Immediate Consequences: The Doukhobor Exile

Before examining the transition to new agricultural methods (in Chap­ters 5 and 6), the immediate social consequences of the crises of the 1830s demand attention. These are most vividly illustrated in the story of the Doukhobor exile, which, not coincidentally, had its direct ante­cedents in the land requests made by Molokans in 1832.

In many ways Molochna Doukhobors occupy a unique place in the history of Orthodox Russia’s relationship with its religious dissenters. The bulk of that history is one of repression, but for a brief time Doukhobors experienced the benefit of Tsar Alexander Γs most liberal impulses and not only overcame official discrimination, but found them­selves among the most privileged settlers in the Molochna region. Doukhobors seized the moment, coalescing religiously and economi­cally into a remarkably cohesive community - a ⁴Doukhobor common­wealth’ - that stood firm in the face of persecution and exile after Nicholas I became tsar in 1825.³⁹ The unity of this commonwealth is a key factor in the Doukhobors' fame, and indeed, in their notoriety. Rather than renouncing their beliefs, they suffered exile from Molochna to the Caucasus in the 1840s, from the Caucasus to Canada in 1895, and discrimination and vilification in Canada as recendy as the 1970s.

The Molokan land requests that sparked the Doukhobor exile at first fell on deaf ears, and it was only after a group of Molokans asked permission to leave Molochna and emigrate to the Caucasus that the Ministry of Internal Affairs conducted a close investigation of their concerns.⁴⁰ The Molokan population had grown to 1,352 male souls, leaving them with less than ten desiatinas per male soul.⁴¹ In 1834 the state proposed resolving the problem by pooling together all ‘sectarian land,’ Molokan and Doukhobor alike, and redistributing it at the rate of fifteen desiatinas per male soul.⁴² However, Doukhobors did not hold their excess land as allotment land, which was subject to redistri­bution by fiat based on population size.

Allegations against the Doukhobors in the 1830s drew upon suspi­cions and prejudices dating from earlier investigations. In 1815 former members of the sect accused Doukhobor leaders of various crimes, prompting an inquiry by an Orthodox priest, Father Nalimskii, and the arrest of Doukhobor leader Savelii Kapustin together with sixteen of his Apostles.⁴³ Labelling Kapustin the ‘leading false teacher’ of the Doukhobors, Nalimskii accused him and his followers of vaguely de­fined ‘illegal and evil acts,’ dangerous ‘not only to the Christian religion, but to the state.’⁴⁴ L.A. Langeron, vice-governor of New Russia and a harsh critic of Doukhobors, reacted by proposing that the Doukhobor community be broken up and dispersed, but Alexander I, demonstrat­ing his liberal attitudes towards sectarians, intervened, dismissing the charges and ordering the release of Kapustin and his followers.⁴⁵

Any understanding of the change in Doukhobor fortunes must begin with the shift in state religious policy after the death of Alexander I in 1825. Almost immediately after his accession, Nicholas I introduced sharply reactionary policies towards sectarians. An important objective of his ‘official nationality,’ with its tenets of ‘Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality,’ was to reaffirm the commonality of goals of church and state.⁴⁶ This rather amorphous principle could have had little focused expression at regional levels, for the inefficiency of tsarist administra­tion in peripheral regions is legendary.

Although Nicholas’s reactionary policies worked against the Doukhobors, oddly enough it was his efforts at peasant reforms that harmed them most. The decision to reduce land allotments in the Molochna region to eight desiatinas per male soul served as a crucial impetus to renewed persecution of Doukhobors in the 1830s, for under such circumstances the particularly large Doukhobor allotments were bound to attract the attention of the central administration.

This renewed attention began with the arrival of P. Koppen in Molochna in 1837. Known as the ‘father of Russian statistics,’ Koppen was one of the most trusted and influential men in Russia. He came to Molochna during his survey of Tavria guberniia for the Fifth Depart­ment of the Tsar’s chancery, forerunner of the Ministry of State Do­mains and the body responsible for reviewing the condition of the state peasantry.⁴⁸ In his reports, Kδppen had little to say about the material well-being of Doukhobors, but he repeated accounts of crimes in the villages provided to him bv Melitopol District Administrator Kolosov.

