Tolstoy and The Kingdom of God is Within You? I've never read it.
There is however an interesting history of anti-state religiosity among peasants, who for a long time had been involved in various rebellious
raskolniki Old Believer sects (The Wanderers etc), practising their faith in resistance to the Russian state, who they saw as the rule of the Anti-Christ.
Serfs tied as chattels to noble estates escaped to join them, and richer and educated non-peasant Old Believers helped to hide them from the authorities, while also helping to teach a fair few how to read and write, including women. They were also a way for serfs without necessarily having the freedom to choose who they wanted to marry, to elope. They could acquire for themselves a different, independent identity and also a cultural authority, previously denied them.
This sectarianism is something which nineteenth century radicals had tried to tap into as a source of revolutionary potential, believing it be a popular manifestation of resistance to social oppression. As well as romanticising them as something exotic, they condescendingly viewed the sects as proof of a desire for social liberation among who they viewed as simple illiterate people, but without scientific knowledge expressed it in the form of religious dissent. There was the aim of transferring it into their own movement, but the attempt to link the dissent of 'common folk' with their own failed.
The professors knew where to find them and record their contact, but their students, who later faked it in the countryside during the Lavrov-inspired and very naive 'going to the people,' usually ended up getting arrested by the Tsarist police, at times with the help of suspicious peasants. A good person to read up on this is kind of stuff among the intelligentsia, is a historian of the time called
Afanasy Shchapov.
