Well, smell that Union Jack!
That’s it.
BURN YOUR RIFLES AND RETURN TO WORK
XXXVI. DUKHOBORS
We had not anticipated coming into the neighbourhood of the Dukhobors. It was an interesting surprise. I had promised myself I would make a special pilgrimage some day to Western Canada just to find out what the Dukhobors thought about life, and how they were getting on now. And then to come on them accidentally.
The Dukhobors, or “Spirit wrestlers,” are a Russian religious community brought to Canada in 1898. They claim to have been in existence in Russia for over three hundred years. They are primitive Christians akin to Quakers, but more uncompromising. They are Communists, pacifists, anti-state, anti-church, anti-law. Theologically they consider Christ as a good man and teacher, but not divine. Tolstoy’s teachings show him very close to the Dukhobors in theory. He greatly sympathised with them in the persecution which they suffered at the hands of the Russian Government, and it was in part due to him, and more largely to the Society of Friends in England, that the expatriation of the Dukhobors was accomplished. Tolstoy is said to have put aside the profits of his novel Resurrection to defray in part the expenses of transporting the Russians. There are several thousand of them, and first they were taken to Cyprus where at least the British Navy got acquainted with them, as they were naturally a curiosity. Cyprus was not suitable, and so Canada was chosen for a habitat. The community was taken to Saskatchewan, and later migrated in large part to British Columbia. They did not find their path strewn with roses in Canada, and have had a hard time. But despite persecution they have prospered. They are notorious for a naked procession they once made “in quest of the Messiah” some forty miles in bitter winter weather, displaying “the naked truth” to the Canadians—the pilgrimage to Yorktown which has been described with much gusto in the American and Canadian Press. They have refused to take steps to relinquish their Russian nationality, refused to fight, refused to pay taxes. So naturally they have been a thorn in the side of the Canadian.
The Rocky Mountains stretching away in their majesty must remind some Russians of the grand array of the Caucasus as seen from the north—and the prairie is the steppe. Far away you discern the white and brown buildings of a settlement, and then, ten times as large as anything else, pale-blue grain-elevators. The circumambient moor is many coloured, and a dove-coloured sky is flecked with softest cloud. There are snow fences at many points of the road to protect from drifts in winter. A neverceasing wind which brings no rain is driving over the corn-fields. As you approach the village you begin to see Russian peasant men and women working on the fields hoisting the wheat-sheaves to the harvesting carts, hoisting the sheaves to the top of the stacks. A stalwart peasant-wife in cottons stands on top of the stack, pitchfork in her hand, and she catches the sheaves as they come up to her. The grain-elevators rise mightily into vision, and then the words printed on them in large black letters—THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY OF UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD.
I soon met Pavel Potapof, the local headman, and I talked in Russian with a number of men and women who spoke no other language. They were raising wheat for themselves and for their wheatless brethren who live in the lumbering camps and villages of British Columbia, but represent a sort of a half-way colony between the original Verigin, Saskatchewan, and the main settlement of Brilliant, British Columbia.
Potapof was a boy at Cyprus, where his father enjoyed some authority. He is now a man in his thirties with brown moustache and close-clipped chin. If you are a Dukhobor you may not shave but you may clip with the shears. He remembered touching a Mr. St. John at Cyprus, who used to call him Pavlushka.