Kolosov, from 1827 to 1830 chair of the district court in Melitopol, sat on a commission of inquiry that investigated Doukhobor crimes in 1835-6.⁴⁹ Hostile to Doukhobors, Kolosov told Koppen that the death of Doukhobor leader Vasilii Kalmykov and inheritance of leadership by his son Ilarion in 1832 was followed by ‘unusual peril amongst the Doukhobors; many murders occurred for various reasons, and many military deserters and bandits hid among them.’⁵⁰ Doukhobors, Kolosov claimed, had committed twenty-four murders, seven ‘tyrannical acts of torture,’ eleven robberies, and had hidden eight army deserters.⁵¹

This was a strategically pivotal report that became the key justifica­tion for exiling the Doukhobors.

In February 1838 Kiselev, newly appointed minister of state domains, forwarded a copy of Koppen’s report to D.N. Bludov, the minister of internal affairs. In an accompanying letter, Kiselev wrote: ‘His Highness the Emperor, upon reviewing the report, has expressed his Imperial pleasure that I come to an agreement with Your Excellency and the Lord Over-Procurator of the Holy State Synod on measures for the conversion of the majority of the dissenters to Orthodoxy.’⁵⁴ Bludov responded that most Doukhobors could ‘easily be converted to Ortho­doxy, as soon as the state will take actions to exile the principal sectar­ians.’⁵⁵ He forwarded this proposal to M.S. Vorontsov, governor general of New Russia,⁵⁶ who at first defended the Doukhobors on the grounds that they ‘raise catde and sheep, and grow outstanding crops... [and] can be an extremely useful community and even serve as model agricul­turists.’⁵⁷ However, in August, bowing to the wishes of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Vorontsov sent Bludov a detailed plan for forcing Doukhobors to convert by exiling to the Caucasus those who refused.⁵⁸ Nicholas signed the fateful decree ordering the Doukhobors into exile on 17 February 1839.⁵⁹ In most particulars, it followed Vorontsov’s rec­ommendations.

Ultimately, the state ordered 773 Doukhobors into exile in the sum­mer of 1841 ‘without option’ (bez zhrebiia).⁶° The remaining Doukhobors, exiled in groups during the following four summers, had the option to convert to Orthodoxy and remain in Molochna.⁶¹ Ministry reactions to Kδppen^,s original report and the reports of officials supervising the exile indicate that the state expected most Doukhobors to convert.

This conversion strategy of divide and conquer could only work, of course, if the allegations of disruptions in the community were true. In the event, only 248 Doukhobors converted to Orthodoxy, while 4,992 affirmed their faith and took the long trek to the Caucasus. This dem­onstration of solidarity refutes the claim that the Doukhobor common­wealth was disrupted and consequently raises serious doubts about the truth of the principal evidence of disruption, the murder accusations.⁶²

Some of the accusations are detailed in an ‘extract from the ongoing investigation of various crimes carried out in the Doukhobor and Molokan Setfiements of Melitopol uezd.’⁶¹ In the absence of extant offi­cial records from the investigation, this document is of potential impor­tance, but it is also problematic, for it is undated, and there is no indication of its provenance.⁶⁴ Its most recent testimony dates from 4 March 1836, the year in which, according to Kolosov, the investigation ended.⁶⁵ It does, however, describe just nineteen murders, not twenty- four as mentioned by Kolosov or twenty-one as appear, uncredited, in the influential study by nineteenth-century Russian historian Orest Novitskii.⁶⁶ Nevertheless, the nineteen include all four that Kolosov spe­cifically mentioned in his report. Whether or not the extract is com­plete, it sheds significant light on the charges against the Doukhobors. As a closer examination reveals, many of those charges can only be described as unfounded rumour.

To begin with, it must be emphasized that some of the alleged mur­ders almost certainly did occur.

The accusation that Doukhobors buried people alive surfaces again and again in subsequent accounts. Vorontsov abandoned his defence of Doukhobors in part, he wrote, because they ‘bury the living in the ground.’⁶⁸ He drew his information from Kolosov’s report, and it thus appears that the example of the single, admittedly gruesome murder of Voronova was exaggerated into a common Doukhobor practice. In the most famous description of the crimes, Baron August Freiherr von Haxthausen, author of the enormously influential nineteenth-century study entitled The Russian Empire, wrote that ‘bodies were found buried alive,’ although he offered no proof of the claim; both Orest Novitskii and George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic echoed Haxthausen.⁶⁹

The second confessed murder was that of Evdokim Lukianov.⁷⁰ One day in 1827, Lukianov, a convert from the Doukhobor faith to Orthodoxy, reportedly set out for the Doukhobor village of Bogdanovka to borrow some money from his father. Walking along the road he met three other Doukhobors, Onisim Botkin and the brothers Semon and Stepan Voikin, who offered him a lift in their wagon. He discovered that they were illegally transporting vodka, demanded some, and threatened to turn them in if they refused. In the ensuing brawl, Lukianov was killed.

