A 10-year-old boy proudly stands beside his father, listening to the monotonous chanting of elderly women adorned in embroidered headscarves and vibrant skirts. This is Ilya’s first experience at a night prayer meeting in Gorelovka, a tiny village in the South Caucasus nation of Georgia, and he is determined to grasp the centuries-old hymns that have been handed down through generations.
There is no priest or iconography here—just men and women praying together, as the Doukhobors have done since the pacifist Christian sect emerged in Russia in the 18th century. Thousands of their ancestors were expelled to the peripheries of the Russian Empire nearly two centuries ago for rejecting the Orthodox Church and refusing to serve in Czar Nicholas I’s army, similar to the many men who fled Russia to avoid conscription for the invasion of Ukraine two years ago.
Today, the Doukhobors’ numbers have dwindled to about a hundred in the close-knit Russian-speaking farming communities nestled in two remote mountainous villages. “Our people are dying,” says 47-year-old Svetlana Svetlishcheva, Ilya’s mother, as she walks with her family to an ancient cemetery.
About 5,000 Doukhobors banished in the mid-19th century established ten villages near the border with the hostile Ottoman Empire. Here, they continued to preach nonviolence and worship without priests or rituals. The community flourished, growing to around 20,000 members, but their refusal to pledge allegiance to the new czar, Nicholas II, and their protest by burning weapons led to a violent crackdown and the forced relocation of about 4,000 to distant parts of the Russian Empire.
Nonviolence forms the bedrock of Doukhobor culture, says Yulia Mokshina, a professor at the Mordovia State University in Russia. “The Doukhobors proved that without using force, you can stand up for the truth,” Mokshina explains. “They fought without arms but with their truth and internal power.”
Their plight attracted the attention of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who donated the profits from his final novel “Resurrection” to aid around 7,500 Doukhobors in emigrating to Canada to escape persecution. Despite the Soviet authorities’ relentless crackdown on religious activities, their prayers continued unabated. “There hasn’t been a single Sunday without prayer,” proudly says Yuri Strukov, 46, who has lived in the village of Orlovka for 30 years.
Like others in the rural community, Strukov owns cattle and produces cottage cheese, sour cream, and a brined cheese called suluguni, which he sells in a nearby town. His lifestyle is challenging—enduring freezing winters and summer droughts, with the nearest big city a three-hour drive away—a way of life less appealing to many Doukhobors today. “The community has changed because it became small,” Strukov says. “The fact that there are few of us leaves a heavy residue in the soul.”
During Soviet times, Doukhobor collective farms were among the best in the region. However, as nationalist sentiment swelled in Georgia with the Soviet Union’s imminent collapse, many returned to Russia in the late 1980s. “We didn’t relocate, we came back,” says 39-year-old Dmitry Zubkov, who was among the first convoy of 1,000 Doukhobors leaving Gorelovka for what is now western Russia in 1989. Zubkov and his family settled in the village of Arkhangelskoye in Russia’s Tula region.
Strukov also contemplates moving. After successive waves of Doukhobors departed, ethnic Georgians and Armenians—even close to the Armenian border—moved in, creating tensions with the shrinking Doukhobor community. His own family is the last Doukhobor household in Orlovka. Yet, the prayer house and his ancestors’ graves anchor him. “The whole land is soaked with the prayers, sweat, and blood of our ancestors,” he says. “We always try to find solutions so we can stay here and preserve our culture, traditions, and rites.”
Doukhobor traditions are orally transmitted, and Strukov’s 21-year-old daughter, Daria, feels the urgency to learn from senior community members. “I’m always worried that such a deep and interesting culture will just get lost if we don’t take it over in time,” Daria says. She had considered converting to the Georgian Orthodox Church while studying in Tbilisi but found clarity upon hearing a Doukhobor choir. “I realized that this is what I missed, this is what I couldn’t find anywhere,” she says. “I know now that the Doukhobor faith will always be with me till the end of my life.”
Zubkov notes that wavering faith is common among Doukhobors in Russia. Assimilation into Russian society, interacting with city life, and sharing language and traditions with locals often lead individuals to the predominant religion. “People didn’t want to stand out,” he says. “Unfortunately, we have been assimilating very fast.” In Arkhangelskoye, where 750 Doukhobors settled over 30 years ago, only a few elderly women attend Sunday prayers, and traditional anthems at funerals are rare. Zubkov predicts that their culture will vanish from Arkhangelskoye within a decade.
The Doukhobors who restarted their lives in Canada over a century ago feel less connected to villages like Gorelovka. Their focus remains on the faith and its pacifist principles. “We do not hold any specific place and historical places … in some kind of spiritual significance,” says John J. Verigin Jr., the leader of the largest Doukhobor organization in Canada. “What we try to sustain in our organization is our dedication to those fundamental principles of our life concept.”
Back in Gorelovka, Ilya finds solace knowing his community, culture, and faith are rooted in the place his ancestors built. “I see myself a tall grown-up going to the prayers every day in Doukhobor clothes,” Ilya says. “I will love coming here, I love it now too.”