Memories of the Holoboff Family

by Russell A. Holoboff

Russell A. Holoboff (1918-1991) was born in Veregin, Saskatchewan to Independent Doukhobor parents.  In 1922, at the age of four, he accompanied his family to Los Angeles, California seeking a better life and warmer climate.  Life stateside, however, proved to be disappointing, and in 1929, at the age of eleven, he returned with his family to the Veregin district where they resumed farming.  Russell’s boyhood during the Depression was filled with hard work and responsibilities beyond his years, but there was also laughter, adventure, and the love of family and friends.  Russell would later write that, “there was no money for anything…one just did the best with what he had…but in spite of all this, there was still joy and laughter.”  His memoirs of his boyhood, reproduced here by permission, are an evocative picture of a way of life that will bring back memories of anyone who grew up there, and make the Prairies come alive for those who didn’t.   

Foreward

Russell Holoboff, my uncle, was the fourth son of my grandfather, Alexei A. and Mary J. Holoboff, a pair I have always known as simply “Baba and Dyeda”. Ever since finding a copy of my uncle’s memoir among my late mother’s things, it has been a lamp that has helped to illuminate the darkness of my knowledge about my Russian background. I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Jonathan Kalmakoff for allowing me to contribute my Uncle Russell’s memoir to the Doukhobor Genealogy Website which he so generously shares with us all. His research has been profoundly helpful in my understanding of my Russian Doukhobor ancestors, a lineage of which I am very proud. I would also like to thank my cousin Laurie Holoboff Verstegen, Russell’s daughter, for her kind permission to publish her father’s invaluable memoir. To my dear departed Uncle Russ: “Я люблю вас.”

Lisa Holoboff, Los Angeles, California, 2006

As I sit back in my easy chair, my mind drifts back to where I first experienced life in a very small village in the northern part of Canada, the province of Saskatchewan…

It was late at night when the Holoboff family disembarked from a train on the C.N.R. rail line. The train is one of those old locomotives, with live steam and a long, mournful whistle only the old people can remember.

We are arriving from California (circa 1929). We are met by my brother Alex, his wife Polly, and their daughter, Nora. Nora is only a couple of years younger than me. I knew her when they lived in Los Angeles, and since she was born, of course. This little village that we have come to is my birthplace. It is called Veregin. It is also the birthplace of all the Holoboff children except one – my brother, Fred, who is now long deceased.

The season is early fall and the night is dark. There are no electric lights, only the flickering of a few gas lights. All this is so new to me. I am not aware of all that is taking place – that I am going to make a new life for myself here. I asked Nora what street she lived on, and she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Central.” Central was not a street at all, just a spot of recognition. Central was the building where the telephone operator worked. I thought every place was like Los Angeles – what a rude awakening I am about to receive. My cousin, John (Holoboff), had brainwashed me into believing that I would have a horse of my own and all the good things that go with it. I still believed in things like Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, and the like. Well, it didn’t take too long until I did get a horse: eight of them in harnesses all hitched to a bunch of harrows, and a hundred acres of land to work!

Alex and Mary Holoboff with children Mary, Frederick (front), and Russell (back), c.1935, Veregin, Saskatchewan.

I was enrolled in the school in the town. Sorry to say, but right off the bat, I didn’t fare too well. The Canadian standards of teaching were higher than the United States, so I was immediately set back a grade and was laughed at. This broke my desire to learn. If I had started at the beginning of the semester, I would have been more prepared. But here it was, almost at the end of the year, with everyone busy with harvesting, and no time to see how I was doing. Can I blame them? Not really. I don’t think any of them had any time for anything but work. The harvest was very important in this part of the country because of the weather – snow could fall at any time. The ground was frozen and the nights were very cold with heavy frost.

I enjoyed a couple of weekends at the threshing machine with its steam engine puffing away. The fun was to blow the whistle. Before I go too far into my story, I must try to clarify a few things that I have already left out. The reason we are in this part of the country is that it is the very first beginnings of the Holoboff family (after leaving Russia). Starting from the immigration of my father into Canada, his first ventures began in the rural parts of the village of Verigin. And at one time (circa 1922) he left it behind for the golden shores of California, which lasted only a couple of years. So now we’re back to where it all started. This village of Verigin is located in the middle of the province. The capital is Regina. It’s the home of the Mounties – yes, the real ones. On numerous occasions, I had the chance to be in the company of them.

The easiest way I can describe the climate is that it’s eleven months of winter and all the rest of the year it’s summer. Ruthless and mean winters. They made many a strong man drop to his knees and beg and caused many families desperation, despair and hunger.

We spent that first winter after returning from Los Angeles in town with my brother Alex and his family. Alex was a businessman, the owner of the Holoboff & Co. General Store. He sold everything from groceries to farm equipment. At the time, he was very successful. When I think of his store and supermarkets of today it makes my head swim. It’s a story in itself to describe that store. Everything was shelved behind the counter. Everything that you bought was clerked to you, weighed, packaged, and wrapped. If you bought coal oil and had no cork for the spout they would plug it with a big gumdrop. It never lasted very long because one of us kids would steal it and eat it. And you know what? We never tasted the coal oil.

Speaking of the store…one time in the spring when the snow had almost melted, the gophers were starting to come out of their winter sleep. The county was paying two cents for every gopher that was destroyed. To prove it, you had to strip him of his tail as proof. We would hang the carcasses on the barbed wire fence in hopes it would ward off more gophers. It didn’t. It just made the crows breed more. They were a deterrent for the farmer. The county also paid five cents for a pair of crow’s legs. So this is what my friend and I did: We caught a gunnysack full of gophers and took them to Alex’s store, stripped them of their tails, and collected the bounty. But we left the dead gophers tucked away in the back of the store. In a few days they started to smell something awful. It almost drove Alex insane until he found the source of the smell. Don’t you think we didn’t hear about it. Poor Alex. He was one hell of a nice fellow. We got along just swell throughout all the years of our relationship.

Everything was an adventure to me. There wasn’t very much I didn’t tackle, which included a few shiners that I wore for a few days. This one big kid would get me and another kid into the livery barn and make us fight for no reason at all. He would tell this one kid one thing and me another and then it wouldn’t take much for a fight to start. I was well known among the young and old, but I was liked by all and respected by many, including some of the young maidens. It was fun living in town. I had little supervision, but I knew better than to do something bad. What made me so popular was that I spoke good English compared to the rest of the kids. The reason for this is that they were taught to speak their native tongue, Russian, and their parents were illiterate in English. Like their parents, the other kids could only read and write in Russian.

Russell Holoboff, c.1935, Veregin, Saskatchewan.

I guess I was also different because I had known life in the big city of Los Angeles. But I sure wasn’t in any way smarter. I was just a city kid. Anyway, my town life near Verigin was coming to an end and I would be moving to my new home out in the country. The place is a farm that belonged to my mother (Mary nee Petroff). It was three miles from town and it was a very pretty farm. The reason it was my mother’s is that it was part of a legacy from her first husband (Nikolai Shcuratoff). Yes, both Mother and Dad were married before. I will explain all that later.

But mother’s inheriting the farm was the big inducement for Dad to give up Los Angeles and the job he had at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant. He had a pretty good job there, too. Our whole family was a part of the Goodyear plant – pioneers, so to speak. Dad opened the plant and I closed it years later. You see, this all came about because of a man named John Holoboff, my first cousin on Dad’s side. After Dad came to the United States and settled down, the correspondence started with the folks back in Saskatchewan, with Dad telling them how nice and warm it was in California. To hear this at a time when the temperatures in Saskatchewan were in the forties or less, California sounded like heaven. This news brought John Holoboff to California and Dad got him a job at Goodyear. It was hard and dirty work, but that’s where they started a new man there. John couldn’t take it and he started to miss the come-and-go, as-you-please lifestyle of the farm, with no lunch box to tote around. So he started to brainwash Dad, and he did a good job of it. Mother didn’t approve of this but lost the battle. Until her dying day she didn’t like John.

The move back to Saskatchewan broke up some of us kids in the family. Sam, Honey, and Mike stayed behind in Los Angeles. They wanted no part of Canada. They were old enough to know the difference. Afterward, Mother’s life was not at all that easy without the conveniences of a large family to help her. She worked during the walnut harvest. I think she liked living in California and having the family all together. She gave a lot and received little. She never once said these are my children and these are my husband’s children. We were all her children. Now I will name all of the family.

There was Grandfather (Joseph Petroff) on Mother’s side, a very adventurous man. There was (half-brother) Alex Holoboff who also moved to California but didn’t like city life and not being his own boss. With some persuasion from his wife, Polly, they returned to Canada before we did. Sam, Honey, Mike and Alice were Dad’s kids from his first marriage. Peggy and Molly (Shcuratoff) were from Mother’s first marriage. Me, Fred and Mary, were from Mother and Dad’s marriage. Fred was born in Los Angeles (1925) and Mary was born in Canada (1930) after we returned. So, that makes quite a table-full.

I don’t remember when we first moved to Los Angeles. I was very young, but I remember growing up there. I went to Miramonte School. It was right across the street from us. I remember two teachers: Mr. Henderson and Mrs. Holt. She used to snitch in the kids’ lunch bags. And who can forget Mr. Walker, our principal? No comment. I remember this one fellow who lived on our street who had an airplane. He crashed it on our street, showing off. Boy did Grandfather give him a tongue lashing – “sookin sin,” etc. – for trying to fly. But I wish Grandfather could see the progress that has been made in aviation since then. Lindbergh flew over Los Angeles after his world flight. That was a big day in Los Angeles. The Blimp was also something to see.

There was this family across the street named Lewis. They had a son my age and the sun set and rose on him. They liked me well enough that they took me every place they went. Especially to the beach for an overnight stay. Mrs. Lewis was very nice to me. After many long years I had the honor to be her pallbearer. What a coincidence. The son, Buckey, never respected his parents after all they had done for him.

I remember hiking to the Los Angeles River in the summer to swim in it and just bum around. Also the Christmas the Shriners held for us. The Red Car Line to Balboa; the fare was three cents to Los Angeles and parts unknown. The young kids dancing to the Charleston. Rudy Valentino, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, the Our Gang comedies, and ten cent movies. It was the beginning of a new era.

A pensive Alex Holoboff.

Driving to Long Beach by car was an all-day trip. It was sure to consist of a flat tire or two. If that happened, us kids would play in the orange groves. The people my parents associated with were friends of theirs from Canada, and all they had cars. At this time Dad didn’t have a car. One time he was talked into buying one but he didn’t keep it; he got tired of buying someone else’s gas, as he never drove the car. I remember it well. It was an Overland Touring. Sam sure looked good behind the wheel. The city limits of Los Angeles were small then. Huntington Park and Southgate were in the orange groves and there was hardly any streets in them. The Lyric Theatre in Huntington Park was the one of the last big movie houses to open and it was very popular. There was no public transportation to reach it, so we had to hoof it on Saturday matinees. Anyway, my life was very happy then, except that we weren’t a rich family and I always envied other kids. But as I see it know, they just lived a different life.

Before I go any further, I would like to tell you a little about Grandfather (Petroff). He was born somewhere in Russia and spent most of his life living among the Turks and Cossacks. He told us many a hair-lifting tale of true adventure. He was really not a bother to anyone, but few wanted to admit they were related to him. He spoke no English, but swore a blue streak at the kids who passed by our house on their way home. He had some small parts as an extra in movies during the early days of Hollywood. Had one studied him more sincerely they could have learned a lot about the ways of life. He was always very daring. Anyway, I had some good and bad times with him. He smoked pipes that were so strong the smoke would not disappear. When he passed away I became heir to them by knowing where they were hidden. One puff from one of them would make your head swim all day.

Yes, I had many good times in California. Maybe that’s why I came back to live here. Perhaps I lived in a boy’s dream. Eventually it was time to say goodbye to sunny California and 1418 70th Street. If one goes by there they will see the house still standing and not much changed since we left. At the time we lived there it was a very nice part of town – not rich or poor, but it was centrally located in Los Angeles and close to the car line and to Dad’s work. Now the area is nothing compared to the old days.

We boarded a steamer for Canada. A steamer was the most reasonable fare to Canada, but it only lasted until we reached Seattle because everyone got sea sick. From there, we took a train for the rest of the journey north to our destination. Or maybe I should “our destiny” because that’s what it really amounted to. Why Saskatchewan, Canada? It all stems back to Dad’s and Mother’s beginning their new lives in a new part of the world, away from the steppes of peasantry in old Russia. Saskatchewan is where the immigrants settled after they landed in Halifax, Canada.

I don’t know too much about Mother’s immigration to Canada; she was not on the same boat as Dad, and she came from another part of Russia. I do know that her first husband (Nikolai Shcuratoff), Peggy’s and Molly’s dad, was a Yakut (exiled Doukhobor) from northern Russia. He spent quite some time in Siberia in the salt mines.

Dad was from the southern part of Russia. And an orphan. He was taken under someone’s wing and landed with a sect of Russian people called Doukhobors, a very religious group. They later formed a community called the Christian Community of (Universal Brotherhood) Doukhobors. They worked and lived in a community and shared the results of their toil. Eventually they owned thousands of acres of land, had their own flour mill, and large brick buildings for homes. They had a leader named Peter Verigin, and so named the town after him. Their leader was well respected by all, even Queen Victoria. He was the forerunner that made all this possible for some of these people. There is more to this – community living and so on – but I can’t possibly tell it all. And it doesn’t really mean that much to the Holoboff family because Dad didn’t belong to the sect or live with them for long. He preferred to freelance and go it on his own (as an Independent Doukhobor). And that’s what he did but it was not as easy as you might think. I will tell of some of his hardships.

It was said that Dad was so young when he married (first wife Vasilisa Perepelkin) that he fell asleep in the bride’s arms on this wedding night. The young had very little to say as to who they were going to marry; it was all matched and planned by their elders. So his first wife was the mother of Alexei, Helen, Samuel, Mike and Alice Holoboff. While on the subject of names let me further enlighten you. Mother’s maiden name was Petroff and her first two daughters, Peggy and Molly, had the last name Shcuratoff. Peggy and Molly never used their real last name, but always went by the name Holoboff.

Dad had a brother named Vasya. He was older than Dad and he had three sons, Pete, John and Nick, and a daughter, Lesunia, of McCloud, Alberta. Pete died at an early age from cancer. I liked him the best of the brothers. Uncle Vasya’s life was short-lived. He was gored to death by a bull. Dad’s dad (Alexei Holubov) died after being chewed up by a badger. Gangrene set in and resulted in his death. I did not know him and neither did Dad.

I think this covers all the history that I know about the family. One other thing…the name “Doukhobor” means “spirit wrestler”. They did not believe in bearing arms and that was one of the reasons for their migration to Canada. Russia would not tolerate them. Their religion was very strong; that is why they had the name of Christian Community (of Universal Brotherhood) of Doukhobors. In Brilliant, British Columbia, they had a large cannery of great renown. They grew and made strawberry jam that was know the world over. It is no longer in existence.

Alex Holoboff with son Fred, feeding the chickens, c.1932, Veregin, Saskatchewan.

Okay, let’s get back to the farm, our destination. It was Fall 1929 when I got my first glimpse of the farm. I really don’t know how I felt at that time, it just seems hazy to me. I think there was nothing eventful about it, maybe because nothing there was like I expected. There was no livestock yet; Dad was out, busy buying livestock. Uncle Vasya gave us an old gray horse who was more than ready for the glue factory. But we used him to haul water for our use. Yep, you heard right: hauled water.

Farm or no farm, I still had to go to school. I was enrolled in a country school two and a half miles from home and the only way to get there was by Shank’s Pony (this is an old euphemism: “Shank’s Mare” – to travel upon one’s own “shanks” – to get there on foot). It was not the kind of school I expected: a lonely one room building on the corner of someone’s farm. Grades 1 through 8 were all together in the same room. Inside was a world globe suspended from the ceiling and a big pot-bellied stove for heat. It was the pits. Lunch was not much to be desired: homemade bread and honey packed in a honey can and a whiskey bottle full of cold tea. It was like something you see in an old movie and couldn’t believe it. Tobacco Road, I called it. Sometimes a kid had something better in his lunch that you envied. The fall of the year was nice, like Indian Summer, but then the snow fell and winter came.

I’m going to try and explain how things were, as I see it now. I was too young then to know what it was all about. Everything was new and strange and there was no one to explain anything to me. I had to find out for myself and I still don’t know why it was so. There are many spots in my young childhood that I can’t explain. But I will do my best.

Winter was in full force: freezing temperatures, cold blizzards, winds up to sixty miles per hour. Child’s play was limited mostly to the house or barn – snow balls and sledding was out of the question. The only thing in my favor was that school had its summer holiday break during the winter, to spare us kids from freezing to death. Somewhere close to Christmas, we had our school Christmas party. A homemade stage was set up for our plays; you had to be careful not to stand too far at the edge, as the other end would raise up. We used sheets for curtains and a borrowed gas lamp for light. We didn’t have a Christmas tree because in spite of the cold north country, fir trees didn’t grow there, as it was all bald prairie (and it would have been ridiculous to go further north for one). So we did without a tree. But we did have a Santa. Everyone for miles was invited to the party because there was always a big dance held after. That was really the big event. We kids exchanged gifts. The boys desperately tried to impress their best girl with a small bottle of Orange Blossom perfume, a shining brooch, or a box of chocolates costing a total sum of twenty-five cents. I wasn’t in that class, but I did impress in my own way.

After the kids did our bit we were taken home by our parents so that the grown-ups could have their party. Well, I got to stay because my parents weren’t there to take me home. I acted big for my age and I liked to dance. The older girls didn’t mind dancing with me. The older boys were too busy getting drunk on white lightning – and on many occasions I was encouraged. There was nothing backward about me and I caught on easy. Somehow I acted older than I was (and I was always full of the devil) and I fit in with the older crowd. Even Dad would comment to some of the older boys who insisted that I partake in their activities. Like going to Vecheruskie parties (evening parties for young Doukhobor men and women) with dancing, singing and parlor games like spin-the-bottle. Most of them were fun. Despite the cold we would hitch up a team of horses to a sleigh and go from one farmhouse to the other picking up friends until we reached the designated house for the party. Sometimes they would last into the wee hours of the morning.

Somehow winter passed quickly and I really didn’t know what to expect. I really didn’t know anything about seasons. Some things I had to learn for myself. My friend (horse) Levon, didn’t make it through the winter. I can still see his remains, which by spring was pretty much a skeleton.

As yet I have still not gotten the steed that I was so ready to have at my disposal. I will never forget the rotten joke that was played on me. Dad and I were going to Alex’s in-laws (the Kabatoffs). They lived about seven miles away from us. We spent the night there. Anyway, when they were putting me to bed they told me that there would be a big white stallion all saddled and ready for me in the morning. I was more than sure that this would be true. Even when I woke up in the early hours of the morning, they encouraged me to hurry and eat my breakfast as the steed was waiting for me at the door. Well, if you ever saw a broken hearted child, I was one. How could they have played such a bad trick on me and get some fun out of it? Even my own Dad! I have lived with this all my life, and will to my dying day. I had finished my breakfast, rushed to the door, and opened it to find no such promise there. I was stunned beyond belief. There were much more such surprises in store for me in the years to come.

Spring was a beautiful time of year. The fields were full of little lakes from the winter snow. The streams of running water and the budding out of the pussy willows…everything seemed to smell fresh and clean. The most memorable thing about this part of the world at this time of year was the full moon of springtime. Just to hear the babbling streams and the croaking of the frogs – our farm had all of this! Being a kid, I didn’t want to come inside. Also at this time of year was the dropping (birthing) of new animals. I especially liked the horses, but as yet we didn’t have any. At any rate, spring was a blessing as I didn’t have to plow through the snow going to school. I could take a shortcut through the farm to lessen the distance. I could enjoy the wild little creatures that came to life with the warm weather – especially the red-breasted robin. When you saw the robin you knew that winter was well past. I also remember the big slough that I had to pass on the way to school; it was full of blackbirds. But the birds that stood out the most were the red winged (blackbird) – truly beautiful. And the chatter they would make if you disturbed them! There were a lot of things to amuse a child and cause him to be late for school. And I was late many times. As I see it now, school was no big thing to me then and I fared well below average. I was by no means a bum, more like too smart for my britches. I need guidance then more than anything. I will try to explain this more in detail as I go on.

Now it is late spring or early summer. I am witnessing death in the family for the first time. Grandfather (Petroff) passed on and we are very sorry for the loss. He passed away in the night, and in the early morning, Dad and our handyman acted as morticians. They gave him a bath and a shave, and got him all dressed up for his last rites. The neighbors pitched in and made a casket, a pine box. It looked very professional. The funeral was held in Russian style – lots of prayer and singing and feeding to no end. There must have been a hundred people at the funeral. Even the big dignitary, Peter (Chistiakov) Verigin, was there as he and Grandfather had been buddies in Russia. This was a big hour for Grandfather and the community as Mr. Verigin was a big wheel. Everyone was amazed that Grandfather knew him as well as he did. Funerals and weddings were big things and they brought many people together for the occasion. Grandfather’s funeral was a big step in my life, as I was only a young boy. It was a strange feeling. But with loss we also have our gains – births.

Very much to my surprise I suddenly became a brother to a sister, Mary (1930). I was not the least bit aware of this and even to this day I don’t know how it happened. We were all happy with her arrival and she was a very pretty girl. When she was a little girl she had a very bad accident. Mother was washing clothes one day and while she was transferring some boiling water from one pot to another, Mary dashed underneath the pot causing Mother to stumble and spill the water on Mary’s back. It was more than a first degree burn as her clothes stuck to her skin. There was no doctor handy so the folks did the best with what they had. The doctor was of very little help; the medication he prescribed was of little help. The skin would not heal. As a last resort, Dad used some of his own medication and healed the wound. It consisted of charred bulrushes. So it wasn’t just the Indians that made their own medicine – the old Russians did, too.

It’s the first year that we planted a crop. It should have been the last. From there on it was nothing short of disaster farming. The crops consisted of wheat, oats and some barley. Year after year, the same routine with the crops. The farmer fallowed half the acreage and sowed the rest. There wasn’t any help from the agriculture department to advise the farmer whether his soil was suitable for this or that particular crop. In many cases it was not. After years of disaster farming, the government stepped in to help. Necessity and politics.

The crop that we first planted was doing fine. It was all headed out and not too far from harvest time when one afternoon – wham! – it started to thunder and rain. The sky got really dark and it was suddenly very cold for that time of year. All of a sudden it started to hail and the hailstones were as large as chicken eggs. I am not exaggerating one bit. In about five minutes the crops were flattened to the ground and animals were killed. But just as fast as the storm appeared, the sun came out and the ground was covered with inches of hail. The crops, our main source of a livelihood, did not survive. This and the stock market crash was the beginning of total depression and near-survival for the farmer. This was only the beginning, there were other years to follow just as bad. The next year rust set in to the crops, which was also another total loss. The grain buyers would not accept this crop at any price. It wasn’t even suitable as cattle feed.