Two other alleged murders, although unproved, also have an air of authenticity. In 1803, in a dispute over an unpaid debt, Semen Negreev was allegedly stabbed to death by his brother Pavl and another man.⁷¹ In 1820, during a dispute over a cow, a certain Karp Susoev was alleg­edly beaten and later died.⁷² These three cases, if true, reveal a degree of violence in Doukhobor society, but hardly a profound crisis. Rather, they suggest that Doukhobor society shared in the violent characteris­tics common to all peasant societies.

Apart from these four murders there is little in the extract that bears up under close scrutiny. Several cases were less mundane, but also less believable because of their reliance on extremely questionable witnesses. The state’s star witnesses were Iosif Gankin, a one-time Doukhobor village elder, and his son Fomin. They testified in six cases involving thirteen accused murderers and seven victims. Earlier they had testified in five of these cases during a district court trial (in 1828), but at that time the charges had been dismissed and Iosif and Fomin had been imprisoned for giving false evidence. The two escaped and ran off to Ekaterinoslav, where they converted to Orthodoxy ‘for protection,’ and returned with a letter from the bishop who had converted them asking for leniency. This did not impress District Court Judge Sokolovskii who threw them back in jail. They again escaped, this time to Simferopol, where they appealed to Langeron, by now retired from his vice-guber­natorial position but still influential. Armed with a letter from Langeron, they returned again, and the still-unimpressed Judge Sokolovskii jailed them again, concluding that Langeron’s letter ‘protected their heads but not their bodies.’ This time the apparendy much-improved penal system managed to hold onto Iosif, but Fomin slipped away again, back to Langeron in Simferopol, who finally contrived to have the charges dismissed. Vindicated, the two returned to the stand to repeat their testimony during the later investigation.⁷³

The most interesting case in which the Gankins testified was the alleged 1821 murder of Petr Plaksin and a friend, identified only as ‘Sergei.’⁷⁴ Later anecdotal accounts of Doukhobor crimes often men­tion the exhumation of bodies during the investigation, but the Plaksin case is the only example of exhumation to appear in the extract.⁷⁵ According to the Gankins, Petr and Sergei were Doukhobors who had been raised in Molochna and returned there in 1820 as army deserters. They were supposedly soon heard making drunken threats to burn down the houses of the elders who had singled them out for conscrip­tion. Village officials arrested them, intending to turn them over to the authorities, but the two threatened to reveal the names of other desert­ers in the Doukhobor villages. The Gankins claimed that Vasilii Kalmykov, leader of the Doukhobors, ordered the two murdered to prevent them testifying, and his orders were carried out by five Apostles who disposed of the bodies in a dry well. Doukhobor witnesses, how­ever, disputed the Gankins’s testimony, claiming the two men had sim­ply disappeared and were thought to have fled to the town of Azov. During the investigation the commission had the well dug up and found it filled with horse bones, and among them ‘one bone, broken in two, that resembled a human arm, and also two more bones that resembled human bones.’ This the commission accepted as verification of the Gankins’s story.

The principal witness in six of the other cases was a Molokan woman, Agafiia Nemanikhina, who had no personal knowledge of the murders and simply relayed rumours heard by her husband Grigorii, who could not testify himself because he was ‘crazy in the brain’ {pomeshateΓstvo v time).^κ One of the six cases was that of Elisaveta Voronova, described above, but the others were more dubious. The least convincing is short enough to quote in full: ‘The Fifth [Case]: Concerning two unknown merchants from the city of Feodosiia who came to purchase wool in an unknown year. The Molokan woman Agafiia Nemanikhina reports the rumour that of two merchants who came to the village of Terpenie to buy wool, one was drowned by Doukhobors in the Molochna River, and the other has disappeared; concerning these people nothing further is known.’⁷⁷

Several aspects of the accusations demand comment. The nineteen murders alleged in the extract were not part of a savage mid-1830s spree, but occurred over a period of twenty-six years, from 1802 to 1828. This is in sharp contrast to published accounts, which rely heavily on Haxthausen. Travelling through Molochna in 1843, ten years after the murders had allegedly occured, Haxthausen discussed the Doukhobors with Johann Cornies, visiting a Doukhobor village in Comies’s company. According to Haxthausen, Ilarion Kalmykov, who inherited the leadership of the Doukhobors in 1832, was an ineffectual leader who spent his time in drunken orgies, while the real administra­tion of the community fell to a Council of Elders. The Orphans’ Home, the Doukhobor seat of administration, soon became a ‘den of crime,’ while the Council of Elders ‘constituted itself a terrible inquisitional tribunal. The principle, “Whoso denies his God shall perish by the sword,” was interpreted according to their caprice; the house of justice was called Rai ł muka, paradise and torture; the place of execution was on the island at the mouth of the Molochna. A mere suspicion of treachery, or of an intention to go over to the Russian Church, was punished with torture and death.’⁷⁸

