Drawing on extensive research in Russian archives, Robert Croskey examines how Alexandra Tolstoy, the youngest daughter of Russian writer Lev (Leo) Tolstoy, sought to preserve the work of her father after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. Best known as the founder and lifelong president of the Tolstoy Foundation in New York, where she worked to assist Russian emigres, Alexandra Tolstoy was determined to maintain her family's estate at Iasnaia Poliana as a museum and living memorial to her father's ideals; in addition, she was involved with the Tolstoy museums in Moscow and in preparing her father's manuscripts for publication. Croskey shows how Tolstoy's daughter drew upon patronage networks to sustain Iasnaia Poliana as ideologically hostile winds blew around her, and how and why a precarious accommodation with the Bolshevik government broke down. The story culminates with her emigration from Soviet Russia in 1929, when she was forty-five.

The Legacy of Tolstoy interweaves Alexandra Tolstoy's life with events in Soviet history and illuminates Lev Tolstoy's legacy during the Soviet period.