Migration as Protest and Nostalgia: The Doukhobors’ Attempted Return to Soviet ​Union in the 1920s

Victoria Peretitskaya

As religious dissenters, the Doukhobors, a pacifist Christian sect dating back to the eighteenth century, endured multiple resettlements within the borders of the Russian Empire. First scattered across the territories of Sloboda-Ukraine, Ekaterinoslav, the Don River area, Tambov, and Voronezh regions, they were relocated in the early 1800s to a compact settlement in the Taurida Governorate (now southern Ukraine), and later, in the 1840s, to the southern periphery of the Empire – Transcaucasia (now Georgia). There, in 1895, they staged their first mass pacifist protest—the Burning of Arms—refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the tsar and expressing solidarity with Doukhobor conscientious objectors. The resulting state persecution led around 8000 Doukhobors to immigrate to Canada in 1899, with the help of Leo Tolstoy, the British Tolstoy disciples, the English Quakers, and other sympathizers.

Photograph of Doukhobor Community in British Columbia, Canada, 1922. Courtesy of the Doukhobor Collection of Simon Fraser University.

At the time of the Russian Revolution, Canadian Doukhobors, were mostly preoccupied with the rhythms of their own life. The first decades of their Canadian chapter were marked by uncertainty and disunity: homesteading on new land, internal disputes and the subsequent fragmentation of the community, conflicts with authorities over land ownership, taxation, and education. Still, they maintained contact with those Doukhobors who remained in Russia — family members and friends. The news of the fall of the Tsarist regime, which harshly persecuted them, and the Doukhobor’ vague understanding of communist ideals of the new authorities, sparked hope for a brighter future in some Doukhobors. In this blogpost, I will discuss a few families, who were moved by the idea of reuniting with all the Doukhobors on a single territory. Encouraged by the new Soviet government’s overtures to sectarians, they remigrated to Soviet Russia in the 1920s. However, their dreams and hopes were soon dashed by the tough reality they encountered.

In 1919, the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars) adopted a decree on exemption from military service, granting the right to perform alternative service on religious grounds. Although the decree was not effectively enforced and was even ignored at the local level, it still provided a legal opportunity for pacifist sects to avoid military service. In 1921, this was followed by an Appeal to sectarians and Staroobryadtsy (Old Ritualists, also known as Old Believers) living in Russia and abroad, who had suffered particularly under the Tsarist regime, to build a new communist world on the land confiscated after the Revolution. It equated the ideals of Soviet communism with the communal traditions of the Russian sectarians[1] which is why their example was important for developing the Soviet agrarian politics.

Notably, the figures behind both the decree and the broader efforts to establish relations between the authorities and sectarians were Doukhobors’ old advocates who played a crucial role in the Doukhobor emigration campaign at the turn of the century: Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich (1873-1955) and Vladimir Chertkov (1954-1936).[2] Both remained deeply interested in how the Doukhobors were maintaining their communal living in Canada. In 1922, according to personal correspondence from one of the Doukhobors, a Bolshevik visited their community and agitated them to relocate back to Russia. However, they were still hesitant.[3] Soon after the decrees were issued, some of the Doukhobors from Transcaucasia migrated to central Russia. Some returned to the southern part of Ukraine, while others, around four thousand, settled in the Don oblast, where they established twenty villages based on communist principles. By the mid-1920s these were transformed into individual farms. Despite their resistance to collectivization, the Doukhobors were ultimately forced to join the Soviet kolkhoz system in the 1930s.[4]

Photograph of nine standing women and eight seated men in traditional dress, n.d. Courtesy of the Doukhobor Collection of Simon Fraser University.

In February 1922, the Canadian Doukhobors sent a response to the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. The letter was signed by two Doukhobors, members of the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood (CCUB),[5] Danilo Cherviakov and Gavriil Zlatoustov. They indicated their willingness to return to Russia at their own expense, but requested land suitable for grain cultivation, as their intention was to be involved exclusively in agriculture. Additionally, their conditions included a twenty-year exemption from taxes, exclusion from official registration, exemption from military service and from compulsory schooling for their children.[6] These requirements mirrored the Doukhobors’ requests to the Canadian authorities at the time: while the Doukhobors sought to minimise the government’s interference in their affairs, the authorities sought to enforce Canadian laws upon their communities and encouraged them to accept citizenship, individual land ownership, and state schooling. Besides, Cherviakov and Zlatoustov stated that there were about 1000 individuals who supported them and they did not wish to be associated with other community members they referred to as “Communists”,[7] criticising them for not adhering to the community’s rules. Although they did not specify their critics, they mentioned other “Doukhobors-obschinniki”[8] not registered with the CCUB, suggesting it was likely aimed at Independent Doukhobors[9] who chose individual land ownership over communal living.

