Tolstoy

After translating Lao Tzu, Popov took up the cause of another Tolstoyan conscientious objector, who was about to be exiled to Siberia after serving his term in a disciplinary battalion. While visiting him at the central transit prison in Moscow in december 1894, Popov was intrigued by three men dressed half like peasants, half like Cossacks.²⁸ They were dukhobors – ‘wrestlers in the name of the Holy Spirit’ – and they had come up from their home in the Caucasus to meet with Pyotr Verigin, who was their leader. Verigin had already spent seven years in exile in the northern province of Arkhangelsk, following disputes with other dukhobors over his leadership, and he was now about to be sent to Berezov, in the Siberian province of Tobolsk, where he faced another seven years of exile. Popov introduced himself to the three dukhobors, swiftly arranged another meeting to which he could bring Tolstoy when he heard their story. It was to be a fateful encounter.

The lack of historical records makes tracing their origins difficult, but the dukhobors seem to have emerged from disparate groups of like-minded religious dissenters in the Ukraine who were forced to settle along Russia’s southern borders at some point in the eighteenth century. It was only under Nicholas I that they formed a distinct community, however, when in the 1830s they were again forcibly resettled by imperial decree in the more remote reaches of the Russian Empire’s new Caucasian territories, close to the border with the Ottoman Empire. Like many peasant sectarians, the dukhobors acquired a reputation for their abstemious, hard-working and humble way of life. Believing, like Tolstoy, that ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’, they revered the sanctity of all human life, thus were opposed not only to taking up arms, but to almost every aspect of the Russian Orthodox Church, since it supported the state during warfare. This meant rejecting all rituals, sacraments, icons, clergy, sacred buildings, and also the Scriptures themselves, in favour of seeking guidance from the voice of individual conscience. The dukhobors first came into serious conflict with the Russian government in 1887, when military conscription was introduced in the Caucasus, and the situation worsened in 1894, when all Russian citizens were required to swear allegiance to the Tsar.²⁹

Before his first meetings with the dukhobors, Tolstoy knew very little about their beliefs, since their existence was officially frowned upon and barely documented. Tolstoy could not meet Verigin himself, who was imprisoned like a convicted criminal while awaiting his departure for Siberia, but on 9 december 1894 Popov and Biryukov accompanied him to a meeting with the three dukhobors who had come to see Verigin off, one of whom was his brother Vasily. To his delight, Tolstoy discovered that the dukhobor views on private property, organised religion, secular authority and non-resistance to violence were remarkably similar to his own. Verigin had already made this discovery. Even before he had started reading Tolstoy’s banned religious writings (procured via contacts with political exiles in the far north) he had begun inciting dukhobors to renounce tobacco, alchohol and the eating of meat. Now he realised that a concerted application of the principles contained in Tolstoy’s writings offered an effective means for the dukhobors to stand up against the government. He started plotting various strategies for mass resistance.³⁰