Molokans in the Far
East
from John J. Stephan, The
Russian Far East: a history. 1994. Pages 62-68,
73
In the 1858
Treaty
of
Aigun, Russia
acquired the southern part of what is now called the Far
East. Immediately Russian offered incentives to its
Cossacks, peasants and sectarians to move there.
In 1862 the Tsar gave settlers to the Far East 270
acres (0.42 square mile) of land per household
(2,000 square miles just for sectarians), no military
conscription for 10 years, no taxes for 20 years. By
1880 ...Amur district ... had more religious sectarians
than any province in Russia. By the 1890s Molokans were
good businessmen, with steamship lines, flour mills, stores, and factories.
Also, Molokans
were the best farmers, working at least
60 square miles,
giving the Amur district more agricultural machinery per
capita than any province in the Russian Empire. And Molokans celebrated
Epiphany with Holy water imported from China.
—Stephan
"In 1887..'.it would not be an exaggeration to call the
city of Blogoveshshensk
a Molokan city'."
More than a third of all the Molokans in the world lived
in the Far East. —Klibanov
Though Stephan mentions Molokans in his section on Sectarians below and in a footnote
in Chapter 9,
his Chapter 8 is worthy for it's description of life
in the Far East and how sectarians migrated relative
to other Russians, ethnic groups and nationalities.
Stephan also had this remarkable photo (#14 below) of
3 Molokan women
copied
from
a
1926 German study about Russians and Chinese in the
Far East.
For more photos see: Photos of 3 Molokan
Buildings in Blagoveshchensk, Russia For more detail about
Molokans and
Doukhobors in
the Far East, see History
of Religious Sectarianism in Russia (1860s - 1917), by A.I. Klibanov,
(translated) pages 184-199, 205, with statistics in
the Appendix, pages 412-421. The movement of Molokans and Doukhobors to the
Far East was related to their movement to the
Caucasus, described in Breyfogle's
thesis
and
book.
[Photo]
14.
Molokan women,
Amur
District.
Click on photo to
enlarge. Note that this dress (sarafan)
evolved differently from what is typical in
the Caucasus.
Original photo from V. K. Arsen’ev
[Wladimir Arsenjew], Russen und Chinesen in Ostsibirien. 1926
(German). 228 p. with 28 leaves of photos
|
The Molokan
dresses (left) are similar to that of a
young
traditional Old Ritualist wife (above) in
Brazil in 2004. Find similar dresses in a
thrift shop in Fairbanks,
Alaska; in Oregon
(1989) and near Lake
Baikal
Russia (2001). The husband above is
wearing a kosovorotka,
Russian peasant tunic shirt, optional among
Molokans today, but now
mandatory among diaspora Dukhizhizniki.
|
Compare
"jumper" or "sundress" (sarafan)"
shown on many
webpages.
|
Contents
Chapter 8 — Patterns of
Settlement
The last exile on the
Amur breathes more easily than the first general in
Russia. —Anton Chekhov (1890)
Between 1859 and 1917 over half a million people moved to
what some called a "New America.” (This phrase, quoted in
a major 1909 study of the Far East, was attributed to
Niels E. Hansen, a University of South Dakota professor
who conducted firsthand observations of Siberian
settlement in 1894, 1897, 1905, and 1906 for the U.S.
Department of Agriculture. Priamur’e, p. 848.)