The price of grain on the stock market dropped to ten cents a bushel for No. 1 Northern Wheat, a drop from over two dollars a bushel. In many cases the grain buyers refused to buy at all. Cattle prices also dropped so low that the farmer owed money for shipping his cattle to market. Butter and eggs were five cents per dozen or pound, but even at this price there wasn’t a market for anything the farmer had to sell. We had to go as far as twenty miles for wood in the winter, in the worst cold, never more than thirty or forty degrees below zero. This wood would be cut to stove length and taken to town to sell at a dollar-fifty a cord. Many times we made just enough to by coal, oil, sugar and salt, a very sad situation, to say the least. There was no such thing as welfare, one just did the best with what he had. There were some people who had money stashed away and lived quite well. This was the time that my brother Alex lost all he had because he had allowed too much credit to the farmers who were not able to pay their debts. In spite of all this, there was still joy and laughter.

I really didn’t know what it was all about and went along with the times, always wishing. But I recall lots of enjoyment in my time, the type that no one will ever witness in his entire life. Like when Dad got me a pony and we became inseparable, just short of taking him to bed with me. I remember the little hunting trips I used to go on in the fall in a little meadow which had once been someone’s home site. I spent hours loitering there, and would admire Dad’s first farm nearby. It had a big red barn, the most outstanding of all the buildings in the area. But this farm held something more important to me. It was my birthplace: Northeast Quarter, Section 28, Township 30, West of the Second Meridian, in the Province of Saskatchewan, Canada. This took place on the 16th of May, 1918. What a button-popper I was to my Dad.

Frederick, Mary and Russell Holoboff, c. 1944, New Westminster, British Columbia.

This is about the only time there was any deep affection ever shown to me. This lasted only a few years, to my knowledge. If it ever existed beyond this, it was well hidden inside of Dad. But I will say that a lot of it showed up later in my life, with some guilt written on Dad’s face. For all of this there was a reason, I’m sure. It’s hard to give something when you never received it yourself. But I never felt bitter about it. I just carried on, not knowing the difference. It’s only now that I sometimes analyze these things.

Anyway, the farm. It still holds lots of memories for me, like the big red barn and the beautiful horses that Dad had, especially one we called Nell, a very pretty mare. She was very tame and gentle until one day I snuck up behind her and hit her with a switch. It startled her and she retaliated with her hind leg, grazing me at the temple of my head. I went flying over, ass-over-tea kettle, blood all over my face. Everyone panicked as they thought I was dead. But I survived with nothing less than a scar which I still bear.

I remember a horse we called Twilby. She was really my brother Mike’s pony, but we all enjoyed her. I remember the big pond by the house; in the fall it would be full of migrating foul – a hunter’s delight. Wildlife was plentiful in those years. Killing, to us, was a bit on the religious forbidden side. I doubt if Dad owned a gun.

The first marriage in our family took place at this farm. It was the wedding of my brother Alexis and a local farm gal named Polly Kabatoff. I have heard that cousin John talked Alex into getting married, and I wouldn’t doubt it because Alex was young and timid. But the wedding was a blast. I remember drinking a lot of bubbling water – I think they called it lemonot. After the wedding, Alex brought his new bride home to a little house that we built for the young lovers. I liked to visit with them. The house had no kitchen, so we ate at the big house; it had a large kitchen and a long table. There were eleven of us sitting at that table, country-style.

Another incident was in the spring. Mother had some newborn chicks she was keeping behind the stove. Well, I got wind of this – just a little boy – and played with them. Before Mother knew what had happened, I had them all strangled with loving care. They were so soft and cuddly. But my rear end was red and sore afterward.

Playing in the huge loft of the big red barn was a lot of fun. If I went back to that part of the country, I would make sure to visit the old barn as I hear it still stands.

Alex’s and Polly’s first child was born at this farm. Her name is Nora, my niece, and she now resides in Grand Forks, British Columbia, with her husband, Pete Semenoff.

Another memory was my pony, King. I could write a book about our adventures. I remember being buried in snow drifts that rose over our heads, in freezing temperatures, going to and from school. I remember having visions of being a cowboy, and for all purposes I was but didn’t know it. Because anything on the farm pertained to being a cowboy. But in my vision I was wearing a tall Stetson, with boots and a gun. I wore out the pages of the Eaton’s Wish Book. About the closest I ever got to any kind of cowboy regalia was a western bit for my pony’s bridle. Times were too tough for any luxuries. The harness was more important for the work horse, and they were fixed and re-fixed. But I never gave up hope, as I liked all accessories pertaining to horses. I did manage to get together a set of fancy harnesses for my favorite team. I even had brass bells that I put on the harnesses in the winter. I just liked horses and I still do. I had the opportunity to breed them and raise them from birth. I doubt if there is any other animal so rewarding as a colt of your own.

Besides my little pony King, we had eight horses, all bred from one mare. Her name was Lady; she was a Belgium breed. Her first colt was a little sorrel filly. Her face was blazed and her tail and main were flaxen. She was very pretty and gentle. Lady’s colt eventually also produced quite a few colts. In all we managed to breed seven generations, which made the last purebred. In spite of hard times, our horses brought top dollar at auction. When they were sold, there were a lot of tears on my part.

About my pony, King…it was early winter when Dad and I set out to buy the little critter. The owner told us that he was with the rest of the horses at the straw pile. Finally we saw a little black spot and it was him. After some time spent trying to catch him, we put him in the sleigh box and started home. I was so happy I almost choked him with joy and love. He was only a year old then and it would still be some time before I could ride him. About the only thing I didn’t do was take him to bed with me, but I did sleep in the barn with him.

One adventure with my pony is clear in my mind. When he was old enough for me to ride him, I trained him to run a blue streak. It was always a full gallop. I must say that he was darned fast and on several occasions I raced him against big horses. Not too many would out-speed him.

In the Fall there was an annual fair held at a bigger town nearby called Kamsack, about fifteen miles from our home. People came from far away, despite poor times. Farmers took their wares to exhibit and the youngsters went for the excitement of the merry-go-round and the Ferris Wheel, the sideshows, cotton candy, and yelling barkers selling the all-cure medicine. All of this was very exciting because very little else went on during the year. Despite hard times, with the harvest done, everyone managed to scrape together a few nickels.

My main purpose for going to the fair was that horses raced there, with a special division for ponies that carried a purse of $2.50 for First Place. Need I say more? Yep, I was determined to go to the fair and win. Before I go on about this adventure, let me tell you a little about this fair. One will never again see a fair like fairs back then. Tents pitched all over the grounds, with all sorts of enticements: Lena the Tattooed Lady, sword swallowers, Harem girls, the old shill game of guessing where the pea is, Kewpie doll winnings for your best gal, barkers shouting, a caravan of Real Gypsies…ah, come, let me tell your future.

After telling the folks what I had in mind, they agreed to my adventure and the next day I was off to the races. I had no money, nor any idea how all this was to be executed, but more than halfway there I was stopped by some young farmer and his wife. They were very nice people and they didn’t know my folks, so they talked me into staying the night with them and then in the early morning I could pursue my journey to the fair. After they took me in for the night, it seemed that they immediately took a liking to me. The man helped me stable my pony and took me into the house to clean up for dinner. His wife was very young and kind to me. Their house was big, fairly modern for the times, and made of brick. Well, I was plenty hungry and I ate to my heart’s content. They just kept passing food to me, including dessert. After dinner, the lady showed me to my own room which was nicely furnished and had a very comfortable bed. Looking at it now, it seems that this young farmer and his wife wanted me as their own son. Maybe they had some difficulty having children of their own and took a liking to me. I was happy with it all and it fit in with my journey. I stopped at their place on my way home from the fair as they had insisted. But I did not spend the night with them again. I guess I was getting tired and homesick so I made it home that day.

Now, my day at the fair: When I got there I registered for the pony race and was told what time I was to be ready. It was to take place after the big horses raced. There were many Indians who entered in the big race. They were notorious horsemen. When the pony race was called, we brought our steeds to the race track and arrived at the starting point. It just so happened that the stewards forgot to close the gate where we had entered, and at the sound of the gun, my pony headed straight back for the little pasture I had come through, and there was no way I could get him back to the track. So they had to rerun the race due to negligence on the stewards part. Race we did, and I came in first in my class with a total purse of two dollars and fifty cents – which took a whole year to collect.

Time passes. I am growing up and changing. I quit school – I made a thorough mess of it. One year I missed fifteen days in one month. Yes, I was lectured on this quite severely, but it was a rather hopeless case to make up for all this. Today it’s much to my sorrow, but at that time I knew no better, so the choice I was given was to take a man’s place in the world and go to work. I accepted this role. I was used to work. As a matter of fact, that’s all I knew.

My first real job was at harvest time. Our neighbor had a threshing rig and he hired me as his assistant to operate the tractor and threshing machine. I felt really good about this as no other kid had this type of opportunity, to learn mechanics. What the job really meant was that I was to be grease monkey. But I learned to drive a car and a tractor. In order to learn this and a lot of other things I had to get up at four in the morning with heavy frost on the ground and on the machines. I dipped my hands into cold grease and oil to get the rig ready for when the men got there to thresh. Believe me, this was not fit for man nor beast. I had a lot of other chores that were back-breaking, like pulling the separator belt to the tractor. It was about a hundred feet long and weighed a ton. After I got the rig running I would go have breakfast, or what was left of it. But the prestige was something else at my age. I even had my own tobacco to smoke. Of course I hid it from my parents, but I wasn’t fooling anyone. I was about twenty-five before I smoked in front of Mom and Dad. In our belief smoking was very much taboo.

Taboo or not, I was growing up pretty fast – too fast for my own good. There are other things I started trying, like white lightning – homemade grain alcohol, over a hundred percent proof. We young ones thought this was great and a part of growing up, and the older ones thought we were funny and encouraged us. What drinking really was, was an escape from our depressing times. It could be a serious situation because whereas some could control themselves, some went on to the bye-and-bye as a result. Because it was easy to make, bootleggers sprang up all over the place.

Russell, Alex, Mary, Fred, and Mary Holoboff, c. 1944, New Westminster, British Columbia.

Anyway, back to my job. Harvest lasted about six weeks and I was anxious to receive my pay. I had no idea what the pay would be. One night, when I was asleep, my boss came to our house to treat Mom and Dad with a drink and pay my wages. He woke me up to tell me that he wanted to square up with me for my services and asked me what I thought would be a fair price. As a young boy I was not allowed to say, so I left it to his discretion. He handed me eleven dollars. I nearly died. I had worked really hard for him, and many times I had to cover up for him because he was a playboy and hit the bottle often. Dad should have spoke up for me, and why he didn’t I don’t know. Well, it was better than nothing and it wasn’t likely I could find any other job that would have paid as well. The experience had been worth it and I worked for him the next year, but after that, not much more.

My next problem was what to spend the money on – you’d have thought I was a millionaire. It was the first time I had my own money to spend on myself and I did so wisely. The first thing was to get out Eaton’s Wish Book. What a decision I had to make! Would it be a saddle, a bridle, or that navy blue striped suit for seven dollars? It took some time to make up my mind and the suit won out. You see, although I was young and small, I had already had lots of briefings about the birds and the bees and the penalties that went with them. But I was entering manhood and girls and dancing were entering my mind a lot. After all, during the winter, dancing was our only fun and entertainment. I liked to dance and did a very nice job of it – not many girls refused to dance with me. So I needed to dress up and try to make a good impression.

By the time I paid for the suit and a few things to go with it, I was broke but happy. The day the suit arrived, I got all spruced up and felt like Clarke Gable (movie stars being our ideals and inspiration). I looked pretty sharp for the first dance of the season.

The dances were held mostly in town or in schoolhouses. The orchestras were very simple – an accordion, a violin, and a guitar, more or less. The music was mostly Western style and also lots of polkas. We would dance until the wee hours of the morning, and in many cases, we’d have to walk home in a blizzard. Sometimes there were house parties and sometimes we would dance to just a Jew’s harp or a kazoo. We played parlor games like spin-the-bottle, anything to get a kiss from your favorite girl.

There was this family, close neighbors of ours, who had three girls and one boy. The girls were musically inclined without any training and they made wonderful music on their accordions. They were God-gifted with an ear for music but it took an awful lot of persuasion to get them to play. Who could blame them? Playing the music left them out of the fun. But they were always available for hire. With the few pennies they earned they could buy lipstick. For eye shadow, girls used charcoal. But these girls were very beautiful. Most girls were natural wholesome beauties without makeup, but they liked to live in the world of Hollywood.

In spite of the cold winter, the months went by fast. There were lots of weddings and different kinds of celebrations that kept us happy. On the subject of weddings…I don’t think one ever lived until he or she participated in our kind. Food, liquor and dancing for days with as many as a hundred people in attendance.

There was one wedding I will never forget. It was a Ukrainian family, one of our close neighbors. They were fairly wealthy and this was the marriage of their only son. They went all out for this wedding and it lasted three days and nights. People would sleep wherever they fell. The orchestra was authentic. There were Russian troubadours with cimbalas and balalaikas. In no way could you refrain from dancing when they played. This wedding was also my first experience getting bombed. I don’t remember, to this day, taking a shortcut home in waist deep snow. How foolish – I could have easily passed out and froze to death. But I don’t regret the experience I had at a real Ukraine-style wedding. Only in the Ukraine could you experience a ceremony like that.

I would like you to understand one thing. The people in this era still had morals and scruples. It was different and far better than today’s standards – the body and soul were not abused. But more specifically, this was some fifty years ago, before the modern age. The telephone and the radio were marvels. The first thing anywhere near to a radio that I had was a crystal set. There wasn’t too much to it – it had a piece of crystal metal, a coil, and a set of earphones. Reception was best at night. With a small piece of steel spring you would start scratching the piece of crystal until you were able to pick up a strong station in the wavelength. If you were lucky you would get a good station with good sound and a good program. If there were others in the room they would almost tear your head off to get the earphones.

That was the beginning of radio. After that came the modern tube type radio. Most of them were the cabinet type – no one knew what portable was. As I remember, a person’s wealth could be judged by the beauty of the cabinet: solid hardwood, highly polished and lovely. People that enjoyed radio the most were the ones who lived in towns with electricity. For us rural folk, reception wasn’t good. We had to run our radio off batteries and the reception wasn’t good, plus you never knew when the radio was going to die. Just like everything new on the market, not everyone could afford a good radio; we certainly could not. But we were fortunate to have a nice neighbor about a half mile away who was generous to share his radio and we took advantage of his generosity. My sister Peggy and I couldn’t wait to get the evening chores and dinner over with, then off we would go, tracking through the snow drifts to the neighbor’s place to hear our favorite programs. We listened to Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, and the Lone Ranger, a very popular series. We heard a lot of good western music; a few programs came in quite good like the one from Del Rio, Texas. Also, Kate Smith and her theme song “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountains”. The thing that was nice about radio instead of modern television was that you had to picture the characters. Movies were out of the question. There was only one movie house in a small town about ten miles away. In all the years I lived in Saskatchewan I went to only one show: “The Silver Bullet”.

This is what it was like in this remote part of the country. Not all of the people were so backward, mostly the older folks who had not been in this country too long. Children only know what is taught to them. The younger generation of parents were different. Most of them had some education and passed it down to their children. I can’t say the same for my parents. If you started to play some sport you were told it was a waste of time. If you had some idea, to prove something, all you heard is “it won’t work.” Like when Grandfather used to say, “Look at that damned fool trying to fly.” I wish he could see what it’s like now. Progress didn’t seem very important to my parents and their generation, only their one knowledge: work, work, and more work.

Doctors and dentists in those times was almost nil. We had a country doctor but we couldn’t afford him, and he was tired of getting paid in calves, pigs, and such. I can remember having a toothache once in the middle of winter. The closest dentist was fifteen miles away. We had a farmer nearby who was a kind of self-made dentist and he only charged what you could afford. He was five miles away and I rode horseback in a blizzard to get to him and have my tooth pulled. The pain was so bad, I didn’t care.

As I said before, all we ever heard from our elders was “no”, “what for?”, “it’s not important”, “tomorrow”, “maybe” – teachings that always seemed negative. It was fear, their fear. It was the depression and hard times, another era not like today. There was no such thing as credit cards. To buy anything you had to have the full amount, even if you ordered from the Wish Book. So we had to make do with whatever we had. Only during the harvest season, after the crops were sold, did we have any money. I know hardship well.

Back to family events. My sister Alice married her beloved, Charles Schram. He came from a very large German family. He had six brothers and three sisters, and like everyone else, they were poor as church mice. But the family had a lot of love for each other and it really showed. Their mother was a frail, little woman. I fit in to their family well, and with the other boys, most of them were in my age bracket. I spent a lot of time there during winters. We went to a lot of house parties and raided the smokehouse and smoked like steam engines. The Schram boys had a bunk house all to themselves so we got away with a lot of things. I can still see Mr. Schram waking up the boys. It was like a ritual, the same thing every morning: “Charlie! George! William! Robert! Albert! Steve!” But the boys would merely grumble some cuss word and go further down into their blankets. It took an Act of Congress to get them up.

Russell in later life, c. 1980.

Charlie Schram was a prince of a man. He was about five feet, ten inches tall and nearly two hundred pounds. A very solid, very handsome man. I liked him very much and still do to this day. When Alice told the folks she was going to marry Charlie, the folks weren’t pleased because they knew nothing about his family, and because he was not the same nationality. At that time, in this region, intermarriage wasn’t heard of very often. But eventually they got the folks’ blessing and were married. It had to be true love because Charlie had nothing to offer Alice except love. Alice and Charlie lived with the Schrams after their wedding which was not all that great. Alice had little knowledge of their way of life and it took some time to get used to. Eventually they were able to move out on their own and it was better. They rented a farm in God’s Forsaken Acres, about as far north in the province as a white man wanted to go. Their nearest neighbor was the Indian agent on the reservation. It was a struggle for them. They raised three wonderful children. My sister Molly was midwife at the birth of their oldest child, Richard. Then came Shirley and Douglas. The story of when Molly was a midwife at Richard’s birth is somewhat funny. Alice was very near to her delivery and Molly was visiting them at the time. One night while they were playing cards, Alice felt tired and wanted to go to bed. In her preparation to go to bed she decided to use a portable john in the house (there was no such thing as an inside bathroom and the night was frightfully cold). As she sat down she started to give birth and Molly was the closest thing to any help. It was quite an experience for them all.

Peggy was married next. One day in the barn, while she was milking the cows, she asked me what I thought about her getting married to this fellow named Mike Gizowski. Hell, what did I know about marriage? I told her it was for her to decide. She was afraid she would be left an old maid. She married Mike and they raised a great family of three girls and one boy: Barbara, Mona, Linda, and Fred – a great bunch of kids. Mike was a Polish immigrant from Warsaw who was raised with strict Polish military training. He was old-school and he had an excellent trade as a shoe and harness maker. His work was something to see. His life came to a close at an early age – he died from arthritis. To my deep regret, Peggy’s life ended tragically. She was killed in a car accident on her way home from visiting the folks. But she left a nice family. I have nice memories of Peggy. Her housekeeping was not the best, but her warm heart and hospitality, along with her good cooking, was out of this world.

Not too much later after Peggy‘s marriage, my sister Molly had her wedding bells ring. She married a local boy of the same background and faith. He was a farm boy named Paul J. Rieben; his family lived near us. Molly and Paul had two boys, Paul, Jr. and Donald, and two girls, Debbie and Julie. Their marriage was good and lasted right up to Paul’s death.

So, between droughts, cold, no crops, and working for ten cents a day, the family grew with no sign of a light at the end of the tunnel and it gradually got to Dad. All this time, his heart was still in California and so he began to seriously consider going back there. I acted as his legal aid, getting birth certificates, passports, and other legal documents together. Eventually we got an appointment with the U.S. Immigration Department for a final interview. After all of our efforts, Dad failed to qualify for entry into the states. I still think he needed someone other than me to help him with this – after all, I was just a kid. It was a disappointment to everyone after all the trouble we’d gone through. But Dad was no quitter. He had another plan. Before I tell you about it, I want to back up a bit in my story.

I have been talking about all of the family, but I have said very little about Mother (Mary nee Petroff). Good old mother, how dear a mother she was and how little rewards she received. I remember how hard she toiled from sunup to sundown, then many a night up with one of us kids. I can remember Mother and me in the hot sun, out in the field, making hay, then she would have to come home to milk cows and make dinner, or stand over a hot tub scrubbing clothes. There was no end to her work but I never heard her complain, not until after the birth of Mary. With all the hardship and things getting worse, it put an awful strain on her nerves which eventually resulted in her having a complete nervous breakdown. The fact that she was going through the change of life then only made matters worse for her. There were times she was completely out of her mind from the suffering she went through. What she really needed was total rest away from all the worry. But that was like wishing for the moon. As a result Mother suffered for the rest of her life.

Back to Dad’s plan: British Columbia, here we come! Dad was determined to get the hell out of Saskatchewan. No matter what happened, it couldn’t be any worse. We had some friends and relatives in Grand Forks, BC. and that was to be our destination. I don’t recall the exact month this took place, but it was in the early spring. All I know is that it was damned cold.

The date was set and all the arrangements were made for the auction sale. Lots of comments were heard, like “Are you crazy?” But Dad was determined to leave so there was very little feedback on the sojourner’s part. Mother gave him static. I was all for it. My brother, Fred, and my sister, Mary, were too little to have a say. The girls were married and on their own and would stay behind. Peggy and Molly had a farm that was willed to them by their real father, so they decided to stay. They were sad to see their mother go, but the trek was destined.

As I said, Dad got a lot of remarks from lots of neighbors and friends. But in the end he actually started a whole movement west. The day of the auction was a very sad day, especially when I had to lead out the horses for the auctioneer. I sure hated to part with them. I told all the new owners to treat them as I did, with loving care. Each one brought a fair price and it was time for the last farewells.

It was a cold, blustery morning when the neighbor came for us. We packed everything on the sleigh and off we went to the railroad station. The train was to leave at 9:00 a.m. The station was full of friends and relatives, there to wish us well. Also, quite a lot of my school friends and sweet ones. The whole thing was quite an affair as nothing like this had happened here before. No one could believe that there was any place else than here.

Still, I was sad to leave all my dear friends and the place itself, so vital a part of my life, and all the things I had learned growing up there. The experiences I had living on the farm – even during bad times – I don’t regret at all.

A faint sound, a train whistle, is heard in the distance. The train is on time and we will be boarding it soon. All the farewells have been said. The train blows the high ball whistle and the conductor yells “Alllllll-aboard!”  With the clack of the wheels and in a short time of travel, my birthplace is now a memory.

Afterword

Russell Alexander Holoboff, the writer of this memoir, married and moved to Downey, Los Angeles, California, where he and his wife Bess raised three daughters. Russell passed away on 4 March 1991 in Downey, CA, leaving ten grandchildren. One of his favorite places was the Fraser River in British Columbia where his family scattered his ashes as he had requested.

