The Life and Labor Commune was a Tolstoyan agricultural commune founded in 1921 and disbanded as a state run collective farm on 1 January 1939. The commune was founded near Moscow but was later resettled in central Siberia, not far from Novokuznetsk.[1] At its peak, it reportedly had as many as 1,000 participants.[2] Throughout its existence the members of the commune were persecuted by the Bolsheviks, both for refusing to enlist or support their war efforts as well as for organizing themselves communally outside of the approved state structure.
As the Russian Civil War drew to an end, and in the middle of the Russian famine of 1921–1922, the Life and Labor Commune was established. The Commune held 55 hectares of agricultural land in Shestakovka, roughly 10 kilometers outside of Moscow. All its members were provided with free, vegetarian, communal meals, as well as housing, lighting and heating. Each member was also given a monthly allowance of 25 rubles, which were usually spent on clothing and footwear.
Life and Labor was one of several Tolstoyan agricultural communes that existed in the Moscow region during the 1920s. Following Joseph Stalin's rise to power, in 1929, the New Jerusalem Commune was forcibly dissolved and its members were taken in by the Life and Labor Commune. The government then pressed for the Life and Labor Commune to be forcibly converted into a kolkhoz, despite the Commune's members wishes to maintain their voluntary collective labor. They countered with a proposal that all Tolstoyans in Russia be granted land, where they could collectively resettle. In March 1931, the Life and Labour Commune transferred to Novokuznetsk, in Siberia.
Over a thousand Tolstoyans from various different groups joined the Commune in Siberia. The different conditions in Siberia forced them to experiment with new kinds of agriculture, establishing greenhouses and using different grains. Their efforts were successful and they began supplying food for the local market, which gave them the resources to buy an oil press, build a watermill and set up an apiary. They also established contact with Tolstoyan communities abroad, including in Bulgaria, Canada and the United Kingdom.
From the start of their time in Siberia, the Commune faced a conflict with local Soviet authorities, which set high grain quotas and requisitioned food without authorization, conscripted the commune's pacifist members, carried out arbitrary arrests of Tolstoyans and tried its schoolteachers for teaching about religion. During the Great Purge, 65 of the Commune's leading members were arrested and tried, with many of them being sentenced to forced labor in the Gulag, where a number of them died or were killed. During World War II, 40 more of the Commune's members were conscripted to fight on the Eastern Front, while others were sentenced as conscientious objectors. With its membership facing a rapid decline, the Commune was finally converted into a kolkhoz.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about the persecution of the commune:
Several of the participants in the commune wrote memoirs of their experiences.