Though the Far East did
not match Western Siberia in volume, it held its own in
diversity, accommodating besides Russians, Ukrainians,
Belorussians, Cossacks, Finns, Estonians, Latvians,
Germans, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Americans,
not to mention the stray Swiss and Scot. Immigration
transformed the region's demographic profile. In the
Priamur and the Primorye, aborigines declined
precipitously in relative terms, numbering merely 45,000,
or 5 percent of the inhabitants in 1911. Only in the
Northeast and Transbaikalia did indigenous peoples
constitute a significant proportion of the population, and
only in Yakutia did they retain their numerical
preponderance. Immigrants boosted the Slavic portion of
the population from 66 percent in 1897 to 80 percent in
1917.(1)
Cossacks
The Amur and Ussuri kazachestvos
[Cossacks], established respectively in 1859 and 1860,
formed a distinct socioeconomic stratum, with generous
land allotments, tax exemptions, and a separate military
administration. Leavened with convicts and penal battalion
incorrigibles, they offered unpromising material for any
colonizing venture. Muraviev's hopes that they would build
healthy agrarian communities proved illusory, although
Cossack villages near Blagoveshchensk appeared orderly and
clean to one observer in 1866.(2) Amur
and Ussuri Cossacks cultivated less than 1 percent of
their holdings, and some abandoned the land altogether in
favor of part-time labor or brigandage.(3)
It was not unheard of for men to sell the favors of their
wives and daughters for provisions and drink.(4)
Free, self-governing, and self-sustaining Cossack
communities did not develop in the Far East as they had
along the Don [Rostov province]. Inexperienced as
agriculturists and overextended by military, constabulary,
and postal duties, most Cossack households just managed to
subsist.(5) Governor Generals Dukhovskoi
and Grodekov tried to reinvigorate Cossack communities by
resettling families from the Don, Orenburg, Kuban, and
Urals along the Ussuri and around Lake Khanka, but these
efforts did not stem the decline of Cossacks as a
percentage of the Far East’s population: from 85 percent
(1859) to 18 percent (1897) in the Amur District; from 43
percent (1869) to 6 percent (1897) in the Maritime
District.(6)
[In the Millky Waters
area, now the South Ukraine, many Orthodox Cossacks
intermarried with and converted to Dukhobor, Molokan
and Prygun; which is one of the reasons
sectarians were moved to the Caucasus. The sub-group of
Don-Molokans started there. The diaspora Prygun singing
style — "the beat" — was promoted by the late Misei
Volkoff from Cossack styles he learned as a kid. Volkoff
was the lead
singer (glavnii pivets)
at the Samarin sobranie (Akhtinsi sobranie, Percy Street Church) in
Los Angeles, and lead the editorial board that collected
songs and produced the diaspora Dukhizhiznik Songbook of Zion (Sionskii Pesennek)
up to his death.]
Land became a source of tension between Cossacks and
peasants. Because most of the former were unable or
unwilling to cultivate all of their allotments, some
settlers started to move in and clear homesteads for
themselves around the edges. The Cossacks regarded this as
encroachment, but their appeals to higher officials to
exclude peasants from frontier areas fell on deaf ears
because the Priamur governor-generals were more interested
in promoting Slavic colonization and expanding the
regional food base than in preserving the integrity of
underutilized parcels. Dukhovskoi and Grodekov offered
peasants land near the frontier on condition that they
share certain duties with Cossacks. The last
governor-general, Nikolai Gondatti (1911-17), went further
and distributed frontier plots to peasants without
attaching service obligations .(7)
Meanwhile, the Amur and Ussuri Cossack communities
themselves underwent structural changes. What started out
as a motley aggregation in 1860 differentiated into atamans
(officers drawn from regular army units), cavalrymen,
policemen, and agriculturists. Successful Cossack farmers
hired substitutes to discharge their military service
obligations, thereby freeing themselves to consolidate
their advantages as cultivators. Some Ussuri Cossacks
hired Koreans and Chinese to till their fields. Economic
stratification gave rise to envy and resentment, but
whether this merited the name "class struggle" is a matter
of debate.(8)
Peasants
Peasant migration to the Far East fell into three phrases:
(1) 1859-82, (2) 1882-1907, and (3) 1908-17. Each phase
was characterized by distinctive government policies,
modes of transport, and types of immigrants.
