Russians have always preferred to submit to acts of violence rather than respond with violence or participate therein. They have therefore always submitted.
“A voluntary submission, having nothing in common with servile obedience.”[1]
“The true Christian may submit, indeed it is impossible for him not to submit without a struggle to no matter what violence; but he could not obey it—that is, he could not recognise it as legitimate.”[2]
At the time of writing these lines Tolstoy was still subject to the emotion caused by one of the most tragical examples of this heroic non-resistance of a people—the bloody manifestation of January 22nd in St. Petersburg, when an unarmed crowd, led by Father Gapon, allowed itself to be shot down without a cry of hatred or a gesture of self-defence.
For a long time the Old Believers, known in Russia as the Sectators, had been obstinately practising, in spite of persecution, non-obedience to the State, and had refused to recognise the legitimacy of its power.[3] The absurdity of the Russo-Japanese
- ↑ In a letter written in 1900 to a friend (Further Letters) Tolstoy complains of the false interpretation given to his doctrine of non-resistance. People, he says, confound Do not oppose evil by evil with Do not oppose evil: that is to say, Be indifferent to evil…” “Whereas the conflict with evil is the sole object of Christianity, and the commandment of non-resistance to evil is given as the most effectual means of conflict.”
- ↑ The End of a World.
- ↑ Tolstoy has drawn two types of these “Sectators,” one in Resurrection (towards the end) and one in Three More Dead.