A History of the Perverseff Family

by Roger Phillips

Roger Phillips (1926-) was born in Tangleflags, Saskatchewan to Francis "Frank" Henry James Phillips, an English "remittance man", and Agatha J. Perverseff, a university-educated Doukhobor schoolteacher. At the age of nine, he moved with his mother to her parents home west of Blaine Lake. There, Roger enjoyed a typical Independent Doukhobor farmboy upbringing for the times, complete with hard work and responsibility. Nearly eighty years later, his Doukhobor heritage and upbringing has given Roger much to treasure and remember. His memoirs, reproduced here by permission from his book, “A History of the Phillips & Perverseff Families” provides an overview of his Perverseff family roots from their earliest origins through to their settlement on the Molochnaya, exile to the Caucasus and emigration to Canada – the ‘Promised Land’, as well as the family’s early pioneer years, and his own boyhood during the Depression.

Having introduced (my mother) Agatha into this narrative, the time is ripe to trace what is known of her early family history—one very different from (my father) Frank’s and sometimes quite turbulent. The Perverseffs (maternal line) belonged to a unique social entity. They were Doukhobors, a strongly pacifist social grouping driven by persecution in Mother Russia to migrate to Canada. I spent some time with my Perverseff grandparents as a little boy and young man and learned just enough Russian to grasp snatches of stories my Grandmother told. I refer to my grandparents now as John and Lucille, but in Russian they were Vanya and Lusha; to me they were Dyeda and Babushka. They and my Mother were my bridges to the past.

Family Origins

Scholarly sources state that the Russian surname Pereverzev (transcribed as Perverseff or Pereverseff in Canada) originates from the Russian verb pereverziti meaning “to muddle” or “to distort”. One may suppose that an early ancestor acquired this term as a nickname, which in turn was passed on to his forebears. The exact reason for such a nickname is unknown. It might be complimentary or insulting, or even ironic depending on circumstance and the individual concerned.

I recall that Russia’s Perm region, some 700 miles east of Moscow, was often alluded to by the family, for there my Pereverzev forebears purportedly dwelled and toiled until the 1700’s. Lusha had heard folk tales but the intercession of tumultuous events had insinuated themselves between her memory and that long-ago time so the connection was at best tenuous. Nevertheless, that is the first historical hint we have.

Were one to fall back on an imagination sprinkled with elusive wisps of hearsay to pierce the mists of centuries, he might conjure up images of his village-dwelling ancestors herding sheep and cattle on the steppes of Perm gubernia (province) or meeting in sobranya (a primarily religious gathering) to foster a burgeoning pacifist faith which by the 1700s was already balking against an increasingly stifling church orthodoxy and corrupt priesthood.

The Molochnaya and Caucasian Exile

If, indeed, Perm was an ancestral home, my antecedents had left it long before the migration made to the Molochnye Vody (Milky Waters) region of Tavria Province on the Crimean frontier just north of the Sea of Azov. Doukhobor researcher Jon Kalmakoff’s accessing of Russian archives reveals that the Pereverzev family in the later 1700s lived in Ekaterinoslav province, migrating about 1801 to land along or near the Molochnaya River in the Melitopol district of Tavria province, Russia (present day Zaporozhye province, Ukraine) where they lived in Rodionovka village, farming adjoining land for some forty years. There were eight other Doukhobor villages scattered along the river and adjoining lake known as Molochnaya.

In 1845, a Pereverzev family and other Doukhobors were exiled to the forbidding Zakavkaz (Transcaucasian) region. Wild Asiatic tribes occupied this mountainous, inhospitable region and Tsar Nikolai I, hitherto unable to rehabilitate what he considered to be an incorrigible sect, opined that these mountain tribes would soon teach the Doukhobors a lesson or, better still, remove altogether this thorn from his side.

Kalmakoff, a Regina-based researcher, accessed long-forgotten Russian archives and found that the family patriarch, Vasily Mikhailovich Pereverzev, together with his wife Maria, was listed among the Doukhobors exiled to the Caucasus. His parents and siblings did not accompany him.

Seduced, one might posit, by a growing prosperity that looked askance at being driven into unpleasant exile, his parents and siblings demurred to Orthodoxy and pronounced allegiance to the Tsar. The parents were Mikhailo (b. 1802), and Maria (b. 1802); his siblings, Ilya Mikhailovich (b.1827), Pelegea Mikhailovna (b. 1828), Semyon Mikhailovich (b. 1830), Fedosia Mikhailovna (b. 1832), Irena Mikhailovna (b. 1834), Evdokia Mikhailovna (b. 1837), Evdokim Mikhailovich (b. 1839), Ivan Mikhailovich (b. 1841) and Anna Mikhailovna (b. 1843).

Ivan Vasilyevich Pereverzev (left) and unidentified Doukhobor relatives in Gorelovka village, Kars province, Russia, c. 1890.

So it was that as the middle of the Nineteenth Century approached, my maternal Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Vasily Mikhailovich Pereverzev had grown up and chosen to go into exile with his wife Maria and their two sons rather than bow to Orthodox Church and Tsarist pressure.

Their sons were Ivan Vasilyevich, to whom our branch of the Perverseffs traces our lineage, and Fyodor Vasilyevich, who founded the Fred, Andrew, and Alexander Perverseff lines. Their father, Vasily, was the only one of his line of Pereverzevs to accompany those Doukhobors who stood firm by their faith and were banished from their Molochnaya settlements between 1841 and 1845.

In the Caucasus, the Pereverzevs settled in Novo-Goreloye village in Elizavetpol province (in present-day Azerbaijan), one of four Doukhobor villages established in that province of Transcaucasian Russia.

Harsh Living Conditions

Ivan Vasilyevich, my Great-Great-Grandfather and son of the patriarch Vasily, married in the mid-1850s and his wife Aksinya bore him a son Vasily in 1859. In 1880 this son Vasily married Elizaveta Lapshinov and they had a son, my Grandfather Ivan Vasilyevich in 1883 and two daughters.

The Pereverzevs along with their fellow Doukhobors in Elizavetpol province found life harsh. Fleeting summers squeezed between frost-bitten springs and falls and deep winter snows contrasted sharply with the pleasing milder climate their elders had known in the Molochnaya region. Subsistence was based mainly on cattle and sheep raising, market gardening, and what little wheat could be grown. There was something else. An undercurrent of fear shadowed the Elizavetpol villages, with good reason.

Asiatic hill country tribesmen would occasionally swoop down on horseback on the Doukhobor villages, plundering livestock and poultry and, reputedly, even carrying off children. The hillsmen’s depredations were tempered somewhat by the retributive countering of armed Doukhobors riding out to punish the raiders. Circumstances soon offered many Elizavetpol Doukhobor families an opportunity to leave.

Aksinya Pereverzeva in Gorelovka village, Kars province, Russia, c. 1894. Her loyalty to Verigin’s Large Party resulted in a Pereverzev family schism in 1886.

During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, Doukhobor men were enlisted as teamsters for the Russian Army – a compromise from being actual combatants and a lucrative arrangement made by the then-Doukhobor leader Lukeria Kalmykova. The Doukhobor teamsters served faithfully and their efforts helped Russia emerge victorious from the conflict. As a reward, the Doukhobors in Elizavetpol and other areas were invited to settle in the more temperate and fertile province of Kars, newly-conquered from the Ottoman Empire. Many Doukhobors accepted, including the Pereverzevs.

The Pereverzevs’ migration to Kars in 1880 took them through Tiflis (later Tbilisi, Georgia), a city Grandmother Lusha sometimes mentioned when talking about life in Kars. Once in Kars, the Pereverzevs settled in the village of Gorelovka, named after their former home in Elizavetpol. It was one of six Doukhobor villages established in the province. There, they would live and prosper for the next nineteen years.

A Pereverzev family schism occurred in 1886 when the Doukhobor leader Lukeria (Lushechka) Vasilyevna Kalmykova died. Many Doukhobors decided to follow Petr Vasilyevich Verigin, who had been a protégé of hers, and formed what became known as the “Large Party”. Other Doukhobors maintained that Lushechka had not anointed Peter and instead sided with her officials who claimed Verigin usurped the leadership. Individuals of this persuasion established themselves as the “Small Party”. My Great-Great-Grandmother, Aksinya, was by all accounts a loyal Large Party adherent while her husband Ivan Vasilyevich sided with the Small Party. Sadly, the ill feelings this rift created forced the elderly couple to vacate the family home.

In his later years, Ivan Vasilyevich Pereverzev was a village starshina – a dignitary we would today call a mayor. His son Vasily Ivanovich became a trader as well as farmer, herdsman, and carpenter and, years later, related that on his trading expeditions he found Christian Armenian shopkeepers the most hospitable of the merchants he encountered in the Caucasus. Only after sharing a meal and an hour or two of pleasant conversation would they get down to mundane business.

Restrictions meant to better reflect their pacifism were imposed on the Large Party Doukhobors in the early 1890s, and the following obeyed Leader-in-Exile Petr Vasilyevich Verigin’s decree to forego smoking, drinking, sex, and eating meat. Late in 1894, Verigin wrote from banishment in Siberia that such denial would purify the body and bring into one fold all the animal kingdom in the Doukhobor pact of non-violence.

The Burning of Arms

A supreme test came in 1895 when Verigin ordered his followers to protest war and killing of any sort by burning their arms. This they did in dramatic fashion on the night of June 28-29. A bonfire near the villages of the Kars Doukhobors punctuated the darkness as guns and other killing instruments were put to the torch. As well, Doukhobors serving in the army laid down their rifles, refusing to kill for the state. Then it was that these folk felt the full fury of an enraged officialdom. The whippings and other means of persecution were brutal. Indeed, the “Burning of Arms”, as Doukhobor history records the event, became buried deep in the psyche of these people, a watershed act pointing them towards Canada and a new destiny.

Vasily Ivanovich (sitting) and his son Vanya (standing) Pereverzev pictured in typical Russian dress – a military style peaked cap, a coat tight at the waist and high boots. Gorelovka village, Kars province, Russia, c. 1894.

The Doukhobors wanted so little and yet so much. Above all they wished to peacefully pursue their faith, to be free to lead simple, non-violent, productive lives in a communal environment with “Toil and Peaceful Life” and “Thou Shalt Not Kill” their watchwords. Noble sentiments, indeed, but the Burning of Arms and Doukhobor soldiers rejecting the army were highly provocative acts inviting harsh reprisals by Tsarist officials. The persecution that followed seemed to leave no choice for many but to get out or perish.

Exodus to Canada

Their plight attracted worldwide attention. Journalists, writers and benefactors in several countries took up their cause. Not the least of these was the already famous Russian novelist and humanitarian Lev Tolstoy who, himself, embraced many Doukhobor ideals, becoming their staunchest ally. His financial contribution and towering talent as a writer did much to facilitate their move to Canada, an exodus that began December 21, 1898, when the first shipload left Russia. Their turn to depart set for some months later, the Pereverzevs and other villagers in Gorelovka, Kars Province, began selling off their possessions and preparing for their own departure. Overseeing preparations for our branch of the Pereverzevs was Vasily Ivanovich, now 40, who had helped shepherd the family through the harrowing times in Transcaucasia and the terrors following the Burning of Arms. He and his wife Elizaveta now had in their care a 16-year-old son, Ivan Vasilyevich, his wife Lusha, and two younger daughters, Dunya and Hanya. Ivan’s birth, on May 1, 1883, followed by two years that of Lusha (nee Negreeva). Under mutual arrangements and approving eyes Ivan and Lusha were married in 1898.

Cousin Mae Postnikoff tells Grandmother’s side of the story. Mae stayed with the Perverseff grandfolks in Blaine Lake while attending high school in the 1950s. Grandmother told her the marriage was arranged by the Pereverzev and Negreev families and confided that back in Russia she loved not Grandfather but another man her family wouldn’t condone her marrying. This “beloved” also migrated to Canada eventually moving on to British Columbia and Grandmother never saw him again. Love takes nurturing and while Lusha may not have loved Ivan at first, she did in time.

Vasily Ivanovich’s immediate and extended family was among that part of the Kars Doukhobor population scheduled to set sail for Canada May 12, 1899. At sea they lived on sukhari (dried bread) and water, reaching Canada June 6. After a lengthy quarantine they proceeded west by rail, reaching the Northwest Territories settlement of Duck Lake in early July. Detraining there, they temporarily occupied immigration sheds, regrouped, acquired settlement supplies, and underwent further documentation.

A cavalcade of Doukhobor immigrants on the move from debarkation at Duck Lake, Northwest Territories, to settle a prairie site in the summer of 1899.

Canadian unfamiliarity with the spelling and pronunciation of Russian family names resulted in their sometimes being anglicized. In our case, Pereverzev became Perverseff although family members eventually adopted Pereverseff. Today, more than a hundred years later, the Russian pronunciation of names has often given way to anglicized versions.

With August approaching and half the summer gone, Vasily and the other new arrivals to Canada were understandably restless. Having heard of the harshness of western prairie winters, they were anxious to reach their new lands, build shelters in time to get through the inevitable snows and cold, and get on with their new life. To this end they formed into groups based mainly on extended family relationships. One group of some 20 families including the Perverseffs set off with wagons and on foot for a site nearly 40 miles west of Duck Lake. With a few horse-and-oxen-drawn wagons heaped with necessities they were part of the procession that marched to Carlton Ferry, crossed the North Saskatchewan River and entered the “Prince Albert Colony”. To the newcomers this was indeed a Promised Land where they and their faith might flourish. Little did they realize then that inevitable acculturation would modify and eventually replace traditional thinking and ways with Canadian thinking and ways. Once across the river, the different groups set off to the designated areas each was to settle.

The Promised Land

Let us retrace this migration and subsequent settlement as seen through the eyes of Grandfather Vanya and his son Jack, with manuscript-typist and cousin Mae Postnikoff joining in. In a memoir, Grandfather related that the Gorelovka villagers began their journey on a fresh April morning. They spent Easter Week in the Russian Black Sea port of Batum awaiting the May 12 departure of the S.S. Lake Huron, the Canadian ship taking them to Canada. Of the 2,300 Kars Doukhobors who made the voyage by sea and ocean, 23 did not survive the rough waters and meager diet. Reaching Quebec City at the beginning of June, the new arrivals were immediately subjected to a thirty-day quarantine on Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence River to obviate any communicable disease spread. Ten days aboard Canadian Pacific Railway “colonial” rail cars with wooden benches to sit and sleep on brought the migrants by later-July via the still largely tent city of Saskatoon to Duck Lake, the seat of a Metis uprising 14 years earlier. There, immigration sheds housed them before they departed for their settlement sites.

With a few oxen and horses and wagons and a few cows in tow the group that included Grandfather’s family wended its way westward to a point approximately a mile and a half northeast of where the town of Krydor now stands. In a ravine near a small lake they stopped. Squatters now, the migrants dug holes in the ravine walls into which they thrust poles and used sod to complete rude huts. These first “homes”, not unlike the domiciles characteristic of some of their Asiatic neighbors in Russia, provided rough shelter. Grandfather wrote that “we lived about three years” in this “wild and desolate place…isolated in a strange and unfamiliar land”.

Vanya, Lusha and their son Jack photographed in Canada c. 1903. 

A creek ran through the ravine meandering across rolling prairie situated in the SE 26-44-8-W3. Men who could be spared were away railroad building or working on construction or for established farmers earning money for settlement needs. It fell to the womenfolk to break ground for gardens, manage the livestock and keep the village going. Many years later, the late Bill Lapshinoff, a relative whose farm was nearby, showed a friend and me where village women had dug a channel to provide water flow to turn a grist mill wheel. The channel lay in a copse of brush and poplar preserved from the effects of wind and water erosion. There is no one left to tell us now, but the new settlers presumably called this first village Gorelovka after their former home village in Russia.

Grandfather further wrote that things changed when the Doukhobor leader Peter “Lordly” Verigin arrived in Canada from Siberian exile late in 1902. He soon convinced his Doukhobor brethren to start living communally. New villages built would hold and work land in common sharing resources equally. Grandfather noted that “we began communal life which we had not been living before”. Grandfather’s revelation indicates that it was at this time that our forebears abandoned their original dugout settlement in 1902 to build the village of Bolshaya (Large) Gorelovka a mile or so north and a bit west. The word “Large” was needed to distinguish it from the nearby village of Malaya (Small) Gorelovka established at the same time. Both derived from the original dugout settlement. Goreloye, a diminutive form of the village name, was what my grandfolks called Bolshaya Gorelovka. The word Bolshaya was not used unless one needed to distinguish the village from Malaya Gorelovka.

Bolshaya Gorelovka or Goreloye was well situated. High bordering hills tree-covered in places offered shelter from the prevailing northwest wind. A ravine with a free flowing natural spring intersected the northwest corner of the village which ran in an approximate north-south direction for about three quarters of a mile. A large slough lay near the south end and sod from its environs provided roofing. The Fort Carlton-Fort Pitt trail ran east and west just north of the village.

The spring flowed year round providing water for household and livestock use. It ran northeasterly as a creek forming a muskeg that bordered a row of gardens including the Perverseff’s. An open area, where a Russian ball game called hilki was played by youngsters in summer and on hard-packed snow in winter, divided the village into two parts. Toward the north end on the east side stood a large community barn just to the north of which a shallow well had been dug where the creek flowed. A large wooden watering trough lay beside this depression. Here, old country innovation came into play. A stout pole sunk into the ground had attached to it a smaller pole with an arm that could swivel. A pail filled at the well and hung over the arm by its handle would be swung to the watering trough and there emptied. This beat having to physically carry the pail back and forth.

Vasily, in a traditional Russian coat, with his son Vanya and daughters Dunya and Hanya photographed in Canada c. 1903. 

An indoor, closed-in brick oven was built into the wall of each village house. Oven tops covered with blankets or coats made good resting places and in winter, ideal retreats from invading cold. Soon banyas (bath houses) that had been an Old Country fixture began to appear, one of the first built by William John Perverseff, as Vasily Ivanovich Pereverzev came to be known in Canada.

The land description on which Bolshaya Gorelovka or Goreloye village stood was the SW 35-44-8-W3, North-West Territories (Saskatchewan came into being three years later). While hilly benchland rimmed the west and north, the country east and south was flat or gently rolling prairie carpeted with fescue, spear and wheat grass knee high in places, and pocked with numerous sloughs and potholes. There were poplar groves and to the north, spruce was available. The soil was mainly good black loam. To the Perverseffs and their fellow settlers, this land truly held promise.

Cousin Mae picks up the narrative: "Grandfather Vanya was an admirer of education and he was the prime mover in establishing the first Canadian public school in their midst. He did attend school in Petrofka in winter months… around 1907. The teacher was Herman Fast who was… responsible for the English spelling of our surname… It was in this school that our grandfather… learned the rudiments of the English language… [and] to read the English newspapers and get the gist of the meaning."

Grandpa really did not have a good command of the English language, but he insisted on corresponding with the Department of Education through Uncle Jack after Uncle Jack started attending school in 1911. Before that, all business was transacted through a Ukrainian intellectual immigrant with old country higher education. His name was Joseph Megas…an organizer and field representative of the Department of Education….It was he who misnamed our school to Havrilowka, which later was corrected to "Haralowka"S, but still a far cry from Gorelovka or Goreloye.

By the fall of 1902, Bolshaya Gorelovka or Goreloye had taken shape, with the new pioneers sharing the tasks of village building and taming the wild land. Although many of the men-folk were away earning money, the work of building still got done with women pitching in to fill the manpower shortage. A belief that women were hitched to ploughs to till the fields is not true. Men using oxen ploughed the fields. However women, in pairs twenty strong, did pull a small one-furrow plough to break up garden ground.

Perverseff women and children grouped in front of the Gorelovka village family home in 1904. Vasily’s wife Elizaveta (Lisunya) stands at left, Lusha holds Agatha while Jack stands beside her, with sister-in-law Hanya at right.

Unlike other blocks of Doukhobor land elsewhere, the Prince Albert Colony allotment was in alternate sections. Canadian authorities were aware that the Kars Doukhobors were more individualistic than their brethren from other areas. These so-called “Independents” had been reluctant to go along with Verigin’s 1893 edict asking all Doukhobors not only to live communally but also to share all resource ownership in what amounted to Christian Communism. Alternate sections of land amidst other nationalities imbued with the spirit of individual enterprise fostered independent farmstead development instead of living in a central communal village – a notion the Doukhobors from Kars found attractive. But for the first dozen or so years communal living did prevail.

Village buildings were simple yet sturdy. Logs trimmed to form four-sided timbers made up the main framework. Clay, grass and other ingredients were mixed with water and treaded into a paste that was plastered on both the outside and inside of the timbered walls. Poles laid lengthwise on inverted v-shaped frames supported the roofing sod cut from the marshy margins of nearby sloughs. Grey/white calcimine covered the walls inside and helped waterproof them outside.

William’s home (starting from the street and working back) had a living room that also served as a bedroom, a kitchen, a verandah, a main bedroom, then a storage room, and a brick oven. Sod cut from the environs of a nearby slough covered the roof. Out back was the inevitable outhouse. Before long, William built a bath house patterned after those popular in Russia, and eventually a small blacksmith shop was erected. Since self sufficiency was an ingrained Doukhobor trait, the Perverseffs – like their neighbors – cultivated a large garden.

The Perverseffs and fellow immigrants soon added to their initial inventory of eight horses, five cows, four oxen, four wagons and three ploughs. Horses pulled the wagons; oxen, the ploughs.

Pioneering was at first extremely labour intensive. Grain was sown by hand broadcasting; mature crops were cut with scythes and sickles; grain was threshed by men and women wielding flails. William, good with his hands and mechanically inclined, made shovels and other needed tools and implements in his blacksmith shop. When Elizabeth (as Elizaveta came to be called) wanted a spinning wheel or Lucille (as Lusha was called in Canada) needed a garden hoe, William made them. Because money was needed to buy livestock and farm machinery, William’s son John joined other young men and walked to St. Lazare, Manitoba to work on the Grand Trunk Railway (see How the Doukhobors Build Railways). A picture taken in 1907 shows him with 18 other Doukhobor men in a work party.

When time permitted, Lucille and the other women earned money, too, gathering seneca root, considered to have medicinal benefits, and selling their fine needlework or trading it for things they needed.

John and Lucille began their Canadian family in 1901 when John Ivan “Jack” was born. Agatha (my mother) followed in 1904; Nicholas “Nick” in 1907, Nita in 1911, and Mary “Marion” in 1919. John and Lucille’s first-born daughter was lost in childbirth during the sea voyage to Canada. What became known as Haralowka School opened in 1911 three quarters of a mile southeast of the village and all five children went there, with Marion also attending a new, larger brick school erected a half mile north which opened in 1930.