Although St. Petersburg removed some statutory obstacles
to peasant migration in 1859, colonization got off to a
slow start. Only 250 families came to the Far East in the
years 1859-61.(9) Eastward movement
picked up in conjunction with Alexander II's Great Reforms
in general and the emancipation of serfs in particular. In 1862 an imperial
edict granted settlers to the Far East 100 desyatins
(one
desyatin = 2.7 acres) of land
per household, exemption from conscription for ten
years, and exemption from taxation for twenty years.(10) [These
were very attractive grants. 100 desiatins is about 270 acres,
about 42% of a square mile!] During the next
decade about 5,000 "hundred-desyatiners" moved to the
Priamur from Western Siberia, Transbaikalia, the Volga,
and the Urals, forming the nucleus of the region’s
prosperous peasantry.(11) Although an
overwhelming majority of these newcomers were Russians,
Finnish and Estonian colonies cropped up along the shores
of Peter the Great Bay starting in 1869.(12)
Settlers fared variously depending on the location of
allotments. In the middle Amur, peasants found their grain
and vegetables in demand in Blagoveshchensk and the Zeya
goldfields. Conditions were less favorable along the lower
Amur, where enterprising immigrants gave up their original
allotments in favor of the warmer climes, richer soils,
and. ready markets of the southern Primorye.(13)
Among the 14,000 peasants who migrated to the Far East
between 1859 and 1882, the Khudyakov family showed what
could be achieved by ingenuity, energy, and good fortune.
Forty-one-year-old Leonty arrived in the Primorye from
Tomsk in 1877 with his wife and five sons ranging in age
from three to eleven. Draining his parcel of land near
Razdolnoye, he planted and harvested crops of grain and
vegetables, assisted by his growing children. Eventually
the boys married and had sons of their own until three
generations worked together on adjacent farms. Seeing a
commercial opportunity, the Khudyakovs cultivated ginseng
with the help of a Chinese, whom they had saved from
Manchurian bandits called hong huzi. (The term hong huzi (literally
"red beards") may have been coined by Manchus and Chinese
in reference to "red-beardcd" Russians who preyed on Amur
natives during the 17th century. Harvey J. Howard, Ten Weeks with Chinese
Bandits (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1926), pp. 23)
Father and sons built a five-ton schooner and descended
the Suifen River to fish in Amur Bay. Venturing farther
afield each year, by 1910 the sons were bringing back
sealskins and walrus tusks from the Sea of Okhotsk. To
cope with the ubiquitous hong huzi, the Khudyakovs erected
watchtowers, dug underground bunkers, and kept their
powder dry, enabling them to repulse periodic assaults.
Less provident homesteaders took fatal risks. One day in
1879 a Finnish sea captain, Fridolf Heeck, returned to his
home at Sidemi on an Amur Bay peninsula opposite
Vladivostok to find the house in ruins, his common-law
wife and manservant slaughtered, and his seven-year-old
son abducted.(14) What befell the
Khudyakov and Heeck families threatened isolated southern
Primorye settlements well into the twentieth century.
The second phase of peasant migration (1882-1907) was
shaped by the advent of maritime transport to the Far
East. Almost all arrivals before 1882 had come across
Siberia and down the Amur, an undertaking so
time-consuming and arduous that one St. Petersburg
bureaucrat preferred to travel to and from his Maritime
District post via New York and San Francisco.(15) Until the railroads reached
Transbaikalia and Manchuria in the 1890s, emigrants from
Central Russia and the Ukraine favored the Volunteer
Fleet, an offspring of the Anglo-Russian war scare of
1877. Looking for vessels to use as raiders against
British commerce, St. Petersburg ordered several 5,000-ton
steamers from German shipyards. When the war scare
subsided in 1878, the steamers were purchased with funds
raised by public subscription in the name of the Volunteer
Fleet Company, with offices in Odessa and Vladivostok. The
first group to capitalize on the new service arrived in
1882 when the Rossiya steamed
into the Golden Horn after a record-setting forty-six-day
journey from Odessa via the Dardanelles, Suez, the Indian
Ocean, the East China Sea, and the Sea of Japan.(16)
Meanwhile, on taking office as the governor general of
Eastern Siberia, Dmitry Anuchin had been trying to
persuade St. Petersburg of the benefits of resettling
peasants from overpopulated southwestern provinces of the
Empire to the strategically sensitive southern Primorye.(17) Anuchin’s efforts were rewarded in
1882 by the South Ussuri Resettlement Law, providing land
allotments (fifteen desyatins per person, with a maximum
of 100 per family), five years of tax exemption, food
supplies for eighteen months, and free tools, construction
materials, agricultural implements, and transportation
from Odessa to Vladivostok. To administer the program, a
South Ussuri Resettlement Office opened in Vladivostok,
headed from 1883 by a member of the Primorye governor's
staff, Fyodor Busse.
