section_path: Legacy
section_name: Legacy
paragraph_text: Legacy
  
  Although Leo Tolstoy was regarded as a Christian anarchist and not a socialist, his ideas and works still influenced socialist thinkers throughout history. He held an unromantic view of governments as being essentially violent forces held together by intimidation from state authority, corruption on behalf of officials, and the indoctrination of people from a young age. In regard to his view of economics, he advocated for a return to subsistence agriculture. In his view, a simplified economy would afford a lesser need for the exchange of goods, and as such, factories and cities – the centers of industry – would become obsolete.
  
  In 1944, literary historian and Soviet medievalist Nikolai Gudzii wrote a biography of Tolstoy that spanned 80 pages. It was designed to show readers that Tolstoy would have revised his pacifistic and anti-patriotic sentiments if he were alive amid World War II. At around the same time, literary scholar and historian Boris Eikhenbaum – in a stark contrast from his earlier works on Tolstoy – portrayed the Russian novelist as someone whose ideas aligned with those of early utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Henri Saint-Simon. Eikenbaum suggested that these influences can be seen in Tolstoy's emphases on individual happiness and peasant welfare. The discrepancies in Eikenbaum's portrayals of Tolstoy can be attributed to the political pressure in Soviet Russia at the time: public officials pressured literary scholars to conform with party doctrine.