This image of a Haralowka home was found among the Perverseff collection or pictures and may have been the family home. It is typical of those at the time–squared log construction, a plaster covering painted with calcimine and with a sod roof. A buggy or what was often called a “democrat” is parked beside the home.

Both Bolshaya and Malaya Gorelovka were reminiscent of old country mirs (communal villages in Russia), but they were short-lived, the villagers having abandoned them by 1920 to become individual landowners. However, the name continued in the form of Haralowka school district.

Independence

William and John were among the first villagers to file for their own land, the first in 1909 being 320 acres of scrip land that had been assigned to a Boer War veteran named Thomas J. Stamp. Its legal description was NW & NE 22-45-8-W3. Located some six miles to the northwest of the village, it was used primarily for grazing. In 1912, the SW 25-44-8-W3 was acquired and buildings were erected that served as a temporary base of operations. Other land subsequently added to the family holdings included the NW 25-44-8-W3, SE 31-44-8-W3 and NE 25-44-8-W3. An old land registry map shows the Perverseff home place on the NW 30-44-8-W3. Because Haralowka district Doukhobor settlers became sole land owners, they were referred to in Russian as farmli (individual farmers) and were no favorites of the Doukhobor leader, Peter Verigin. Lucille’s parents, on the other hand, joined more communally-minded Doukhobors migrating to British Columbia.

In 1909 William journeyed to Russia to bring back his newly-widowed mother Aksinya. According to Jon Kalmakoff’s research, they returned to Canada aboard the SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, sailing from Hamburg, Germany on November 4, 1909, arriving at New York, USA on November 13, 1909. Aksinya lived in the village for three years before passing away and was laid to rest in the tiny burial ground near the top of a hill just west of the village. “Bill” Lapshinoff, the owner of the village land in the 1990s, regretted that this original cemetery had eventually been ploughed over instead of being retained historically.

The Perverseffs on their homestead. Jack and Agatha at back, Nick beside seated Vanya, Lusha and Nita. Blaine Lake district, SK, c. 1914.

For their home place William and John chose a site at the northeast corner of the quarter with the erecting of farm buildings starting immediately. The main farmyard sloped on all sides near the southeast corner to a low point at which the base of the main garden started and where spring runoff advantageously settled. A fence divided the house, great grandfolk’s cottage, summer kitchen, a small grassed field, orchard and garden from the farm utility buildings. Open to the east, this spacious area of perhaps ten acres was bounded on the south, west, and north by a three row-spruce tree shelterbelt. A caragana-lined sidewalk led from the farmyard gate to the house.

The home Vanya and Lusha moved into in 1914 was modest, probably no more than 30 by 40 feet. The front porch, entered from the south, had two inner doors, one opening into the kitchen beyond which was the one bedroom; the other, into the large living room. A bookcase and writing desk constituted John’s study and there was a large table where meals were served. A couch in one corner doubled as my bed when I stayed as a child with my grandparents. A radio was turned on mainly for the news, although I recall listening Wednesday evenings to Herb Paul, the yodeling cowboy, his program originating from Winnipeg.

The impressive barn on the Perverseff family homestead near Blaine Lake, SK, c. 1921.

A cottage built just a few steps east of the main house was a comfortable haven for William and Elizabeth. They ate their meals with the rest of the family in the main house and during the warmer months of the year, in the summer kitchen.

While the house was modest, the barn started in 1921 was anything but. The largest in the district, it was a red-painted, hip-roof type boasting cement and plank flooring, plank stalls, a harness tack room with harness repair equipment, water cistern, large hayloft area, and an ample chop bin. The north side was extended to include a cow-barn/milking area, a box stall for small calves, and a cream separating room. The barn was completed in 1922 and if ever there was a status symbol in the Haralowka district, this was it.

Down a bit from the west entrance to the barn was a windmill-powered well beside which stood a big corrugated metal watering trough. The garden and orchard extended south and west. Just north of the garden and behind the well was a Russian style bath-house and just north of it was the blacksmith shop, complete with forge and foot-pedal-driven wood lathe, a marvel that William designed and built. A few yards further north was the root cellar, while a granary and chicken coop with fenced-in yard stood south of the barn.

Implement and storage sheds were northeast of the summer kitchen. A three-car brick garage built in 1927 housed sleeping quarters for hired men and a McLaughlin-Buick car. A tree-lined lane ran a hundred yards or so north to an east-west road. The natural lawn lying west of the house and extending north and south served as an outdoor recreational area. Slough willow and poplar sheltered the south side of the garden and orchard. John, with an eye for symmetry and order, could be justifiably proud of the impressive yard.

A Good Life

Hard work and good planning combined with good wheat prices during World War I brought prosperity. The meager assets with which the Perverseffs started out had multiplied many-fold. John emerged the master planner; William, the implementer. By 1930, with the Great Depression still around the corner, they presided over a successful farming operation, with a complete line of farm machinery. They had a section of land under cultivation; three hired men during the busiest times and a hired girl when Lucille needed extra help. Cree Indian men from the nearby Muskeg Reserve signed on during fall threshing to haul sheaves and field pitch.

On the farm at any one time would be up to ten milking cows, at least eight draft horses, and a fast team of matched sorrels kept for buggy and cutter use. Selling cream and eggs provided extra income that helped tide the family over during the cash-strapped Depression years of the 1930s.

Grandfather Vanya was inordinately proud of the family’s white stallion, Safron, seen here pulling a buggy, c. 1908.

In the rhythm of farm life, seeding and harvesting took precedence over all else. Social activities followed the then-current rural pattern: visiting with relatives and friends, attending marriages and funerals, and going regularly to sobranya, first in a rural dom, a hall built for gatherings a half mile east of the farmstead; later in the town of Blaine Lake, ten miles east. Cream and eggs were delivered to Tallman, a hamlet three miles southeast, where mail was picked up and cream cans retrieved.

The main event of the year was Peter’s Day, held every June 29. It was essentially a commemoration of the trials and tribulations the Doukhobors had endured in Russia. There were prayers and the air swelled harmoniously with the a cappella singing of psalms and resonated with voices raised in discourse on the Doukhobor faith. A huge tent holding more than a hundred people was set up on grounds just southeast of Blaine Lake and a carnival atmosphere prevailed especially for the younger children who would absent themselves from the tent to play. A noon meal, served picnic style, consisted of such fare as pie-like cheese and fruit peroshki, crepe-like bliny, boiled eggs, fresh bread and fruit, especially arbus (watermelon), a universal Doukhobor favorite, if available. Life was good!

The Perverseffs did not smoke, drink alcohol, or eat meat but a diet rich in garden-grown vegetables and their own dairy products made for healthy eating. Vegetable borsch (a heavy soup), bread and cheese were staples, eaten pretty well daily.

About 1935, William and John acquired land near Blaine Lake for John’s son Nick to farm. I was present when John negotiated with the owner, Senator Byron Horner. A handshake sealed the deal – unlike today no lawyers were needed then to oversee an agreement between men whose word was their bond.

Perverseff family portrait, 1919. At back Agatha and Jack; in front, Vanya, Nita, Lusha (holding Marion) and Nick.

In 1935 William’s wife Elizabeth died. Casting further gloom was the Great Depression, the so-called Dirty Thirties, now firmly entrenched. The bottom had dropped out of wheat prices. Grasshopper and army worm infestations plagued the farmland. Only “empties” going by, a wry allusion to rainless dark clouds, conspired with wicked winds to rearrange quarter sections and penetrate homes, layering windowsills and floors with fine dust. Planted fields baked dry had to be ploughed over. Talk about good times and bad – these were really bad!

Tangleflags

Back in Tangleflags, Saskatchewan – where I lived with my parents in the late 1920’s and early 1930s – folks didn’t find the Depression quite so severe. There was more moisture – less than everyone would have liked – but enough to produce some grain, and livestock pastured better. I didn’t think anything was really out of the ordinary before we left the area in October of 1935. My friend Vernon Dubay would come over to play. I poled my raft on the lake. I walked to school or rode double on horseback with Dad or Mother or sometimes a visiting aunt. Grace Harbin, a spinster, taught at Tangleflags School, and I once penciled a rather good likeness of her attractive niece, Betty, who sat in front of me.

Born on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1926, I won a prize in the fall as “baby of the year” in a weekly newspaper contest and still wonder how such a chubby, round-faced little cherub could have been selected. Francis “Frank” Henry James Philips, an English immigrant farmer, and Agatha (nee Perverseff) had married in Lashburn at friends Bob and Dorie Sanderson’s place on December 26, 1924 and I was their first child.

I’ve speculated about why Agatha married Frank. Having attended university (Education) she was at that time considered well educated (especially for a Doukhobor). Frank wasn’t. She had mastered two languages. He knew only one. She had a quick mind. His was more plodding and his prospects didn’t really reach beyond farming. So! Was it pity for the underdog? Did she feel sorry for him because of his physical handicap (he was missing one arm)? Did his cheerfully and successfully forging ahead in the face of odds win her heart. Did his fine baritone singing voice move her? Why is something I really cannot answer.

This most glamorous image of Agatha is thought to have been taken just after she graduated from what was then called “Normal School” in April of 1924. She was immediately hired to teach for the remainder of the school year in rural Tangleflags, SK.

As the schoolteacher at Tangleflags, Agatha gained quick entree into the community. Her pupils brought her in touch with their parents and community functions with eligible bachelors usually in attendance. Just shy of eight months from the time she met Frank, they married and his little bungalow was their first home. In January, 1925 she started teaching at North Gully, close to 15 miles southwest from our place shortcutting across country. She rode Satin, a fine saddle pony, to a farmstead near North Gully School where she boarded during the week.

On one occasion, as she would later recall, Satin, likely feeling bored, decided to jump Cook’s gate [a quarter mile from our place and the beginning of the cross country shortcut]. “Bob Oswell was rounding up his horses nearby and saw me fall. He galloped over to render assistance but I was back on Satin before he reached me.” Falling off horses happened frequently in those days and it’s a wonder more people weren’t badly hurt. Satin’s faithful companion and Mother’s was Bob, a dog of mixed heritage but good character. Whenever she tethered Satin, Bob always stayed close by until they were off again.

Frank concentrated on building a proper house, and proper it truly was, the first in Tangleflags to have hardwood floors, occasioning some neighbor women to consider Mother “spoiled”. Agatha quit teaching in December and she and Frank moved into the new home the beginning of January, 1926, with me arriving a month and a half later. Agatha’s sisters Nita and Marion Perverseff came to visit in the ensuing years, and Mother chummed with a Miss Thom and Phoebe Mudge from Paradise Hill. By 1930, we had a piano in the house and a tennis court outside.

One was practically born in the saddle in those days and I was quite at home riding horseback by the time I was six. The only problem was getting on; but a fence or corral pole or anything a couple of feet high answered well enough. By the time I could ride, Frank had sold Satin and acquired Phyllis, a mare in foal who soon gave us Star, a black colt named for the white patch on his forehead. In the warm months I’d ride Phyllis to herd our cattle on Crown grassland a half mile northeast of our place. Influenced no doubt by tales of the Old West, I trained Phyllis to dig in her front feet and “stop on a dime”. If we were moving quickly and I yelled whoa, I’d have to brace myself or go for a tumble. Once, I did. I chased a gopher taking a zigzag course over the prairie. When it disappeared down a hole, I excitedly yelled whoa, and forgetting to brace myself, flew over Phyllis’ head as she stopped abruptly. I was seven at the time; my young bones were pliant, and thankfully the prairie wasn’t too hard; my feelings were the most damaged.

Frank, Agatha and “Old Bob” standing in front of the new farmhouse the couple moved into in January of 1926 at Tangleflags, SK.

Once summoned, other childhood memories flood back, jostling for attention.

Bob Oswell, whose folks farmed up in the hills southwest of us, was my idea of a cowboy. Bob always wore a beat-up old ten-gallon hat and had trained a white pony named Smokey to rear up on its hind legs when he mounted it. Watching Smokey rear up and then gallop away, Bob firmly in the saddle with a rifle in a scabbard strapped to it, convinced me to become a cowboy. But once in a long while an airplane would fly over and I’d change my mind. I figured piloting a plane was even better than being a cowboy. I even went so far as to build what vaguely resembled a plane with boards and logs in back of the old bungalow. Then I’d walk up a nearby hill to watch it get smaller, the way planes did in the sky.

Once, Frank let me plough a furrow right across a field by myself. Actually, the horses were so conditioned to this work that they needed no guidance. Still, I held the reins and kicked the foot rod that raised the ploughshares up and that released them when we’d turned around. I was pretty proud of myself and thought maybe I’d be a farmer.

I changed my mind when I fell off a straw stack. Frank was loading straw onto a hayrack and I, not paying proper attention, missed my footing and tumbled off the stack crashing down on my back. That hurt! Farming was proving to be dangerous.

Another incident altered my thinking about being a cowboy. On one occasion Aunt Marion Perverseff rode Phyllis to fetch me from school and for some reason Phyllis didn’t take kindly to riding double that day. She bucked and I fell off, much, I imagine, to the amusement of the other children.

I was fortunate to have a sister, if only for a short while. Her given names were Lorna Ruth and Agatha always remembered her as “my golden-haired girl”. Though she was more than two years younger than me, we were pretty good companions. She was my chum and we played together, happily most of the time but not without the odd sibling tiff.

Frank, Agatha, Roger and newly-born Lorna pose for a family portrait in 1928 at Tangleflags, SK.

Lorna fell dreadfully ill in the dead of winter. The last day or two before the end of January, 1933, a doctor snow-planed out from Lloydminster and took her back with him. Her death from peritonitis February 2 broke Mother’s heart and fanned the spark of a hitherto embryonic paranoia that gradually grew more troublesome and consumed her last years. I stayed with Cook’s, our closest neighbors, while Frank and Agatha were at Lorna’s hospital bedside and when they got home and told me Lorna was now with God and that I wouldn’t see her again, a terrible weight settled on me. I’ve since experienced many deaths amongst family and friends, but none that hurt more.

I wasn’t crazy about school, but I liked recess. One of our main amusements was a maypole-like swing with several chains having rungs to cling to that dangled from a rotating disk at the top of the steel pole. One person who was “it” would take his or her chain in a circle around all the other chains to which children clung. Then the youngsters would race around the pole with whoever was “it” flying high in the air. It was great fun and my turn could never come soon enough. But one day when it did, disaster struck. I was flung out and around so furiously that my hands slipped off the chain rung and my now uncharted flight path brought me into contact with a nearby woodpile. Somehow a nail gashed my skull which bled so profusely that some of the kids figured I was “sure a goner”. I survived, bloody and somewhat bowed.

In the 1930s for a few years a troop of Boy Scouts summer camped across the lake in front of Cook’s. The boys were from Lloydminster and possibly Lashburn and Marshall. Island Lake was likely chosen for this outing because it was so buoyant that drowning was practically impossible. In the evenings, if the wind was right, we could hear the boys singing around a campfire and see flames leaping into the air. I thought being a Boy Scout was alright and maybe I’d try it when I got old enough.

On the farm we grew or raised part of what we ate. We had a large garden which mostly gave us potatoes. Occasionally we’d slaughter a pig or a beef. I usually wasn’t around when that happened but the year before we left the farm, I was. I knew we were going to kill a pig and wanted no part of it. When a man Dad hired to help arrived, I headed down to the lake. Suddenly there was an awful squeal and I knew the pig was dying.

Agatha with Lorna and Roger in front of the Tangleflags house in 1932.

Grassland was needed for grazing when I was little, and there was more of it then than now. More grass meant more prairie fires and there was a bad one when I was about five. It burned to within a couple hundred yards of our place and I remember men with faces and hands smeared black from fighting it dropping in for coffee and sandwiches or heading for the dipper in the water pail. The lake probably saved us, both in cutting off the direct line of the blaze and being so handy a source for water to wet gunny sacking used to beat the flames. I was too young to comprehend what a close call we had. Instead, I childishly found the rush of activity exciting.

One tends to remember certain people. As a councilman for Britania Rural Municipality No. 502 our neighbor Joe Cook was out and about a lot in the district. He’d come riding by in his buggy, whip in one hand, reins in the other. His big walrus moustache made him quite imposing, even a bit fearsome. I rather fancied his good-looking daughter Joan, maybe because she always beat me when we raced on horseback. But she was older and paid me no mind.

British accents attested to the strong English influence in the community where the men smoked pipes and played cricket. There were garden parties, and you watched how you held your little finger when you sipped your tea. Since the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons, I, like Dad, smoked a pipe when I grew up. Eventually, though, I gave up pipe smoking as a bad habit.

I always paid heed when Bob Oswell’s dad passed in his wagon going to Bob’s place. He was built stocky, “strong as a bull”, my father said, and it seemed to me that he always scowled. And his Tyne-sider’s accent was so strong and his voice so raspy that I never understood a word he said. He was a good enough neighbor but his gruff manner told me to steer clear of him.

Nip and Tuck were a pair of greys that Dad treasured. They were big horses, Clydesdales probably, and powerful. I would watch them strain and see their muscles ripple as they pulled a wagonload of wheat up the steep hill a half mile south of our place. It was a treat to accompany Frank to Hillmond for these trips usually promised hard candy in Arthur Rutherford’s general store. I remember coyote skins hanging on a store wall – each had brought someone a $25.00 bounty. Coyotes chased bad little boys, I’d been told, but they didn’t seem so scary now.

On one Hillmond trip Bob spooked a deer with a good rack of antlers. He chased it across the road right in front of us and got a futile but good workout. This was near the Allen’s and I’d always watch hard when we passed their place. They were reputedly a “rough bunch” but I never saw anything untoward. One of the Allen girls later became a policewoman in Edmonton so I guess they weren’t so bad.

Frank, Agatha, Roger and cousin Joan Perverseff photographed in Saskatoon in 1935.

We used to have dances in Tangleflags School. I don’t recall that much about them. I’d sit on Mother’s knee. I remember once that she wore a black dress. There was other entertainment -singing, mostly. Frank was a regular in this department and always got a lot of applause when he sang old favorites like Climb Upon My Knee Sonny Boy and My Wild Irish Rose. Mother didn’t like it when some woman would go up and congratulate him.

That was one thing about Agatha. She was possessive. If Frank even looked at another woman, it upset her and she’d let him know about it. When I look back now, it seems she carried her distrust of other women to extremes. I’m convinced she’d only have been happy if Frank were actually rude to them. She was strong willed to the point of being dictatorial sometimes no doubt thinking her education (allowedly good for a woman of her time) had prepared – nay entitled – her to tell others what to do. In our realm she decided the course of events, exerting her will in everything except farm finance. Frank made it clear when they married that he would “wear the pants in the family” when it came to money matters, and he did.

Living on a farm we may have lacked some city life niceties but there were still refinements. Agatha had a piano to play and was middling good on our tennis court even sometimes beating Jack Hickman who was no slouch. The one thing Mother seemed to enjoy most in life was talking philosophy. Having Alfred Abraham, a student minister stay with us one summer, gave her unlimited opportunities. The poor young cleric must have grown weary of fending off her intellectual parries.

That was something else about Agatha – her intelligence. She had a fine memory and a mind able to manipulate and exploit what she had learned. She may not have been a genius, but I think she came closer to that than most of us. One has to wonder if there isn’t a grain of truth in the old straw that genius stands next to madness; if not Mother’s quick mind had become a nursery where paranoia took root and grew.

Lorna’s death broke Mother, who became convinced that the Tangleflags farm was cursed. There was nothing for it but to move to Haralowka where her folks would help us make a new start. This running away from a situation of growing torment became a pattern as Agatha’s paranoia worsened. A new setting initially worked wonders but in time her nerves would start bothering her and the cycle would repeat itself. Frank resisted the idea of selling out and moving but Agatha’s will prevailed. The farm auction went well enough but we had to rent our land which didn’t sell. It was now the beginning of October, 1935, and with our house empty, we slept the night at Dubay’s. The next day our Model T Ford car carried us into a new life chapter.

A young Roger launches a flying model airplane he built.

Leaving the West Saskatchewan farm he had built up out of the wilderness and the people he had come to know so well was a wrenching experience for Father. Even though the Perverseffs welcomed us with open arms and open hearts and even though they would have helped us make a fresh start with land and equipment, Frank was sorely troubled. Nurturing a growing independence and self-reliance, he’d become a successful pioneer farmer in Tangleflags—made it on his own; was what the English so prided, a self-made man. And now the thought of accepting charity (for that’s how he saw it) was too much.

Then there was Mother’s affliction. Temporarily at bay in the first weeks in Haralowka, the paranoia that tormented her would return. Frank may not have known then the precise medical term for what she had but he knew the toll it took—how miserable it made life for Agatha and those around her.

There was more. Word came from England that his Mother was dying and his Father was seriously ill. Everything, it seemed, was conspiring against him. Separation resulted with Frank going to England and Mother’s restless spirit soon taking her to California.

Haralowka

Now nine years old, I entered what I call my Russian phase, experiencing Doukhobor/Russian culture in Haralowka as an unuk (grandson in Russian). Meanwhile, Mother sampled work life in California, first as a day nurse to a Mrs. Strictland, next as governess to a Hollywood movie director’s daughter, then as personal assistant to Madam Boday, a Los Angeles dowager. In turn she became a confidant to Julia Edmunds, a leader in the Oxford Group movement, then a teacher at Harding Military Academy where a fellow teacher was nominally a prince of the long since deposed Bourbon family. Prince Bruce de Bourbon de Conde was then simply a commissioned U.S. Army officer. Like Agatha, Captain Conde had an adventurous spirit and after World War II service in Europe, ended up as an administrator in the Arab Emirates where intrigue brought him to an untimely end.

A nine-year-old learns quickly and I was soon able to speak Russian with Grandmother at an elementary level – things like, “I’m hungry”, “I wish to have water”, “shall I fetch the eggs”, “where are we going?”, “When do you want me to get the cows”, “give me”, “here”, “I want to sleep”, and (I remember ruefully now) “please give me money”. I later became friends with a second cousin named Sam “Sammy” Perverseff. His family lived a quarter mile east of us and in the winter time I would ride to school with him on his horse-drawn stone-boat. Sammy introduced me to a lot more Russian, mostly words and phrases embracing life’s seamier side. A few years older than me, taller, and good-looking, Sammy was something of a Don Juan.

My Aunt Marion was still at home when we arrived in Haralowka, but her days there were numbered, for an Edward Postnikoff was courting her and they soon married. Edward was a likely young man but poor as a church mouse. Courting wasn’t all that easy then. He had to peddle the twenty-some miles from Petrofka on a bicycle to see Marion. But he had the right stuff and with a little help from Grandfather, became a successful farmer in the district.

Roger playing baseball at Jarvis Collegiate in Toronto in 1941.

Great Grandfather William and Great Grandmother Elizabeth had lived contentedly together in their little cottage. Since Elizabeth passed away soon after we arrived, I barely got to know her. Agatha, who looked after her the last while, said she was a very wise and practical woman. To the extent that the goodness of parents can have a bearing on the way their children turn out, William and Elizabeth were truly good people and John, their son and my Grandfather, bore excellent witness to that.

