In general, the Soviet cultural gatekeeper's approach to Leo Tolstoy and other figures in the Russian literary canon was generally positive. Tolstoy lived until 1910 and was a major Russian cultural figure, so much that the exiled Lenin opined in two famous articles on the great author's legacy. The first article, "Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution," written while Tolstoy was still living, extolled the author with guarded praise:

Tolstoy reflected the pent-up hatred, the ripened striving for a better lot, the desire to get rid of the past—and also the immature dreaming, the political inexperience, the revolutionary flabbiness. Historical and economic conditions explain both the inevitable beginning of the revolutionary struggle of the masses and their unpreparedness for the struggle, their Tolstoyan non-resistance to evil, which was a most serious cause of the defeat of the first revolutionary campaign.

Lenin softened his critique with Tolstoy's death in 1910, maintaining in "An Appraisal of Leo Tolstoy," that the author was both a "great artist" and a "genius," but that the contradictions of his social origins and milieu prevented him from truly realizing the revolutionary potential of his art. As Lenin put it:

The contradictions in Tolstoy’s views are not the contradictions arising solely from his own mentality but are the reflections of those most complex and contradictory conditions, social influences and historical traditions which determined the psychology of the various classes and estates in Russian society during the reformist but pre-revolutionary epoch.

For this reason a correct estimation of Tolstoy can be given only from the standpoint of that class which by its political role and its struggle during the first climax of these contradictions, during the revolution, has given proof of its mission to be the leader in the struggle for the freedom of the people and for the emancipation of the masses from exploitation – a class that has given proof of its unwavering devotion to the cause of democracy and of its capacity to struggle against the limitations and inconsistency of bourgeois (as well as peasant) democracy – a correct appraisal can be given only from the standpoint of the social democratic proletariat.

Lenin's critiques of Tolstoy need to be taken with a pinch of salt; Tolstoy's alienation from mainstream tsarist society meant he was an important cultural figure that many political groups operating outside the tsarist system tried to claim as one of their own. "An Appraisal of Leo Tolstoy" does not so much critique Tolstoy himself, but rather other political factions' allegedly facile and non-materialist interpretations of Tolstoy's work.

Aside from a brief period in the roughly first decade of Bolshevik rule when attempts to cultivate a true proletarian culture often meant rejecting the old canon, Soviet cultural authorities approached Tolstoy as a precursor for Soviet art and literature. Even though he featured the old regime in vivid detail, Lenin's interpretation became the bedrock for the official stance on the great novelist. As the conflict with fascism seemed more imminent in the mid-1930s, the state began to draft figures from Russian history as spiritual ancestors of the modern Soviet sate who by accident of birth could not break out of their particular epoch of historical development. War and Peace became particularly popular with the state after Barbarossa as it showcased a unified Russian people uniting against the foreign invader. Prokofiev composed an opera of War and Peace during the war and it premiered after the war due to wartime disruption and the composer's endless tinkering with it.

This nationalistic reading of Tolstoy became one of the dominant state interpretations of the man and his work from the Second World War onward. In official cultural circles, Tolstoy's depiction of the Napoleonic Wars became a historical prequel to the much larger invasion of the Third Reich. Mosfilm produced a truly massive film adaptation in 1966. The 1979 Great Soviet Encyclopedia entry on Tolstoy sums up his opus thus:

War and Peace, which Tolstoy wrote between 1863 and 1869, was published beginning in 1865. The work is unique in Russian and world literature, combining epic scope with the depth of a psychological novel. Tolstoy’s novel answered the needs of literature during the 1860’s, which were to clarify the course of historical development and to depict the common people’s role at decisive periods of the nation’s life. Tolstoy dealt with the heroic year of 1812, when Russians of different classes united in resisting foreign invasion. At the same time, Tolstoy’s elation over the national communal spirit is supported by his utopianism, which is evident in his loving re-creation of the life of the landowning dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry) of the early 19th century. Tolstoy considered the main drawback of the illusory life of high society and the court in St. Petersburg to be its alienation from the common people during a time of terrible trials for the nation. In contrast, the patriotism of the Rostovs is presented as part of the people’s elemental life.

Other Soviet cultural figures during the Cold War would invoke the Russian literary canon as a means to prove the cultural superiority of the USSR over the superficial US consumerism.

The state's appropriation of Tolstoy's works for political purposes should not obscure the fact that Tolstoy and other literary figures were popular among Soviet readers without the prodding of the state. This was especially true in the 1930s and 40s when there was a concerted push from below for self-education and literacy, especial of material that would make one Kulturnost (civilized- as one mentor of mine put it, the best translation in English is "a gentleman and a scholar"). Soviet magazines and advice columns of the Stalinist period had large sections devoted to which canonical books to read or how to correct your comrades on the finer points of art and literature. Red Army soldiers during the war developed a voracious appetite for classical literature and popular histories and were often quite shocked when they overran German trenches and discovered their counterparts tended to read pornography over more elevated forms of literature. The Mosfilm adaptation of war and Peace was in no small measure due to the enormous success of the 1956 American-Italian adaptation which played to packed Soviet theaters when it was released in 1959. Even though the larger mass culture of the post-Stalinist period moved away from the Russian canon or state-sanctioned cultural movements like socialist realism, readership of pre-revolutionary Russian literary figures never disappeared and their books were available for public consumption.