Letters to Tolstoy: The Russian Imperial Bahá'ís

J. E. Esslemont's classic introduction Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, first published in 1923, devotes a section to the reception of the Bahá'í Faith in pre-revolutionary Russia. He records that the Russian Imperial period — from the 1860s through the Revolution of 1917 — saw a more substantial engagement with the Faith by Russian intellectual circles than any other Western culture of the same years.

The Russian engagement had several streams. The Russian diplomatic corps, in its long contact with Persia, had become familiar with the Bábí movement during the years of the persecutions. The Russian minister in Tihrán had intervened decisively to secure Bahá'u'lláh's release from the Síyáh-Chál in 1853. Russian scholars at the Imperial University in St Petersburg published, in subsequent decades, several scholarly works on the Babi and Bahá'í histories.

The most consequential of the Russian encounters, however, was the encounter of Count Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy in his last decades had become preoccupied with questions of religious truth across the world's traditions. He read what he could find of the Bahá'í writings in the Russian and German translations available to him. He corresponded directly with Bahá'í teachers — most notably with the Russian Jewish poetess Isabel Grinevskaya, who had written a verse drama about the life of the Báb that was performed in St Petersburg in 1903.

Esslemont preserves the substance of Tolstoy's response to the Bahá'í teachings, drawn from Tolstoy's letters and published essays. The great Russian had concluded, after some years of study, that the Faith answered the most urgent of the modern religious questions:

The teaching of the Bábís — which is now passing into a form of pure Bahá'ísm — comes to us as the highest and purest form of religious teaching.

He praised, in his letters, the principle of progressive revelation, the abolition of clerical hierarchy, the emphasis on the unity of religions, and the practical teachings on equality of women and on universal education. He did not himself formally enrol as a Bahá'í — he was already the founder of his own non-denominational ethical movement — but he praised the Faith publicly and at length.

The Russian community of declared Bahá'ís remained small through the Imperial period. A few converts in the major cities — St Petersburg, Moscow, the Caucasian provincial capitals — formed small private gatherings. The substantial Bahá'í community in the Russian Empire was the Persian-speaking community at 'Ishqábád in Russian Turkmenistan, which had built the first Bahá'í House of Worship in the world by 1908.

The Revolution of 1917 brought to an end the Russian Imperial engagement with the Faith. The new Soviet state took, by stages, an increasingly hostile attitude to all religion. The 'Ishqábád community was suppressed; the House of Worship was confiscated and eventually demolished. Tolstoy's correspondence on the Faith, however, survived in the Russian archives and would be re-discovered, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, by a new Russian generation interested in the spiritual options the Imperial period had explored.

Source: J. E. Esslemont, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era (George Allen & Unwin, 1923), with reference to Tolstoy's letters to Bahá'í correspondents preserved in the Tolstoy archives at Yasnaya Polyana. Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19241.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. George Allen & Unwin. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19241