From 1882 through 1907 about 243,000 peasants arrived in
the Far East from the Ukraine (64%), Siberia (17%), and
central Russia (11%), with small contingents from
Belorussia, the lower Volga, and the Urals.(18)
Whereas the Amur region absorbed most immigrants before
1882, about 75 percent in this second phase made their
homes in the Primorye, thanks to the Volunteer Fleet and,
from 1901, the Chinese Eastern Railroad.(19)
The preponderance of Ukrainians made itself felt in
village names like Poltavka, Kevka, Chernigovka, and
Chuguyevka, giving birth to the expression "Ukrainian Far
East."(20) The Ukrainian connection
acquired political significance after the establishment of
Soviet rule.
Most settlers arriving before 1900 came from the middle
strata of the rural population. The government discouraged
poor peasants from using the Volunteer Fleet by requiring
each family to make a 600 ruble deposit in Odessa, an
obstacle that some families circumvented by pooling their
resources to pay the deposit and traveling as a putative
"family," then dividing up the refund and the land
allotted to them by the Resettlement Office in
Vladivostok." In 1901, in conjunction with the penetration
of Manchuria, St. Petersburg broke with precedent and
resettled poor peasants from European Russia and the
Ukraine in the Sikhote Alin and along the Primoryecoast.(22)
During the third stage (1908-17) some 300,000 settlers
moved to the Far East, more than during the previous
half-century, Reflecting Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin's
attempt to create a class of peasant proprietors
throughout Russia, immigration at this time is referred to
as the "Stolypin wave." Many emigrants of this period came
by train in "Stolypin cars" divided into equal sections
for humans and livestock.(23) They were
largely Russian and Ukrainian poor peasants and
agricultural laborers who were less technologically
literate and less entrepreneurial than their
predecessors.(24) Novosely ("new
settlers") who received good land in the Bureya and Zeya
valleys helped double grain production in the Amur
District between 1906 and 1913(25) . On
the less hospitable lower Amur, about 15 percent of the
newcomers abandoned their allotments.(26)
In the southern Primorye the "Stolypin wave" collided with
commercialization. Starozhily
("old settlers") and Cossacks were renting out part
of their allotments to Chinese and Korean tenants, and the
state was selling land to merchants, ship-owners, retired
military officers, officials, and naturalized foreigners.
Novosely had three choices: to cultivate parcels in
marginal areas, become tenants, or hire themselves out as
seasonal laborers on commercial farms.(27)
Feelings between starozhily and novosely varied among
districts and individual households, but here too some
historians have perceived symptoms of "class struggle.”(28)
Social differentiation should not obscure the fact that
the Priamur was one of the most economically dynamic
provinces of Imperial Russia during the last decade of
tsarist rule. Land under cultivation increased 42 percent
between 1911 and 1917, a rate outstripping the United
States, Canada, and Australia.(29) The
Far East had the second highest birthrate in Russia (after
Siberia) and a lower death rate than France.(30)
Village organizations were stronger than in European
Russia.(31) Peasant cooperatives allowed
cultivators to pool their resources when selling crops and
buying provisions, to operate their own dairies and
machinery repair shops, to run their own schools, and to
negotiate their own contracts with American, German,
Japanese, and British firms.(32)
Sectarians
Religious sectarians occupied a special position among
peasant migrants to the Far
East. Following the Great Schism within the Russian
Orthodox Church in 1658, many of those unreconciled to new
liturgical forms, referred to variously as "Old Ritualists" "Old
Believers" or "sectarians," crossed the Urals
to continue their practices undisturbed. [It's more accurate to label Old
Ritualists as "schismatics," or "raskolniki".] During the
eighteenth century Skoptsy
(from the word "eunuch," a sect stressing sexual
abstinence) and Dukhobors
(literally: "soul strugglers") [Canadian
Doukhobors prefer: "spirit
wrestlers"] who emphasized the supreme
authority of inner experience and believed that the Spirit
was embodied in their leaders) founded communities that
acknowledged the authority of neither the Russian Orthodox
Church nor the Russian state.(33)
Sectarians migrated to the
Far East in increasing numbers during the1860s, attracted
by the opening of 470,000 desyatins [about 2,000 square miles!] of imperial
domains along the middle Amur. Dukhobors and Molokans (a Dukhobor offshoot, whose
dietary laws permitted the drinking
of milk during Lent) gravitated to the environs of Blagoveshchensk. German Mennonites
and Baptists settled along the Zeya and Bureya. By 1880
Old Believers accounted for half the population of the
Amur district, which had more religious sectarians than
any province in Russia.(34) Smaller
communities clustered in the Sikhote Alin and on the
Khanka Plain.(35)
[Stephan appears to
label all religious groups that are not Russian, or
Russian but not Orthodox, as "sectarian", which includes
the Germans, and other immigrants. But other historians
only label those non-Orthodox Russians as "sects".]
