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  • The Last Days Of Tolstoy's People

    THE LAST DAYS OF TOLSTOY'S PEOPLE

    Roads and Kingdoms
    Aug 23 2013

    by Sonia Smith

    GORELOVKA, Georgia-The July sun had yet to shake the night chill from
    the air, so the men stood hunched with their hands in their pockets,
    watching the appointed soup makers stir two large cast-iron caldrons
    full of borscht and lapsha. The two men worked over a brazier of tezek,
    bricks of dried manure that are the favored fuel in a land that has
    few trees but many cows. They were preparing the food for a Doukhobor
    wake that would mark 40 days since another member of their religious
    sect, a carpenter named Vladimir Smorodin, was taken by old age. More
    than 80 Doukhobors would gather that day in the sod-roofed home to
    pay their respects.

    The wake might as well have been for the Doukhobors themselves. After
    300 years of tumultuous history, this remote strain of pacifists,
    who have called the mountain highlands of Georgia their home since
    Tsar Nicholas I exiled them in the 1840s, is about to disappear. A
    splinter from the Russian Orthodox Church, their way of life rests on
    the brink of extinction, as the few who remain either pass away or
    return to Russia, leaving their life in the mountains behind. Their
    numbers in Georgia today have dwindled to 500; here in Gorelovka,
    once their spiritual center, there are 145 left. Their ineluctable
    exodus north, to cities in modern Russia, could spell the end of an
    entire culture, something akin to what would happen if all the Amish
    slowly moved to Pittsburgh. Removed from their villages, they would
    be swallowed whole by the modern world.

    The irony is that the Doukhobors never wanted to leave Russia in the
    first place. They emerged in the 1700s in the Tambov region of Russia,
    a Christian sect that believed God resides within every person,
    rendering the need for the church and all its trappings-icons,
    buildings, rituals, even priests-unnecessary. These views did not
    endear themselves with the Russian Orthodox Church, and in 1785,
    an archbishop gave them the name Doukhobors, which means "spirit
    wrestlers." It was meant as an insult, but they embraced it. The sect
    rejected the authority of the state, refusing to pay taxes or serve
    in the military, and by the 1840s became such an irritant that Tsar
    Nicholas I exiled nearly 5,000 of them to the edge of the Russian
    empire. Many of the Doukhobors died on the treacherous 70-day wagon
    journey.

    Nikolai Sukhorukov, a village elder who hopes to beautify Gorelovka,
    stands in a field behind his housePhoto by: Natela Grigalashvili

    They founded eight villages-the largest of which was Gorelovka-in
    the distant peaks of what is now the Republic of Georgia's
    Javakheti region, near the border with Turkey and Armenia. They
    flung themselves into creating a place for themselves in this new
    inhospitable climate-the winters are harsh and long in the mountains
    here-tilling the rocky soil and taming the land to build a tidy town
    of sod-roofed homes with whitewashed walls and carved wooden shutters
    that are painted cheerful shades of blue. As the Doukhobors don't have
    churches, Gorelovka's spiritual and civic life is centered around the
    orphanage, a mint green building that was built in the 1800s. Every
    Sunday a dozen Doukhobors still meet there for prayers.

    In the summer, white storks with clattering beaks stand atop their
    huge nests, which are balanced precariously on the sod-roofed houses
    and utility poles. (Armenians call the town Aragilneri Gyugh, stork
    village). The village still feels a part of the 19th century, despite
    the satellite dishes, cell phones, and 18-wheelers that pass through
    the town's one paved road on their way to Armenia or Turkey. The
    remaining roads are no more than rutted dirt paths, spackled with
    cow patties from the twice-daily cattle drives up the nearby hills
    and back again. "The Doukhobors, we made all of this ourselves," says
    Nikolai Sukhorukov, 59, a village elder of sorts with an inquisitive
    face and a long white beard.

    A Doukhobor woman carries milk in the hills outside GorelovkaPhoto by:
    Natela Grigalashvili

    The Doukhobors eked out a relatively quiet existence here until 1895,
    when they rounded up all the weapons in the villages and burned them in
    protest of the Tsarist government's military draft. They paid dearly
    for their principles: Some were deported to Siberia, others were
    imprisoned and tortured. But they gained an unlikely savior in Leo
    Tolstoy, the famed novelist who was undergoing a spiritual renewal
    in the later years of his life. Tolstoy admired the Doukhobors'
    pacifism and met their leaders at his estate in Yasnaya Polyana, in
    what must have been one of history's great beard-summits. He engaged
    in a furious letter-writing campaign on their behalf, including
    one missive sent to Sweden suggesting the first Nobel Peace Prize
    be awarded to these remote people Eventually he donated the profits
    from his final novel, Resurrection, to resettle a group of more than
    7,500 Doukhobors from Eastern Europe to Saskatchewan in 1899. Some
    25,000 of their descendants still live in Canada, but the majority
    of them have assimilated. For those left behind in Georgia, Tolstoy
    sent money to build a school in Gorelovka that still bears his name.

    The school is a well maintained, whitewashed building with a
    black-and-white portrait of its famous benefactor hanging in the
    office. However, as with the rest of the town, the school's future is
    uncertain. "We're trying to save the school," director Tatyana Kirova
    told me as she led me down the building's single dimly lit hallway,
    showing me the classrooms, each heated by their own stove.

    Hand-lettered posters in Russian and Georgian hung on the walls
    alongside educational posters from the Soviet era. When Kirova
    graduated from the school in 1992, it had 300 students. Today there
    are 32. Most of the town's children attend the Armenian school down
    the road.

