Vladimir Chertkov was the literary executor of Tolstoy, and the organiser of the Russian pacifist movement in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in the early 20th Century.
The aim of this project was to preserve, by electronic scanning, documents from the library archive of his materials, to preserve them before the originals deteriorate.
The archive is held in the Lenin Library in Moscow, and has only recently been made available for academic access. FHM provided financial support to allow historian Irina Gordeeva to preserve copies of the most important documents.
The volume of materials scanned comprised about 1,100 pages. This forms a collection of a large number of documents which chronicle systematically the buried, officially not
recognised, activities of pacifists in the 1920s and first half of the 1930s. It is planned to make the information available to scholars and the general public via publication and on the
internet.
Irina Gordeeva writes: “These are the kind of materials that no one remembered, that no one noticed for decades, despite their importance.” They “document, by their existence, in their very flesh, something that was officially not recognized [as existing] — the activity of proponents of non-violence, and they show the actual extent of that activity.”
Photo: Portrait of Chertkov by Repin (Wikipedia public domain)
For an article by Irina about Chertkov and the pacifist movement, see our blog: The Chertkov Archives