B.C. attempts atonement to Doukhobors
Children seized from families in 1950s
There had been harbingers of what was to come. School burnings, mostly. And then, in the middle of the night, Oct. 29, 1924, when the Canadian Pacific train on the Kettle Valley Line stopped at the small station of Farron in British Columbia’s Monashee Mountains, there was a deafening explosion. Among the dead passengers were Grand Forks MLA John Mckie and eight others, including Peter “The Lordly” Veregin, the spiritual leader of the world’s Doukhobors.
Second only to the savage reign of the Ku Klux Klan in the American South, what followed was the longest, most spectacularly violent terrorist campaign in North American history. Until it petered out in the 1970s, factories, sawmills, canneries, bridges and power lines were dynamited. Rail lines were destroyed. Hundreds of homes and businesses were burned to the ground. Nearly 1,000 extremists were jailed.
It’s a good bet that most Canadians know nothing about it. There was certainly no inkling of this history in the formal apology the British Columbia government issued last month to atone for the apprehension of roughly 200 Doukhobor children who were caught up in their parents’ mayhem back in the 1950s.
In an expression of regret for confining the children to a school dormitory in the town of New Denver between 1953 and 1959, the apology comes with $10 million for wellness, culture and education programs, mental health services and archival research.
It’s not that the apology was unwarranted or that there weren’t grave injustices visited upon the Doukhobors, the “spirit wrestlers” that Russian literary colossus Count Leo Tolstoy, the Quakers and other philanthropists urged the Canadian government to take in as refugees from Tsarist persecution in the late 19th century.
The Doukhobors of the mainline Union of Spiritual Communities in Christ and their predecessor organization, the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood, were denied the right to vote, for one thing.
But the apology package has fallen a bit flat among its intended beneficiaries. Some say it has just reopened old wounds, and some say they’d have preferred lump-sum payments. Even the B.C. government’s own ombudsman is dissatisfied, saying the apology package didn’t go far enough.
That’s the way it is with apologies like these. They don’t necessarily address the prejudices and injustices they’re intended to remedy, and history tends to get warped and rewritten or moulded and bent to fit prevailing fashion.
The apology was offered in a general way to the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors — the Freedomites. These were the parents of the children who were forced to attend that school in New Denver. The Freedomites considered schooling to be an abomination, along with paying taxes, buying or selling land, registering for the census, eating meat, swearing oaths or keeping horses. They loathed and feared anything to do with the Canadian state — a paranoia the Doukhobors brought with them from living under the boot of the Russian tsars since the 1700s.
The Freedomites lived as squatters on Crown land, unwelcome in the orthodox Doukhobors’ vast tracts of communally-held land in dozens of villages in the Kootenay Mountains. They could have taken their children from the dormitory any time, so long as they agreed to let their children go to school.
Although they have largely integrated into the Canadian mainstream, it’s only a generation or two ago that the Doukhobors were a separatist, anarchist, pacifist, communist and Christian community. But the orthodox among them were not so obstreperous in their defiance of Canadian laws and conventions to warrant having their children forcibly removed from their homes so they could attend school.
Even the militant Sons of Freedom sectarians within the broader Doukhobor community were entitled to be left alone in their devotional eccentricities, which included occasionally staging mass marches, naked. But as for the decades of guerrilla warfare that caused the B.C. government to apprehend those children in the first place, you’d never know from the government’s various pronouncements around the apology that anything like that had even happened.
Although they tended to get blamed for it by a panicked general public and opportunistic politicians, it wasn’t the orthodox Doukhobors who were behind the violence. Most Doukhobors were as scandalized as their prudish Anglo-canadian neighbours by the Freedomite habit of indulging in public nudity, and violence ran against everything the Doukhobors believed in. The Doukhobors were the primary victims of the terror, which ebbed and flowed from the 1920s to the early 1980s.
The most prominent and longest-serving leader of the Freedomite terror cells, Stefan Sorokin, wasn’t even a Doukhobor. He was a former German Baptist missionary who divided his time between the Freedomite shack village of Krestova and an opulent retreat in Uruguay. Sorokin busied himself organizing arsonists and inciting violence against the mainline orthodox and pacifist Doukhobors, and conniving against Freedomite rivals.
Sorokin had insinuated himself into Doukhobor society by broadly hinting that he was Peter The Hawk — Peter The Lordly’s long-lost son and heir — and that he’d escaped captivity after being disappeared into the Soviet prison system by the Russian secret police. It wasn’t until 1962 that the Red Cross obtained an official explanation from the Soviet authorities that The Hawk had died in a Soviet gulag 20 years earlier.
No one was ever convicted for the blast on the Kettle Valley Line that killed Peter The Lordly. Suspicion turned to Bolshevik saboteurs, and some Doukhobors were convinced that it was the work of Canadian government agents, but it was hard to doubt the proposition that the Freedomites were behind it.
But all that is part of a disturbing, complicated and fascinating history, which is not the sort of history Canadian governments can be expected to grapple with anymore. The only history that’s currently fashionable for governments to tell is history we’re supposed to apologize for.