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Tolstoy Foundation's award for Dalai Lama

George Joseph in New York

For Indians worldwide, Leo Tolstoy and the Dalai Lama, though aliens, are parts of their culture. Not only are Tolstoy's writings still read widely, he is venerated as a guru of Mahatma Gandhi himself.

Little wonder then that the Indian community has greeted with cheers the announcement by the Tolstoy Foundation based in Valley Cottage, New York, that it would bestow its highest award on the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama will be the second recipient of the Alexandra Tolstoy Humanitarian Award, which honours an individual whose 'life's work and career reflect the spirit of Alexandra Tolstoy's humanitarian principles', according to the foundation.

The first to receive the award was Angier Biddle Duke, chief of protocol for former presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson and a former ambassador of the United States in Spain, Denmark and Morocco. Duke received the honour in 1996 for his work with refugees.

Alexandra was the youngest child of Count Leo Tolstoy. She started the Tolstoy Foundation on a farm on Lake Road in 1939. The foundation's original aim was to assist Russian refugees fleeing Communism to resettle in North and South America and Europe. It has assisted in resettling more than 100,000 refugees, including Afghans, Armenians, Bulgarians, Cambodians, Czechs, Ethiopians, Hungarians, Iranians, Iraqis, Laotians, Poles, Rumanians, Tibetans and Ugandans.

To the foundation, the Dalai Lama is no stranger. Almost 60 years ago, Ilya Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy's grandson, went to Tibet as an envoy of the US government and met the Dalai Lama, then barely seven years old.

That meeting was the beginning of a relationship between the famous Russian family and the Tibetan people that continues even now through the foundation.

The award will be presented when the Dalai Lama visits New York in April 2002.

"His Holiness the Dalai Lama will accept the award as a gesture of the friendship between the Tolstoy Foundation and the people of Tibet," Xenia Woyevodsky, executive director of the international humanitarian organization, was quoted in news reports.

A series of events, including the screening of a film made during Ilya Tolstoy's 1942-43 exploration, are planned to celebrate the connection between the foundation and the Dalai Lama.

"The Tolstoy Foundation has been a good friend to the people of Tibet for many years," Rinchen Dharlo, a long-time representative of the Dalai Lama and now president of the Tibet Fund, a New York City-based non-profit organisation, was quoted in reports.

When China occupied Tibet, the foundation began to help the Tibetans too. "We realised that there are other victims of communist oppression that we needed to help," Woyevodsky said.

The Tolstoy Foundation's by-laws were changed to allow an international effort to aid victims of Communism as well as other refugees. Thus the foundation stopped being a Russian organisation and became an international organisation.

Some Tibetan refugees came to the Valley Cottage farm run by Alexandra during the 1960s.

About 1 million refugees have passed through Rockland as part of the resettlement programme between the 1940s and 1994, the foundation estimates.

The Tolstoy Foundation provided scholarships for Tibetans who returned to India and helped fund schools to serve the refugees in India.

The foundation also gave its support to the Tibetan struggle years before most of the rest of the world even knew of the existence of the country wedged between India and China.

Ilya Tolstoy died in 1970 and his aunt, Alexandra, died nine years later.

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