Looting of Yasnaya Polyana in 1941 and the rescue of Tolstoy's house from arson

During the Great Patriotic War, Yasnaya Polyana Was Occupied by the Nazis for a Month and a Half.

Tolstoy's house was turned into barracks and storerooms; a cobbler's workshop was installed in it, and in the "room under the vaults", where War and Peace was written, they set up a pigsty.

The house itself was plundered completely, and, unlike many other museums, it was abandoned to the soldiery to be torn to pieces, not having been entered on Rosenberg's lists for the confiscation of valuables. Things made by Tolstoy's own hands, his books, furniture and picture frames were burned in the stoves. The Hitlerites refused to use firewood, explaining that they had been ordered to leave no trace of Tolstoy. Many photographs, manuscripts and paintings were looted. In 1941 Izvestia wrote that when Guderian came to inspect the estate, one of the soldiers even presented him with a photograph of Lev Nikolayevich stolen from the museum. Antique furniture went into the furnace, and the saddle that Tolstoy used when riding was stolen. Two Nazi soldiers were buried beside Tolstoy's grave, and in front of the grave a heap of frozen corpses was piled up. The approximate material damage inflicted on the museum complex came, in monetary terms for 1942, to 1.5 million roubles.

On 14 December 1941 the Red Army approached Yasnaya Polyana, and the Nazis set fire to all the buildings of the estate; Tolstoy's house was set alight with particular diligence: bonfires were lit in three rooms, everything was doused with petrol, and the means of extinguishing the flames were destroyed, even the buckets. To keep people from rushing to put out the fire, it was announced that the house was mined. But the people of Yasnaya Polyana were not stopped. The schoolgirl Klara Litvinova found a fire extinguisher in the attic, other villagers opened up an abandoned well and found buckets. Taking part in fighting the fire were two Yasnaya Polyana schoolchildren, K. Litvinova and Pasha Komarovsky, Dr Ilyukhin, Tolstoy's former coachman Yegorov, the museum's curator Shchegolev with his sister, and the collective farmers Akimov, Filatov and Fokonov. After four hours of struggle with the flames the house was saved. When, a month later, his granddaughter Sofya Tolstaya-Yesenina and Ève Curie (the daughter of Marie) arrived here, the women wept, standing in the middle of the master's bedroom with its floor burned clean through and its windows smashed and stopped up with straw and turf.

However dreadful the consequences for the estate, Tolstoy could have been proud of the defenders of his home, the simple people whom he loved so much.