The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (12 page)
Read The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
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The Universal Brotherhood
The touching and often tragic drama of the Doukhobor migration to the Canadian West is animated by a singular cast of characters. The leading actors (setting aside the Spirit Wrestlers themselves) form a unique international brotherhood, perhaps the most remarkable ever assembled to make common and selfless cause in the interests of one immigrant sect. They were poorly organized; they often quarrelled with one another; and they only vaguely understood the nature of the communities they proposed to settle in the West. But they were idealists, men of quality and rank in most cases, who were prepared to devote their time, energies, money, and reputation to a project from which they could not personally benefit and which some would live to regret.
Look at them! There were, first, those indomitable Russian nobles with the tangled beards who seem to have stepped out of a Tolstoyan novel: Kropotkin, Hilkoff, Tchertkoff, and the saintly count himself – the author of
War and Peace –
who had, often at considerable cost, rejected the crasser values of their homeland. There were the Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic, stubborn pacifists who dressed in funereal black and peppered their conversations with the archaic second-person singular. There was Aylmer Maude, hard-nosed businessman turned Tolstoyan disciple, prickly, dedicated, often impractical. There were those quirky anarchists from the doomed Utopian colony of Purleigh in Essex. And last, but not least, there was the eccentric professor of political science at the University of Toronto, the remarkable James Mavor.
On September 22, 1897, there arrived in Winnipeg the most exotic member of this group, Peter Aleksevich Kropotkin, who was – or had been – a Czarist prince. An exile from his native land, an escapee from a Siberian cell, expelled from Switzerland, imprisoned in France, this one-time royal aide and army officer had an international reputation among scientists as a geographer, zoologist, sociologist, and historian and among his friends and enemies as a radical, an anarchist, and a revolutionary.
Prince Kropotkin spent an hour dashing about at full speed on one of Winnipeg’s electric tram cars, marvelling at the city, which was already being compared with Chicago. Substantial buildings of masonry and brick lined the downtown streets, where the pavements were of solid stone blocks. Here was the dazzling city hall, flamboyantly baroque – Western enthusiasm expressed in pink brick and spikey domes. Here were grand hotels with grander names flanking the two-hundred-foot-wide expanse of Main: the Oriental, the Cosmopolitan, the American, the Brunswick, and, at the busy intersection of Main and Water, the eight-storey Manitoban with its curved façade and conical cupola. By the time he took the train west, Prince Kropotkin was properly impressed. Why, Winnipeg was only twenty-five years old! In Russia, a city of that size and quality might go back for centuries.
We have boarded the train with the Prince. He is a bulky man with a great naked dome and a monstrous square beard. As the train rolls heavily out of the city limits and enters the prairie, he takes everything in with the eyes both of a geographer and of a poet. They are blue and intelligent, those eyes, peering out from behind a pair of tiny, wire-rimmed spectacles, and now they sparkle with astonishment as he contemplates the flatness of the prairie. Ahead, he sees the straight line of the railway – a ruler laid across the level surface of the plain; behind him is another steel ruler leading back to Winnipeg. The land is so flat that even after miles of track have clattered beneath him, he can still spot the silhouette of the elevators on the city’s outskirts
.
He notes the black earth, the extraordinary absence of a single tree or shrub, and, on the horizon, a sunset such as he has not experienced since he left the steppes of southern Russia. We, his travelling companions, including his fellow members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, find it all very monotonous, but the Prince is thrilled. “What an infinite variety of life in these steppes!” he thinks to himself These Western Europeans have no concept of the poetry of the steppes; even his own people in middle Russia are ignorant of it. One cannot find any reference to it in the geographical works with which he is so familiar. One must seek for it instead in Russian literature – in the souls of men born on the steppes, in the poetry of Klotsoff or the novels of Oertel. One must have lived on the steppes, rambled over them on horseback, inhaled the perfume of mown grass, spent the night in the open, crossed the boundless prairie in sledges behind a trio of galloping horses to realize the real beauty of a country which, in Kropotkin’s poetic vision, is so like this Manitoba prairie. This is his kind of country; mountains and valleys are not for him – they make him feel like a bird in a cage
.
