Word: dukhobors
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...aide to a provincial governor. As an already dedicated geographer, he set out to determine the course of the Amur River, a project that led him into a total revision of the geographical concept of Central Asia. He was impressed by the semi-Communistic "brotherly organization" of the Dukhobor sect. He proposed a sweeping agricultural reform, which was widely hailed. But then the whole enterprise bogged down in Czarist bureaucracies. "I lost in Siberia whatever faith in state discipline I had cherished before. I was prepared to become an anarchist," he wrote...
Tolstoy. His letters to Caucasia decreed vegetarianism, communal property, no alcohol, no tobacco, no soldiering, no sexual intercourse. These decrees made the Dukhobors more fanatical than ever. The Cossacks tried harder to lash them into submission. Over this persecution Tolstoy, Quakers, Christian Socialists, idealists everywhere seethed, then arranged a Dukhobor migration to the untilled Canadian prairies...
...promised to do so when entering Canada and were exempt from military service. They protested by ingrained habit long after oppression disappeared. They could not comprehend that Canada was not Tsardom, redcoated Mounties not Cossacks, census-takers not conscription officers, homestead laws not a landlord's tyranny. All Dukhobor benefactors (including Tolstoy) were soon fed up, regretted having burdened Canada with them. Said their former friends: "The sect ... is self-centred, self-righteous, and intolerant." "No more impenetrable group of people exist...
...Peter Verigin rejoined his followers in Canada. Together Verigin and the Dukhobors conspired to preserve their ignorance, secrecy, gregariousness, in time achieved a mild communal prosperity in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. When Verigin was killed in an explosion in 1924, surly Dukhobors whispered that "the Government" had plotted his death. They set fire or blew up scores of schools, and 600 Dukhobors were imprisoned for refusing to send their children to school. More clothes were shed. The Dominion thought of putting the unassimilable Russians on a reservation, like an Indian tribe. The leadership succeeded upon Peter's son, Peter...
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