Nikolai Tolstoy
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Count Nikolai Tolstoy-Miloslavsky (1935-) is a prominent and controversial Russo-British historian.
Despite his advertised relationship with Leo Tolstoy, he belongs to a collateral branch of the great Tolstoy family. His stepfather was the famed novelist Patrick O'Brian.
Tolstoy wrote a number of books about Celtic mythology and about World War II. Among them there were Victims Of Yalta (1977) and The Minister and the Massacres (1986) which criticised the British for the handling of post-war refugees from eastern Europe, the Operation Keelhaul.
In 1989, Toby Low, Lord Aldington, previously a British officer and now an owner of Sun Alliance, a company dealing with insurance, sued Tolstoy over war crimes allegations made by Tolstoy in a pamphlet distributed by Nigel Watts, a man involved with Sun Alliance on an unrelated insurance matter. Tolstoy lost and was ordered to pay two million pounds (1.5 million in damages and 500 thousand in costs), without the right to appeal. He appealed his case to the European Court of Human Rights and it ruled that the fine was excessive in the light of not being able to appeal.
He ran for the Wantage seat for the United Kingdom Independence Party in the United Kingdom general election, 2005.
External links
- Count Tolstoy's homepage (http://www.uvsc.edu/commorgs/russia/tolstoy/)
- An Interview with Pravda.ru (http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/04/11/27546.html)
- An Interview by Raymond H. Thompson (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/tolstoy.htm)
- Tolstoy's Times of London article on his stepfather Patrick O'Brian (http://www.hmssurprise.org/Related/tolstoy_obrian.html)
- Lord Aldington obituary (http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politicsobituaries/story/0,1441,563440,00.html)