The prairie, though almost empty of humans, is bursting with life
.
Flocks of wildfowl blacken the sky. Gulls rise screaming from the lakelets. Ducks speckle the prairie ponds. Gophers and squirrels scamper about by the thousands. The wild grasses, tinted red, yellow, and brown, make a Persian carpet of the plains
.
As the prairie unfolds the Prince continues to be amazed by the similarities between Canada’s geographical features and those of his native land. When he first reached Manitoba the illusion was complete; he might as well be in the prairies of South Tobolsk at the foot of the Urals: the same aspect, the same black soil, the same dried-up lake bottoms, the same character of climate
.
Now, as the train rolls westward toward the high sub-arid prairie, he can easily imagine himself upon the higher level steppe, which the Trans-Siberian railway enters beyond Tomsk. The little Siberian towns, he tells us, could be described as sister growths of Medicine Hat, Calgary, and Regina were it not for the Americanized aspect of the Canadian communities. Even the vegetation is similar. Suddenly the expatriate feels at home again. And, with his help, the day will come when actual Russian villages, indistinguishable from those of the Caucasus, will spring up here in this strangely familiar land
.
There was another reminder of home, here in the Canadian West – the presence of the Mennonites. These were also followers of Leo Tolstoy, with whom the anarchist prince felt more than kinship. To escape military service, these industrious, God-fearing people had left Russia in the 1870s. Visiting a Mennonite village, Kropotkin once again found himself in a replica of his homeland, a small Russian community, complete with thatched houses, broad streets, manured plots, and lines of little trees. These people, too, were anarchists in the sense that “they never have anything to do with justice or law.” Kropotkin found it remarkable that in the midst of a capitalist civilization some twenty thousand people had been able to continue to live and thrive under a system of partial communism and passive resistance to the state, which they had managed to maintain for more than three centuries in the face of almost continual persecution.
He was, of course, aware that in the valleys of the Caucasus Mountains, between the Caspian and Black seas, there was another religious group in some ways similar to the Mennonites, who lived communally, rejected military service, and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Czar. They called themselves the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood, but their tormentors jeered at them as Doukhoborski, or Spirit Wrestlers. The name stuck and, in the end, was accepted with pride, in the same way that the Society of Friends accepted the epithet “Quaker.”
Among these simple people, until he fled the country, lived another of those curiously attractive Russian noblemen – one who, like Kropotkin, had been driven to reject his aristocratic heritage by Czarist excesses and his own conscience. Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich Hilkoff came of one of the oldest of the noble families – older, in fact, than the ruling Romanovs. The family was still powerful; Hilkoff’s uncle was a member of the Czarist cabinet. But Hilkoff himself subscribed to the pacifist philosophy of Leo Tolstoy. As a colonel in the Russian Army during the war with Turkey in 1878, he had slain an enemy soldier in battle and suffered such pangs of remorse that he quit both the army and the Orthodox Church. Appalled at the condition of the serfs on the family estate, he gave up his legacy upon his mother’s death and divided all his lands among them.
Banished to the Caucasus (where he encountered the Doukhobors), broken hearted because his children had been removed from him forever by the Czar’s decree, he at last received permission to exile himself from Russia, but not before he had brought the plight of the Doukhobors to the attention of his hero, Tolstoy. Doukhobors were being plundered, raped, tortured, imprisoned, beaten, and starved by Cossack troops because they refused to bear arms or take an oath of allegiance to the Czar. Tolstoy, whose own philosophy was remarkably similar to theirs, brought the details of their plight to the world.
