Tolstoyan movement

"[1] However, the author also thought it was a mistake to create a specific movement or doctrine after him, urging individuals to listen to their own conscience rather than blindly follow his.

In regard to a letter he received from an adherent, he wrote: To speak of "Tolstoyism," to seek guidance, to inquire about my solution of questions, is a great and gross error.

Tolstoy's understanding of what it means to be Christian was defined by the Sermon on the Mount and summed up in five simple propositions: They do not support or participate in the government which they consider immoral, violent and corrupt.

Tolstoy rejected the state (as it only exists on the basis of physical force) and all institutions that are derived from it – the police, law courts and army.

Leon Trotsky summed up Tolstoy's social philosophy, on the basis of his writings, in five "programmatic theses": The vegetarian movement started in Europe in the 19th century.

[1][12] In Russia censorship meant that many of Tolstoy's non-fiction works in the 1880s and 1890s were published abroad first, either in Russian or in translation, delaying the author's influence in his country of birth.

The movement continued to grow after the writer's death and was at its strongest in the years immediately following the revolutions of 1917 with agricultural communities established in the provinces of Smolensk, Tver, Samara, Kursk, Perm and Kiev.

[1] The reasons attributed to the failure of Tolstoyan communities across Europe have included the personal incompatibility of the participants and a general lack of practical agricultural experience.

Alexander Fodor wrote: We know that [Tolstoy's] pacificism, his advocacy of passive resistance to evil through nonviolent means, has had incalculable influence on pacificist movements in general and on the philosophical and social views and programs of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez.

[17]Another prominent follower of Tolstoy's teachings was Dorothy Day, an American social activist, and a founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement.