Anton Yu. Fomin

PhD in Historical Sciences, Junior Researcher

Saint Petersburg Institute of History of Russian Academy of Sciences

(St. Petersburg, Russia)

Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

(Tula, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2023-2-20-30

Abstract. The article examines military writings of Leo Tolstoy Jr., Count Leo Tolstoy's son. From the passionate devotion to his father’s ideas L. L. Tolstoy moved to a critical attitude towards L. N. Tolstoy’s extreme pacifism and public propaganda of directly opposite views on the pages of military press. L. L. Tolstoy began to cooperate with the official military press and openly challenge his father’s views and the antimilitarist attitudes of the Russian intelligentsia. The personal reasons for the “rebellion” of Leo Tolstoy Jr. against his father are of secondary importance for this study. The article primarily focuses on the Ministry of War’s efforts to involve the great writer’s son in its propaganda campaign and ideas that L. L. Tolstoy and the military administration wanted to use against the popular antimilitarist sentiment. The situation was complicated by the fact that L. L. Tolstoy was a purely civilian person. He wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the military affairs, the current state of the Russian arm and also the professional military vocabulary. It took military journalists a lot of effort to make his writings correspond with the traditional forms of military-patriotic rhetoric. Support from the son of the most prominent pacifist public figure was crucial for the military circles under conditions of severe crisis in civil-military relations and decline of the army’s prestige present in Russia during the second half of the 1900s. It was a result of the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the participation of troops in the suppression of revolutionary uprisings.
Keywords: L. L. Tolstoy, L. N. Tolstoy, D. N. Dubenskiy, Russkiy Invalid, Tolstoyism, Troop Formation Committee.

Acknowledgements: the research was carried out at the expense of the grant of the Russian Science Foundation No. 23-28-00325, https://rscf.ru/project/23-28-00325/

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Fomin, AYu 2023, ‘Count L. L. Tolstoy and the Propaganda of Militarism after the RussoJapanese War’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 2 (14), pp. 20–30, http://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2023-2-20-30 (in Russ.)

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