William suffered through his loss and carried on. Friends came initially to commiserate and later to visit. Grandfather Samirodin with his bristling, Russian Cossack-like moustache was one who came regularly. Well into his eighties, he would walk the three miles across snow-laden fields to our place and he and William would greet each another with kisses on each cheek and traditional words praising God. His advanced age walking prowess bore testimony to the health benefits of a lifetime diet of borshch and other Doukhobor staples and the rigors of good, hard work in the outdoors.

In 1937 I stayed a short while with my Uncle Jack (Dr. J.I. Perverseff), Aunt Anne, and their daughters Joan and Dorothy at their Avenue V South home. For the brief time I was in Saskatoon I attended Pleasant Hill School. It was a short walk from Uncle Jack’s and one day as I passed the Hamms (Uncle Jack’s neighbors) their German Shepherd grabbed my lunch and trotted off with it. Mrs. Hamm saw this and brought me a couple of sandwiches in a big basin. The Hamms may have been poor folk with rough edges, but I’ll always remember Mrs. Hamm as a good-hearted woman.

The Principal at Pleasant Hill School was Sam Trerice. It happened that the Trerices were friends of Mother’s and had spent a summer holiday with us in Tangleflags. Fortunate that was for me, because I soon got into a school fight that Sam, himself, broke up. The other poor fellow was grabbed by the ear and hauled off for rough justice while I went scot free. The lesson I learned from this experience was that in life it wasn’t so much what you knew (or did) but who you knew that counted.

We didn’t have television back in the “Thirties”. About the only time one listened to the radio was to hear the news. I was too young to be interested. We did have fun, though. In winter kids would get together to play street hockey or “shinnie”; in summer, cowboys and Indians. This latter activity was eminently fair and politically correct. Some days more Indians got killed; other days, more cowboys.

Roger and his Haralowka buddy Sammy Perverseff, a second cousin.

I was soon back with my Grandparents and attending Haralowka School. Muriel Borisinkoff, Sammy’s cousin, taught there and it wasn’t long before I discovered how good she was with the strap. Big Paul Greva and I were having a dustup about midway between the school and the barn when Bill Samirodin, a school trustee, drove up to fetch his daughter. Paul and I ceased hostilities and stood like innocents watching as Bill drove by. But it was too late. He had seen us fighting and amusingly commented to Muriel about her unruly pupils. That really stung a hard taskmaster who prided herself on her discipline. Summoned to the school, Paul was strategically in tears and I tried to feign innocence as we entered the side door. The situation was bleak. With tears streaming down Paul’s cheeks, Muriel took out the wrath she would have devoted to him on me – along with my share. In time the strap was outlawed in Saskatchewan schools, but I can attest to having intimately known its application before that happened.

If kindness was a Perverseff trait, then I was blessed. William and Lucille treated me like a favorite son. They fed me well and clothed me warmly. On Saturdays I would get the huge sum of 25 cents to spend in Blaine Lake where folks from the country gathered to buy groceries, attend to other matters, or just visit. I would go to town with John and Lucille or with Sammy and his folks. Later, a Tallman elevator man put a bare bicycle together for me – bare because it lacked handlebar grips, fenders and a chain guard, but it was transportation. Grandfather paid seven dollars for it and I surely got his money’s worth.

Life wasn’t all fun. I had to fetch the cows, help milk, turn the cream separator, and churn the butter. I’d also gather the eggs, carry wood to the house, help clean the barn and do other sundry chores. Sometimes when I was out in the yard around sundown, I would hear Grandmother whistle in an odd way. It was to keep the vadema (bad spirits) away, she said. I don’t know if it worked but I never saw the need for it myself.

Portrait of a Doukhobor Conscientious Objector: An Interview with Mike S. Nadane

by Jonathan J. Kalmakoff

Mike S. Nadane (1918-) is the son of Russian Doukhobor immigrants who arrived in Canada in 1899 and settled in the Kamsack district of Saskatchewan. Raised on the family farm, he received his early education at the Bonnybank one-room rural school before moving to the Town of Kamsack to attend high school. Upon completing his grade twelve, Mike worked at the Rexall Drugs store in Kamsack for three years and then established Nadanes Ltd., a general store with his brother Alex. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Mike refused to perform military service when he received his call-up papers. As a conscientious objector, he chose to perform alternative service instead. He was initially sent to Fort William, Ontario where he worked in a military aircraft factory. He was then sent to Montreal Lake in northern Saskatchewan, where along with 70 other Doukhobor men, he worked in a road construction camp, building Highway No. 2 between Prince Albert and Lac la Ronge. After completing his alternative service, Mike returned to Kamsack, where he raised a family and ran the store with his brother until his retirement in 1983. In the following interview, conducted by Jonathan J. Kalmakoff on September 23, 2011, Mike discusses his experiences of 70 years ago as a Doukhobor conscientious objector. 

Mike S. Nadane, Kamsack, Saskatchewan, September 23, 2011.  Photo by Jonathan J. Kalmakoff.

General

What is your full name?

Mike S. Nadane.

What is your present address?

Eaglestone Lodge, Kamsack, SK.

What is your date of birth?

February 3, 1918.

Where were you born?

On the farm, six miles south, three miles west of Kamsack in the Bonnybank school district.

What were your parent’s names and occupations?

Sam and Tatyana (Evdokimoff) Nadane. They were farmers.

Describe your upbringing as a Canadian Doukhobor. How did it influence you growing up?

Well, my dad – we never lived in the Community. Our dad went Independent and he got his naturalization papers – from Canada – and of course with that he was allowed to buy a quarter-section of [homestead] land for ten dollars – which they were giving away – which he did.

So we lived on a farm at the time I was born. The house I was born in became a chicken coop later!  [laughter]  It was a small house; dad after several years built a house that was, you know, like a house.

Dad – he farmed. When he started farming he didn’t have enough money to buy seed wheat so he bought oats. He broke on this quarter section of land that he bought about sixty acres that were prairie – he seeded it in oats. When he finished harvesting, he had six thousand bushels of grain – a hundred bushels an acre. At fifty cents a bushel, that was three thousand dollars. That was money. So he got friendly with a Jewish chap by the name of David Shwartzman in Kamsack – who ran a store – and he went in partnership with him; sold the farm for two thousand dollars, and had this other money, and he went in partnership. Well, he stayed in the partnership for a year, and it wasn’t his cup of tea. So he bought his farm back with his two thousand dollars, and he went farming again. [laughter] Got himself a line of machinery and went back farming. That’s where he spent the rest of his life – farming. He had cows, chickens, geese, ducks – everything.

We all ate meat – we were Doukhobors, but we ate meat. Dad – he was a small boy yet – back wherever he was, it was close to the Turkish border – in Tiflis. He was eleven or so years old; he went with this farmer and he was herding pigs and cows in the bushes. This farmer – he made him come to work sunup to sunset – he’d work for him all day and then go back home at night. While he was with him, they started eating meat then. When he was just a little fella. He said, “boy, it sure smelled good”.  [laughter]  So the rest of the villagers – they went blind after sunset – that’s the way it was. He was the only who could see. And his step-father – his father didn’t go with the Doukhobors, he stayed in Russia, and his mother, she married a Dubasoff. So, he says, we’ll eat meat. So that’s the way it was. And of course when they came to Canada, they didn’t stop eating meat. His step-father – he got his citizenship papers too, and they lived on the farm also. So dad worked with him.

When I was growing up, we had neighbours close by. We were on the northwest quarter; there was a neighbour across the road and a neighbour going west. These people – they were Ukrainians – the others were Doukhobors – they had a boy. I got to know him – think I was maybe four or five – he was my age, and a boy my younger brother’s age – Sam. So we played together – we all grew up till I started going to school. Then dad moved us into town.

Although I started school in Bonnybank. My two sisters and my older brother Alex – they had a previous education and they passed their grade eight school, so they had to go to high-school, and Kamsack was the place. And dad still had this little house, so he moved us into there. I started school in Kamsack in 1924-25. I went to high school and passed my grade twelve. During the summer holidays, I went back to the farm. Worked with four horses; six foot disc; two-share plow!  [laughter] And five sections of harrows. Did a lot of walking in those days. Of course the disc and plow I rode. Helped dad all the time I was going to school – every summer. When I finished Grade Twelve, dad, of course, he had bought another quarter-section of land closer to town – two or three miles out of town. And so he had that quarter-section and he kept the other farm too. So in the summer time, we moved over to the one closer to Kamsack, cause the farm that we were on didn’t have enough pasture for the cows; we had lots of pasture with this one. So we lived in both places.

Mom – we had chickens and cows and everything. So we were never short of food, anyway. A lot of people during the Thirties, they went on relief. Dad didn’t go on relief. Or anybody who worked for him, for five dollars a month.

And that’s the way I was brought up.

When I passed Grade 12, I got a job in the drug store – after 1936-1937 I was through high school. I worked for Jack Lipsett at the Rexall Drugs store for about three years. Then my brother, he opened up a store. He was working for this David Shwartzman after he finished his Grade Eight. Dad sort of set him up on the business – it was a grocery business and dry goods too. I worked for him till the war started; then I had to go.

First I was sent to Fort William – I worked in an aircraft factory for the United States Navy. We were building Curtiss Helldivers. The deal was, of course, I got the regular wages that everyone else got, but I had to pay $25 a month to the government for being a Doukhobor. That cut my living down!  [laughter]  I was there until the war ended. After that, I came back to Kamsack and I worked for my brother, for the rest of the time, until we closed the store in 1983.

Outbreak of World War Two

Where were you living when war broke out in 1939?

In Kamsack.

What was your occupation at the time?

I was working for my brother at that time. He had his business set up at that time.

What was your marital and family status at the time?

I was married. I had my first child, Karen.

What was your personal reaction to the outbreak of war? What do you recall thinking and feeling when you first heard the news?

At first – we were friends with people and this one friend of ours, Louie Eckford, he was a chiropractor. We were together friends. He had joined the navy, and I was ready to join the navy too. But then, my folks stepped in and said “no, you can’t join the navy”. And so I didn’t join the navy. I worked for brother until I had to go to camp. First was I had to go to Fort William.

What was the general reaction of your Doukhobor friends and family to the war?

Everybody – they used to have meetings about this and that with the government when they decided we had to go to camp – they were negotiating about what they were going to do with the young people that were of call-up age. The government said that you have to go to camp – they would send us wherever we had to go, which was mostly building roads. I forget what the government wanted to pay us, but the guys who negotiated for us said, “well no, they’re going to work for fifty cents a day”. That’s what we got paid – fifty cents a day!  [laughter]

What was the general reaction of your non-Doukhobor friends and neighbours to the war? Did it differ from the Doukhobors?

They were sort of belligerent about that – friends, you know. “Oh yeah”, they said, “that’s not right”. But they couldn’t do nothing about it.

Did you belong to a Doukhobor organization during the war? If so, what organization?

My dad was what they called an Independent Doukhobor. They weren’t in the Community, you see. We had services at the Kamsack Doukhobor Society. They belonged to that organization.

A national registration was carried out in 1940. The Doukhobors were permitted to register their own people. Do you recall that event?

No. I went and registered with the government [myself]. I’ve still got my registration card.

Compulsory military training in Canada was announced in 1940. Did this change your views about the war?

No – that really didn’t change my view. What was happening was happening.

How and when did you receive your call-up to perform compulsory military training?

I forget the date.

Opposition to Military Service

Did you object to military service when you received your call-up?

Yes. I was a conscientious objector.

Why did you object to military service? What religious and philosophical beliefs led you to this decision?

Well, mostly because of my parents. Their wishes were that I don’t go to war. So I listened to father and mother.

Mike S. Nadane (centre with guitar) with two tent mates, alternative service work camp, Montreal Lake, SK, 1941.  He was 21 years of age at the time.

Alternative Service

In 1941, Conscientious Objectors were allowed to perform alternative service, or jail, instead of military service. What was “alternative service” and what did this involve?

It was explained to us what it was – I understood what it was.

Given your objection to military service, why did you choose alternate service?

I didn’t want to go to jail – and be a jailbird.

Did you have to report and register with the authorities for alternative service? What did this process involve?

Not really. When the call-up came up for us to go to camp, we got letters, and we were transported. They provided transportation for us.

Where were you designated to perform alternative service? Did you know where you would be going and what you would be doing?

Yes. They explained where we were going.

How long did you have to perform alternative service? When did it begin and end?

I think it was thirty days. I wasn’t there for four months – maybe two at the most.

The Work Camp

How did you get to the work camp?

They transported us by train to Prince Albert. And then we were put on a bus after that, going further north on Number 2 Highway past Clear Lake. We went to Clear Lake – there was a camp at Clear Lake – another work camp. We stopped there for lunch. And then they kept us going to Montreal Lake.

Did you travel alone or with others?

There were others that went with me. From Kamsack – there was Al Malakoe, Alec Kalmakoff, John Cazakoff, John Vanin from Pelly was with us. There were quite a few of us from Kamsack together.

Describe the work camp you stayed at. Where was it located?

It was at Montreal Lake.

What was the physical layout? What kind of structures?

It was all tents. Maybe 10 in a tent. I shared a tent with Al Malakoe, and Bill Malekoff – on the farm we were neighbours, half a mile apart. I forget who else we had.
The cook shack was a tent; the dining room was a tent. There were about 40 or 50 of us eating at one time, so they had a big long table there for us to have dinners, breakfasts, lunch.

They had a first aid van there for us. Outside of that, it was pretty much all tents. Everything was all temporary.

Did you know of other CO work camps in the area?

There was another camp at Clear Lake. There were 16 Doukhobors there.

Did you know many of the Doukhobors at the camp when you arrived there?

Well, the ones that were in Kamsack. And of course, a few from Veregin that I knew. Demofski and Mahonin and guys like that. John Vanin from Pelly. Yes, I knew quite a few of them.

Did you make many friends with Doukhobors from other communities?

Oh yes, we were all together. We would sing songs. Al Malakoe – he had a guitar, and we’d sing Russian songs like you wouldn’t believe!

Who were the non-Doukhobors who stayed at the camp? What were their names and what jobs did they perform? What do you recall about them?

The foreman for the roadwork. And the cook. They were good company. Nothing was said about anything. We just had one happy gang. Everybody got along.

What were your assigned tasks and duties at the camp?

I was what they called a “bull cook”. I helped the cook peel potatoes, stuff like that, and we served the tables. That took all of our time – we were steady on that. We were up early in the morning for breakfast – to get all the dishes on the tables. The cook, of course, had everything prepared, because we helped him peel potatoes and whatever was needed for him. He did the cooking, and it was ready to cook, ready to serve. There were six of us altogether [helping the cook].

Of the other Doukhobors?

The rest of the men worked on road construction – most of them. What they did, I couldn’t even tell you. Where they were working was about five or six miles north of us. So they went in the morning and they went out there in a gang and came back at night. They had their lunch out there. They had trucks – it is possible they rode out there.

Describe the construction work itself. What type of work was involved? Was it manual labour or did you operate equipment?

Most of it was manual labour.

Would you say that the work was difficult?

No, not really. Nobody strained themselves.  [laughter]

Were there chores at the camp besides the construction work?

There were fellows who cleaned the tent – swept it out, things like that. Latrines, things like that. They were assigned from among the Doukhobors.

Were there any special dietary needs in camp? Were there any vegetarians?

Yes – one especially, I’ll never forget!  [laughter]  Alex – he was from Pelly. He claimed he didn’t eat meat. But you put baloney on the table, and he lapped ‘er up like you wouldn’t believe!  [laughter]

Did the kitchen staff make traditional Doukhobor food?

I don’t remember [any Doukhobor food]. It was English food – soup, meat and potatoes.

Were there any opportunities for recreation and relaxation at the camp, when you weren’t working? What did this involve?

Everyone was pretty well on their own. Nobody really had anything really going. The boys in our tent – we would sing – and guys from other tents, they’d come in to join us. Singsongs happened often – pretty much every night.

I don’t remember playing any sports.

Possibly there were opportunities to go swimming and fishing – if you were interested enough to go some place. But I never went swimming or fishing – although the lake [Montreal Lake] was close enough.

What reading materials did you have in camp?

I don’t remember reading a lot; although we’d catch a newspaper every once in a while. But outside of that, I didn’t have any books, myself, to read. I don’t know if the other boys read or not.

Did you listen to the radio?

Gosh, you know, I don’t remember.

Were Doukhobor spiritual sobranies and choir practices held at the camp?

No prayer meetings. No choir practices [that I recall].

What main language did you speak in camp?

Mostly English – even among ourselves.

Did you interact much with the local Cree Indian residents?

No – none that I remember.

What visitors do you recall coming to the camp?

Yes – we had, the odd time, visitors. That’s so long ago, I forget what really happened. We didn’t have too many [friends and family]. Didn’t have too many visitors that way.

Were you allowed to take leave from the work camp?

No – I was there for the whole time.

Do you recall any disciplinary problems at the camp?

Not really, no.

Were you paid for your work at the camp? If so, how much?

We got paid fifty cents a day.

All and all, did you enjoy camp life?

I enjoyed it – I think everybody there enjoyed it.

When your alternative service ended, how did you travel back home?

Same way we came. In groups – some went to Blaine Lake, others [elsewhere]. Prince Albert was sort of the centre – they dispersed from Prince Albert. We took the train from Prince Albert – I did anyway, and the boys from Kamsack did.

What’s your fondest memory of the camp?

The companionship, you know. We were all together – having a good time, so to speak. We were all there for the same reason. There were no big differences of opinion among the group.

When you arrived back home, how was the attitude of your family and local people towards you as one who chose not to go to war?

Nothing very serious about anything. It happened – it happened. You went and you came back. The local Doukhobor people were supportive. The local people who weren’t Doukhobors – maybe they made comments, but it wasn’t a big deal.

What did you do once you left the camp?

I went back to work in the store. That’s where I worked until my retirement.

Did you continue to keep in touch with the other Doukhobor men you met at the camp?

Once in a while, yeah. I remember John Bondoreff – he was asking me about something one time. Every once in a while, we’d get in touch – most of the time by phone.

And the men from Kamsack who were at the camp with you – did you often talk about that experience, later in life?

Well, yeah, we always got together, and said what a good time we used to have.  [laughter]

In Retrospect

Looking back, seventy years later, how did alternative service impact your life?

I can’t really say. I did it – and that was it.

Do you still feel as strongly today, as you did then, about your objection to war?

Oh yeah. I see no reason for it.

Based on your experience in the Second World War, what message would you give Doukhobors today, or in the future, about war and military service?

Well, I’d say that war is not the answer to the questions that have to be settled. They should be settled peaceably, across the table.

There is a proposal to name the highway you helped build the “Highway of Peace”. What do you think of this proposal?

Well, I guess that’s a good idea. That’s good… I support that.

Thank you, Mike, for agreeing to participate in this interview.

Group photo of 54 Doukhobor conscientious objectors – alternative service work camp, Montreal Lake, SK, August 25, 1941.  Mike S. Nadane is standing in the third row (circled).

For More Information

For more information on Doukhobor conscientious objectors during the Second World War, see the following links:

The Dukhobortsy, 1822-1828

by Daniel Schlatter

Daniel Schlatter (1791-1870) was a Swiss missionary who lived among the Nogay Tatars on the Molochnaya River in South Russia between 1822 and 1828. During that time, he had opportunity to study and observe their neighbours, the Dukhobortsy. Schlatter was sharply critical of the Dukhobortsy, whom he viewed as materially prosperous but in spiritual decline and discord. He maintained a journal and recorded his impressions, which he later published in Swiss German in “Bruchstücke aus einigen Reisen nach dem südlichen Russland in den Jahren 1822 bis 1828: Mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Nogaÿen” (Huber, 1836). Available for the first time in this exclusive English translation, Schlatter’s account provides a rare, penetrating glimpse into this little-known period of Doukhobor history. Translated by Gunter Schaarschmidt for the Doukhobor Genealogy Website. Afterword by Jonathan J. Kalmakoff.

Other neighbours of the Nogay Tartars are the Dukhobortsy whose self-identifying name means “Spiritual Ones; those born [sic] from the Spirit”. They are a sect that split from the Russian-Greek [Orthodox] Church and its members now reside in large and pretty villages on the right bank of the Molochna [Molochnaya] and of Lake Molochna. They are people who were no longer satisfied with the ritual and ceremonial practices of the Church and who believed they had sought and found something better. Especially by reading the Holy Scriptures (which had been spread in Russian by Bible societies that arose all over the Empire), they had been awakened out of their slumber and led to contemplating. A large part of them had been scattered all over the Empire even before the spread of the Bible.

A significant number of people, of both sexes, from various Russian provinces, in particular also from Finland and from the more enlightened Don Cossacks, separated from the great Mother Church. Neither forced exile nor imprisonment deterred them. As usual, resistance increased their zeal and the dissemination of new teachings and principles. Since all efforts to make them return to the Church failed, the authorities granted them freedom and allotted them landed property on the Sea of Azov. However, a few of them had to leave behind wives and children in the retention of the great Church. The reasons for the split [from Orthodoxy] as well as the religious beliefs among the dissenters were understandably not very uniform.

A mass of people who descended from various regions of the wide Russian Empire and differed in customs, practices and character, could not stay united. The character and views of the Cossacks in particular did not agree with those of the remaining resettled groups [of Dukhobortsy on the Molochnaya]. What kind of partial or religious motives may have caused a split [among themselves]?

Yet at the time of the foundation of this colony there certainly were truly enlightened or, even if labouring under a delusion, upright and well thinking people who were striving to worship God in spirit and in truth instead of in lifeless hypocrisy and formalism. However, gradually these [people] passed away; the spirit was extinguished and people got benumbed – and what started in the spirit ended in the flesh.

They rejected almost all outward means for [spiritual] revival and edification; they completely lacked religious instruction for youth; they relegated God’s written word – all this soon led to a great decline, disorder, irreligiosity, and even indifference to religion.

Many began to want to return to the Greek Church, or, separating again, hope to form a new sect. Many families returned to the Mother Church and left the colony either because they desired a physical worshipping of God or due to pecuniary advantage because the Government imposed severe punishment in order to maintain at least an external order. Yet others formed their own sect named Molokans and received new landed properties in the middle of the regions of the Nogay Tartars.

The Dukhobortsy are for the most part handsome, physically well-shaped people. They dress well and are industrious and capable farmers. Their villages give evidence of wealth. They engage a lot in cattle-raising and agriculture. A large part of them, however, indulge in envy, quarrels, indecency and all sorts of sensual pleasures. At the same time they consider themselves to be spiritual, to be sons of God, and to be God themselves.

If you ask them about their belief system, they give evasive or shrewd answers. And how could they account for their belief system since they do not know what to believe, are in disagreement among themselves, and, to be sure, may of them do not believe in anything at all. They have not accepted a proper Symbolum (creed).

Germans who served under them as farm-hands and others who have business dealings with them, say that the Dukhobortsy have meetings every now and then in which they sing psalms. It is also reported that they live in partial abstinence and that they still have many adherents in the interior of Russia and especially in the Caucasus. In addition, they are reported to have no proper teachers but recognize a supreme leader. Few of them are reported to keep Bibles, and if so, then in secret. Finally, a small better group is afraid of the larger group which exerts a lot of pressure on the former. Visiting English and American Quakers who were hoping to find similarities with their own principles among the Dukhobortsy already many years ago, were painfully disappointed in their expectations. 

View Tavria Doukhobor Villages, 1802-1845 in a larger map

Afterword

Daniel Schlatter (1791-1870) was raised in St. Gallens, Switzerland, where he gained a sophisticated education and a deep immersion in Pietist religious belief, which emphasized personal faith and salvation through piety, Bible study and prayer rather than church doctrine and theology. He was also strongly influenced by ecumenical religious belief, which promoted unity within and among different Christian churches and groups, as well as by physiognomic ideas that people could be physically and morally transformed through education.

From his earliest years, Schlatter was gripped by a passion for travel and adventure coupled with a fervent desire to perform missionary work among non-Christian peoples, and in doing so, influence and benefit them religiously and economically. To this end, at age 29, Schlatter set out for South Russia in 1822 to promote Christianity among the Nogay Tatars.

Schlatter arrived in the Molochnaya River region in Autumn 1822. He found himself a position as a servant in a Nogay Tatar home, shed his western clothing in favour of Nogay robes, and pursued the religious enlightenment of his host. He also became a frequent visitor of the home of Johann Cornies, leader of the Mennonites settled on the upper left bank of the river, with whom he formed a close friendship and enjoyed a lengthy discourse on Christianity. Schlatter spent much of the next six years on the Molochnaya, departing briefly to Switzerland in 1823 and England in 1827, before making his final departure in June 1828.

During his time on the Molochnaya, Schlatter came to observe and study the neighbouring Dukhobortsy living in nine villages on the right bank of the river. He obtained his information about them in part from his Nogay hosts, in part from the Mennonite Johann Cornies, from German labourers in the employ of the Dukhobortsy, and partially from the Dukhobortsy themselves.

Schlatter wrote approvingly of the Dukhobortsy’s industry and capability in agriculture and animal husbandry. He admired their “large and pretty” villages which displayed “evidence of wealth” and abundance. Schlatter also noted that the Dukhobortsy were “handsome, physically well-shaped people”; observations that no doubt stemmed from his interest in physiognomy.

At the same time, Schlatter’s Pietist and ecumenical beliefs made him sharply critical of mainstream Dukhobortsy society, which in his view, suffered from “a great decline, disorder, irreligiosity, and even indifference to religion”.

From a Pietist perspective, Schlatter was strongly sympathetic to the early founders of the Dukhobortsy colony, “upright and well-thinking” people who had been spiritually “awakened out of their slumber”, and were dissatisfied with the “lifeless hypocrisy and formalism” of Church ritual and ceremony. In Schlatter’s view, these “truly enlightened” people were “led to contemplating” and strove “to worship God in Spirit and in truth”. In doing so, they “believed they had sought and found something better”. However, with the passing of these early founders, the spirit of truth and enlightenment declined among the Dukhobortsy and was slowly extinguished. In Schlatter’s opinion, while the Dukhobortsy of the 1820’s “consider[ed] themselves to be spiritual”, they showed little evidence of the spiritual enlightenment of their founders.

Equally disconcerting for Schlatter, from an ecumenical point of view, was the lack of unity among the Dukhobortsy regarding their belief system. Disagreement over religious creed had led some members of the sect to leave the colony and return to the Orthodox Church, while others joined the rival Molokan sect situated on the lower left bank of the Molochnaya River. Those remaining in the colony could not, in Schlatter’s estimation, properly account for their creed “since they do not know what to believe”. This stemmed from the fact that the Dukhobortsy had been resettled on the Molochnaya “from various regions of the wide Russian Empire” and differed in their “customs, practices and character”. Their reasons for joining the sect were also varied. Thus, the religious beliefs of the dissenters were, from Schlatter’s viewpoint, “understandably not very uniform”.

For Schlatter, the roots of the spiritual decline and discord among the Dukhobortsy lay in the absence of religious education; sentiments derived from his physiognomic beliefs. He censured the sectarians for having “no proper teachers” among them and for completely lacking “religious instruction for youth”. He was disturbed by the lack of scriptural study and noted that “few are reported to have Bibles, and if so, then in secret.” In the same vein, he disapproved of their rejection of “almost all outward means” of spiritual revival and edification.

If Schlatter was a harsh critic of the Dukhobortsy, he reported much the same of the Mennonites he encountered on the Molochnaya, writing that their faith was “superficial”, formalistic, and showed little evidence of “true belief”. His comments must therefore be taken at face value, in the context of his particularly aggressive Pietist evangelical religious beliefs.

Schlatter recorded his observations during a period of rapid and profound transition within the Dukhobortsy colony. Prior to 1820, under the able leadership of Savely Kapustin, the colony was organized on a communal basis, was well administered and reasonably united, and relations with Tsarist authorities were cordial. The period following Kapustin’s death in 1820, by contrast, was marked by the abandonment of communal institutions, weak and ineffectual leadership, the decay of internal administration, disunity within the sect and a deterioration of relations with Tsarist authorities.  Schlatter’s writings reflect these changes, and are among the very few sources of published information for this little-known and little-explored period of Doukhobor history.  Therefore, Schlatter’s work is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the period.

To read more, search, download, save and print a full PDF copy of the original Swiss German text of “Bruchstücke aus einigen Reisen nach dem südlichen Russland in den Jahren 1822 bis 1828: Mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Nogaÿen” by Daniel Schlatter (Huber, 1836), visit the Google Book Search digital database.

Quaker Visit to the Dukhobortsy, 1819

Passages by William Allen and Stephen Grellet

In 1819, two Quaker missionaries visiting Russia, William Allen and Stephen Grellet, at the suggestion of Tsar Alexander I, travelled to the Dukhobortsy living on the Molochnaya River. Both kept journals and recorded their impressions. The following accounts are reproduced from Grellet’s “Memoirs of the Life and Gospel Labours of Stephen Grellet” (Longstreth, Philadelphia, 1862) and Allen’s “Life of William Allen” (Longstreth, Philadelphia, 1847). Together they are the earliest surviving descriptions by western observers of Doukhobor religious practices.  They also reveal the Quaker missionaries’ distress at the deep doctrinal differences they encountered with their Doukhobor hosts.  Foreword and afterword by Jonathan J. Kalmakoff. 

Foreword

In 1818, two members of the Society of Friends, English philanthropist William Allen (1770-1843) and French-born American evangelist Stephen Grellet (1773-1855) embarked on an extensive missionary tour of Europe designed to establish a network of correspondents “who have at heart the promotion of real vital religion…”.  They visited most countries and were respectfully granted meetings with many rulers and dignitaries with whom they discussed their Quaker beliefs.

In November of 1818 Allen and Grellet arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia where they met with prominent members of the Russian nobility.  In February of 1819, they had an audience with Tsar Alexander I whom they first met in London in 1814, at which time he showed a great interest in the Quaker faith.  The Tsar warmly recalled their previous meeting “saying that this meeting provided for him cheer and firmness of spirit…”  When the Quakers informed Alexander of their intention to tour parts of the Russian Empire, the Tsar observed that they “should be pleased with some of the people (i.e. sectarians) in the South….”

Allen and Grellet travelled to southern Russia in the spring of 1819.  In Tavria province, the Quakers first visited the Mennonite village of Altona.  From there, on May 29 and 30, 1819, they journeyed about five versts (an Imperial Russian unit of measure equal to 1.0668 km) to the Doukhobor village of Terpeniye, accompanied by German-born Superintendent of the Tavria Colonies, Samuel Contenius (1749-1830) and their Mennonite host.  In Terpeniye, the visitors were conducted to the Sirotsky Dom (Orphan’s Home) where they met with a group of several Doukhobors.  They recorded the following accounts of their visit.

William Allen’s Account

In the evening, Contenius and our host accompanied us a distance of about five versts to Terpeniye, a village where there is a settlement of one of the sects of the Dukhobortsy.  We crossed the Molochnaya river, and on our arrival, were conducted to the house where they are in the practice of meeting on public occasions, and where we found several of the fraternity.  They were well dressed according to the custom of the country, but there was something in their countenances which I did not quite like.

William Allen (1770-1843)

We had some conversation through Contenius, and informed them that we had heard in England of the persecution they had endured, and also of the humane interposition of the Emperor, on their behalf, – that while we had felt sympathy with them in their sufferings, we wished to know from themselves what were their religious principles.  It soon appeared, however, that they have no fixed principles; there was a studied evasion in their answers, and though they readily quoted texts, it is plain they do not acknowledge the authority of scripture, and have some very erroneous notions.  I was anxious to ascertain their belief respecting our Saviour, but could learn nothing satisfactory.

Stephen endeavoured, through Contenius, to convince them of their errors on some points, but they appear in a very dark state; they have driven out from among them, all those persons called Dukhobortsy, who receive scriptural truth, and who are of the class with whom we were so much pleased at Ekaterinoslav.  My spirit was greatly affected, and I came away from them much depressed.

The following morning (First-day) was also spent with the Dukhobortsy; a considerable number attended what they called their worship, but some of their ceremonies were painful to witness.  They manifested great ignorance on the subject of religion, and the interview did not prove more satisfactory than that on the preceding day.  An opportunity was however afforded for some gospel labour among them.

Stephen Grellet’s Account

29th of Fifth month. This afternoon we went to the principal village of the Dukhobortsy; they inhabit several others near. We went to the abode of the chief man among them. He is ninety years old, nearly blind, but very active in body and mind. He appears to be a robust, strong man. Fourteen others of their elders or chief men were with him. We had a long conference with them. He was the chief speaker. We found him very evasive in several of his answers to our inquiries.

They however stated unequivocally, that they do not believe in the authority of the Scriptures. They look upon Jesus Christ in no other light than that of a good man. They therefore have no confidence in him as a Saviour from sin. They say that they believe that there is a spirit in man, to teach and lead him in the right way, and in support of this they were fluent in the quotation of Scripture texts, which they teach to their children; but they will not allow any of their people to have a Bible among them.

We inquired about their mode of worship. They said they met together to sing some of the Psalms of David. Respecting their manner of solemnizing their marriages, they declined giving an answer; but a very favourite reply to some of our questions, was, “the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.” We found however that they have no stated times for their meetings for worship; but that tomorrow, which is First-day, they intend to have one, and this, they said we might attend, and see for ourselves. We left them with heavy hearts and returned to Altona.

Stephen Grellet (1773-1855)

First-day, 30th. I had a sleepless night; my mind being under great weight of exercise for the Dukhobortsy. I felt much for these people, thus darkened by their leaders, and I did not apprehend that I should stand acquitted in the Divine sight, without seeking for an opportunity to expostulate with them, and to proclaim that salvation which comes by Jesus Christ. It appeared best to go back to their village, and see what opportunity the Lord would open for it, after their meeting, whilst they are all congregated. My dear Allen and Contenius felt very tenderly with me on the occasion. We rode again to their village in the morning; having previously appointed a meeting here among the Mennonites to be held in the afternoon.

The Dukhobortsy collected, at about ten o’clock, on a spacious spot of ground out of doors; they all stood, forming a large circle; all the men on the left hand of the old man, and the women on his right; the children of both sexes formed the opposite side of the circle; they were all cleanly dressed; an old woman was next to the old man: she began by singing what they call a Psalm; the other women joined in it; then the man next the old man, taking him by the hand, stepped in front of him, each bowed down very low to one another three times and then twice to the women, who returned the salute; that man resuming his place, the one next to him performed the same ceremony to the old man, and to the women; then, by turns, all the others, even the boys, came and kissed three times the one in the circle above him, instead of bowing. When the men and boys had accomplished this, the women did the same to each other; then the girls; the singing continuing the whole time.

It took them nearly an hour to perform this round of bowing and kissing; then the old woman, in a fluent manner, uttered what they called a prayer, and their worship concluded; but no seriousness appeared over them at any time.

O how was my soul bowed before the Lord, earnestly craving that he would touch their hearts by his power and love! I felt also much towards the young people. I embraced the opportunity to preach the Lord Jesus Christ, and that salvation which is through faith in him; “If ye believe not that I am He, (the Christ the Son of God,) ye shall die in your sins.” I entreated them to try what manner of spirit they are of; for many spirits are gone out into the world; and “hereby know we the Spirit of God; every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, is not of God; but this is that spirit of Antichrist,” &c.

Whilst I was speaking, the old men appeared restless; they invited me several times to retire to the house, but I could not do so till I had endeavoured to relieve my mind of the great concern I felt for them; many of the people were very attentive, and the Truth appeared to reach their hearts. We then went into the house with the old men; they had a few things to say, but not to any more satisfaction than yesterday. We left them with heavy hearts, and returned to Altona.

Afterword

Allen and Grellet arrived in the village of Terpeniye the evening of May 29, 1819. A religious colloquy took place between the Quakers and the Doukhobors, during which the latter were asked to expound on their religious principles. The colloquy, which at times became more of a dispute, touched on the authority of Scripture, divinity of Christ, Doukhobor worship services and marriage rites. Allen and Grellet then returned to Altona for the night. They returned the following morning of May 30, 1819 and attended a moleniye (prayer service) which they dutifully described. The Quakers then attempted some “gospel labour” but the Doukhobors proved unresponsive to the missionaries’ entreaties. Allen and Grellet again returned to Altona “with heavy hearts”.

Remarkably, the names of the Doukhobors whom Allen and Grellet met with and held religious debate have been preserved in historical records. In Orest Markovich Novitsky’s classic work, Dukhobortsy: ikh istoriia i verouchenie (Kiev: Universitetskaia tip., 1882), widely regarded as the most substantial and comprehensive treatment of Doukhobor history in the nineteenth century, it is recorded that the Quakers met with those Doukhobors held to be the “main teachers” and “mentors” in their colony.  Their names are recorded by Novitsky as follows: from Terpeniye – Vasily Kalmykov, the son of Kapustin, Aleksander Krylov, Matvey Kuchaev, Grigory Malen’kov, Kirill Kolesnikov, Ivan Barbin, Fatei Zhikharev, Sergei Sukharev, Grigory Remez, Nikolai Zakharov and Stepan Tikhonov; from Goreloye – Abrosim Tomilin, Gavriil Sorokin, Ivan Ostryakov, Trofim Kalmykov and Ivlii Kudrin; from Orekhov (or Rodionovka) – Semeyon Perepelkin and his son Ivan; from Bogdanovka -Yakov Peregudov; from Kirilovka – Timofei Khudyakov and his son Ivlii, and Ivan Ishchenkov; from Troitskoye – Mikhail Bezlepkin, Mikhail Stroev; and in Spasskoye – Abram Samoylov. According to Novitsky, the discussion between the Quakers and Doukhobors was dominated by Grigory Malen’kov and Grigory Remez, who willingly joined in the religious debate, which lasted as much as half a day, and whose responses to the Quakers’ questions “did honour to the most clever sophist”.  The revered Doukhobor leader Savely Kapustin was not himself present at the debate, as he was then in hiding from Tsarist authorities. 

In any case, the visit proved to be deeply disappointing for Allen and Grellet. They found the Doukhobors to be “very evasive” in several of their replies to their inquiries. What the Quakers did not take sufficiently into account, however, was the intensity of persecution that had made the Doukhobors evolve evasion as a means of dealing with the authorities or with passing strangers. On some points, however, the Doukhobors made no attempt to conceal their religious views. They “stated unequivocally” that they denied the divine authority of the Scriptures and looked upon Christ in no other light than as a good man; views which scandalized the evangelical-based Quakers. Moreover, the Quakers, whose own worship services were characterized by strict silence and solemnity, were prudishly upset by the lack of “seriousness” they observed at the Doukhobor moleniye and by the rounds of bowing and kissing which they found “painful to watch”. Overall, the Quakers’ disapproval of the Doukhobor variety of folk Christianity implies a certain intolerance and insensitivity, tinged with religious bigotry.

View Tavria Doukhobor Villages, 1802-1845 in a larger map

The Quakers did not return to Terpeniye, but they encountered groups of Doukhobors elsewhere. On May 24, 1819 in the city of Simferopol, Allen and Grellet met with “five or six of the people called Dukhobortsy”. This group, the Quakers decided, was “of the right sort” because they “prized” the Scriptures. Similarly, on June 10, 1819 in the town of Nikolaev the Quaker pair “met a number of the Dukhobortsy”. This group had read the Scriptures and had “seen the gross errors under which they had been.” The Quakers concluded, however, that “their eyes [were] only partially opened…”. The Nikolaev Doukhobors told Grellet that “several” of the Molochnaya Doukhobors desired to read the Scriptures and that “they [the Molochnaya group] think that they see farther than their old men and elders.” Unlike the Molochnaya Doukhobors, who under the magnetic influence of their leader Savely Kapustin (1843-1819) had rejected the divine authority of the Scriptures, these groups still maintained the earlier Doukhobor tendency to follow the Bible as well as their Living Book. Moreover, in Nikolaev, the Quakers also encountered a group of Molokans who “were originally Dukhobortsy…”. These individuals told Allen that “many” of the Molochnaya Doukhobors “read the Scriptures privately, and teach their children to read them.”

The visit of Allen and Grellet to the Molochnaya, while painfully depressing for the Quakers, was to become for the Doukhobors a fondly memorable event. Eighty years later, during the voyage to their new Canadian home in 1899, a group of Doukhobors gathered in the cabin of a steamship and spoke warmly with appreciation of the Allen and Grellet visit to Joseph Elkinton, an American Quaker assisting in their migration to Canada. Interestingly, the Doukhobors told of a prophecy, purportedly from Grellet, which foretold of their persecution, exile and final deliverance to a foreign country “among a people of a different language.” There, the prophecy continued, the Doukhobors would prosper and be visited by members of the Quaker brotherhood. While the prophecy is no doubt apocryphal, it demonstrates the spiritual significance which the Allen and Grellet visit acquired among Doukhobors over the years that followed.

To read more, search, download, save and print a full PDF copy of Memoirs of the Life and Gospel Labours of Stephen Grellet  by Stephen Grellet (Longstreth, Philadelphia, 1862) or Life of William Allen by William Allen (Longstreth, Philadelphia, 1847) visit the Google Book Search database.

Shining Waters: Doukhobors in the Castlegar Area

by Vi Plotnikoff

Located in the Kootenay region at the confluence of the Columbia and Kootenay Rivers, Castlegar is the home of many of British Columbia’s Doukhobors. The following article by Vi Plotnikoff tells the story of Doukhobor culture and lifestyle as it evolved in the Castlegar area between 1908 and 1938.  Their unique communal way of life, sharing of resources, agrarian development, industry, schools and education, and politics and leadership are brought to life in text and photographs.  Reproduced by permission from “Castlegar, a Confluence” (Karen W. Farrer (ed), Castlegar: Castlegar & District Heritage Society, 2000).

From 1908 to 1913, the Doukhobors purchased vast tracts of land in the West Kootenay, but it was at Waterloo that they first settled in BC. Peter V. Verigin renamed the place Dolina Ootischenia meaning “Valley of Consolation”. He also named the community of Brilliant for its sparkling waters.

Village life

Upon arrival in British Columbia, the Doukhobors began constructing temporary houses. These were individual homes, small in size and constructed of logs. As lumber became more readily available, temporary houses were built as long, single-story structures.

In 1911, Peter Verigin divided the land into 100 acre plots and built houses, or doms, which were unique to the area and Tolstoyan in concept because of their uniformity. Eventually, as brick factories were built, the doms were constructed out of brick. Each dom was 32 feet by 40 feet, and was two stories high with an attic, and a half-basement for storage. The wooden buildings in the village were never painted.

Brilliant, BC, circa 1920. British Columbia Archives A-08737.

There were usually two large houses or doms in each village. They were built side by side, approximately 60 feet apart, and joined by one-story buildings in a U-shape. Often families with very young children lived in these buildings, ensuring privacy. They also served as storage areas and summer kitchens. Each large dom had a meeting room with a long table and benches, sometimes used as additional sleeping space. The enormous kitchen was the heart of each dom. It was furnished with a long dining table and benches, a large cook-stove, cupboards to store cooking utensils and dishes, and a huge petch, or Russian-style oven. By 1912, all the kitchens had piped-in water. The head man in each village and his family usually had two bedrooms on the first level. Upstairs, several small bedrooms opened off a long central hall. People slept on long, wooden beds resembling benches, lying feet to feet. Thus a family of four often occupied a small bedroom.. An attic made up the third floor. Each village usually had a room which was used as a maternity room or an infirmary. A courtyard was located in the middle of the square and used for activities, such as drying fruit, vegetables and grains. Barns and outbuildings were built behind the doms. Each village had a banya (steambath), which everyone in the village took turns using. The banya also housed a laundry.

Every village contained about seventy to one hundred persons, or ten to fifteen families, and was known as a “BC One Hundred”. The people in the villages were not necessarily related to one another, but were chosen for their skills and assigned to various villages that needed these skills.

Orchards and gardens were planted and the people produced nearly all of their food. Each garden had an abundance of sunflower plants as sunflower seeds were a favourite snack among the Doukhobors. Fruit and vegetables were dried in the sun or in drying sheds and stored for winter use. Vegetables and grains were exchanged among the villages, and wheat was shipped from the Saskatchewan Community villages, while the British Columbia Doukhobors shipped fruit to the prairies.

The economic structure of the Doukhobor community in British Columbia was based on the mir of Russian peasants. The central committee included Peter Verigin and a head man from each village, also the manager from each of the economic enterprises.

Each individual’s needs were supplied from the community fund. If a person worked outside the community, he handed over his wage to the community, where it went into a common fund from which all purchases were made. Each region had a purchasing agent and if an individual required clothing, food or supplies, he only had to ask. If he had to visit a neighbouring town for medical or business purposes, he simply asked for the funds to cover his trip. Thus, people contributed their labour to the community, and the community looked after their needs.

In 1917, under a Dominion charter, the Doukhobor community was incorporated as the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood (CCUB). All commune members received flour, potatoes, salt and shelter and every member received a sum of money, which varied from year to year. Widows, the elderly and the men received different amounts, depending upon their needs. Each male member was assessed an annual sum, depending on his earnings. The settlements were functioning as a single unit, with crops and produce being shared by all as necessity arose.

Daily life among the Community Doukhobors was fairly structured, with the men either working outside the community, or in various community industries. Women’s work was laid out formally, with a strict rotation of duties. One week, a woman might be cooking and serving the meals, while the following week, she would be weeding the gardens or milking the cows and separating the milk.

