attended to the needs of the people. Religious services and all recreation were provided by
members of their own sect, as professional clergy and outside entertainers found little, if
any, welcome in their communities.

In spite of the ever increasing pressures on the Doukhobors to make more and more
contacts with the outside world, they managed to maintain a fair degree of isolationism. It
is stated that this was a result of the women who did not have the urge to go outside their
communities and thus had no occasion to learn the English language or the Canadian
customs. In addition to this they had an unbounded faith in, and reverence for their leader.
Loyalty to him, together with fear of the chaos outside Doukhoborism were strong factors
in the preservation of the sect. It was due to the influence of the women that the men
remained within the communistic system when their own judgement would have led them
to farm for themselves, even at the risk of excommunication from their sect.

Land Crisis of 1907

The 1907 Land Crisis between the Doukhobors and the Canadian Government
brought a virtual end to the communitarian experiment on the Canadian prairies. This
confrontation however, with all its implications and hardships, was not something that
evolved suddenly overnight. One can possibly view it as an apex situation that resulted
from a culmination of factors. Throughout the years prior to the final blow in 1907 the
Doukhobors had encountered several clashes with the Canadian authorities, clashes which
did little to enhance Doukhobor popularity.

The year 1902 stands out as an important year — possibly the turning point in the

history of the Doukhobors on Canadian soil. This year saw the rise of ‘zealotry’ among a
small fraction of the sect’s population. There suddenly appeared a fever pitched state of
passion or great zeal; an impatient enthusiasm displayed by a handful of individuals, as a
result of various physical, economic and psychological conditions. Some have gone as far
as to suggest that a social stress situation resulted due to a cultural clash between the
Doukhobors and the Canadian peoples. Some of the so-called ‘zealots’ protested their own
communities’ prosperity — a result of machines. Others suddenly acquired the urge to ‘go
back to nature,’ a philosophy idolized by some from undigested Tolstoyan sources via the
writings of their leader Peter Verigin. Still others visualized a demonstrated cross-country
march as a method of hastening the release of their leader from Siberia.
In 1902 a prairie trek of 1,700 people began rather spontaneously. People left their homes, released their cattle
(which they called “our brothers”), and trekked by foot to the Canadian prairie town of Yorkton, where the women
and children were held; the men, however, continued for another eleven days along the railway tracks toward
Winnipeg, Manitoba, where they were stopped and herded like cattle into train coaches, then shipped back.'8

Perhaps the main reason for this cross-country trek was the fact that the immigrants
were finding it very frustrating by this time, to be told by the many government officials
and political leaders that they must take up land in individual holdings, which included the
oath of allegiance (a legal requirement of the Homestead Act) or else lose the land that they
were given freely at the time of migration.

The year 1903 saw another major encounter which again did very little for the cause of
the Doukhobors. This year saw the first ‘Sons of Freedom’ march nude through the
prairies, in protest against what they believed to be a growth of materialism in their
brethren. Acts of arson — the burning of several binder canvases along with a Doukhobor
community home just added fuel to the already rapidly burning fires within the Canadian
authorities. These two techniques — nudity and arson had by now turned both government
and the Canadian community against them.

A continuing sequence of events and circumstances in the succeeding years only
brought the Doukhobors and the Canadian authorities ever closer to a head-on confronta-

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