Today, only about 100 Dukhobors remain in a close-knit, Russian-speaking farming community in two remote mountain villages in southern Georgia.
advertisementA 10-year-old boy stands proudly next to his father, listening to the monotonous chants of older women in embroidered headscarves and colorful long skirts. When Ilya attends a nightly prayer service for the first time in Gorelovka, a small town in the South Caucasus country of Georgia, he decides to follow the hymns that have been passed down for centuries.
There are no priests, no iconography. All it takes is men and women praying together, as the Dukhobors have done since the emergence of a pacifist Christian sect in Russia in the 18th century.
Thousands of their ancestors were exiled to the outskirts of the Russian Empire nearly 200 years ago for rejecting Orthodoxy and refusing to serve in the army of Tsar Nicholas I. This is similar to the thousands of people who fled Russia two years ago to avoid conscription. Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Today, only about 100 Dukhobors remain in a close-knit, Russian-speaking farming community in two remote mountain villages.
“Our people are dying,” Ilya’s mother, Svetlana Svetlisheva, 47, told The Associated Press as she walked with her family to an ancient cemetery.
Doukhobors with roots in the Russian Empire
In the mid-19th century, some 5,000 exiled Dukhobors established ten villages near the border with the hostile Ottoman Empire, where they continued to preach nonviolence and worship without priests or church ceremonies.
The community prospered, growing to about 20,000 members. When some people refused to swear fealty to the new Tsar, Nicholas II, and protested by burning weapons, the authorities carried out a violent crackdown and sent about 4,000 of them to live elsewhere in the vast Russian empire.
Nonviolence is the basis of Dukhobor culture, says Yulia Mokshina, a professor at Russia’s Mordovia State University who studies the group.
“Dukhobor proved that it is possible to defend the truth without using force,” says Mokshina. “They fought without weapons, with truth and inner strength.”
Their plight caught the attention of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who was also a pacifist, and he donated the proceeds from his last novel, Resurrection, to help some 7,500 Dukhobors immigrate to Canada to escape persecution.
Meanwhile, prayers never stopped, even as the Soviet authorities brutally suppressed religious activities.
Shaky faith?
“There has never been a single Sunday without prayer,” says Yuri Strukov, 46, proudly, in the village of Orlovka, where he has lived for 30 years.
Like other people in rural areas, Strukov owns cattle and produces cottage cheese, sour cream, and pickled cheese called suluguni, which he sells to nearby villages. His way of life is difficult. He must endure sub-zero temperatures in the winter and droughts in the summer, and his remote village is a three-hour drive from the nearest big city, making it no longer attractive to many Doukhobors.
“The community has changed because it has become smaller,” says Strukov, “and the fact that there are so few of us leaves a heavy residue on the soul.”
In Soviet times, the Doukhobors remained one of the best collective farms in the region. However, with the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, the nationalist sentiment that broke out in Georgia led many people to return to Russia in the late 1980s.
advertisement“We didn’t move, we came back,” said Dmitry Zubkov, 39, who was among the first convoy of 1,000 Doukhobors to leave Gorelovka in 1989 for what is now western Russia. Zubkov and his family settled in this village. Arkhangelskoye, Tula region, Russia.
Strukov also thinks about moving.
After several departures of the Dukhobor people, Georgians and Armenians (Orlovka is close to the Armenian border) moved in, and he says relations between them and the dwindling Dukhobor community are strained. His family of four are the last Doukhobors living in Orlovka.
But the prayer house and the tombs of his ancestors prevent him from leaving.
advertisement“The whole land is soaked with the prayers, sweat and blood of our ancestors. We always try to find solutions in different situations so that we can stay here and preserve our culture, traditions and rituals.”
Dukhobor rituals were traditionally passed from one generation to the next through word of mouth. Strukov’s 21-year-old daughter, Daria Strukova, feels desperate to learn as much as possible from seniors in the community.
“I always worry that if we don’t embrace this deep and interesting culture in time, it will simply disappear,” says Strukova.
She said she considered converting to the Georgian Orthodox Church while she was a student in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Faith is very influential there. But her doubts disappeared when she heard the Dukhobor Choir sing at a prayer meeting.
advertisement“I realized that this is what I was missing, this is nowhere to be found. Now I know that the Doukhobor faith will always be with me until the end of my life.”
Zubkov said Strukova’s wavering faith is not uncommon among Russia’s Doukhobors. After assimilating into Russian society, experiencing a big city, speaking the same language and sharing traditions with the locals, they will naturally be tempted by the dominant religion.
“People didn’t want to stand out. Unfortunately, we assimilated very quickly,” he says.
About 750 Doukhobors settled in Arkhangelskoye more than 30 years ago. Now only a few older women attend Sunday prayers, and only the Dukhobor sing the traditional national anthem at funerals.
advertisementZubkov predicts that within 10 years, the culture of Arkhangelskoye will disappear completely.
The Doukhobors, whose family started anew in Canada more than 100 years ago, do not feel a strong connection to the village that is sacred to the Strukov family. What matters, they say, is their faith and the pacifist principles it emphasizes.
“We don’t have any specific place or historical site in a spiritual sense,” said John J. Verigin Jr., who heads Canada’s largest Doukhobor organization. “What we strive to maintain in our organization is a commitment to the fundamental principles of our concept of life.”
But Ilya of Gorelovka finds comfort in knowing that his community, culture and faith are rooted in the place founded by his ancestors.
advertisement“Every day I see a tall man wearing Doukhobor clothes going to pray,” said Ilya. “I would love coming here. I still love it.
