had been cast yet. There were people who called Gorky the 'semi emigre'... Alexey Tolstoy, surrounded by Smena Vekh (Changing Landmarks) people, alternately praised the Bolsheviks as, 'unifiers of the Russian land,' and indulged in angry abuse. The fog was still swirling. Soviet dignitary Tolstoy revisited Russia in May 1923, and decided to return permanently, having decided that "no literature will come out of the emigration". In his farewell editorial printed in Nakanune, he wrote, "I am leaving with my family for the homeland forever. If there are people here abroad close to me, my words are addressed to them. Do I go to happiness? Oh, no: Russia is going through hard times. Once again she is enveloped by a wave of hatred... I am going home to a hard life." Because of his ancestry he was sometimes called "Comrade Count" or "Red Count". Far from experiencing a "hard life" in the Soviet Union, Tolstoy was a highly privileged Soviet citizen, who prospered under the dictator, Joseph Stalin, when other writers who had chosen to live under Soviet rule throughout the civil war were persecuted. According to a widespread rumour, he was a millionaire with a 'bottomless bank account'. 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." 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. If Tolstoy was aware that she had linked his name with that of the reviled head of the NKVD, he did not bear a grudge. In 1940, he and Mikhail Sholokhov proposed that Akhmatova be awarded a Stalin Prize, which would have been her first official recognition by the Soviet literary establishment, but the proposal was vetoed by Stalin. Soviet critics abruptly changed their view of Tolstoy's work once he had declared his new allegiance to the regime. Instead of being denounced in Krasnaya nov, he had more work published in that magazine during the 1920s than any other author apart from Maxim Gorky, starting with Aelita. A critic writing