Sushkova Yu.N. State and Legal Views and Human Rights Protection Activities of Leo Tolstoy

Abstract: Leo Tolstoy is famous not only as a writer, but also as a public figure who has made a significant contribution to the development of original political and legal ideas about the law, the system of public administration, international relations, education and other important spheres of life. The subject of the study includes the analysis of the main state-legal ideas of Tolstoy, as well as his life path associated with direct participation in the political and legal processes. In the context of the protection of human rights, Tolstoy actively represented the interests of Russian Doukhobors who were forced to emigrate in the late XIX and early XX centuries from Russia to Canada. Many of the episodes in Tolstoy's literary works written according to the materials of the real judicial cases, which demonstrated the shortcomings of the justice system and the state legal system as a whole. The most important ideological concept of Tolstoy is pacifism, the rejection of military action in favor of diplomatic and peaceful conflict resolution. Tolstoy paid great attention to the analysis of social structure of the Russian village, customary law of the peasants and their relationship with the public authorities. Political and legal views of Tolstoy have become a unique source of knowledge and approaches to improve the modern model of the Russian legal system, to overcome such issues as the legal nihilism, corruption, and bureaucracy. His literary legacy contains profound philosophical, methodological, and fundamental ideas about the nature of life, purpose of man, the role of religion, civil and state institutions, which could be regarded as “eternal themes”, constantly attracting the interest of many generations in search of true values and constants of life. Analysis of the most important aspects of the topic were based on historical, formal-legal, comparative legal methods of scientific research.

Keywords: