Defenders of the Soul

Nearly 100 years ago some 600 families of Russia’s persecuted Dukhobory sect sought, and obtained, asylum in Canada. There they have earned a reputation for diligence and tolerance of suffering. But what of the Dukhobory who stayed behind, to face persecution under Imperial and Communist rule? Ivan Sergeyev made a rare visit to their Caucasian homeland to bring back this telling story. Photos by Yuri Pirogov.

Storks are everywhere in the remote village of Gorelovka in Georgia. Almost every house has a nest. And according to folk wisdom, they only build them on roofs that protect peaceful and hard working  people.

The Russians who inhabit Gorelovka are Dukhobory, members of a religious sect persecuted by the authorities and ultimately exiled to Georgia for their beliefs. For them, the stork has been no less than a good-luck charm throughout their extraordinarily unfortunate history.

Old people here argue that storks chose to nest in their villages when the first Dukhobor settlers started to build their homes.

“Maybe we managed to hold out because of them,” observed one man.

Strange as it may seem, storks don’t choose to settle in an Armenian village 20 km away. On one occasion, a householder from that village had the effrontery to come over to Gorelovka, steal some stork chicks and force them to nest on his house. The venture was a total failure.

The Dukhobory (literally, ‘fighters of the soul’) are adherents of a faith which originated in Central Russia at the end of the 18th century from among groups of ‘Old Believers1.’ They recognize neither the Bible nor Orthodox priests, nor the cross, nor icons. They neither build churches, nor attend services — they believe that their temples are “not in logs but in their ribs.”

They believe in never opposing evil with violence, and instead ‘fight it with their souls.’ This form of pacifism led to their being anathematized by the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1804, Tsar Alexander I exiled them as heretics to the southern province of Tavriya and in 1841 Nicholas I decided to send them even further — to the wild, savage and remote Georgian region of Dzhavakhetiya.

But even here they survived. Arriving in late fall, they lived through the winter in mud huts. Many children and elderly people died. Later they started building izby (wooden huts), covering the roofs with a triple layer of turf. In the valleys and at the foot of a nearby mountain they dug up thousands of tons of stone in order to cultivate the soil underneath. They got by one way or another.

At the end of the last century, they received both moral and financial support from the great Russian author Lev Tolstoi. In fact, his stand on their behalf was one of the reasons for his own excommunication.

To the Dukhobory, Tolstoi was a guru and spiritual shepherd. They had the same perception of God, the church and the clergy. In his essays, Tolstoi would often defend the Dukhobory against the oppression of the authorities and persecution by the church.

In August 1895, Dzhavakhetiya’s Dukhobory suddenly staged an act of defiance: they piled all their weapons on top of a hill and burned them, thereby stating their commitment to pacifism. This sparked the ire and indignation of the authorities. The Governor-General of Tiflis (now Tbilisi) ordered the several hundred participants and, most importantly, the instigators of this ‘seditious stunt’ to be flogged publicly with rifle rods. Many died in the process.

It was at that point that about 600 families resolved to leave Russia. The unfortunate Dukhobory, victimized for their beliefs, asked the Canadian Government for asylum. The funds for the passage and settlement were provided by Tolstoi himself, who gave all his royalties from the novel Resurrection to the now Canadian Dukhobory.

Today,  nearly 30,000 Dukhobory of Russian origin live in Canada. Older people still write to their relatives and friends in Gorelovka and other villages in Georgia. Some of the younger ones sometimes come from Canada to look around and make friends with their Russian fellow believers.

The Dukhobory have been settled in Canada for a century now, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are naturalized Canadians speaking mostly English and gradually forgetting their Russian. But it only takes a visiting Russian hockey team to get them rooting for players from their historic homeland.

The Caucasian Dukhobory, meanwhile, have kept doggedly to Russian customs and traditions for more than 150 years. People of the older generation still wear only homemade clothes. Each household has bread, water and salt, the Russian symbols of life, on its table. They have managed to preserve, at least until now, a unique little corner of the real, old, patriarchal Russia. Loyal to the traditions of old Russian villages, they do everything collectively, like helping neighbors in need or singing to share their joy.

An acute economic crisis in Georgia, though, has made the lives of the Dukhobory almost intolerable — the villages have neither electricity for their houses nor fuel for their tractors. And it’s getting increasingly hard for them to get to Russia to see their relatives.

As a result, seven years ago a new migration of Dukhobory began — this time from Georgia back to Russia. Thus, one of the last pockets of real old Russia (so ironically located outside it) seems to be disappearing. In some villages only 2-3 families are left.

“May God judge them,” say the babushkas who remain about those who leave. These women know for sure that they will never leave their land and, when the time comes, will be buried here next to their ancestors.

Those that stay see Dzhavakhetiya as a mountain haven free of the tensions and conflicts that have appeared around it. The civil war in Georgia went on for over three years. Just 20 km away is the border with Armenia, rent by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Meanwhile, this small community of Russians cultivates the land, plants and harvests crops, and rears cattle. They work to survive, just as their forefathers did.

If war and ethnic strife have passed them by, the realities of the market have not. Trade has increased in the Dukhobor villages, the most striking feature being that the sellers are exclusively Georgian or Armenian. The Dukhobory are mostly out in the fields, at the water mill or on the farm. They just keep on laboring.

“All these wars have produced lots of refugees in Georgia, Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, and many are now rushing to settle in our villages,” said Gorelovka community leader Lyubov Goncharova. “Now they’re buying homes from those leaving for Russia, mainly at giveaway prices. All they do is trade. I’m concerned now about the risk of this migration wave overwhelming the Dukhobory and what we stand for.  But God willing, we shall hold out!”

