Polemic around Leo Tolstoy’s Teaching on Non-resistance to Evil by Violence in the First Decade after 1917
The article presents a critical review of the opinions expressed by several soviet and émigré authors concerning Tolstoy’s teaching on non-resistance to evil by violence. The paper includes a brief history of Tolstoy’s philosophical and religious legacy in Russia in the first years after 1917. The censorship of Tolstoy’s essays on philosophy and the repression of his followers in Russia were visible manifestations of immoralism inherent in Bolshevism, in which violence played an important role. At the same time, despite the difference of their political values, the formal criticism aimed at Tolstoy’s moral teaching by Bolshevik ideologists and famous white émigré thinkers was often similar. Tolstoy’s teaching was considered by them to be unreasonable, naïve, craven, selfish and harmful. Tolstoy was regarded as a brilliant novelist but a bad thinker. His ethical ideas were seen as provocative and dangerous to the political aspirations of the rival camps. With the hindsight at the Russian history of the 20th Century, we can say that the utopian thinkers were the ideologists of Bolshevism and White Army, who were also both compromised by the immorality of real violence, while the only moral alternative was put forward by Tolstoy’s teaching on non-resistance to evil by violence. This teaching has not lost its significance in the 21th Century.