Doukhobour women, 1887. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Quakers and the Doukhobors: Graham Waterhouse is intrigued
‘I was intrigued to learn of his reason for writing it.’
A few years ago I read Leo Tolstoy’s last great novel, Resurrection, and was intrigued to learn of his reason for writing it, more than twenty years after he wrote Anna Karenina. The translator of my Penguin edition, Rosemary Edmonds, relates in her introduction how Tolstoy had been shocked by the persecution of the Doukhobors, a Russian Christian peasant sect which preached chastity, teetotalism, vegetarianism, sharing of all possessions, and above all, resistance to the use of force against evil. Their name, originally given them by the Orthodox Church, which intended it to be derogatory, has the meaning of ‘spirit-fighters’, but the Doukhobors embraced the name as meaning fighters for the spirit of God, not against it. The parallels with Quaker history were not lost on me.
The Doukhobors’ refusal of military service led to their persecution in the 1890s. Hundreds died, and several thousand were dispersed to remote mountain villages where they barely survived. Tolstoy was sympathetic to their beliefs, and wrote of their plight in an article to The Times. This brought the Doukhobors to the attention of the Society of Friends, which took up their cause by petitioning Nicholas II for the sect members to be resettled in a British territory. A Friends Doukhobor Fund was set up, and Tolstoy wrote Resurrection to raise money for it. There was great interest around the world on its publication, and it was translated into many languages. The proceeds became controversial for Friends in 1901, due to the prominence in the plot of a prostitute. The clerk of the Friends Doukhobor Committee declared the book to be smutty, and that Friends should not have received its proceeds. Apparently he felt obliged to refund the money from his own pocket.
‘The parallels with Quaker history were not lost on me.’
By 1898, the Russian government had consented to the migration of the Doukhobors, and a first group sailed to Cyprus. As more money was raised, a further group went to Canada, where they were welcomed and granted asylum. Their fellows from Cyprus later joined them there.
But the story does not end there. In February this year, journalist Leyland Cecco reported in The Guardian that nearly 8,000 of the sect had been moved to Canada, most of them settling in British Columbia, and that over time their separate lifestyle caused concern, as it had in Russia decades earlier. In the 1950s around 200 children suffered a similar fate to first-nations children, and were removed from their families to a school in a former hospital, in an attempt to strip away their Doukhobor identity. Survivors have told of mental, physical and sexual abuse, but it took until early this year for the province to make the first public apology in the presence of survivors of the abuse.
I wonder how many more human rights abuses in the time of recent generations have yet to be exposed?
Comments
How very interesting! Thanks for this.
By ljkerrsheff@gmail.com on 8th August 2024 - 15:00
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