This system allowed each woman to work and participate in all aspects of village life. Although the women sewed most of the clothing for their families, the exception was the denim work clothes sewed for the men. These were produced in a community factory. Many of the older women spent much of their time spinning wool and knitting stockings and mittens. Shoes were sewn in a cobbler’s shop and harnesses for the horses were produced in a harness shop or chebatarna.

Children spent much of their time weeding the gardens and working in the orchards. They also helped the elderly pick nuts and wild berries. Girls learned to knit, sew and cook at an early age, and boys helped with the cattle and learned carpentery or blacksmith work. Both boys and girls up to the age of twelve wore a dress-like garment and went barefoot all summer.

Doukhobor communal workers at mealtime – Brilliant, BC, circa 1920. British Columbia Archives C-01490.

Meals were prepared and eaten in the large kitchens with everyone in the dom sitting down to eat together. The Lord’s Prayer was recited prior to each meal. Borshch and piroghi were usually prepared for weekends. Large pots of soup were served daily, and vegetables, fruits or traditional pastries such as vareniki rounded out the meals. Cottage cheese, sour cream and yogurt were also part of the diet. Tea or atvar (fruit juice) were the favourite beverages. Bread-baking was done often and in large quantities. The loaves were huge and usually round. They were baked in the petch which stood in a corner of the kitchen.

Living in a village was a social experience, for one was seldom alone. People of all ages gathered on the porches of the doms or in the courtyards in the summertime, working at drying fruits and vegetables, mending or spinning. Evening singsongs were commonplace and most winter evenings were spent in the kitchens near the petch, perhaps eating sunflower seeds. The babas (grandmothers) and children often lay on top of the warm petch and the children learned to recite psalomchiki, or listen to stories about Russia.

The young people socialized, at the sobranye which the youth from other villages attended. Sunday afternoons, group singing was popular, especially in the summer. Young people would often meet outdoors and dance to harmonicas. In the winter, boys played hockey on the sloughs, and evening gatherings took place indoors. The girls spent their winters working on needlework for their sunduk (hope chest).

On Saturdays, work stopped at noon. This was the time for visiting the banya and preparing for Sunday, when everyone attended the molenye (prayer service), and the sobranye, where business would be discussed and hymns sung. In the summertime, large sobranye were held on the meadows near the Kootenay River in Ootischenia where hundreds might attend, especially if the leader were present.

By 1922, there were fifty-seven sets of double houses, and several single ones built in the West Kootenay, and twenty-four in the Fruktova area. The largest settlement was still at Ootischenia with twenty-four villages.

Agrarian Development

Throughout their history, Doukhobors were agrarians, and upon their arrival in British Columbia, they immediately began clearing land for agricultural purposes. The first area to be cleared was Brilliant, and the second area was the lowest terrace at Ootischenia. Krestova had also been partially cleared by 1909. Soon afterwards, in 1912, the Brilliant bench, nearly all of the second terrace at Ootischenia, 160 acres in Pass Creek, several hundred acres in Krestova and nearly all of Glade was ready for planting. The Fruktova (Grand Forks) area was easier to clear because it was mostly open land, with little underbrush and a light stand of timber.

Many of the trees were more than three feet in diameter and over one hundred feet high. The timber was cut by two men using cross-cut saws, and hauled to community sawmills by sled in the winter. Smaller trees were cut and used for producing railway ties for sale and for poles, posts and small buildings on community property. Cordwood was also cut, both for sale and for use by the Doukhobors. The underbrush was cleared, using grubbing hoes, axes, saws and shovels and the brush was used as fuel for the community steam engines. A rotary drum and ratchet puller, and horses were used to clear stumps. Boulders were also removed using this method. Stubborn stumps and rocks were sometimes removed by dynamite.

Sorting apples at Brilliant, BC, circa 1920. British Columbia Archives C-01535.

As land was cleared, a five acre plot was assigned each village and the people immediately began planting. It was expected that food would be produced within forty-five days to feed a village and make it self-reliant. Crops included vegetables and berries. Wild nuts and berries supplemented the diet. Fruit trees were planted for commercial purposes, along with a large variety of berries. Grains and hay were sown in other areas. Soil at Krestova proved too sandy for successful crops; however, Brilliant, Ootischenia, Pass Creek and Shoreacres had thriving orchards within a short time. The Doukhobor communities in British Columbia used what they could, then shipped fruit to the prairies or sold it at local markets. Each village assigned about twenty men to work in the orchards and even more during peak times.

The Community Doukhobors practiced double-cropping, which entailed planting strawberries and vegetables between the young fruit trees. As the trees matured and spread, this method ceased because of the lack of sun. Ootischenia had the majority of orchards, producing apples, pears and cherries, mostly located on the second terrace. Grains, strawberries and potatoes were also grown there. Flax for linen clothing was grown in Ootischenia, the Slocan Valley and Fruktova areas. Woolen clothing was also highly utilized.

Linseed oil pressed from flax seed was used in cooking to a great extent, and the honey industry was flourishing. Flour mills were established in Fruktova, Ootischenia, Champion Creek and in the Slocan Valley, and flour was produced from grains grown on CCUB lands. Grains were grown in several places with the largest area being the northern part of the second terrace at Ootischenia. These ( crops included oats, wheat and millet. The broadcasting method was used to sow the grains, and harvesting was done by hand scythes. Various threshing methods were used, depending upon the amount of grain being threshed. If it were a small amount, large farm animals would be led over the grains, loosening hulls. Beans and peas were also threshed in this manner. If the harvest was a large one, either a horse-harnessed sled or a cog-roller was dragged over the grain. The sled was constructed out of wood, three feet by eight feet, with sharp pieces of small rocks studding the underside. This method was used by Doukhobors in the Kars province of Russia, who learned it from the Turks in Caucasia. The cog-roller consisted of a tree trunk with wooden blocks nailed into it.

Since all produce went into the central community, there was no need to separate the crops, and no need for fences. Crops were not fertilized by mineral fertilizers and there was not enough ‘natural’ fertilizer from farm animals to make much of a difference. This was cited as one of the reasons communities like Krestova did not succeed as agrarian areas.

Industry

The development of irrigation systems in the Doukhobor communities were of prime concern, and by 1912, two irrigation systems were in place in Ootischenia. A concrete tank measuring 75 feet by 125 feet and 14 feet deep was built. It held 1,000,000 gallons when full and was supplied by mountain streams. Located on the second terrace, it operated by gravity, providing water for several villages. A steam-driven, four-cylinder pump was located on the Kootenay River, supplying water to the reservoir through a fourteen-inch wooden pipe. A mill to manufacture staves for the wooden pipes was constructed in Ootischenia. The irrigation system was over seven miles long.

Doukhobor Reservoir at Brilliant, BC, circa 1920. British Columbia Archives D-01927.

Several sawmills were constructed on community lands, with eight mills operating by 1912. Other enterprises soon followed, including a brickyard in Fruktova, blacksmith and woodwork shops, flour mill, and harness-making and cobbler shops. A large honey industry was developed at Brilliant.

Soon after the Doukhobors arrived, they began building their own roads, ferries and bridges. In 1913, they completed the Brilliant Suspension Bridge. The bridge was part of the public highway system until the 1960s. The inscription on the bridge stated ‘Strictly Prohibited Smoking and Trespassing with Fire Arms over this Bridge’. Roads were built, connecting the Doukhobor settlements. The Doukhobors also operated ferries at Brilliant and Glade.

By 1911, more than 50,000 fruit trees had been planted, and the Community Doukhobors purchased the Kootenay Jam Company, which was located on Front Street in Nelson, BC. In 1914, they donated jam to the Red Cross for the families of soldiers.

Although Ootischenia had the largest population of all the Doukhobor settlements in British Columbia, it was in Brilliant where the biggest commercial enterprise was located. At the heart of this enterprise was the jam factory, which was relocated to Brilliant in 1915. It was called the Kootenay Columbia Preserving Works, but was better known as the Brilliant Jam Factory. The complex included a packing house, grain elevator storing prairie wheat, community store, gas pumps, offices, library, a dormitory with sleeping quarters and a dining hall for workers, also the dom of the Doukhobor leader, who also had a home in Veregin, Saskatchewan. Across the road from the complex was the CPR railway station with living quarters attached, and the Brilliant Post Office.

With the relocation of the factory to Brilliant, the production of jam was brought near the heart of the community fields and the output of jam increased. Twelve steam heated copper kettles were in use and the berries were picked and processed the same day. The factory also began manufacturing tin cans and lids for the jam. The community fields of Ootischenia, Shoreacres, Glade, Slocan Valley, Brilliant and Pass Creek provided the berries for the jam. Fruit from the Grand Forks community was shipped by rail. Harry Beach, jam-maker, introduced an old English recipe. It contained only fresh berries or fruit, pure cane sugar and water.

The irrigation system was further developed, with water from Pass Creek being brought in by wooden pipes to the Brilliant area. It was distributed by gravity flow. Two small systems located on the banks of the Columbia River brought water to the lower bench in Ootischenia in six inch wooden pipes to provide irrigation for the orchards. Staves for the pipes were supplied by mills in Champion Creek and Ootischenia.

By 1916, more land was acquired by the Doukhobors including two thousand acres of timber south of Nelson. In Ootischenia, one thousand acres were added to the lands there, extending toward McPhee and Little McPhee Creeks, and bringing in much-needed water supplies from the creeks. The rich soil of the Raspberry area was added to the Doukhobor community, and holdings in Pass Creek were extended by over 3,000 acres. Other land purchases included 360 acres in the Slocan Valley, and 240 acres across the Kootenay River from Shoreacres.

There was great demand for wood during World War I and the CCUB cleared vast tracts of land in Ootischenia, with the second terrace and the side hills between the benches cleared of underbrush and logged by 1921. By 1922, sixty acres on the upper bench were also cleared. The purchase of a steam donkey engine greatly aided stump pulling, but on the upper bench, the large trees were felled by hand, and the holes filled with dirt, thus large rocks below the surface would remain undisturbed, making the soil easier to till.

The eight mills in the CCUB provided adequate lumber for the Doukhobors, and up to three carloads daily besides. Some of the lumber was shipped to Saskatchewan for the CCUB communities, and the surplus was sold. By 1922 the sawmills dwindled to four as the lumber was exhausted.

A second brickyard was constructed in the Slocan Valley to supplement the yard in Fruktova. Bricks began to be used for the construction of the doms, and in the early 1920s, each village had at least one dom constructed out of brick, as fire protection. Other wooden doms were veneered with brick.

As the CCUB developed its industries and villages, fewer labourers were required, resulting in more men working outside of the community and contributing to the income of the CCUB. Some were skilled tradesmen, but most worked as labourers.

Doukhobor Jam Factory at Brilliant, BC, circa 1930. British Columbia Archives D-06930.

Despite the Depression, the Brilliant Jam Factory continued to flourish. Upon Peter P. Verigin’s arrival in Canada, the factory was enlarged and 24 jam kettles were in operation. The community could not keep up with the demand for fruit, so the farmers from Creston, Slocan Valley and Kootenay Lake areas began selling their produce to the jam factory.

During the Depression, household jam consisting of strawberries and apples proved the most popular because it was both economical and delicious. Commercial huckleberry jam was sold for the first time in Canada, but was not economically viable as the berries were not readily available. Other jams included plum, cherry, gooseberry, currant, apricot and peach. Large fields of raspberries were planted on fertile slopes and supplied to the factory. The Doukhobors named this area ‘Raspberry’. But it was the famous strawberry jam which was the most popular.

At peak times, sixty people could produce 1,050 cans of jam per hour, with shipments of 43,000 cases annually. Each case of jam contained 12 four pound cans. During one record-breaking trip in eastern Canada, salesman William J. Soukeroff sold 18 railway freight cars of jam.

From 1915 to 1935, Peter P. Zibin supervised the factory, followed by Mike J.Makeiff. The irrigation system in Brilliant-Pass Creek was very efficient, so it was decided to expand it by replacing the 15 inch pipe with a 24 inch pipe which was also made out of wood staves. The new pipe crossed the Kootenay River on the bridge at Brilliant. However, the wooden pipe could not withstand the pressure of water and attempts to pump it into the reservoir failed. Several Ootischenia villages obtained their domestic water from this system. The system feeding Ootischenia from McPhee and Little McPhee Creeks supplied water until 1953. A forest fire in 1933 destroyed the wooden pipes, trestles, and small pipes leading to the reservoir and damaged the watershed. This greatly reduced the output of the streams in the mountains east of Ootischenia. The water projects, which cost $438,000 to install, could not meet the needs of the Doukhobor community.

At this time, sawmills were abandoned, leaving only one sawmill and planing mill in the Slocan Valley and another planing mill at Champion Creek. They were destroyed by fire before 1938.

Schools and Education

The immigration of Doukhobors to British Columbia from Saskatchewan brought about new challenges to public education. First, there were at least 700 children of school age who had never seen a school and who knew little English. Second, there were the pacifist beliefs of the Doukhobors. Third, there was mistrust of governments by these new immigrants.

The Blakemore Royal Commission of 1912 recommended that “in order to give the Doukhobors confidence and secure their sympathy, some working arrangement might be made under which Russian teachers could be employed in conjunction with Canadian teachers and the curriculum modified so as to include only elementary subjects”.

In 1910, Peter V. Verigin constructed the first Doukhobor school in Brilliant, with eleven small schools being built in Doukhobor areas by 1920. It wasn’t until 1919 that Doukhobor girls were allowed to attend school, and even after that time boys largely outnumbered the girls.

In the next two decades many schools were built to accommodate the Doukhobor children. By 1923, school boards were held responsible for enforcing the attendance law, with compulsory age limit being fifteen years. By 1929, thirteen schools had been destroyed, mostly by arson. These activities were blamed on the extreme zealot group, who opposed the compulsory attendance law.

The name of ‘Brilliant’ was given to each of the schools within a five mile’s radius. They were identified as ‘Brilliant No. 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5’. Brilliant No. I began as a small school, with the teacher being principal for all of the five Brilliant schools. Eventually, overcrowding caused the school to close and a large brick school to be built. It was located at the junction of Pass Creek Road, Brilliant and Raspberry.

Group of Doukhobor schoolchildren at Brilliant, BC, circa 1920. British Columbia Archives D-01929.

In 1930 the school located in the south end of Ootischenia was burned as a cover-up to a theft, so classes were relocated to the old chebatarnia. The drafty old building housed forty students, so another classroom was hastily prepared in the front section of the building. These were Brilliant No. 4 & 5 Schools. The teachers lived in a nearby communal home and walked the four miles to the Brilliant Railway Station for supplies and mail. In the ensuing years, students from this school began attending either Pleasant or Cay Creek Schools.

In 1933 a brick school was constructed in Glade, resembling the Raspberry (Brilliant) and Fructova Schools. The school included a classroom at each end and a four-room teacherage in the centre. Although modern by the standards of the day, water had to be hauled from the nearby river and toilets were outside. The teachers found that one of the hardships of living in an isolated community was the drift ferry. If one wished to cross, one would call out “Parome!” (ferry) and it would be brought to your side of the river.

In 1935, Alexander Zuckerberg was invited by Peter P. Verigin to teach Doukhobor children in Russian. Classes were conducted in various Doukhobor prayer doms. Zuckerberg taught until 1961.

The first Ootischenia School was opened in 1942, consisting of three classrooms and teacherage. The building was not insulated, and the washrooms were outdoors. Wood stoves heated each room. The school was in operation for twenty years, until a modern facility was built. It was also named Ootischenia School and opened in 1963. Despite major additions, enrollment decreased and the school closed in 1986. Both buildings remain today, with the old school being utilized as a Doukhobor community hall.

Possibly the most isolated area in which the Doukhobors settled was Champion Creek. Situated eight miles south of Castlegar on the east side of the Columbia River, it was accessible by walking from Castlegar, then rowing a boat across the river from Blueberry Creek, or horseback riding from Ootischenia. In later years, you could risk your life by driving a vehicle, because the banks were sandy and there was the possibility of landing in the Columbia.

Champion Creek had a thriving population of five hundred people among its five Doukhobor villages. Because of isolation, the men came home only on weekends and holidays. Most worked for the CPR, in lumber camps or mines. The women did the bulk of the farming on the slopes high above the Columbia, growing fruits, vegetables, berries and hay.

The teacherage was located in one of the large doms, and sparsely furnished. Classes were also held in a meeting room of a dom, which was furnished with long desks and benches. Again, there were usually twice as many boys as girls. Wages were $100 per month, while other rural schools paid $79.

John Landis, who later became Mayor of Castlegar, recalled his years at Champion Creek School in the book “School District No. 9“.

I was assigned to Champion Creek School in 1956. The single room had ample space for its eight pupils from Grades 1 to 6. The teacherage consisted of a kitchen and a bedroom. Washrooms were two outdoor facilities past the woodshed. I soon settled into my first teaching assignment. The isolated area was far removed from a library or teaching tools. My copying machine was a jelly pad, and chalk and black on boards my sole visual aid tools. The parents supplied me with fresh produce, and I in turn, wrote letters on their behalf, and when I bought my 1938 Chevy, they received transportation to Castlegar.

“1956-57 was a cold winter, and the stove was kept cherry-red. During spring breakup, I left my Chevy past Blueberry, and then called for the boys to row me across the Columbia.

“P.E. activities were held outdoors except for curling. I used paper rolled out on the floor for a rink, and ink bottle caps for rocks. Curling became the children’s favourite winter pastime.

Isolation had caught up with Champion Creek, and in the mid 1950s, all that remained were three rundown sparsely populated villages. The school closed in 1958. Children began to be bused in 1956. Electricity arrived in 1960, the road was paved, and phone and cable services were installed.

Gibson Creek’s first school was built in 1924. It was small, dark and bare. A wood stove heated the one room and the toilets were outside. Water was hauled from a neighbouring home. Living quarters for the teacher were attached to the school. By 1947, the old Gibson Creek School was deemed inadequate, and a new school was built. It consisted of a stucco building with a large classroom and teacher’s apartment, and modern amenities such as washrooms, furnace room and lots of endows. By 1960 there were electric lights. The school was situated in a remote area. To reach it, one had to branch off of Pass Creek Road and take a scenic winding mountain road. During spring, Gibson Creek overflowed its banks and washed out the road, making it inaccessible. Heavy snowfalls hampered students as they climbed the hill. In 1963, parents withdrew their children from school because of poor road conditions. After that, the road was deemed public and has been maintained by the Highways Department. Gibson Creek School was closed in 1966 and its pupils bused to Pass Creek.

In 1948, a new school was built in Tarrys, just down the road from Thrums. To celebrate the opening, an open house was held. But before a single class could be conducted, it was levelled by fire – the work of an arsonist. Subsequently, the old school was moved to the burned site. It was known as Tarrys School. In 1954, a new school was built next to the old one, and the building of 1910 vintage was finally demolished. In the ensuing years, the school population expanded, and so did the school. Today, students from Tarrys, Thrums, Glade and Shoreacres attend this modern school.

Among Doukhobor students, various activities meant an absence from school. For example, the school register during the 1940s recorded the following reasons for absenteeism: Mrs. Verigin’s funeral, Peter’s Day, pilgrimage to Verigin’s Tomb, and celebration in honour of the elder Mrs. Verigin.

In 1945, when the Cameron Report on School Finance was given, it made no specific provision regarding Doukhobor schools other than that they should be treated no differently than others. “Every effort should be made to get them into the ordinary scheme of things.”

In the 1950s, the BC Government made an all-out effort to enforce school attendance among children in Krestova and Gilpin. Forty children were seized in one pre-dawn raid on Krestova and taken to an old sanatorium in New Denver, a nearby village located on Slocan Lake. The raids on the children continued for the next six years. The children were housed and schooled but not allowed to have contact with their families, except for every other Sunday. On that day, families would travel from Krestova and from Gilpin, the latter necessitating a two day trip in winter. An eight foot high wire fence divided the children and families. A molenye was held, and favourite foods passed to the young inmates. Farewells were said through the ‘chicken wire’ fence. The children were held in New Denver until fifteen years of age. The school closed in 1959.

The Golden Years

It could be said that the early twenties were the golden years for the CCUB. The Brilliant Jam Factory was producing high yields of jams, utilizing fruit from community orchards. The sawmills, flourmills and brickyards were busy, and there was plenty of work outside of the community. Most important of all, there was a noticeable spirit of togetherness among the people.

The Death of Peter “Lordly” Verigin

But on October 29, 1924, tragedy struck the Doukhobor community. Peter “Lordly” Verigin was killed in a mysterious train explosion in Farron, BC. Dynamite had been placed near his seat. Although eight others died, it was believed that Verigin was the target. John Mackie, MLA, was one of the victims, as was Harry Bishop, a hockey player with a Nelson hockey team. Others included a rancher from Grand Forks, two businessmen, labourers and a young Doukhobor woman. Although extensive inquiries were conducted, the murders remain unsolved.

Verigin’s funeral drew an estimated seven thousand people from across western Canada, many non-Doukhobor. After a lengthy and emotional funeral, during which hymns and psalms were sung and eulogies delivered, the leader was buried on November 2, 1924. His resting place was a rocky bluff high above the Kootenay River, Brilliant and Ootischenia, overlooking the vast enterprise he had developed. An elaborate tomb with intricate carvings had been erected, but it was blown up by dynamite several years later and replaced by a plain edifice.

Some seven thousand people attended the funeral of Peter “Lordly” Verigin on a hillside overlooking Brilliant, BC. Simon Fraser University Doukhobor Collection.

Peter Lordly Verigin was the ideal leader for the times. He had led the Doukhobors throughout the most turbulent period in their history, when they were at the mercy of various governments. He had counseled them to reject militarism from his exile in Siberia, which precipitated their move to Canada. After the loss of community lands on the prairies he had brought his people to British Columbia and established a large communal enterprise, which was at the height of its prosperity when he died a martyr’s death. It is no wonder that he is still revered today. “Toil and Peaceful Life” was the slogan he left his people.

Six weeks after the death of Verigin, a memorial service was held at his graveside. Four thousand people attended. They decided that the successor to Peter V. Verigin should be his son, Peter P. Verigin, who was living in Russia. He did not arrive in Canada until 1927. In his absence, the CCUB Board of Directors continued to function. When Peter P. Verigin “Chistiakov’ (Cleanser) arrived, he was greeted by enormous crowds and songs composed in his honour.

The CCUB under Peter Verigin Chistiakov

Verigin immediately implemented economic and cultural initiatives and organizational restructuring. He began by giving commune status to each village, with the CCUB providing leadership to these communes. Building on the structures already in place, he established villages or ‘Families’ in units of 100 persons, while on the prairie, 25 persons were allotted to a ‘Family’. A total of eighty communes or ‘Families’ were established, with an appointed headman from each village collecting earnings from his workers, making purchases, and paying levies and rent assessments to the CCUB for the entire village. Business between individual communes was done on a cash basis.