    "There are no more young people here," lamented teacher Irina
    Tamilina, 43, as we sat in her kitchen later that day, drinking tea
    and eating watermelon. She handed me a creased photocopy, flecked
    with brown stains, of a letter Tolstoy wrote in 1898 to a newspaper
    about the plight of the Doukhobors. "The government of the Caucasus
    has surrounded the whole rebellious population with a magic circle,
    and this population is slowly dying out. In another three or four
    years, it's possible there could be no Doukhobors left," the novelist
    cautioned. (That last sentence had been underlined in black pen.)

    In the Gorelovka today, Doukhobors are outnumbered at least 15-to-1 by
    the majority Armenians; in the broader Javakheti region of Georgia,
    the ratio is 200-to-1. And various Armenian groups, both moderate
    and more hardline paramilitary groups, have been a part of de facto
    Armenian control of the region since the fall of the Soviet Union.

    That may make Doukhobors anxious, but the Georgian government likes
    it even less: On the heels of a series of bloody wars of secession by
    Ossetians and Abkhazians, Georgia is wary of any demographic imbalance
    within its borders. One solution has been to periodically re-settle
    ethnic Georgian Muslims in empty Doukhobor houses.

    Rivalries run deep in this part of the world. Lukeria Medvedova,
    an octogenarian left in Gorelovka after her extended family moved
    back to Russia, takes a dim view of her Armenian neighbors. "They
    know I see poorly and so they take things off my clotheslines," she
    said, as she stooped over a metal bowl of laundry in her kitchen,
    swirling the soapy water with her hands. "They steal and steal and
    steal." She was widowed 53 years ago, and her only son died when he
    was a teenager in the 1970's. As is Doukhobor custom, photos of them
    as corpses in their caskets hang alongside other less grim family
    pictures. Yet she has no desire to leave her one room, sod-roofed
    home, which is tidy and well-kept despite her waning eyesight. "I
    didn't exist when this house was built," she said.

    A young Doukhobor girl and a male relativePhoto by: Natela
    Grigalashvili

    The Doukhobors' return to Russia began as a trickle in the glasnost
    era and has gained momentum since then. In 2007, Russia launched
    a "voluntary migration" program under President Vladimir Putin,
    as a means of stemming Russia's demographic collapse. The results
    are mixed: More than 98,000 ethnic Russians have been lured back to
    the motherland under the program, but a far larger exodus out of the
    country, particularly of the wealthy and highly skilled, continues. In
    Javakheti, the reasons for Doukhobors moving out seem to be largely
    economic: Russia's per capita GDP is $14,000 compared to Georgia's
    $3,500. This is why Tamilina, the schoolteacher, and her husband
    bought a house in Bryansk, Russia, five hours southwest of Moscow,
    a year ago. They'll be leaving as soon as they sell their house in
    Gorelovka. Her 23-year-old son Alexander has already moved, bringing
    home $1,000 a month remodeling apartments, 10-times what he could make
    in Georgia. The move, she says, will still pain her. "Georgia is my
    homeland. Russia is not." And besides, like many of the Doukhobors,
    they'll be moving to the big city. There are Doukhobors in Russia,
    but no Doukhobor villages.

    In Soviet times, there was a dairy factory in town that made
    Swiss-style cheese, but it has long since been shuttered. Now, the
    cows are all that's left in Gorelovka, and they serve as the main
    source of income for the village. "If you have 10 cows, then you'll
    have enough bread to eat," one Georgian woman explained to me outside
    the town's kindergarten. "We only have one cow."

    Three Doukhobor women clad in traditional dress gather flowers in
    the hills outside GorelovkaPhoto by: Natela Grigalashvili

    Twice a day, a dozen Doukhobor women board a white van and make a
    jolting trip a few miles up into the hills where a herd of brown,
    handsome cattle have spent the day grazing. The women head into a room
    in the barn to don headscarves, aprons, and sensible, waterproof shoes
    or clogs (the better to dodge fresh cow patties and errant squirts of
    milk) and head outside to the waiting herd. For the next two hours,
    they milk, filling up 14 large stainless steel cans. Not that it's
    easy work-one wandering animal vexed her owner enough to elicit a
    rather irreligious "Cursed cow! Damn cow!" from her. The milk they
    gather is made into cheese at the Doukhobors' small workshop, either
    for their own consumption or to be sold locally. Cheese and other
    dairy products are just about the only items the Doukhobors in the
    village still produce.

    There are some who recognize what's at stake. After living in the
    Ukraine for more than a decade, Vasily Slastukin moved back to
    Gorelovka in 2002, in part to take care of his aging parents, in
    part to raise a family in the traditional Doukhobor style. Now 57,
    he prays at the orphanage with the elderly women and passes down oral
    histories to his two young daughters. As in Soviet times, Slastukin
    explained, oral traditions and village life are what keep Doukhobor
    culture alive. "Preserving these traditions is much harder than just
    going to church," he says.

    Inside the house on the day of the wake, around 12 women, mostly in
    headscarves, prepared typical Doukhobor sides: cucumber and tomato
    salad, eggplant with walnuts, fish jelly, homemade cheese, mashed
    potatoes with eggs, and ground liver. Sitting on mint green benches at
    the head table, the women-in a hodgepodge of plaid and pastel, outfits
    completed by colorful vests featuring hand-embroidered roses-started
    praying, then singing mournful songs in unison with long, drawn out
    vowels. Anya Smorodina, 66, the widow of the deceased, bowed and
    touched her head to the floor several times. The singing continued
    as everyone ate, washing down the food with shots of vodka and fennel
    soda. As one woman explained to me as we took our seats at the table:
    "We need to preserve this." The question of where it might be preserved
    remains unanswered.

    For more of Natela Grigalashvili's photography from Javakheti and
    around Georgia, visit Natalagrigalashvili.ge

    http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/the-last-days-of-tolstoys-people/




    From: A. Papazian
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