Doukhobor leader Verigin killed by train explosion
Ninety-five years ago, Doukhobor leader Peter Verigin boarded the train from Nelson to Grand Forks.
Around 1:20 a.m. the train made a stop at Farron, a remote station in the Monashee mountains 34 kilometres west of Castlegar and 25 km east of Christina Lake. Then it blew up. “BOMB EXPLOSION KILLS SIX,” screamed a giant headline in the Oct. 29, 1924 Vancouver Sun. “PROBE BEGUN INTO TRAGEDY ON C.P. TRAIN.”
Grand Forks MLA John Mckie was also killed in the blast, which was initially thought to have been from the “bursting of the gas tanks beneath the day coach.”
But the gas tanks were found to be intact, which led Canadian Pacific Railway officials to speculate “the explosion was caused by some human agency.”
“Dispatches from Nelson state that police officials there are convinced that some explosive was placed in the day coach, and are investigating rumours that it was a plot to destroy the Doukhobor leader,” the Sun reported. “That the explosive was highly powerful was evidenced by the fact that every person in the coach, which burned up, was either killer or injured.”
The death toll eventually reached nine, including a 17-year-old girl, Mary Strelaeff, who was travelling with Verigin. Eleven were injured.
The 64-year-old Verigin was a charismatic but controversial figure who had led 8,000 Doukhobors to move from their native Russia to Canada in the early 20th century.
The first Canadian Doukhobor settlements were in Saskatchewan around 1900, but in 1907 Verigin purchased land in the Kootenays and many of his followers relocated to B.C., largely around Castlegar and Grand Forks.
They lived communally, were pacifists and refused to send their kids to regular schools, which would later lead to confrontation with authorities.
But there was also a lot of strife within the Doukhobor community. Verigin inspired devotion in some Doukhobors — he was called “Lordly” — but was resented by others.
“The more extreme members of the community earnestly believed that he was sent from God to lead them from Russian bondage into a promised land and were firm in the belief that he would never die,” said the Sun the day of his death.
“(But) for several years past there has been a strong movement among the members to break away from the community. The number of these independents, who in the main have proven decidedly unfriendly to Verigin and the community once they leave, has steadily risen.”
On April 20, 1924, Verigin’s house was torched, as was the school in Brilliant, the Doukhobor community across the Columbia River from Castlegar.
The suspicion was that it was done by the Freedomites, a breakaway faction that believed Verigin and the main Doukhobor community had become too materialistic.
The Freedomites were also suspected in the explosion that killed Verigin on Oct. 29. Others believed it might have been the work of the government, or the Bolsheviks in Russia. In the 1960s former Vancouver Sun reporter Simma Holt wrote a book on the Doukhobors, Terror in the Name of God, that advanced a theory that Verigin’s son had assassinated his father.
In 1993, Doukhobor historian Steve Lapshinoff produced a 407 page documentary report on Verigin’s death that looked at the original documents in the case, including police reports.
It included a 1931 interview by the old British Columbia Provincial Police with Archibald Blaney, a CPR engineer who had been on the train.
“While the train was stopped at Castlegar Station, two Doukhobor men entered the day coach carrying two grips, or suitcases, which they placed close to Mr. Verigin,” Blaney said.
“These men then engaged in a short conversation with Mr. Verigin, then shook hands, wished him good luck and left the train, leaving the grips or suitcases in the car.”
Did the suitcases filled with Verigin’s clothes, or a bomb that killed him? No one knows.
Lapshinoff looked at various theories and said they were “nothing but theories, without any direct evidence to back them up.”
His conclusion was that whether Verigin’s death was a murder or an accident remains “an unsolved mystery.”
Five thousand Doukhobors attended Verigin’s funeral in Brilliant.
His body was laid to rest in a handsome tomb that a Doukhobor website said was made “of dark polished marble, with classical colonnades and carved relief panels.”
But some Doukhobors felt the tomb was too lavish, so somebody blew it up on July 29, 1944.