Spirit-Wrestlers

SLAVA BOHU, THE STORY OF THE DUKHOBORS--J. F. C. Wright--Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).

The Dukhobors are a Russian religious sect best known for their tendency to shuck off their clothes and parade naked through startled towns on the Canadian prairies. Less readily do Dukhobors shed the cloak of secrecy and deception in which they have hidden their affairs from a world they fervently mistrust. In Slava Bohu, Canadian Journalist J. F. C. Wright strips them down for good.

The Dukhobors ("spirit-wrestlers") congealed as a sect about 1700 in the reign of Peter the Great. By obeying only the "voice of God within," they sought to live in harmony, achieve Utopia. They soon developed a theocracy which, though as narrow as the Tsar's and Orthodoxy's, was at least of their own choosing. After generations of persecution, they were exiled en masse to Caucasia.

In 1886 the hereditary leadership of the sect was bequeathed by a doting old woman to her lover, Peter Vasilivich Verigin, who had "the body of a Greek god, the face of a Tartar noble, and the pose of a martyred Christ." Verigin publicly insisted, "I am only one of the brothers, a humble slave of God. . . ." But to many Dukhobors he was the Kristos, to most he was the unquestioned dictator, and to the Russian Government he was a nuisance. Exiled to the province of Archangel, Verigin discovered at second hand the philosophy of Count Leo

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 in 1899.

Settling in Saskatchewan, far from Peter Verigin, the Dukhobors were baffled and confused, succumbed to faction, fanaticism, hallucination. With $30,000 from kind Philadelphia Quakers the Dukhobors bought horses, cows, tools--only to set free the animals and destroy the metal tools in a sudden burst of sympathy for their "little brothers" (the beasts) and "the men tormented in the mines." They even refused to kill grain-eating gophers, which they snared and then freed in other people's fields. Singing groups of Dukhobors often marched off into nowhere looking for the Promised Land.

They began flaunting their bare skin because "Adam had no clothes before he sinned. We have not sinned." They thrived on arrest, seemed to crave martyrdom. They refused to register homesteads, furnish vital statistics, send children to school, although they had 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."

By 1903, 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 Petrovich Verigin, a Rasputin-like paranoiac whose mismanagement and personal vices helped ruin the Dukhobor's communal enterprises. The sect disintegrated during the 19305, but in western Canada there are still 17,000 Russians, confused and distrustful of everything.

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