A bright, polemical, harsh work by Ilyin, first published in Berlin in 1925, when the impressions of the Civil War and memories of the horrors of the “Red Terror” were still painfully fresh for Russian émigrés. In this treatise dedicated to “the Whites—bearers of the Orthodox sword,” the ideologue of the right-conservative wing of Russian abroad decisively condemns Leo Tolstoy’s “nonresistance” theory with its “sentimental moralism.” It draws a line between violence itself as meaningless and brutal oppression and “coercion”—that is, conscious and morally justified suppression of some harmful and dangerous activity. The first is condemned; the second is seen as a simple necessity for the continued existence of human society.