Not resisting was not accepting evil; it was refusing to repeat its method. Power is nourished not only by coercion applied from above but by everyday obedience given from below.
When Tolstoy is mentioned, most of us think of thick novels, the Russian aristocracy and long winter nights. Yet in the last period of his life Tolstoy was not only literature’s great writer but a radical thinker asking unsettling questions about the state, the church, property and violence. He questioned his title, his wealth and the class he belonged to ever more severely. What concerned him above all was the contradiction of a person declaring themselves against violence while entrusting their daily life to institutions built upon it.
Tolstoy’s understanding of nonviolence was not simply being polite, avoiding conflict or staying silent under all conditions. He thought the state’s capacity for war, punishment and coercion stood on the obedience of ordinary people. The order of violence continued because the soldier followed orders, the taxpayer met the cost of war, the official applied the oppressive rule and the citizen took all of it as inevitable. He therefore sought the beginning of change not in seizing power but in a person’s refusal to take part, by their own hand, in injustice.
What does not resisting evil by violence mean?
At the centre of Tolstoy’s thought lies the principle of not resisting evil with violence. At first hearing this can sound like remaining passive before evil. If a person is being attacked, must we not defend them, must we give way to the oppressor, must we stay silent before injustice? The hardest point in debates about nonviolence begins here.
For Tolstoy, not resisting was not accepting evil; it was refusing to repeat its method. Not obeying an unjust order, not taking part in war, not serving in institutions that punish people, and not benefiting from exploitation were powerful forms of resistance. Rather than continuing the logic of violence in reverse by killing the oppressor, a person should break that logic’s hold upon themselves. Seen this way, nonviolence is not passivity but a decision to withdraw obedience.
Even so, a problem remains that is not easily solved. We may choose to pay the price for violence directed at ourselves; but what shall we do about violence directed at another? It is not always possible to protect a child, a woman under attack or a targeted community merely by appealing to the aggressor’s conscience. The sharpest criticism of the Tolstoyan principle is the risk of deciding, on behalf of defenceless people, what price they will pay. The moment we counsel someone else “do not strike back,” our moral stance can easily turn into privileged spectatorship.
The state’s invisible violence
What still looks strong in Tolstoy today is that he did not look for violence only in bloody and extraordinary events. The state usually renders violence invisible within the language of order, security and law. A person imprisoned, conscripted by force, displaced or deprived of the resources to sustain their life may not be perceived as suffering violence when it is done through official procedure. The uniform, the seal and the court ruling do not lessen the moral weight of the coercion applied; they only make it appear legitimate.
This view is uncomfortable for our own time too. We may watch images of a distant war with sorrow while ignoring our own link to the economic and political order that makes it possible. We may live without knowing which working conditions underlie a product’s cheapness, whose insecurity underlies our comfort, or whose deaths underlie border security. Violence does not leave our lives merely because we do not apply it with our own hands.
Tolstoy makes this complicity a matter of personal conscience. He does not accept “I only carried out the order” or “everyone does it” as moral excuses. Institutions decide, but it is again human beings who carry out those decisions. This emphasis is as heavy as it is important, for it risks placing structural responsibility on the shoulders of individuals. An appeal to conscience made without accounting for the fear of unemployment, punishment, poverty and exclusion can make heroism compulsory for everyone.
Withdrawing obedience instead of taking power
Tolstoy also viewed with suspicion revolutionary movements’ desire to seize state power. He feared that a new government established through the instruments of violence would fill the place of the old oppression with another. The idea of taking the state and using it for good, he thought, underestimated the power of the machinery of violence to change those who wield it. Someone who fought yesterday in the name of freedom could, on reaching the position of command, see their own coercion as necessary and justified.
On his line, therefore, revolution begins with people withdrawing their cooperation rather than with the taking of a palace or a government building. When the soldier refuses to fight, the official refuses the unjust order and the citizen refuses the task that serves oppression, the instruments in power’s hands cease to function. This thought later influenced conceptions of nonviolent resistance in different parts of the world. Yet it would be wrong to take Tolstoy’s approach on its own as a recipe for large social movements. His strength lies less in offering a ready strategy than in showing sharply the moral link between means and ends.
Withdrawing obedience is not as individual as it looks from outside. A single soldier refusing an order may be severely punished; mass refusal can stop the machinery of war. A single worker declining to take part in an unjust practice may lose their job; collective refusal can make the rule unenforceable. For conscience to become political force it needs solidarity. Otherwise the system easily crushes honest individuals one by one and puts others in their place.
Is a politics of love enough?
In Tolstoy’s thought love is not merely a personal feeling but the foundation of social relation. When a person does not use another as an instrument and does not sacrifice their life to their own purposes, the root of violence weakens. Rather than casting the enemy out of humanity, one must preserve the possibility of their transformation. Nonviolence aims not to destroy the other side’s body but to shake their obedience, their legitimacy and their easy conscience.
But the language of love can conceal the real inequality of political conflict. Telling the oppressed to set aside their anger, asking them to behave in moral equality with the oppressor, is unjust. Anger is not always hatred; it is often the power to name accurately the injustice suffered. A call for peace, too, can be used to silence the demand for justice. The strong may expect calm from the weak so that their own violence remains invisible.
Taking the Tolstoy line seriously today means not repeating all his answers as they stand but keeping this tension open. Nonviolence is meaningful if it is not a morality that demands silence from the victim. Love carries political value if, instead of hiding conflict, it allows conflict to continue without destroying human beings. Forgiveness must not replace responsibility; reconciliation must not come before harm is acknowledged.
Nonviolence is not a certificate of innocence
A movement declaring itself nonviolent is not automatically in the right. People can be excluded without insult, starved without physical force, and have their lives dismantled in the calm language of bureaucracy. A group using nonviolent methods may itself be oppressive, discriminatory and domineering internally. Nonviolence is not merely the absence of a weapon in the hand but a continual inquiry into how power is built over another’s life.
Equally, treating every material intervention as violence empties the concept of meaning. When we place writing on a wall in the same category as wounding a person, damage to property is equated with damage to a human body. That equation usually serves an order which values property above people. What is to be learned from Tolstoyan ethics is not to sanctify objects but not to turn a human being into the instrument of an aim.
Tolstoy’s thought on nonviolence does not answer all our questions today. It leaves serious gaps regarding the limits of self-defence, the responsibility to protect others and effective organisation against institutional violence. Still, it asks a question we cannot easily pass over: when we use the methods of the order we oppose, are we really destroying it, or rebuilding it under other names?
Nonviolence is perhaps not standing outside history with clean hands. On the contrary, it is seeing our own share within a world woven with violence and building the shared courage to reduce that share. Here lies what remains alive in the Tolstoy line: its reminder that power is nourished not only by coercion applied from above but by everyday obedience given from below.