now he considered them some kind of wolves, who, as befits the "orderly of the forest", should have destroyed in Russia the whole sick, weak, flimsy and, having played a role, leave. As a convinced patriot, he considered this stage necessary for the further development of the country.

I do not think that Tolstoy pursued selfish goals and rode in the USSR for money and glory. Nobody gave him such guarantees. <...> Alexei Nikolaevich really believed that Stalinism in his homeland is better than freedom in exile and wrote an “open letter” in which he explained his position. <...>

There were other people who separated Tolstoy's eyes. In exile, the movement “Change of milestones” appeared, whose participants said that the Russian intelligentsia should be with the Russian people, regardless of whether this people are right or not. Everyone knows about the philosophical ship, on which prominent Russian philosophers and public figures left Petrograd in 1922, but few people heard about the reverse flight of this ship, on which Alexei Tolstoy and Smenovites returned to Russia. Of course, all returning were taken note, many later shot. Stalin did not forgive such things.

Nobody needed Tolstoy in Russia. <...> Hunger threatened his family. Tolstoy did not give up, because he was an adventurer, loved the risk, believed in himself and his luck. He possessed absolutely “market” thinking: he knew what the public liked, and knew how to write things that were well sold. So the play appeared about Rasputin "The Empress's Conspiracy." <...> It turned out a obscene historical fake, which, oddly enough, was very talentedly written. <...>

There is such a literary joke. When Tolstoy was going to pick up, he asked: “How much time do I have?” They told him: "One month." And he wrote “bread” - one of his most famous works, which is a loud praise of Stalin. There were a lot of similar literature, but “bread” is an absolute champion. This book is the repentance of Tolstoy, sacrificial offering, a fee for freedom. So he always saved - he traded himself. In this sense, Alexei Nikolaevich was an absolutely unprincipled person. ”