He is a former parliamentary candidate of the UK Independence Party and is the current nominal head of the House of Tolstoy, a Russian noble family.

On his upbringing he has written: Like thousands of Russians in the present century, I was born and brought up in another country and was only able to enter the land of my ancestors as a visitor in later years.

I prayed at night the familiar words Oche nash, attended parties where little Russian boys and girls spoke a mixture of languages, and felt myself by manner and temperament to be different than my English friends.

I think I was the most affected by those melancholy and evocative Russian homes where my elders, for the most part people of great charm and eccentricity, lived surrounded by the relics – ikons, Easter eggs, portraits of Tsar and Tsaritsa, family photographs, and émigré newspapers – of that mysterious, far-off land of wolves, boyars, and snow-forests of Ivan Bilibin's famous illustrations to Russian fairy-tales.

In 1977, he wrote the book Victims of Yalta,[4][a] which exposed and criticised Britain's role in Operation Keelhaul, a forced repatriation of anti-communist political refugees to Joseph Stalin's NKVD in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.

[5][6] In 1986 he wrote The Minister and the Massacres which similar documented and denounced the British Army's forced repatriation of alleged collaborationists to Josip Broz Tito's Soviet-backed Yugoslav Partisans.

[9] In 1989, Lord Aldington, previously a British officer (chief-of-staff to General Charles Keightley), former chairman of the Conservative Party, and then chairman of Sun Alliance insurance company, commenced a libel action over allegations of war crimes made by Tolstoy in a pamphlet distributed by Nigel Watts, a man in dispute with Sun Alliance on an insurance matter.

[12] According to historian Bob Moore, although the repatriations did occur, Tolstoy's intention was to minimize the culpability of the Cossacks for having sided with the Nazis, and in doing so he had undertaken manipulation of the sources and made "outrageous claims" that were exposed during the trial.

[18] He was also Chairman of the London-based Russian Monarchist League, and chaired their annual dinner on 6 March 1986, when the Guest-of-Honour was the MP John Biggs-Davison.

Tolstoy was a founding committee member (January 1989) of the now established War and Peace Ball, held annually in London, which raises funds for White Russian charities.

[20] In October 1987, he was presented with the International Freedom Award by the United States Industrial Council Educational Foundation: "for his courageous search for the truth about the victims of totalitarianism and deceit.

When Grand Duke Kiril succeeded to the imperial inheritance and rights, he granted Pavel Tolstoy-Miloslavsky the title, an elevation which was approved by the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna and by Nicholas II's sisters Xenia and Olga.