Dukhobors
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a religious communistic sect of western Manitoba. They are immigrants from Russia, where they broke away from the Orthodox Church. They accept the Ten Commandments and the "useful parts" of the gospels. They reject the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and the divinity of Christ. The only rule is right living. They submit with reluctance to any form of government, and were induced with difficulty to go through the necessary form of securing title to the lands they occupy. In Russia they were persecuted, killed, imprisoned, banished, flogged, and fined. Leo Tolstoi and others interfered, and they were permitted to emigrate. By 1900, 7,000 of the sect had settled in Manitoba. In 1902 a fanatical procession set out barefooted in winter seeking "the Christ." They declared they could not make private property of "God's cattle," or use animals as beasts of burden. The Canadian authorities had difficulty in returning the pilgrims to their homes, since which they have settled down quietly. They are industrious, hospitable but exclusive, kindly to each other, skilled in agriculture and in road making. They hold property in common. Men and women work in shifts from 5 A. M. to 8 P. M. It would be hard to find a community consisting of an equal number of men among whom there is less crime, and more industry, honesty, and hospitality, or more personal attention by the hale adults to the needs of the old people and the children. They are sober, temperate, healthy; they are a worthy and estimable folk in spite of their obstinacy, sectarian exclusiveness, and their too great dependence on a very fallible authority--Aylmer Maude.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910 the Doukhobors were newly arrived farmers holding land in common on the prairies (mostly in what had just become Saskatchewan rather than Manitoba). Under Peter Verigin they lost most of those homesteads after 1907 for refusing the oath of allegiance and moved to the Kootenay valleys of British Columbia; Verigin was killed by a bomb on a train in 1924, and the communal Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood went bankrupt and was broken up in the late 1930s, ending the shared property the article admired. The "fanatical processions" had a far harsher sequel in the radical Sons of Freedom, whose nude protests and arson ran into the 1960s and whose children were seized and held in a dormitory school at New Denver from 1953 to 1959, an episode a British Columbia Ombudsman report condemned in 1999. Tens of thousands of Canadians still claim Doukhobor descent, and heritage sites at Castlegar and Veregin preserve the story, but the working communes the account describes are gone.
Written for this edition, 2026.