section_path: Legacy/Influence
section_name: Influence
paragraph_text: Influence
  
  Vladimir Lenin wrote several essays about Tolstoy, suggesting that a contradiction exists within his critique of Russian society. According to Lenin, Tolstoy – who adored the peasantry and voiced their discontent with imperial Russian society – may have been revolutionary in his critiques, but his political consciousness was not fully developed for a revolution. Lenin uses this line of thinking to suggest that the 1905 Russian Revolution, which he called a "peasant bourgeois revolution," failed because of its backwardness: the revolutionaries wanted to dismantle the existing medieval forms of oppression and replace them with an old and patriarchal village-commune. Tolstoy's concept of non-resistance to evil additionally hindered the 1905 revolution's success, Lenin thought, because the movement was not militant and had thus allowed the autocracy to crush them. Nevertheless, Lenin concludes in his writings that despite the many contradictions in Tolstoy's critiques, his hatred for feudalism and capitalism mark the prelude to proletarian socialism.
  
  Additionally, Tolstoy's philosophy of non-resistance to evil made an impact on Mahatma Gandhi's political thinking. Gandhi was deeply moved by Tolstoy's concept of truth, which, in his view, constitutes any doctrine that reduces suffering. For both Gandhi and Tolstoy, truth is God, and since God is universal love, truth must therefore also be universal love. The Gujarati word for Gandhi's non-violent movement is "satyagraha", derived from the word "sadagraha" – the "sat" portion translating to "truth", and the "agraha" translating to "firmness". Gandhi's conception of satyagraha was birthed from Tolstoy's understanding of Christianity, rather than from Hindu tradition.