Word: krestova
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more than three years, the village of Krestova in British Columbia's bleak, windswept Kootenay 'hills lay empty as a ghost town. Winter snows blanketed the black hulls of bathtubs, the skeletons of old beds, the charred frames of burnt-out houses. Wolves loped where the valleys once ran fat with cattle, and local ranchers gave the town a wide berth. Then, last week, life returned to Krestova (which in Russian means "City of the Cross"). A band of burly, hard-eyed men and women with thick Russian accents trickled back to the Kootenays. The Doukhobors were coming...
Disdain for the Flesh. Until 1962, Krestova had been the ramshackle capital of the "Sons of Freedom," a fanatical sect of some 3,000 religious anarchists and a constant headache to the Canadian government. The Freedomites are part of a Russian nonconformist movement called the Doukhobors (literally "spirit wrestlers"), who came to Canada in 1899 and now number some 14,000 strong. Believing that man owes his only allegiance to God, the Freedomites are violently defiant of all "worldly" authority, including the Canadian government. To show their disdain for things of the flesh (and reveal a lot of their...
...prisoners' families retaliated in typical Freedomite fashion. They stripped, set fire to their houses in Krestova and nearby Goose Creek, then marched off to Agassiz and laid naked siege to the prison...
...hand to work in the prison, asked for other books and schoolteachers, and slowly shed their traditional sullenness. To date, 14 have been paroled, and last week Canadian officials proudly announced that the first returnees applied at the Kootenay government land office to buy land in burnt-out Krestova. For the first time, Freedomites will be landowning, taxpaying citizens...
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