In March, 1898, a few months after Kropotkin’s Canadian tour, three events took place that were to lead to the most bizarre chapter in the history of the shaping of the Canadian West. First, Kropotkin published in the
Nineteenth Century
a long article about Canada and the Mennonites, which he had written in the Toronto home of his friend Professor James Mavor. Second, the Empress Alexandra of Russia, prompted both by Tolstoy’s importunings and by those of the Society of Friends of England, had persuaded the Czar that the Doukhobors might leave Russia if they did so immediately. Third, Tolstoy’s personal representative, another exiled noble named Vladimir Tchertkoff, arrived at Purleigh in England. Here a Tolstoyan community had been set up by J.C. Kenworthy, a disciple of the Russian author and an anarchist colleague of Kropotkin. It was to be a “part of a world wide movement toward a better and truer life for
humanity.” The spirit there was one of tolerance, of encouraging others “to wake up to the real meaning of life.…”
At Purleigh, Tchertkoff, the one-time St. Petersburg aristocrat, and his wife lived a life of absolute simplicity, eschewing all meat and proclaiming that “as long as there are starving men in the world we hold that luxury is wrong.” Prince Hilkoff also turned up at Purleigh, another exotic figure to visiting journalists who goggled over the spectacle of the scion of one of Russia’s noblest families working with a spade in the garden while his wife, the Princess, chopped wood and hauled water “in true Tolstoy fashion.”
Here, too, was Aylmer Maude, a former businessman who had spent seventeen years in Russia. While acting as director of the Russian Carpet Company, Maude had encountered Tolstoy’s work and presently became a regular visitor at the author’s home in Moscow and at his country villa at Tula.
Tolstoy’s influence on nineteenth-century thought cannot be overestimated. Here was Maude, the English carpet salesman, about to toss aside those values that had sustained him into middle age. Early in the 1890s, under Tolstoy’s influence, he found his conscience could no longer allow him to continue as a tool of the capitalistic world; after all, his mentor’s whole philosophy was an indictment of the industrial system. He quit his job and proceeded to devote himself to the translation of Tolstoy’s works into English. Tolstoy’s
What Is Art?
would shortly be published by Purleigh’s founder, Kenworthy, through his own Brotherhood Press. Meanwhile, the members of the Purleigh community busied themselves with efforts to save the Doukhobors.
Tolstoyism was the glue that held all these people together. Tchertkoff had been sent to Purleigh by Tolstoy in the hope that the community, aided by Maude’s business acumen, would raise funds to pay for the Doukhobors’ passage to another country. But time was of the essence: the Czarina might withdraw her permission for the sect’s departure at any moment.
A variety of destinations was discussed: Texas, Brazil, Argentina, Hawaii, Cyprus. The last was finally chosen because it was the closest refuge to the Black Sea port of Batum, from which the Doukhobors would embark. Plans were laid and money raised to move eleven hundred Doukhobors to Cyprus at once. Prince Hilkoff was dispatched to the island to prepare for their arrival. Then, on the eve of
his departure, Tchertkoff came across Kropotkin’s article about Canada and the Mennonites.
Canada! To most Europeans it hardly existed. Certainly no one had considered it as a new home for the Spirit Wrestlers. Yet Kropotkin made it clear that this oddly attractive country would welcome Russian religious refugees with farming experience as it had the Mennonites, and that the conditions were remarkably similar to those in Russia.
Kropotkin was invited to come to Purleigh to discuss the Doukhobor problem. From there he wrote a long letter to his closest friend in Canada, Professor Mavor, whom he had known since 1884 and who had arranged the cross-Canada tour of the British association, which had sparked the Prince’s article on the Canadian West. In his letter Kropotkin asked if Mavor thought Canada would accept twelve thousand Doukhobors and what advice the professor could give about the mechanics of such a venture.
Here was another remarkable figure. At forty-four, Jimmy Mavor had already acquired a reputation as an eccentric and a Bohemian – a man who dazzled his students with his broad range of knowledge and the brilliance of his teaching. With his vast, rumpled beard, his high, balding forehead, and his long, greying hair, he was said to be Toronto’s “most picturesque academic personality.” He seemed to know a little about everything: indeed, his colleagues tended to look askance at him because he peppered his lectures with anecdotes! He had held the chair of political science at the University of Toronto since 1892, but his bents were also literary and scientific. He had once studied informally under the future Lord Kelvin, the inventor of the absolute temperature scale that bears his name. His correspondence was wide and eclectic, including such exotic figures as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. He had once been a Fabian reformer but was now in the process of reforming himself. He believed, however, that “there must be a constant effort to correct the prevailing tendency of things.” He was an admirer of Tolstoy, of course (he would shortly visit him in Russia), and was also a Russophile who had wintered in St. Petersburg. And he knew a good deal about the Doukhobors.