On a winter afternoon in Russia's Yasnaya Polyana, Vladimir Tolstoy, a great-great-grandson of author Leo Tolstoy and an advisor on cultural affairs to President Vladimir Putin, strode up the birch-lined path that leads to the bucolic family compound where his forebear wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. It is now a state museum. At each step, he was greeted by staff members heading home for the day.
At once friendly and feudal, the scene at this estate some 125 miles south of Moscow captured something of the mood in Russia today, where Putin is regarded as a czar, especially outside the big cities, even as the liberal intelligentsia reviles him and laments his popularity. It also reflects the benefits for Putin of enlisting the support of a member of an illustrious family as he continues to strike notes of national pride.
Since being tapped by Putin in 2012, Tolstoy, 52, has emerged as the more conciliatory, highbrow and Western-friendly face of Kremlin cultural policy. He works with, but is temperamentally different from, Russia's more combative culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, who is known for aggressive assertions of Russian superiority and conservative values.
"Leo Tolstoy was a Russian officer who defended Russia in the Fourth Bastion in Sevastopol," he says, speaking through a translator over tea in a cafe near the museum. "For us, in our mind, this has always been Russia," he says. "Of course, as a descendant of the Russian officer Leo Tolstoy, I cannot have any other attitude toward that."
Tolstoy was raised in a middle-class family in the Moscow region and trained as a journalist. In 1994, he was named director of Yasnaya Polyana, which is centred on the house where the novelist wrote and has been preserved as it was at the time of his death, in 1910.
Tolstoy improved the quality and range of activities at the museum, adding lectures, a literary prize and Russian-language classes. His wife, Ekaterina Tolstaya, took over as director after he became an advisor to Putin.
Tolstoy says that Putin had offered him the post after a meeting of museum directors in April 2012 at which Tolstoy criticised the government's cultural strategy and the president's advisory council for culture as ineffective. "When the meeting was over, the president asked me to stay for a bit and asked if I was so critical, could I do this job better?" Tolstoy says. Now, he briefs Putin on cultural issues and acts a bridge between Russia's cultural world and the Kremlin.
Not long ago, the sense that Russia had somehow lost its way after the fall of the Soviet Union was pervasive here, but Tolstoy and other Putin loyalists have succeeded in reviving a sense of national pride expressly through cultural policy.
Guided by Tolstoy, a committee of leading cultural figures and state officials ultimately produced an 18-page policy document that defines culture broadly, saying it is as valuable to Russia as its natural resources. It also touches on moral precepts, the importance of religion in shaping values and the place of the Russian language in uniting a country of more than 140 million people and diverse ethnicities.
Some cultural figures have criticised the document for not addressing the influence of Russian state television, which operates as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin. Many didn't pay it much attention. "It's abstract, like a biblical text," said Kirill Razlogov, a prominent film historian.
Far more concrete is the impact of laws that ban obscene words in the theatre, films and public performances and that criminalise offending religious believers, both of which were passed after Pussy Riot's members were jailed in 2012.
While Tolstoy may agree with the general direction, his approach is more tolerant. "I believe everything has a right to exist unless it's a provocation," he says. "I think art shouldn't be offensive." As for Pussy Riot, he says: "I don't support them, but on the other hand I also believe the reaction was inappropriate. An artist shouldn't be punished in court." He describes himself as a moderate who could "find balance" between traditionalists and liberals looking Westward.
Back at the cafe, Tolstoy grew animated in talking about Russian pride. "Today's Russia cannot be forced to do what it doesn't want to," he says. "It's impossible to achieve either by sanctions, or even by an overt attack. Russia respects itself, and it wants only justice, nothing else."
On that wintry afternoon, dozens of visitors flocked to Yasnaya Polyana. There was snow on the ground and gray ice on the pond, and the birch trees caught the afternoon light. The spirit of the novelist's former home "is love," Tolstoy reflects.
In Tolstoy's novels, "there are no characters who are complete villains," his great-great-grandson says. "All of his characters are real people."
© 2015 The New York Times