Shunning alcohol and tobacco and stressing hard work,
sobriety, and self reliance, sectarians built strong and
stable communities. Their abundant harvests and sturdy
homes with "German corners" (nemetskie ugli was a Priamur idiom for
solid construction) contrasted with the unworked fields
and rundown structures characteristic of Cossack lands.(36) Molokans
were quick to take advantage of new technology, and
by the 1890s their imported harvesters and reapers gave
the Amur district more agricultural machinery per capita
than any province in the Russian Empire. Credited by Prime
Minister Stolypin with making the Amur District a model of
modern agriculture, Molokan
farmers
were enlisted to grow crops on Kamchatka [map above, right].(37) Molokans also showed themselves to be
good businessmen, operating their own Amur steamship lines
and Blagoveshchensk flour mills. Success bred envy, and
stereotypes of tight-fisted, money-loving Molokans outlived the
communities themselves.(38)
For much more
statistical detail about Molokans in the Far East, see History of
Religious Sectarianism in Russia (1860s - 1917), by A.I. Klibanov,
(translated) pages 184-199, 205, with statistical tables
in the Appendix, pages 412-421, showing the inventory of
many villages. For a comprehensive overview about
Molokan migrations in the 1800s, see Breyfogle's
thesis and book.
|
Klibanov lists 9 Amur Molokan
villages and 42 farms in his appendix with statistics
on population, acreage, livestock and crops. The
data show that about 4,000 rural Molokans
occupied 60 square miles of farmland.
See data tables below. These are not all the
Molokan villages in the Far east, but show some
evidence for his conclusions.
|
Molokan Villages and
Farms near Blagoveschensk, Amur Oblast
(1894)
|
Map
|
Village |
People |
Acres |
Sq.Miles |
A
|
Andreevka |
292 |
3,648 |
5.7 |
B
|
Beloiarskaia [Beloyarovo]
|
208 |
3,667 |
5.7 |
A
|
12 Ivanovka-area farms |
256 |
2,822 |
4.4 |
A
|
Chuevka [Chuyevka]
|
130 |
2,063 |
3.2 |
A
|
Gil'chin* |
502 |
4,574 |
7.1 |
A
|
30 Gil'chin-area farms |
534 |
6,459 |
10.1 |
B
|
Parunov[k]a
|
86 |
481 |
0.8 |
A
|
Tambovka* |
970 |
6,481 |
10.1 |
A
|
Tolstova |
468 |
2,852 |
4.5 |
A
|
Verkhne-Urtui [Verkhniy-Urtuy]
|
75 |
641 |
1.0 |
A
|
Zharikovo |
360 |
3,907 |
6.1 |
|
Totals
|
3,881 |
37,596 |
58.7 |
*
Shared with Doukhobors. See: Doukhobor
and Molokan Settlements in Amur Province,
Russia, 1859-1932 and Amur
Doukhobor
and
Molokan
Villages, 1859-1932, both by Jonathan
Kalmakoff, Doukhboor Genealogy Website. |
Animals |
Count |
Horses |
4,736 |
Sheep |
2,195 |
Cows |
2,139 |
Yearlings |
1,269 |
Bullocks |
536
|
Oxen |
168 |
Camels |
121 |
|
Crops
|
Acres
|
Fallow
|
23,901
|
Hay
|
5,047
|
Farmstead
|
4,631
|
Forest*
|
2,180
|
Oats
|
2,147
|
Spring Wheat
|
1,839
|
Groats
|
556
|
Millet
|
151
|
Barley
|
29
|
Melons
|
26
|
Buckwheat
|
2.6
|
Hemp
|
1.1
|
Flax
|
0.7
|
Peas
|
0.4
|
* Only in Beloiarskaia |
Convicts and Exiles
The living conditions of the three million people forcibly
sent to Siberia between 1584 and 1917 varied by place and
time. Officials who had fallen from favor or wound up on
the losing side of a factional struggle might be given
administrative exile beyond the Urals, a harder blow to
amour proper than to well-being. At the other end of the
spectrum, a person condemned to convict labor (katorga) stood a fair
chance of losing his he if not his life. Political exiles,
about 10 percent of the total, experienced anything from
arctic bleakness to Altai bucolics, from physical drudgery
to literary soirees.
