Note 6 — Chapter VII · GORELOVKA AND QUEEN LUKERIA

To Sembat the Russian colonists were an object of peculiar interest, not indeed in the same capacity in which they appealed to the Governor, but by reason of the kind of religion which they professed. Here was a people who, like himself, were exiles for the sake of religion, who resembled, in their aversion to the trammels of ecclesiasticism, the congregations in whose bosom he had himself been reared. The history of the Dukhobortsy or Dukhoborians—I became familiar with the latter termination, and such is the name of the sect to which these settlers belong—composes a chapter which is neither the least remarkable nor the most creditable in the history of the Russian Church-State. Their origin would appear to be wrapt in some mystery; according to one account a discharged soldier first disseminated the teaching in the Government of Kharkov and in the year 1740.6 Count Tolstoy adopts the view, which would appear the more probable, that it was a foreigner, a Quaker, immigrant to Russia, who spread the seeds of their belief.7 Neither their opinions, nor the temper which was the outcome of their convictions, were calculated to promote the smoothness of their early course. In a country where Church interests permeate every act of policy, they denied the necessity, even the expediency of a Church. Among a people attached with devotion to their temples, images and eikons, they professed the uselessness of all such external aids to religious life. The crusty formulas cracked under their merciless logic; and the grim earnestness with which these spiritual combatants grappled with themselves and with society wore out the patience or aroused the apathy of the State. Already in the eighteenth century they suffered persecution; and so bitter grew the feeling against them, that in the early years of the nineteenth century the Emperor Alexander I. settled them in the Tauric province, in the neighbourhood of the Sea of Azov. But Alexander was not the man to become the instrument of their enemies, whose hostile instances provoked an Imperial rebuke. It had been proposed that a further migration of the sect should be required; the ukase of 1816 enacted that no such migration should take place. The same edict recited the favourable testimony to their character which had been received from the official in whose district they lived, dwelt on the proved futility of the measures previously taken against them, and proclaimed that, far from meditating the repetition of any such measures, it was the Imperial will that every unnecessary restriction should be removed and that all annoyance of the sectaries should cease. The humane, the wise policy of this enlightened ruler has not been followed by his successors on the throne. Nicholas the First expelled them to the Transcaucasian provinces, and they are being persecuted at the present day. The principal emigrations took place between 1841 and 1845. They were allotted seats in the bleak country on the south of Akhalkalaki, whence they have spread into the Government of Elizabetpol and into the more recently acquired province of Kars. According to the census of 1886 their numbers in their adopted country amounted to 12,500 souls at that date.8