in the same magazine praised The Road to Calvary as the best novel ever written by an emigre Russian. 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." She did not explain why her husband, Osip Mandelstam struck Tolstoy, but makes it clear that Tolstoy was so well connected with the Soviet authorities that Mandelstam fled Leningrad because he was afraid that he would be arrested. According to other sources, Tolstoy had chaired a writers' 'court of honour' which looked into Mandelstam's complaint against a fellow writer who had slapped his wife, and objected to a verdict which implied fault on both sides. Tolstoi was Chairman of the USSR Writers Union in 1936-38. 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." In 1937, he published his novel Bread, which eulogised Stalin's role in the defence of Tsaritsyn (later renamed Stalingrad) during the civil war. 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: In December 1937 Tolstoy was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He became a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1939. Peter the Great Tolstoy spent 16 years studying the life of Peter the Great. His first work on this subject was his 1929 play, Na dybe ("On the Rack"). In the 1920s, Soviet historiography was dominated by the Bolshevik historian Mikhail Pokrovsky, who despised "Peter, whom fawning historians have called the great" as a tyrant who provoked war with Sweden and impoverished his subjects. 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." 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