About a fifth of those sent beyond the Urals wound up east
of Lake Baikal, a region that gained special notoriety,
thanks to books by Anton Chekhov and Vlas Doroshevich
about Sakhalin and by George Kennan about Transbaikalia.
(Tsarist authorities who had given Kennan access to
Siberian penal facilities in 1885-86 under the impression
that the American was a "friend of St. Petersburg,"
proscribed Siberia and the Exile System when it appeared
in 1891 but lifted the ban in 1905.) At the time they
wrote, political exiles as a rule fared better than common
criminals, for many of the exiles were allowed to live
independently. One revolutionary recalled that he took
along his books, enjoyed freedom of movement within
several thousand square miles, and was supplied at
government expense with writing paper, weather-recording
instruments, and a Winchester rifle, pistol, and shotgun.(39) When socialist exiles in Yakutsk rose
up to protest travel restrictions in 1904, they wielded
Browning automatic pistols and hunting guns previously
issued to them by the local police.(40)
[George
Kennan (born 1845, died 1924) also collected 100s
of photos — 2 show Molokans in
Georgia. He was the American authority on Siberia. In
1864 he made the first of his journeys to East Asia as
an engineer. His articles on Siberia, for many years
almost the sole authoritative source of information on
that region, were published as Tent Life in Siberia (1870) and Siberia and the Exile
System (2
vol., 1891).]
Escape was common and usually successful, at least in the
short run. In 1861 Mikhail Bakunin rode a barge down the
Amur and boarded ail American schooner at De Castries Bay
for San Francisco. During the next half century, a number
of revolutionaries followed his example, including the
prominent Menshevik Lev Deich, who left Blagoveshchensk by
river-steamer. In 1901 Leib Bronshtein secured a blank
passport in Irkutsk, inscribed "Leon Trotsky" as the name
of his Odessa jailer, and embarked for London. Thousands
of convicts took off into the taiga and became vagabonds,
or in local vernacular, "joined General Cuckoo's Army."
"Cuckoo's troops" usually turned up in the spring thaw as
"snowdrops" a floral euphemism for corpses. To survive,
one had to have "the cleverness of a Chinaman, the nose of
a dog, the eyes of a falcon, the ears of a rabbit, and the
dexterity of a tiger.(41) The Sikhote
Alin, rarely visited by officials, offered vagabonds ample
scope for malfeasance. While surveying the range in
1906,Vladimir Arseniev encountered a self-styled "promyslilennik,"
who confided that he "hunted grouse and swans" (shot
Chinese mid Koreans).(42)
Employment offered an alternative to escape. A fair number
of political exiles sublimated revolutionary impulses into
science, education, and business in the Priamur and the
Primorye. People's Will exiles arriving in Vladivostok
from Sakhalin during 1896-1903 added yeast to local
intellectual life. Lyudmila Volkenshtein devoted herself
to education and social work. Gilyary Gostkevich promoted
a trade union movement while working in the Ussuri
Railroad administration. Boris Orzhikh dabbled in
journalism before emigrating to Japan where he established
a populist Russian-language newspaper.(43)