In the English version, Haxthausen claims the council had two hun­dred people murdered, while the German and French versions give the number as four hundred.⁷⁹ Novitskii cites the French version, but quali­fies it, saying, ‘If one does not believe the rumours about the number of Doukhobor murders, one must in any case accept the results of the investigative commission. It, through all of its persistent and skillful unearthing of secret crimes, revealed twenty-one murders.’⁸⁰ Novitskii then questions his own conclusions, admitting, ‘Unfortunately, the docu­ments addressing this matter, the most interesting and important in the history of the Melitopol Doukhobors during the reign of [Nicholas I], have still not come to light.’⁸¹ Even the most judicious study, by Wood­cock and Avakumovic, quotes Haxthausen at length. It rejects his claims regarding the number of deaths, but accepts Novitskii’s reduced figure of twenty-one.⁸² The new evidence cited here finally gives firm grounds for dismissing Haxthausen ^,s exaggerated claims.

Even the nineteen alleged murders described in the extract were based on the most tenuous of evidence. In only two cases did the accused murderers confess their crimes. In nine the bodies of the al­leged victims were never found. Thirteen of the fourteen cases that had previously been investigated had not led to a conviction. One had origi­nally been ruled death by illness, one a suicide, and one a drowning. Eleven relied heavily on rumours related by Doukhobor converts to Orthodoxy, and none of these converts had first-hand knowledge of the events they testified to. Six of the cases had as their primary witness the Molokan Nemanikhina, who relied exclusively on rumours, while an­other six relied on Iosif and Fomin Gankin, who had previously been jailed for giving false testimony. These reports are no more credible than the accusations of ritual murder levelled so often against Jews. They provide no basis for concluding that the Doukhobor community was deeply troubled in the 1830s.

A second report of Doukhobor crimes makes the claims of a split in the community even more doubtful. A December 1840 report by Melitopol uezd Procurator (Striapchik) Andreevskii provides a summary of the ‘crimes committed by Doukhobors in Melitopol uezd’ in the period 1831 to 1840.⁸³ Andreevskii lists fifty-three significant incidents: eleven cases of arson, eleven of robbery, two of desecrating holy icons, two of concealing runaways, one each of illegally freeing a prisoner, possessing counterfeit money, insolence to a village administrator, and abuse of office, one of carrying out a death penalty on a condemned man without obtaining the proper authorization of the authorities, twelve premature deaths from illness, four premature deaths from excessive consumption of alcohol, one suicide, one attempted suicide, and fi­nally, one - just one - murder. The report specifically excluded crimes ‘presently [under] consideration by the Senate,’ partly because their disposition had not yet been decided, and partly because they included ‘cases that occurred prior to the [specified] ten years.’ Presumably, the excluded murders were precisely those for which the Doukhobors were about to be exiled. In other words, at the time of Andreevskifs report — a full twenty-two months after Nicholas had ordered the exile - the Senate had still not ruled on the alleged Doukhobor crimes.

Andreevskifs reports of arson must raise the eyebrows of anyone familiar with the history of Doukhobors in Canada, but because of the dearth of surviving court records regarding crime in neighbouring com­munities it is impossible to know if this represents an unusual pattern or incidence of crime.⁸⁴ Desecrating icons was certain to attract the attention of the Orthodox state, but two incidents in ten years could hardly have warranted a wholesale exile. Harbouring runaways was the most common complaint against Doukhobors, but again Andreevskii reports only two instances. Altogether, the total number of incidents - an average of just 5.3 per year - is not indicative of severe disturbances in the community, and eleven of these ‘incidents’ were deaths by ill­ness, hardly evidence of a community torn apart by internal dissension. By comparison, Steven L. Hoch documents an average of 256 disciplin­ary actions per year in the 3,500-person serf estate of Petrovskoe in Tambov guberniia in the same era.⁸⁵ Barring the discovery of the full records of the investigative commission, the accusations of mass mur­der must be treated as groundless. Most of the murders probably never happened.

