Invoking Tolstoy’s name in the age of Putin

SIR – I read with dismay of my thoroughly eccentric cousin Pyotr Tolstoy’s diatribe against Britain and support for Vladimir Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine (“Tolstoy slaughtered the English, says great-great-grandson”, report, May 5).

I would be surprised were any other member of the family to share his views, and know of many who emphatically do not. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, did Lev Nikolayevich (Leo) Tolstoy ever kill any Englishmen during the Siege of Sevastopol in 1854.

I believe a more characteristic family view of the British was that of my grandfather, Mikhail Pavlovich Tolstoy-miloslavsky.

In 1911 he travelled to marry my beautiful English grandmother, Eileen Hamshaw, at the Russian Embassy chapel in London. They first met playing tennis in the Crimea.

My own wife, Georgina, is another English beauty, and I hope we will live to see Britain and Russia allies once again, as we were until the German-funded Bolshevik Revolution destroyed almost everything of value in Russia’s history.

Nikolai Tolstoy

Southmoor, Berkshire

Ilya Repin’s 1907 portrait shows Leo Tolstoy with his wife Sophia at his family estate