THE DUKHOBORS _ [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.1.
SIR,—The Dukhobors of Canada are in trouble again : in British Columbia some four hundred of them have been arrested for parading nude. And again, to their misfortune, it1s on. the nude parades rather than on the more permanent causes_ of Dukhobor conflict with established authority that emphasis has been laid. In one form or another Dukhobor disturbances. have been recurrent in- Canada since the settlement of the community there in 1898. Since the death of Peter Verigin the Elder they. have become more serious.. Under his forty years' rule the Dukhobors in Canada flourished. His policy of single leader- ship—manifested in the fact that, while he learnt English and was thus able to communicate with the Government, he dis- suaded his followers from doing so—did not entirely prevent the dissension common to Russian religious bodies, but up to the time of his death the Dukhobors still formed a compara- tively harmonious community. He was killed in October, 1924, in a mysterious train explosion which was believed to have been the work of some of his dissenting followers. His son, who became known as Peter Verigin the Younger, was elected to succeed him.
Peter Verigin the Younger was then forty years old. He bad spent a few months in_Canada in 1914, but the rest of his life in Russia. While he was there the Dukhobor community in Canada had grown from the original 7,000 settlers trans- ported with British aid to some 10,000. It had also divided. Some had remained in the Prairie Provinces. Others, objecting to taxation there, had gone further West to British Columbia, where for twenty years they have been a thorn in the side of the Government. Geographical division and the less powerful personality of Peter Verigin the Younger together made the dissenters' task easier. In the seven years of his leadership disSension has spread. In its most extreme form it is found among the sect known us the Sons of Freedom, who have caused present trouble in British Columbia. Soon after his arrival in Canada Peter Verigin the Younger renewed his fither's agreement with the Government about the attendance of Dukhobor 'children at school, and it is on this point that the Sons of Freedom have found the most fruitful source of conflict with his leadership. Many of them go to a school kept by Rubin, the Californian Dukhobor leader, in the winter, and come back to agitate in British Columbia in the summer. Not content 'with peaceful propaganda, they have also on oeccasion forced pitched battles with orthodox Dukhobors who respect the Provincial laws (incidentally thereby defying the peaceful tenets of the original Dukhobor sect). They have also gone further than the Dukhobori of other Provinces in dynamiting schools where the others are content to bum.
Many attempts have laced made to deal with them, but without . _ success.
- After thirty-four years of Dukhobor settlement in Canada the language barrier maintained by Peter Verigin the Elder remains to complicate a problem already difficult. In 1925. when the Premier of British Columbia gave an interview to Dukhobors complaining of their grievances, he could speak with them only through an interpreter. But essentially the problem remains the same in Canada as in Russia, and essen- tially the- same through:different sects. It is to recd.:Male to the requirements of modern citizenship the conscience of a people whose religion forbids obedience to " man-made " law,
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