It is a truth universally accepted that ideas are more powerful than armies. When Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy published his works on non-violence in 1896, he could not have known that fifty years later Mahatma Gandhi would use those same ideas to tear down British colonial rule in India. Neither could he have known his non-violent ideas would be used to oppose a brutal governor in the Kamansky region of central Russia in 1910. I am Alex Tolstoy, the grandson of Leo Tolstoy. In 1910, when I was a young man at the University, I was swept up into this adventure. We formed the Kamansky Company, and we opposed the governor by attempting to engineer the escape of hundreds of political prisoners - and do it without violence.