Goncharova is certainly trying. When she was elected, there had been no electricity for four years (they used kerosene lamps), bread lines formed at five in the morning, and people were leaving their homes by the hundred. Dzhavakhetiya’s Dukhobor community could have disappeared altogether.

Goncharova responded by organizing a restoration of the disused local water mill, built over a hundred years ago. People now bring their rye, wheat and barley from all over the neighborhood. Anyone with flour is always assured of a loaf of bread. Grannies teach their daughters, granddaughters and daughters-in-law to bake it in Russian wood-burning stoves, and  people in the Dukhobor community have felt a glimmer of hope.

The Dukhobory never ask anyone for anything. They always fed and clothed themselves without outside assistance. Even now, each Dukhobor family has an average of 3-5 cows, up to 30 head of sheep and plenty of smaller domestic animals.

Understandably, petrol and diesel fuel, so critical to farming, are almost impossible to find in Georgia today. To overcome the crisis, Goncharova approached the Russian Government for help.

Russia responded immediately. In six days, an Emergency Ministry convoy brought 100 tons of diesel oil and 557 tons of petrol the 2,500 km from Moscow

On the day it arrived, one elderly woman walked up to a young, tired-looking dust-caked driver and, with tears in her eyes, said what must have been on everybody’s minds:

“We’ve been waiting for you so long. One hundred and fifty endless years. We were afraid Russia had forgotten all about us...”

An Open Door

“This is me before the war at teaching school with my classmates... and this is in 1942, in Sukhumi2, I was 18 then, commander of a VNSO3 platoon. And this is a post-war picture — my students, my kids... Where are you now, kids, where are you?”

Nadezhda Kalmykova paused, and her face suddenly saddened. She teaches kids at a village school built in Gorelovka 100 years ago with money donated by Lev Tolstoi, her favorite writer. The only thing she disagrees with Tolstoi about is his philosophy of non-violence.

“If you stick by everything he says,” she said, “that means you can’t even defend your country against the enemy ...”

She lives in an old house with a clay floor built by her father, a typical early 20th century izba. In the corner is a Russian oven with cast iron kettles and oven forks. There are embroidered curtains on the windows and a kerosene lamp on the table.

“We didn’t have locks on our houses for quite some time,” she recalled, “we weren’t afraid of being robbed. Only in the sixties, when new houses were built with carpets and crystal inside, people began putting locks on their doors. The most disturbing thing for me was that the Dukhobory have fallen prey to envy — this was unthinkable before. It was sad to see how people were getting rich and at the same time losing their moral wealth. The human soul doesn’t tolerate emptiness. A man must have faith.”

But her conclusion was more positive: “Our Dukhobory will recover from this ‘disease’ and get back to real faith,” she said.

Nadezhda never had a lock on her door, and she doesn’t have one even now.

A Miller’s Tale

“Well, here you are at last,” said the miller with relief as he welcomed the dray, thinking Alexei had come to fetch the flour. “Look, I’ve got no room left to stack these sacks of flour.”

“Sorry, Uncle Petya,” explained Alexei, “this time I’ve brought you some reporters from Moscow, but on my way back I could of course take five sacks or so.”

...More than a hundred years ago, the Strelkov brothers erected the area’s first water mill on the edge of Gorelovka. Farmers from all the other Dukhobor settlements in Dzhavakhetiya started bringing their wheat, rye and barley to Strelkov’s mill.

But then this century a new era came. The Dukhobory were driven into collective farms, and the water mill was expropriated. Soon afterwards, power supply lines reached the Dukhobor villages and the water mill became redundant. All that was left was the memory and the ruins.

“Who could have ever thought we would live to use oil-stoves again?” lamented Petya. “The water mill had to be rebuilt to work. We’ve had new millstones hewed and chiseled, walls built and a turf roof put on top just like in the old days...  Now they all want to bring their grain here: people from our Dukhobor community, and Armenians and Georgians too. We’re never left idle. Sometimes we produce over a ton of flour daily. The mill helps people get along in these hard times. As long as we have bread, we’ll survive.”

Grandma Melanya’s Story

“I just went to school for two short years. And that was that: I had to go to work. First I was a hand at the cattle-farm, then I was promoted to milkmaid. But most of the time I spun and wove linen. In my lifetime I must have produced enough to clothe half our army... As for me, I’ve never worn anything from the store, just my own homemade things.

“What am I doing now? I’m stoking the stove, baking bread, tending the cattle. Just finished feeding the calf, he’s been poorly these last few days. I always find time to pull the wool, spin the yarn and knit socks and stockings for my grandchildren.  This distaff I’m using now was left to me by my grandmother. I keep myself busy; I’m just used to it. And anyway, I’m only 68, still a spring chicken! I’m handy with a scythe, and I can get in line with the guys and have a go at making hay. I tell you, some of them have trouble keeping up with me  in the field... I’m no teetotaller either. I don’t mind a shot or two to celebrate, a chat or a singsong with the girls, and sometimes we really let our hair down and do some square-dancing to let off steam.

“After the war, I remember, people would often go cold and hungry, but deep down they were happier than they are now. Youngsters today seem downcast somehow: they drink, dull their senses, start fights, and that’s all the joy they get. No songs to sing, no stories to tell, as our ancestors would say. When we were young, just as the warm spring days set in, we’d be out on the common playing games or dancing.

“A lot of things have gone out of the lives of us Dukhobory. Come back next year for our golden wedding anniversary... Then you’ll see whether or not the old ways and customs are still there to be enjoyed.

“Come and see us.”

^{2 A Black Sea resort, the Capital of Abkhazia}

3 Air Surveillance, Warnings and Communication