Unfortunately, the state believed they did, and this requires an expla­nation. The state based its decision on Koppen’s report, and by exten­sion on District Administrator Kolosov’s description of the crimes. Kolosov implied that the murders were proved beyond a shadow of doubt, but as shown above this was clearly not so. What explains this harsh attack on Doukhobors?

Religious prejudice, officially endorsed by Nicholas Γs official nation­ality policy, must be given a prominent place in any explanation for the exile of the Doukhobors. Still, it is not by itself a sufficient explanation. After all, there is no evidence that the Molokans were subjected to similar pressures, despite the common perception that they were all but identical to the Doukhobors. Kolosov’s report, so openly hostile to the Doukhobors, says only that the Molokans were ‘distinct’ from their sectarian neighbours. Koppen gives a fuller description, concluding that ‘a significant portion of the Molokans, while not renouncing the general tenets of that sect and their mistaken attitudes towards Ortho­doxy and the performance of their duties, show in their written ad­dresses the feelings of devotion to the throne of faithful subjects, and are prepared to affirm their obligations.’⁸⁶

An important reason for this differing attitude towards the two sec­tarian groups was the influence of Mennonite Johann Comies. He held Molokans, who were people of the Book, in much higher esteem than Doukhobors. Cornies endorsed the charges against Doukhobors, and this carried weight. As chairman for life of the Molochna region’s Agri­cultural Society, and a frequent correspondent of Minister of State Domains Kiselev and other top officials, Comies was the most powerful, trusted, and influential man in Molochna.^8, In the 1830s he was un­happy over what he saw as the Doukhobors' unscrupulous sharecrop­ping agreements with the Nogai Tatars. In an 1836 letter to his friend Aleksandr Fadeev, head of the Guardianship Committee which super­vised colonists in New Russia, Cornies expressed revulsion at the crimes described in the investigative commission’s report, writing, T have come to an end with the Doukhobors, crime upon crime, it makes your skin crawl.’⁸⁸ Koppen, in his report to Kiselev, named Comies as a primary informant on Doukhobor religious practices, implying that Comies sup­ported his conclusions. This endorsement must have reassured Kiselev and helped create support in the capital for Koppen’s recommendations.

Comies’s part in determining the Doukhobors' fate points to a vital characteristic of the entire affair: regional interests played a dominant role. The Great Drought of 1832-4 had given other Molochna residents practical reasons to support the Doukhobor exile. Under such circum­stances, the Doukhobors' large landholdings must have prompted jeal­ousy among neighbours. Jews in Russia and elsewhere often found them­selves singled out as scapegoats in times of economic crises, and Doukhobors, as a prominent religious minority, may have suffered from a similar pattern of discrimination.⁸⁹

The crisis of 1833-4 was only the worst manifestation of the larger problem of overcrowding that loomed over Molochna. The Doukhobors' exceptionally large holdings had already attracted the attention of their neighbours. Indeed, it was their landholdings that brought them back under state scrutiny in 1832, in reaction to Molokan requests for land.

The investigations of the 1830s, and the subsequent exile, broke the Doukhobors' perpetual lease and freed their land for reallotment. The Doukhobors themselves claimed that their exile was motivated solely by the desire of local officials to profit from this process. In 1841, in a petition appealing their exile, they specifically identified District Ad­ministrator Kolosov as the true source of their troubles, accusing him of ‘enriching himself in various oppressive ways with our money and es­tates.’⁹⁰ A group ofDoukhobor exiles en route to the Caucasus in 1843 told German zoologist Moritz Wagner that their money ‘filled many an official pocket,’⁹¹ while in 1903 Joseph Elkinton reported a Doukhobor tradition that their exile was sparked by false accusations of a single, unidentified official angered by their refusal to meet his blackmail demands.⁹²

The Doukhobors' reference in their 1841 petition to their ‘estates’ is particularly important, for the only Doukhobor land that figured in Kolosov’s denunciation, which weighed so heavily in the ultimate deci­sion to order the exile, was the 26,878 desiatinas of leased land. Kolosov objected to the advantage that Doukhobors gained over neighbouring ‘land poor’ Orthodox state peasants by renting the large tract and also to their paying only an ‘insignificant price’ for it.⁹³ His concerns were echoed by Koppen, who observed that similar land brought lease pay­ments of as much as sixty kopecks per desiatina.⁹⁴ In 1838 the confisca­tion of this ‘excess land’ figured prominently in recommendations made by the Ministry of Internal Affairs for dealing with the Doukhobors.⁹⁵ In 1842, in rejecting a Doukhobor plea to maintain control of the land, an official in the Ministry of State Domains concluded, Tn as much as the land is extremely good and contains everything needed for new setders, and considering that the treasury can realize from it an incomparably greater return, while it now receives only a token payment of twenty kopecks per desiatina... I recommend that it be returned to the trea­sury, particularly in view of the fact that the Doukhobors have in no way earned such kindness from the state.’⁹⁶

