"[1] According to author and historian Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant relative:His father had been a rake-hell cavalry officer, whose rowdy excesses proved too much even for his fellow hussars.

[4] Due in part to their rejection by both the Russian nobility and the Church, Aleksey grew up in a staunchly atheistic and anti-monarchist environment, and was encouraged to be creative.

He was home taught by his parents, and by a visiting tutor, until the age of 14, when the family moved to Samara, after selling their farm, and he was enrolled in a local school.

He avoided becoming involved in the 1905 Revolution, by moving to Dresden in February 1906, to enrol in the Royal Saxon Higher School after the government temporarily closed the Technological Institute.

The couple decided to emigrate in 1907, and arrived in Paris in January 1908, to join a wide network of emigré Russian writers and artists, including Nikolay Gumilyov, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Andrei Bely, Maximilian Voloshin.

The father, after all, made no attempt to visit his ailing son before his lonely end, nor did he return for the funeral (though he did make another, business journey to Petersburg from Paris).

As subsequent events were to show, he could evince extraordinary callousness toward individual members of the human race, whatever his broadly liberal viewpoint toward the species at large.

[5] By 1910 his success as a writer enabled them to move into a flat along Nevsky Prospekt, but because of her husband's refusal to grant a divorce, when she became pregnant, she returned to Paris in May 1911, where he joined her, so that he could be registered under French law as the father of their daughter, Marianna.

"[10] Tolstoy hoped to marry Kandaurova, but she rejected him,[5] and before the end of the year he had met his third wife, Natalya Volkenstein, née Krandinskaya, by whom he had three children.

While living in France, Aleksey wrote several plays, and began writing a lengthy historical novel entitled, The Road to Calvary, which tracked the period from 1914 to 1919 including the Russian Civil War, which he had completed by 1921.

The leading Bolshevik literary critic, Aleksandr Voronsky, editor of Krasnaya Nov described Tolstoy's depiction of the new regime as a "tendentious lie" full of "improbable banalities" and berated the writer for his "countish hatred, his lordly disdain, his spite, bitterness, fury.

Ilya Ehrenburg later recalled:There was a place in Berlin that reminded one of Noah's Ark, where the clean and unclean met peacefully; it was called the House of Arts and was just a common German café where Russian writers gathered on Fridays.

[16] The American journalist Eugene Lyons noted how "almost alone among Russians, Tolstoy lived in baronial style in a rambling many-roomed mansion stocked with rich antiques ... the whole atmosphere of ripe old-world culture seemed like a throw-back to a nearly forgotten period.

"[17] Anna Akhmatova paid a back-handed tribute to his ability to live well in a short poem written in the 1920s, which included the lines: Ah, where are those islands ... Where the villain Yagoda Would not drive people to the wall and Alyoshka Tolstoy Would not skim it all.

[21] When Nadezhda Mandelstam published her memoirs in the 1960s, she opened with this enigmatic sentence: "After slapping Alexei Tolstoy in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow.

In January 1937, during the second of the Moscow show trials, at which 17 defendants including former leading Bolsheviks such as Georgy Pyatakov and Karl Radek were forced to confess to crimes they had not committed, Tolstoy signed a collective letter, with other writers, declaring "We demand merciless punishment for traitors, spies and murderers who sell their homeland.

This prompted one Soviet reader to write to him anonymously, saying that he had previously admired Tolstoy as Russia's greatest living writer since the death of Maxim Gorky, but on reading Bread: I felt ashamed, bitter and very, very hurt.

Tolstoy's 1929 play was true to the party line, depicting Peter as a tyrant who "suppressed everyone and everything as if he had been possessed by demons, sowed fear, and put both his son and his country on the rack.

[28] In 1935, after Pokrovsky had died and his school of history had been denounced by the party leadership, and the Soviet economy had begun the process of rapid industrialisation through Five Year Plans, Tolstoy wrote a radically different play, Peter I, in which – borrowing a motto from Pushkin that 'Russia came into Europe like the launching of a ship' – the construction of a ship, with Peter acting as the master builder, is the symbol of the entire play.

'[30] After the German invasion, Tolstoy moved to Zimenki, a village east of Moscow, where he wrote the first scenes of The Eagle and His Mate, covering the years 1553-59.

This original version, which was to have been performed in the Maly Theatre was banned by order of the political director the Red Army, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, who sent Stalin a memo explaining that Tolstoy had failed to portray Ivan as "the outstanding stateman of the 16th century".

[29] Both scripts were published in 1944, and The Eagle and His Mate received its premiere in the Maly Theatre in October, but the reviews were such that it was taken off, and the next performance opened a week after Tolstoy's death.

[32] In November 1942 Tolstoy was appointed a member of the Extraordinary State Commission, established to investigate atrocities committed on Soviet territory by the German invaders and their allies.

"[34] In January 1944 Tolstoy was appointed a member of a special commission that was supposedly charged by the Politburo with investigating the massacre in Katyn forest of 22,000 Polish officers, who had been taken prisoner when the Soviet Union occupied the eastern part of Poland in 1939-1940 under a pact with Nazi Germany.

In January 1944 he held a press conference for foreign journalists, in which he and other members of the commission asserted that the officers had been massacred by the Germans in August and September 1941.

As the leading spokesman at the press conference in January 1944, Tolstoy played a major role in ensuring that the Soviet version of the Katyn massacre – which is now known to be a lie – was widely reported in the USA and Great Britain.

The creator of the Moscow Children's Theatre, Natalya Sats spent several months persuading him to write the work, and finally won him over by supplying his wife with foreign fashion magazines.

[37] While Tolstoy enjoyed huge popularity and success in Russia in his lifetime, western assessments of him have been generally negative because of his role as a Stalin apologist.

Nikolai Tolstoy's summation of his distant relative was that "His personal character was without question beneath contempt ... in Stalin, he found a worthy master.

[39]George Orwell branded Tolstoy, along with contemporary Ilya Ehrenburg, as a "literary prostitute" whose freedom of expression was denied by Soviet totalitarianism.