During the 1930s, CCUB membership was declining. This was attributed to a number of factors including the Depression. Furthermore, many Doukhobors were leaving the CCUB community and moving to towns or farms. There were also a growing number of zealots who didn’t pay assessments and who were sent to live in isolated settlements.

In the early 1930s, as a response to nude parades, several hundred zealots were sent to Piers Island on the west coast of BC. Their children were dispersed among mostly non-Doukhobor families for approximately one year. They returned to the communities of Krestova and to Gilpin near Grand Forks, earning their living by selling garden produce and obtaining outside employment.

CCUB losses by depredation were enormous, with flour mills, sawmills and houses, including the leader’s home being destroyed. By 1937, estimated losses totalled $400,000. These depredations, combined with the Depression, unemployment and declining membership, were major contributing factors leading to the bankruptcy in 1937 of the CCUB operations.

Doukhobors meet at Brilliant, BC with their new leader, Peter “Chistiakov” Verigin. Simon Fraser University Doukhobor Collection.

In ten years, Peter P. Verigin had significantly lowered the debt of the CCUB, however it was refused protection under the Farmers’ Creditors Arrangement Act passed by the federal government during the early years of the Depression. In 1938, Sun Life and National Trust Mortgage Companies instituted foreclosure proceedings on a debt of $350,000, dismantling a communal enterprise valued at over $6 million. On the verge of foreclosure by mortgage companies, the BC government became landlords by negotiating a $296,500 knockdown price on the amount owing. Those living on the land became tenants. The Doukhobors were allowed to rent their former homes at nominal fees.

Upon the dissolution of the CCUB, the centerpiece of the community, the Brilliant Jam Factory stood dark and empty. This once-bustling enterprise was a sad reminder of the thriving, golden years of the Doukhobor community.

The Doukhobors continued to tend the former community orchards and much of the produce was sold at Farmer’s Markets. Non-Doukhobor fruit-processing plants bought the surplus. Many people moved from the villages, seeking employment. They either became Independent Doukhobors or remained ‘Orthodox’ Doukhobors.

Following the dissolution of the CCUB, Peter P. Verigin established the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ (USCC) in 1938. Under his guidance, a constitution was developed, and a ‘Declaration’ stating basic principals.

Peter P. Verigin became ill and died in a Saskatoon hospital in February 1939. His funeral was attended by thousands. He was buried in Verigin’s Tomb alongside his father. During the leadership of Peter P. Verigin, more than a dozen schools were built, including Raspberry (Brilliant) and Fruktova Schools. Besides organizing the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ, he also established a strong USCC Youth organization. He left his people the following two slogans, “Sons of Freedom Cannot be Slaves of Corruption” and “The Welfare of the World is Not Worth the Life of One Child”. In 1940, at age 18, John J. Verigin, grandson of Peter P. Verigin, was appointed Secretary of the USCC, taking over many of his grandfather’s responsibilities.

Eventually, Doukhobor lands were re-surveyed, subdivided, appraised and put up for sale. By 1963, all former community lands, except Krestova, were in Doukhobor hands by virtue of sales.

Persecutions in Russia, the arduous journeys to Canada and British Columbia, breaking new ground, building new communities – the lives of the early Doukhobors were fraught with political unrest and heavy with toil. They were yearning for a peaceful life.

About the Author

Vi Plotnikoff (1937-2006) was a well known Doukhobor writer who wrote about her Doukhobor heritage for many years. She published a short story collection, Head Cook at Weddings and Funerals and other stories of Doukhobor Life (Polestar Press) and was a popular lecturer and teacher at Kootenay schools, including the Kootenay School of the Arts and Selkirk College. Prior to her passing, in a return to the roots of her oral tradition, she had begun storytelling. She also released a story CD, The Mysterious Death of a Doukhobor Leader.

Doukhobors in the Boundary

by Vera Novokshonoff, Lucy Reibin & Marion Obedkoff

Woven into the fabric that is Grand Forks are many different nationalities, and, with their personalities, their skills and their culture, they have enhanced “the Boundary” and given to this city a character all its own. Of all these nationalities, the Doukhobors, by their very numbers and distinctive culture have had a more profound effect on the character and life of the community than any other group. The following article by Vera Novokshonoff (Kanigan), Lucy Reibin (Plotnikoff) and Marion Obedkoff (Grummett) outlines the history and settlement of the Doukhobors at Grand Forks in the Boundary region of British Columbia. Reproduced by permission from Boundary Historical Society, Report Nos. 3 and 4, 1964.

Historical Background

The Doukhobors comprise a large percentage of the population in the Boundary District. A religious sect of Russian origin, their history dates back some 300 years. Encyclopedia Britannica has this to say of their religious background:

“The name Doukhobor was given by the Russian Orthodox clergy to a community of non-conformist peasants. The word signifies “spirit-fighters” and was intended by the priesthood to convey that they fight against the Spirit of God, but the Doukhobors themselves accepted it as signifying that they fight, not against, but for and with the Spirit. The foundation of the Doukhobors’ teaching consists in the belief that the Spirit of God is present in the soul of man, and directs him by its word within him. They understand the coming of Christ in the flesh, His works, teaching and sufferings, in a spiritual sense. The whole teaching of the Doukhobors’ is penetrated with the Gospel spirit of love; worshipping God in the spirit, they affirm that the outward Church and all that is performed in it and concerns it has no importance for them; the Church is where two or three are gathered gather, i.e. united in the name of Christ.”

“They hold all people equal and brethren. Obedience to Government authorities they do not consider binding upon them in those cases when the demands of the authorities are in conflict with their conscience; while in all that not infringe what they regard as the will of God they willingly fulfill. They consider killing, violence and in general all relations to living beings not based on love as opposed to their conscience and to the will of God. They are industrious and abstemious in their lives, and living up to the standard of their faith present one of the nearest approaches to the realization of the Christian ideal which has been attained. In many ways they have a close resemblance to the Quakers.”

Their renunciation of rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, as worshipping man-made images or ikons brought upon them persecution by Church and state in Tsarist Russia. This was intensified by their refusal of military service. Influential humanitarians, particularly the famous writer Tolstoy and the Society of Friends in England interceded in their behalf, and arrangements were finally made and some 7500 Doukhobor immigrants came to Canada in 1899, settling in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Group of Doukhobor immigrants aboard the SS Lake Superior, 1899. British Columbia Archives E-07233.

Subsequently, a majority of them refused to comply with the swearing of the oath of allegiance under the Homestead Act, and lost their lands which they had worked on. These were taken away from them. They then decided to move to move to British Columbia, where by purchasing land, instead of accepting grants, they avoided the necessity of swearing to swear the oath of allegiance. They settled predominantly in the West Kootenay and Boundary Districts.

Arrival in Grand Forks

Land was purchased in 1909 by their leader Peter Lordly Verigin. John Sherbinin, Sr., who in later years established Boundary Sawmills Ltd., was his interpreter at the time. John Sherbinin learned the English language in Swan River, Manitoba where he worked in a store the year these people came into Canada. Another associate during the purchasing was Nick S. Zeboroff.

The purchases consisted of the Coryell Ranch (the site of the Brick Yard) from the Coryell family; Murray Creek (presently Outlook) which was open range; the Vaughan Ranch (at the foot of Spencer Hill) from the Vaughans; 4th of July Creek (Spencer) from Hoffman; and the Collins place from H. W. Collins. This involved a total of 4,182 acres.

In March 1909, 12 men came over to Grand Forks by train, with two women accompanying to cook for them. These people amongst the Doukhobors were known as postniki, ones who wished to be abstemious to the point of not eating butter to eliminate the necessity of keeping cows, which would lead to having to sell calves for butchering.

The first group managed to house themselves in rough dwellings that were on the property. Until the warm weather opened up, they were occupied cleaning things up on the place. Another group of 14 came in April.

Industries

They put up a small sawmill just below the site of the present Doukhobor cemetery, and started to produce rough lumber (there was no planer) for the construction of their communal dwellings. Later, when a factory was established a brick siding was put on these buildings.

Logs were cut in the vicinity and were brought to the mill on horse-drawn dollies. In the winter sleighs replaced the dollies. Soon as the supply of logs was exhausted on the place, the sawmill would be moved to another suitable location. William Fofonoff was the sawyer; Alex A. Wishloff, the engineer and Philip P. Stoochnoff, the fireman.

Orchards

The same year, spring of 1909, they planted fruit trees – apples, pears, Italian prunes, cherries, and other plants, such as currants, gooseberries, raspberries, etc. George C. Zebroff and Andrew J. Gritchen were in charge of the orchards. The wives and families of the men-folk came over in the summer of 1909, to join in the communal effort.

Brick Plant

Production of bricks began the same year (1909) beside the clay pit where the Coryells had run a small plant. The same crude machinery was used. Horses supplied the power to turn the clay mixer. Bricks one at a time, were taken by hand and put in rows to dry, which took two weeks. They were put in a pile leaving air space between each brick, old bricks piled around them and covered with clay so there would be no air space. A big fire was built on both sides to burn until the bricks got red hot. Air was let in from the top to make the fire burn stronger. This went on for about a month and had to be under constant watch to make sure the fire did not get too hot for the bricks to melt, nor too cold for them to turn black. After this process, the bricks were put under a roof for further drying.

Doukhobor community brick factory at Grand Forks, BC, circa 1920. British Columbia Archives C-01714.

As early as 1910, the workers produced 22 to 24 thousand bricks a day. Even at that slow pace, 2 million bricks were produced during the summer. William Razinkin was the original man in charge. Later on, Mike Demoskoff and John Gritchen were prominent in the making of bricks. In time, machinery replaced horse-power, and the operation was put on a more efficient and productive basis. Bricks from the plant were widely sold. Their good quality established a wide and well known reputation.

Flour Mill

The Flour Mill was put up in 1910, with two men handling its operation. Wheat, grown in the valley, was brought to the mill and milled by grinding on a large stone without refining or discarding anything in the process. Bread made of this flour was dark, but very healthy. William Fofonoff (the original sawyer) was the miller, later replaced by his brother Peter. In 1917-18 production of linseed oil was started at the flour mill. This became a favourite product with the Doukhobor people. They were and still are particularly fond of using it with sauerkraut.

Development

The work of the first settlers that came in 1909-10 was to prepare living quarters and other primary facilities for those that were to follow. The lumber produced by the first sawmill was used in building communal dwellings, the first of which was built in 1910 near the site of the Flour Mill just below the present Doukhobor cemetery at Sion, formerly known as Fruktova.

Also in 1909, work was started on building an irrigation pipeline. A trench 2 to 3 feet deep was dug from First of July Creek to Sion following a line above the roadbed of the Great Northern Railway, and pipes were laid extending for about 2 miles to bring water to the newly planted orchards and gardens. A few years later when the Great Northern dismantled the railway track, the pipes were relocated to follow the road bed and enlarged to 6 inches in diameter to carry more water. Later another pipeline was built to supply homes with drinking water, taken from a creek running halfway up the mountain at Sion. Water was also piped at the Outlook settlement for drinking as well as for irrigation purposes.

In 1911-12 there followed more Doukhobor settlers with their families, so that by 1913 there were approximately 1000 souls living in the vicinity of Grand Forks.

With more people, the work of development progressed more rapidly. In those years there were built approximately 24 large communal dwellings by the newcomers. At the same time, the planted trees started to bear fruit, so that besides supplying the local needs, fruit was also shipped to other markets. A fruit packing plant was built in 1920. In those years a total of 120 to 130 carloads of fruit – apples, pears, prunes, etc. were shipped annually to outside markets, as well as some berries such as strawberries, black currants, raspberries, etc.

Doukhobor community blacksmith, Grand Forks, BC, circa 1920. British Columbia Archives C-01735.

The lumbering industry also expanded, sawmill operations were extended, tracts of timber stands taken and worked, so that about half of the men were employed in the lumbering industry. At that time most of the heavy work such as plowing and cultivating the land was done by horses, for which purpose every communal village had a team of excellent work horses, hay and feed for which were grown on communal lands.

Altogether the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood Ltd., to which the first Doukhobor settlers belonged, notwithstanding the fact that they lost their lands in Saskatchewan and had to go heavily into debt to buy land and other necessities, by dint of hard work and frugal living had built a thriving economy in the first two score years of life in Grand Forks, which continued to grow and increase in value.

It was still growing when in 1935 a canning factory was built to process tomatoes and other small fruits such as strawberries and raspberries. Unfortunately, this factory was burned down in the same year. Then came years of economic depression, starting in 1929 and continuing for a decade which had a serious effect on the economy and which was one of the reasons that brought the foreclosure on the mortgages held by financial companies, The Sun Life Assurance Co. and The National Trust Co. and the subsequent buying of the land by the Government of British Columbia to prevent mass evictions.

We deem it proper to return back and look on some other facets of Doukhobor life.

Communal Way of Life

At the head was the central administration under the leadership of Peter Lordly Verigin. The people were split up into villages represented by the large apartment-like houses, where from about 35 to 40 members resided. Each village operated separately, with particular tasks assigned to its members. Where necessary, the men were sent out to earn money outside the community, while the rest including the older folk, women and children had to do the work at home. In charge of each village was an appointed “Elder.” All the members contributed to the community according to their capacity, and were doled out equal portions according to their needs. In other words, you put into the community what you earned or produced, and received in equal measure with the rest of the members, what you required. Concentration was on a pure and simple life, without luxuries.

A policy of austerity was in effect both for spiritual and economic reasons. During the wartime in 1914, children were not fed any bread and ate a thick noodle soup instead. The rest of the folk were on a frugal diet of mamalyha made of beans, peas and wheat cooked together. At the time the Community had food in abundance, but it was not indulged in out of compassion for the suffering by the rest of the world.

Housing

A regular .pattern persisted in the building of homes. The main floor of the two storey brick houses contained the large communal kitchen and social centre or living room; the bedrooms were upstairs. In the kitchen, a long table or two stood alongside the windows with a special table for the children. The stove was in about the centre of the room, and there would also be a brick Dutch oven. The living room was used for occasions like a marriage, prayer meetings, singing group, a funeral or for visitors. Adjacent to the large brick house, there was a U-shaped unit of one floor rooms. These provided room for the older folk to sleep in, as well as washing and storage facilities.

Doukhobor community home, Grand Forks, BC. British Columbia Archives C-01729.

Meals

For each large communal house, two women, interchanging weekly had to do the cooking, and the baking of the large round loaves of bread in the Dutch oven. Children ate at a separate table from the adults. Four persons ate out of the same bowl using wooden spoons. This may sound unsanitary, but the fact remains that in those years there were few illnesses among the people and they were very healthy.

After everyone sat down at the table, a hymn would be sung. After saying grace, everyone would eat quietly, without making a racket with the utensils or idle chatter.

The most well-known Doukhobor dish is borshch – a type of vegetable soup. Other dishes were rice soup; cereal made from wheat; cooked halooshki, (dumplings in soup); blintsi (a sort of pancake); vinigret (a salad of beets, apples, beans, dilled cucumbers and sauerkraut); kvas (grated cucumbers and green onions thinned with water); vegetables and fruit. Tomatoes and cucumbers (as well as cabbage for sauerkraut) were salted in big crocks for winter use. Bread was dried, (like crumpets) for eating with rice soup. The main beverage was a fruit juice made from dried apples, prunes and other fruit.

Prayer Meetings

Prayer meetings in the early years were held early in the morning (before breakfast) on Sundays, as well as on some other days. It was the custom then to attend prayer meetings attired in homemade linen clothes, and in the summer months barefoot. Persons entering the meeting greeted the congregation with the words: “Glory to God!” To which those gathered replied: “We glorify and thank God for His grace!” At the meeting the women stood on the right side and the men on the left; in the center between them stood a table on which bread, salt and water was placed. Each person recited a psalm standing before the table. After recitations three psalms were sung and the Lord’s Prayer was said, the end of which all present bowed touching the ground, and said that they bow to God, His Son, Christ and the Holy Ghost. There followed the singing of hymns and discussion on any important matter that happened to come up.

In later years with the coming of Peter P. Chistiakov Verigin, the form of the prayer meeting reverted back to that practiced by Doukhobors in Russia in times past, as follows: On entering the meeting hall, a person greeted those present with the words “Glorious God is praised”, and the congregation answered: “Great is the name of the Lord and His glory is throughout the world.” Some of the men, women as well as children recited psalms, after which the congregation sang psalms at which time the second man in the first row came up to the first man, they clasped each other’s hand and bowed to each other two times, then kissed each other and bowed once more, then the second man turned and bowed to the women and they bowed in reply. After a number of men performed this ritual, which denoted their reverence for the spirit of the divine life that is part of man, their forgiveness and love for each other, the women performed the same ritual of reverent bowing. This being accomplished, a man stepped out near the table and recited the Lord’s Prayer, at the conclusion of which he said: “Here we kneel in reverence to Father, Son and the Holy Ghost,” and the congregation bowed to the ground. The reciter then said: “Christ has arisen,” and the congregation answered: “In Truth He has arisen.” The second time they bowed to the ground they said: “Eternal memory to Witnesses of Truth.” The third time they bowed saying: “God grant the living good health, forgive us and strengthen us in Your ways.” After this a few hymns were sung and time was devoted to discussions on matters of social and spiritual significance.

Weddings

When a young couple decided to get married, the boy, along with his parents, went to the girl’s house to ask her parents for the hand of their daughter.

In the ceremony that followed, everyone read prayers and then someone would read the Lord’s Prayer. The parents gave the couple their blessing and wished them luck. Then the couple kissed both his and her parents and bowed to their feet.

Doukhobor women haying on community land, Grand Forks, BC, circa 1920. British Columbia Archives C-01721.

The wedding took place two or three days later, for there were no engagement parties or rings given. The bride gathered her belongings together with the bedding and tied them up in a bundle (there were no hope chests at that time).

On the wedding day, the groom, along with his parents, went on a horse and buggy after the bride and her parents. When they arrived at the groom’s place, everyone exchanged greetings and wished the couple luck. Only the 30 to 40 members who lived in the big house, where the lived, attended the wedding. The food served was the same as a Sunday dinner. There was borshchplove, and atvar (a beverage made out of fruit). The clothes which the bride and groom wore were their best Sunday clothes.

Funerals

The dead were not taken to a mortician but were bathed and dressed at home. The coffin was also made at home. People came during the daytime as well as in the evening to share the grief with the mourning family. Prayers and psalms were sung in honour of the dead person. There were no dinner lunches served as there are now.

The dead were buried two and a half days after they died. On the next day the family and close relatives went to the grave to pay their respects to the dead. They sang hymns and other songs.

After a period of six weeks, the friends and relatives gathered once more at the grave in memory of the dead person. Once again they read prayers sang hymns. This ritual was repeated after a year was up.

Education

No special outfits were worn by the children when they went to school. Both boys and girls up to twelve years of age wore a dress-like garment. They wore no shoes and had nothing on their heads. The school age was limited to the age of 12 years, so very few children went to school; mostly boys.

Each district had a school to which the children had to walk. During the winter months, the children were taken on sledges pulled by horses.

The children were taught reading, writing, grammar and some arithmetic. They only went as far as grade five or six. Due to the fact that the children were always speaking Russian, and often had to stay away from school in order to help at home, their progress in English school was quite slow.

One of the first schools called “Carson School” was built close to where the Hill View Store is presently located. Later there was a school built at Fruktova.

At home the children were taught to read and write in Russian.

Skills and Crafts: The Process of Making Linen Cloth from Flax

The flax seeds were planted very closely together, in the Spring time. When the seeds were ripe, the whole plant was pulled out and tied into bundles. These bundles were set upright, in the sunny fields, so that they would dry thoroughly. Wooden clubs were used to thresh the flax so that all the seeds fell out.

Doukhobor children in flax field, Grand Forks, BC, circa 1920. British Columbia Archives C-01745.

The stocks were then soaked in water for about two weeks. When the stocks were saturated with water, they were put into bundles and once again dried in the sun. Then, the stocks were put into a block of wood (that had been hollowed out), and were threshed by a large wooden hammer to soften the cellulose. They were then put through home-made combs dividing the stock into thin fibres (by now, all the waste materials had fallen off). The thin fibres were put through a spinning wheel and put tightly on a wooden roll. After the yarn was taken off the wooden roll, it was put into a solution of hot water and flax seed in order to make the yarn slippery. It was wrung, pounded and hung out to dry. When it was dry, the yarns were separated and put on a home-made machine for weaving. There were about 30 yards in one weaving. The cloth was then ready for bleaching.

White ash (taken from burnt weeds and sunflower stems) was gathered and put into boiling water. After this solution stood for a while, it was strained through a canvas sheet. The cloth was placed in that solution and stayed there for two days. A thorough washing was given to the cloth after it was taken out of the solution; and it was placed in the sun to dry. When the cloth had dried, it was placed on a wooden roller used for ironing, and pounded with a flat stick which resembled a scrub board. Then the cloth was ready to be used for sewing.

After the sheep had been sheared, the wool was washed, dried and combed with home-made combs. It was then spun into a yarn on a spinning wheel. The yarn was placed in a paste made out of hot water and flour. After the yarn was dried, it was put on a home-made weaving machine. The cloth was washed with soap and water in a process of preshrinking. It could be dyed with different colours. The woolen yarn was also used to knit stockings, mittens and sweaters.

Other Skills and Handicrafts

The women busied themselves with other handicrafts such as embroidering, and crocheting various pieces. The men carved wooden spoons, salt and pepper shakers and various pieces of furniture. They also made spinning wheels as well as different of machines for weaving cloth. Harnesses were made out of leather, which was bought in bulk. There were shoemakers who made fine quality shoe of leather.

Conclusion

It seems proper to note that in October of 1924 the Doukhobor Community was bereaved by the tragic loss of Peter Lordly Verigin, who was killed in a deliberately set explosion of a passenger car in a C.P.R. train while on his way from Brilliant to Grand Forks. The explosion occurred just after the train left the station at Farron, B.C. He was an outstanding personality and gave leadership in the spiritual as well as the economic life of the Community, which deeply felt the loss of their revered leader. His place as the leader of the Doukhobors was taken by his son, Peter P. Chistiakov Verigin, who came to Canada in October, 1927 and who died in February, 1939.

Doukhobor farm near Grand Forks, BC, circa 1930. British Columbia Archives C-02659.

After it became evident that the lands and property of the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood would be foreclosed by the companies holding mortgages, he re-organized the Community under the new name of the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ, to which belong most of the Doukhobors living at present in Grand Forks. The name of Peter Petrovich Chistiakov Verigin is still revered by his followers.

The members of the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ, while living on an individual basis are still favour of establishing a communal or co-operative way of life. At the present time, they have in Grand Forks a large cooperative store and a service garage under the name of Sunshine Valley Co-op Society.

This brings to a close this short summary of the history of the Doukhobor people in the Grand Forks and Boundary area.

View Grand Forks, British Columbia Doukhobor Villages, 1909-1939 in a larger map