This attention to Doukhobor landholdings reveals a three-sided in­teraction among the ideological prescripts of Nicholas’s official nation­ality policies and the more practical concerns that regional and central officials faced with providing land for Russia’s rapidly growing peasant population. Local Molochna officials, motivated generally by local land shortages and particularly by the 1832-4 drought, and quite possibly also motivated by the opportunity to profit personally from the exer­cise, used dubious charges to free up Doukhobor land. Central officials, concerned with the empire-wide shortage of land for state peasants, accepted the dubious charges and ordered the Doukhobor exile. Yet, whatever the practical concerns, the exile was Officiallyjustified as an attempt to convert the sectarians to Orthodoxy.⁹⁷

Unfortunately for the Doukhobors, the state accepted the accusa­tions made against them. The 26 January 1841 proclamation of exile reads: ‘All your crimes have been discovered, and the innocent blood which you have shed calls down upon your heads the rigours of the law. By your actions you have rendered yourselves unworthy of the indul­gence and pardon which were granted to you by his Majesty, and you have exhausted the patience of the authorities, who are in the end convinced that you should be transferred into distant regions where you will no longer be injurious to your fellow men.’⁹⁸

The Doukhobors did not go without complaint. In March 1841 they petitioned the state, describing their fate in pathetic terms: ‘We unfor­tunate 4,000 souls, torn from our homes and the land which we, over dozens of years and with great difficulty obtained, and spilling tears in comprehension of our fate, must set out on a journey, a Iongjourney, and settle in a barren climate on infertile land, impoverished, brought almost to the sacrifice of our lives, comforted only by the knowledge that we are guildess.’⁹⁹

In the petition they asked permission to stay in Molochna, but reas­serted the unity of the Doukhobor commonwealth by adamantly refus­ing to abandon their religious convictions. A second petition, from the group designated for exile without appeal, asked only that the exile be delayed by a year so they could obtain fair prices for the belongings that they could not take with them.¹⁰⁰ A third petition, turning to the question of property, asked that Doukhobors be allowed to retain con­trol of their leased land, presumably by subletting it.¹⁰¹ All of these petitions were refused.

As for the final benefactors in the reallotment process, most Doukhobor land went to land-short Orthodox peasants. The Molokans, whose need for land had initiated the investigation, also benefited; in 1842 they were granted enough Doukhobor land to bring their total holdings to fifteen desiatinas per male soul.¹⁰² This did not completely satisfy the Molokans; 678 of them asked for and received permission to join the Doukhobor trek to the Caucasus. Such permission was given only grudgingly, for there were suspicions in some quarters that Molokans were simply trying to avoid tax arrears that had built up during the crop failures of 1839.^10s Those Molokans who remained in Molochna after 1845 no longer held the state’s attention. For the most part, the governor of Tavria guberniia contented himself with one or two sentences in annual reports to St Petersburg, reassuring the capital that the local sectarians were an exemplary lot, farming their fields, tending their gardens, and keeping their religious views to themselves.¹⁰⁴

The single largest benefactors of the Doukhobor exile were Johann Cornies and his brother David. In 1845, 4,039 desiatinas of the land taken from the Doukhobors passed into their hands. The lease price was the same low original twenty kopecks per desiatina per year.¹⁰⁵ Although there is no explicit evidence in this regard, one may well wonder whether Johann Cornies’s own well-known thirst for land had influenced the assessment of the Doukhobors that he gave to Koppen in 1837.¹⁰⁶ There is no small irony that the Cornies brothers received land that was taken away from Doukhobors in part because of religion, in part because it exceeded the standard state peasant allotment, and in part because the lease payment of twenty kopecks per desiatina was only ‘token.’ After all, Johann and David were also not Orthodox, and were themselves state peasants. But the Cornies brothers were peasants in name only. Johann, the most powerful man in Molochna, had hosted both Alexander I and Nicholas I in his home, and as chairman for life of the region’s Agricultural Society he acted as the main local represen­tative of the Ministry of State Domains. No doubt he had ‘earned such kindness’ from the state.¹⁰⁷