Alexander Suslin

Author of the book You Shall Not Kill and editor at the Tolstoy Center

1982. Childhood in Sokolniki, Moscow. School years in the Preobrazhenskaya Square area.

2005. Graduated from Bauman Technical University and completed an internship at an aerospace manufacturing facility.

2009. As an aerospace engineer, I was involved in the design and production of components for crewed aircraft. At a certain point, a series of dual-use products appeared, forcing me to take a closer look at what I was actually doing.

2010. I began searching for people who sought to renounce bloody means and methods of protection: armies, police, security services, the justice system… Soon I discovered that no one seemed to object to maintaining “peaceful” life at the expense of threats, maiming, and killing of others.

2010-2013. Leo Tolstoy became my first guide, helping me to rediscover the New Testament and the nonviolence of Jesus Christ. Later I found contemporaries as well, the most outstanding of whom was Vitaly Adamenko – the compiler of the unique Beyond Violence library, which reveals all aspects of nonviolence from a historical perspective.

2014-2020. I collected available testimonies of the power of nonviolence, including people, events, phenomena, methods, and approaches — first in a personal blog, then on a public platform called The First Magazine on Nonviolence. My interlocutors included V. Adamenko, A. Guseynov, G. Gololob, A. Dudarev, V. Ivleva, and others.

2018-2020. A dialogue on the idea of an alternative peace tax was initiated with the Ministry of Finance, the State Duma, the Government, and the Federation Council. I also became a member of the international movement for a peace tax, CPTI – Conscience and Peace Tax International.

2021-2024. Based on the materials I had gathered, I launched a nonviolence knowledge base called Tolstoy Center. I work with like-minded translators from the USA and Canada, France, Italy, Estonia, Lithuania, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.

2025. The book You Shall Not Kill: How to stop needing and participating in killing and maiming people was published.