This letter indicates internal disputes within the CCUB Doukhobor community. It also might be considered an example of a strategy for resolving their conflict with the Canadian authorities—a new migration. The Doukhobors followed the same strategy in leaving Tsarist Russia over twenty years earlier. While this more personal statement expressed a willingness to return to Russia under strict and radical terms, the majority of CCUB Doukhobors adopted a more cautious stance, suggesting that representatives of the sect should first travel to Russia to examine the situation before deciding on their return. This viewpoint is expressed in the correspondence of Ivan Konkin, trusted assistant of Peter Verigin (1895-1924), the Doukhobors’ leader. In letters addressed to a Doukhobor friend in Russia, Timophei Smorodin, he stressed the Doukhobors’ numerous discussions in the early 1920s about their return to Russia—an idea that haunted them and was called into question due to the Russian Civil War and famine.[10] Even though they shared certain principles with the Bolshevik authorities, he emphasised that the Soviet government would never accept the Doukhobors’ terms, specifically “freedom of religion, freedom from registries, freedom from military service, and freedom from compulsory schooling”.[11]

Photograph of the family and guests of Peter Petrovich Verigin, in front of their home in Doukhobor village near Rostov, U.S.S.R., 1925 July ?  Courtesy of the Doukhobor Collection of Simon Fraser University.

Despite the hesitation of the majority of the Doukhobors, some of the Independent Doukhobors remigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Though their hopes of finding religious acceptance and contributing to the building of the new Soviet state were ultimately dashed, this episode was a part of a broader movement of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants. In 1919, in New York, immigrants of Russian origin organised the Society of Technical Aid to Soviet Russia. It was the first organisation dedicated to facilitating the remigration of East European workers from North America to the Soviet Union, which soon established branches in both the United States and Canada. Although it was an independent organisation, it was believed to have close links to American communists, Canadian socialists as well as representatives of Ukrainian Labour associations and Canadian pro-Soviet networks.[12] Besides organising remigration of skilled workers and agricultural communes, they also collected contributions to purchase farming equipment and other agricultural supplies.

The Independent Doukhobors, under the title the Society of Independent Doukhobors of Agricultural Support to Soviet Russia, joined this endeavour in 1923, with the first group, comprising twenty-two members, leaving Canada that year. It is known that two additional groups, presumably smaller than the first[13], left Canada in 1924 and 1926 and settled in Melitopol’ District in Ukraine, where they received homesteads, close to the Russian Doukhobors in the Don oblast. Philipp Makaseeff, one of the resettlers and leaders of this remigration, described his reasons as “…to receive from the Soviet government a better land with (better) climate and to live peacefully for the benefit of our homeland…”.[14] However, eight months later, his enthusiasm turned to disillusionment. He reported to his brother in Canada that a few families had already returned to Canada and others, particularly the younger ones, were planning their return, as having been born in Canada they did not consider Soviet Union to be their homeland.[15] 

Header of a document in Russian: Society of Independent Doukhobors for Agricultural Aid to Soviet Russia. Courtesy of the Doukhobor Collection of Simon Fraser University.

Originally inspired by a nostalgic desire to reunite with the Russian Doukhobors in their historic territories—the former Ekaterinoslav and Taurida Governorates—and motivated by a shared vision of a communist society with the Soviet authorities, the Canadian Doukhobors lost idealism about the Soviet Union in the face of escalating state-led anti-religious propaganda. Their utopian ideas were shattered irreversibly in 1928 when the Soviet government rejected the Doukhobors’ right for exemption from military service. By the end of 1920s, most of the Canadian Doukhobors had safely returned to Canada. Those who remained fell victim to Soviet repressions in the 1930s.[16] Moreover, the Doukhobors living in the Don oblast, following the disenchantment of the collectivisation, expressed desire to join their Canadian peers. They requested permission to leave in 1929 and, after receiving no reply, submitted another request in 1930, which was denied by the officials. Their continued communication with the Soviet officials ultimately led to arrests on charges of counter-revolutionary activity.[17]

The abovementioned examples differ in nature. While the first response to the Appeal is pragmatic in tone and firm in its demands to the Soviet government, the second example of remigration to Soviet Union was driven by the idealisation of communal lifestyle and nostalgic longing for the homeland, which Philipp Makaseeff interpreted as a specific territory where the sect had first lived in the compact settlement in the Taurida Governorate, rather than the Soviet Union more broadly. Such longing may be described as restorative nostalgia which “proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps”.[18] Indeed, this period — when they lived in the Taurida governorate from the early 1800s until the 1840s — is regarded by the Doukhobors themselves as one of the most harmonious, in part due to the relatively tolerant policies of Alexander I. In contrast, under his successor Nicholas I, state pressure on religious minorities increased— an 1826 edict required all Doukhobors to perform military service, and the 1830 edict ordered relocation of sectarians to Transcaucasia--and the Doukhobors were eventually evicted to the eastern periphery of the Russian Empire. As for their sense of belonging to the state, typically they did not associate ethnic identity with state affiliation, rather, they identified themselves primarily through their religion.[19] The differences in these examples emphasize not only the  controversies within the Doukhobor community, but also their common view of migration as a way to secure their mode of living. This idea continued to resonate with the Doukhobors throughout the twentieth century and extended beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Migration rhetoric for the Doukhobors as a passive method of social resistance frequently emerged as a proposed solution to conflicts with Canadian authorities or as a result of rapprochement with the Soviet regime among others.