Mikhail Yankovsky, sentenced to hard labor for involvement
in the 1863 Polish uprising, enlivened the southern
Primorye from 1879 until 1910, when at the age of
sixty-nine he eloped with a young woman to Sochi. During
these three decades, Yankovsky raised a family, bred
horses and reindeer, and cultivated ginseng at a
picturesque farm at Sidcmi on a peninsula across Amur Bay
from Vladivostok. An elaborately unpretentious retreat for
upwardly mobile families and their friends, Sidemi
resembled a Russian Hyannis Port. The guest roster
featured the ethnographer Vladimir Arseniev, the poet
Konstantin Balmont, the governor of the Ussuri District
Aleksandr Sukhanov, and the Swiss entrepreneur Yulius
Bryner, who married Yankovskys cousin. Yulius's grandson
is said to have romped barefoot around Sidemi as he would
on the stage decades later in The King and I
under the name Yul Brynner.(44) [In
1956 The King and I was filmed as a movie.]
Far Eastern exile had a way of channeling outrage into
creativity. Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Vladimir Korolenko
found literary inspiration in Yakutia. An earnest wouldbe
regicide, Konstantin Kurteyev, reinvented himself as a
monarchist newspaper editor in Khabarovsk. The Polish
nationalists Alexander Czekanowski and Iwan Czerski
embarked on geological expeditions in Yakutia, and no one
objected when Benedykt Dybowski went off to study the
zoology of Transbaikalia. Waclaw Sieroszewski spent part
of his exile touring the Priamur under the auspices of the
Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Vladimir Yokhelson,
Vladimir Bogoraz, Lev Shtemberg, and Bronislaw Pilsudski
(older brother of Poland's future president) built
international reputations on the basis of ethnographic
research conducted while exiled to Yakutia and Sakhalin.
In 1894-96, Bogoraz participated in an expedition financed
by the merchant Innokenty Sibiryakov, and in 1900 he and
his friend Yokhelson joined a North Pacific expedition
sponsored by the merchant and banker Morris Ketchum Jesup
on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History in New
York. All eventually left the Far East, but not before
most had availed themselves of Yankovskys hospitality at
Sidemi.(45)
Notes
Epigraph. Chekhov
quoted in Vostrikov, p. 13.
- Russia, Aziatskaia Rossiia, 1: 70;
Rybakovskii, p. 71; White, Siberian Interpention, p. 45.
- Knox, pp. 194-95.
- Kropotkin, Memoirs, p. 186, Sergeev, p. 93.
- Bassin, "Russian Mississippi?" P.
279; Malozemoff, Russian
Far Eastern Polity, p. 2.
- Murov, pp. 149-51; Volgin, p. 139;
Sergeev, P. 36; Nashi
dalekiia okrainy, p. 25.
- Sergeev, p. 80; Iz istorii
revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, pp. 13536.
- Sergeev, pp. 62, 74; Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai,
p. I 17; N. I. Riabov and Shtein, pp. 124-25;
Shindialov, p. 15; MERSH, 41: 137.
- Sergeev, pp. 83-85, 92111
Shindialov, p. 13; Iz
istoriia revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 44.
- N. I. Riabov and Shtein, p. 110.
- Ibid., p. 112; Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai,
p. 6o.
- Ocherki
istorii
sovetskogo
Primor'ia, p. 24.
- Aleksandrovskaia, P. 33; Biankin,
p. 184; Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi
krai, p. 88; Rekk-Lebedev, pp. 10-11.
- Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai, pp. 62, 7476;
Sergeev, p. 66; N. I. Riabov and Shtein, pp. 108,
110-12; Bassin, "Russian Mississippi? ' " p. 276;
Alekseev and Morozov, "Ekonomicheskoe razvitie
Dal'nego Vostoka," p. 38.
- Khisainutdinov, Terra incognita,
pp. 236, 242-44; Khudiakov, "Avtobiografiia"
- Alekseev, Kak nachinalsia Vladivostok, p. 201.
- Biankin, pp. 186-90; Kato, Shiberia ki, p.
34; Vladivostok: Gorod
u okeana, p. 53; Malozemoff, Russian Far Eastern
Policy, pp. 13, 34.
- Anosov, p. 6; Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai,
p. 96.
- Kabuzan, Dal'nevostochnyi krai, pp. 123-24;
Russia, Aziatskaia
Rossiia, 1:69.
- Derber and Sher, Ocherki zhizni,
p. 30; Gerasimov,
Patrioty Dal'nego Yostoka, p. 99; N. I.
