Most days, Yakovlev set off with Peter Voykin and John Verigin to learn about the Doukhobor way of life. They toured apple orchards and visited traditional homesteads — typically a pair of stately redbrick homes linked by a rectangular single-storey building that served as both dormitory and workshop. The structures, historically the group’s primary dwellings, had once housed up to fifty community members at a time, everyone living and farming together. It was not so different from the way Yakovlev had grown up, with his mother and father often sharing their house with his grandfather, his uncles, and their families.
Yakovlev had moments in the Kootenays as enchanting as any he’d experienced. Toward the end of the youth festival, after a prayer service and some choral singing, the community gathered on the lawn beside the meeting hall. The babushkas and pastel-coloured blouses and skirts worn by hundreds of young Doukhobor women stood out brilliantly against the greens and browns of the surrounding forest. Younger members served fruit to their elders. Everyone spoke Russian. In this mountain valley set deep in the BC wilderness, the homesick Soviet ambassador had discovered a community just like the one he knew as a child.
It must have been an enormous surprise for Yakovlev to find in the Canadian Rockies a small community of Russian émigrés who lived a lifestyle so similar to that of his youth. But as the deadline approached for me to submit my biography of him, I still didn’t understand how this encounter could have pulled him from his depression, nor how it inspired him to accomplish what he did.
So last December, I went to the Kootenays, where I stayed with J.J. Verigin Jr., the executive director of the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ, and the heir of John Verigin. The Doukhobors’ de facto leader turned out to be anything but what I had expected. Though he is fifty-two years old, he had the fashion sense and speaking style of a Whistler snowboarder, as well as the same up-for-anything, non-judgmental vibe. Within ten minutes of my arrival at his home in the Kootenay town of Grand Forks, we were sharing a beer, and within ten more we were headed for a concert at a local hall. I expected a traditional choir recital; instead, I found myself watching the legendary Vancouver punk outfit d.o.a.
When the show had ended, our ears still buzzing from d.o.a. ‘s machine-gun kick drumming, Verigin brought me to a home on the outskirts of Grand Forks, where a dozen of his friends were partying with the band. This was not quite the bacchanal it might once have been. d.o.a. leader Joe Keithley still wears his hair dyed blond, but less out of youthful rebellion, one suspects, than a desire to obscure his grey hair. After three decades of punk rock, he’s in his early fifties, and known as much for his politics as his music. Beers in hand, Verigin and Keithley traded observations on the Iraq war and the machinations of Vancouver’s city council.
As the night wrapped up, Keithley let slip that the band’s tour van was having mechanical problems — something that might prevent them from attending their next gig at a snow-boarding competition in Fernie. Verigin and his friends immediately began burning through their cellphone minutes, trying to track down someone in the region who would be able to fix the band’s van at the crack of dawn.
I saw something in that moment. Until then, I had lumped the Doukhobors in with ultra-conservative sects like the Amish and the Mennonites. But Verigin and the rest of the Kootenay Doukhobors were anything but conservative. After more than a century in Canada, they retained their communitarian sensibilities, and their anti-authoritarian, anarchist vibe. They were far more comfortable alongside counter-culture legends like Joe Keithley than buggy-riding Christian conservatives.
Only then did I understand why this exiled but proudly Russian sect of socialist anarchists had the influence on Yakovlev that it did. The Doukhobors were a living rebuttal to the theory that Russia requires a strongman. Yakovlev must have seen them as an example of the way Russians might have lived, had they not been stifled by the corruption and inefficiency of the Communist Party. In a series of mountain valleys in the BC interior, the future architect of perestroika encountered a community of proudly Russian people who convinced him that his countrymen could thrive in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy. Indeed, in his memoirs, Yakovlev had written:
They are amazing people — hard-working, open, courteous . . . They believe with complete sincerity that only moral principles will save mankind from moral collapse . . . These stubborn people, though at times naïve in their misconceptions, have sustained through all their ordeals an uncompromising attitude toward deception, hypocrisy, and violence, along with an unbending rejection of militarism.
The evening before I was to fly home, I ate dinner at the home of the Popoff family, who serve as the Doukhobors’ poet-historians. Eli Popoff ‘s novel Tanya is one of the few representations of the Doukhobor way of life in fiction, and his son, Jim, was the longtime editor of the group’s publication, Iskra. Dorothy Popoff, Eli’s wife, and Jim’s wife, Lillian, had prepared a feast of borscht and piroshki. Over a table set with cloth napkins, lace doilies, and crystal, we spoke of the parallels between the Doukhobors and Yakovlev — both pacifists and exiles, both ardent about social justice and personal freedom.
As we ate, Dorothy revealed that she had been present at the climactic moment of Yakovlev’s visit with the Doukhobors. In 1980, she was one of two women on the Doukhobors’ executive committee, which invited Yakovlev to a meeting on Victoria Day in a wood-panelled conference room in the basement of the community centre. There, the Doukhobors requested Yakovlev’s help in arranging a return to Russia.