While for the Doukhobor community these stories highlight the tension between utopian aspirations of a religious minority group that sought to escape the invasion of state assimilation policies, they also contribute to the broader mosaic of post-revolutionary migration movements of the 1920s [20], which were inspired by the idea of building a utopian communal life in the new Soviet Union.

Victoria Peretitskaya is a PhD candidate in History at Northumbria University, where she is currently working on a thesis about Doukhobors in Canada throughout the twentieth century, exploring their pacifism, religious anarchism, and migration rhetoric. She has an academic and practical background in public history and publishing, and her interests include the history of pacifism, transnational and radical movements.

[1] Alexander Etkind, Khlyst. Sekty. Literatura i revolutsiia (Moskva: NLO, 2019), p. 503.

[2] Bonch-Bruevich, known for his deep interest in sectarians, was the head of the Administration for the Council of People’s Commissars and one of the key figures behind the Appeal, contributed to the idea of mobilising religious sectarians for the ideals of Soviet Union. Chertkov, a Tosltoyan, headed the United Council, an organisation that worked to help implement the decree on exemption of military service.

[3] Ivan Konkin, 3 aprelia, 1922. Doukhobor Collection MsC 121. Series 1 – CCUB, Subseries 1-3, MsC-121-0-1-2-0-4. Simon Fraser University Special Collections and Rare Books.

[4] Svetlana Inikova, ‘Arkhivno-sledstvennie dela o konflikte sal’skikh doukhobortsev s Sovetskim gosudarstvom v kontse 1920-kh – 1930-e gg’, Otechestvennye arkhivy (Moskva, 2024), 6, pp. 72-74.

[5] By the 1920s, Canadian Doukhobors had split into three factions. Each faction maintained its own ideas about property, spiritual leadership, and integration into Canadian society. The largest—and most orthodox—faction was the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood. The members of this community tried to lead a communal lifestyle and supported absolute pacifism.

[6] Danilo Cherviakov, Gavriil Zlatoustov, Appeal to Moscow, People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, 14 Phevralia, 1922. Doukhobor Collection MsC 121. Series 1 – CCUB, Subseries 1-3, MsC-121-0-1-2-0-4. Simon Fraser University Special Collections and Rare Books.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Obschinniki — in some of their open letters and correspondence from the early twentieth century, the Doukhobors used this word to describe those who supported the idea of communal living.

[9] Independent Doukhobors is the second faction of the Doukhobors. Their main difference with the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood was their rejection of communal property and hereditary principles.

[10] Ivan Konkin, 30 maya, 1922. Doukhobor Collection MsC 121. Series 1 – CCUB, Subseries 1-3, MsC-121-0-1-2-0-4. Simon Fraser University Special Collections and Rare Books.

[11] Ivan Konkin, 7 iulia, 1921. Doukhobor Collection MsC 121. Series 1 – CCUB, Subseries 1-3, MsC-121-0-1-2-0-4. Simon Fraser University Special Collections and Rare Books.

[12] Vadim Kukushkin, Back in the USSR. Beaver. Aug/Sep2006, Vol. 86 Issue 4, available at https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=cookie,ip,shib,uid&db=31h&AN=23028752&site=ehost-live&scope=site, accessed 20 December 2024.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Philipp Makaseeff, 13 dekabria 1926. Doukhobor Collection MsC 121. Series 1 – CCUB, MsC-121-0-1-2-0-21. Simon Fraser University Special Collections and Rare Books.

[15] Philipp Makaseeff, 5 avgusta 1927. Doukhobor Collection MsC 121. Series 1 – CCUB, MsC-121-0-1-2-0-21. Simon Fraser University Special Collections and Rare Books.

[16] Vadim Kukushkin, Back in the USSR. Beaver. Aug/Sep2006, Vol. 86 Issue 4, available at https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=cookie,ip,shib,uid&db=31h&AN=23028752&site=ehost-live&scope=site, accessed 20 December 2024.

[17] Joshua A. Sanborn, Non-violent protest and the Russian state: the Doukhobors in 1895 and 1937, in A. Donskov et al. (eds.), The Doukhobor Centenary in Canada, a Multi-disciplinary Perspective on Their Unity and Diversity (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 2000), pp. 93-95.

[18] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 41.

[19] The use of the word “homeland” (or «родина» in Russian) was uncommon—at least in the sources I have been able to consult so far. Svetlana Inikova claims that in the Russian Empire, the Doukhobors understood their homeland to be the Kingdom of Heaven, while to the state they merely paid taxes in order to live according to their principles. See: Svetlana A. Inikova, ‘Istoriiaa patsifistskogo dvizheniia v sekte doukhoborov’, in T. Pavlova et al. (eds.), Dolgii put Rossiiskogo patsifisma (Moskva: Institut Vseobshchei Istorii RAN, 1997), p. 123

[20] See, for instance: Vadim Kukushkin, From Peasants to Labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan Immigration from the Russian Empire to Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants against the state: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (University of Illinois Press, 2015); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford University Press, 1996).