Riabov and Shtein, p. 123; Rybakovskii, p. 68.
- Svit, P. 3; Nesterov, p. 93;
Biankin, pp. 185, 232.
- Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai, p. 97; N. I.
Riabov and Shtein, pp. 120, 122; Ocberki istorii
sovetskogo Primor’ia, pp. 25-26.
- Iz
istorii
revoliutsionnogo
dvizheniia, p. 134.
- Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai, pp. 137-40,
190; N. I. Riabov and Shtein, pp. 154-56.
- Kabuzan, Dal'nevostochnyi krai, p. 135,
- Ibid., pp. 127, 154; Derber and
Sher, Ocherki
zhizni, p. 90.
- Shindialov, p. 14; Nashi dalekiia okrainy,
p. 15.
- Murov, pp. 98-100, 113; Vol'naia Sibir',
1927, no. 1: 166; Ocherki
istorii sovetskogo Primor’ia, p. 26; Iz istorii
revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 141;
Raikhman, Economic
Development, p. 30; Narody sovetskogo Dal'nego Vostoka,
p. 64.
- Iz
istorii
revoliutsionnoyo
dvizheniia, pp. 45, 139-40; N. I. Riabov and
Shtein, p. 166. For a general treatment of "class
struggle," see IDV, 2: 283-88.
- Derber and Sher, Ocherki zhizni,
p. 68.
- Ibid., p. 15.
- Russia, Aziatskaia Rossiia, 1: 51.
- Obzor
russkoi
periodicheskoi
pechati, 3: 31
- Armstrong, Russian Settlement,
pp. 92, 196. [Russian
Settlement in the North, by Terence Edward Armstrong,
Cambridge University Press Cambridge (1965)]
- Russia, Pereselenie na Dal'nii Vostok, p.
11; Balalaeva, p. 3; Fedor Danilenko, p. 13; Kabuzan,
Dal’nevostochnyi
krai, p. 88; Malozemoff, Russian Far Eastern
Policy, p. 10.
- SSE, 3: 731-32; Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai,
p 58.
- Kropotkin, Memoirs, p. 216.
- Balalaeva, p. 4.
- Ibid., p. 4; Miagkoff, Aux bords du Pacifique,
p. 13; Karpenko, p. 19.
- Zenzinov, Road, p. 12.
- Kolpenskii, pp. 16 19.
- Eliseev, P. 5.
- Khisamutdinov,"Madimir Arsen’ev."
- Utyshev, "Pis'ma Bronislava
Pilsudskogo" pp. 168, 171.
- "Sidemi: Kotkrytiiu parniatnika
M.I. Iankovskomu" (Vladivostok: Krasnoe znamia, 1991).
Yul subsequently added an "n" to his name so that it
would not be pronounced with a long "i" as in "brine.”
Personal communication from Cyril Bryner, 9 Sept.
1987.
- SSE, 4: 851-52; Vostrikov and
Vostokov, pp. 120-22; Khisamutdinov, Russian Far East,
p. 41.
In Chapter 9, “East Asian
Communities,” in a description of how lax it was to
smuggle goods between Russia and China, an interesting
footnote on page 73 gives this example: "When Molokans celebrated
Epiphany
and brought holy water from Sagalian across the Amur to
Blagoveshchensk, Cossacks were wont to join the
procession, lustily chanting and carrying buckets of
alcoholic "holy water" past unsuspecting customs
officials."
Molokans celebrate Epiphany, the commemoration of
Christ’s baptism. But the use of imported special “holy
water” brough from China in a singing march is news.
This holiday —
originally the Feast of the Blessing of Water, see: Vodokresch
[водокщи : Vodokschi]
— was adapted from their Orthodox past. Pryguny added
holidays learned from the Subbotniki. Diaspora Dukhizhizniki
occasionally use "spiritual water," taken from the
tap in a glass and used by a prophet during a religious
service, sometimes sprinkled by hand on people, or in
new building during a blessing, similar to Judaic
incense offering, with fimiama (фимиама).
Also see: Siberian
Digital
Photo
Collection, Univeristy of California Berkeley
Library
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