Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is best known as the writer of the War and Peace (Война и мир) novel, but in the last 30 years of his life preached an anarcho-pacifist Christian ideal of loving one's brother and turning the other cheek. As a Count, he was born into the Russian aristocracy, but came to believe that his class was a burden on the backs of the poor. He greatly influenced Mohandas K. Gandhi with his ideas of non-violent resistance, and it is these ideas rather than his anarchist ideas which have survived as a force in the modern world.