Exiled from Russia centuries ago, a religious group is on the edge of vanishing in Georgia

GORELOVKA, Georgia (AP) — A 10-year-old boy proudly stands beside his father and listens to the monotone chanting of elderly women clad in embroidered headscarves and long colorful skirts. It is Ilya's first time attending a night prayer meeting in Gorelovka, a tiny village in the South Caucasus nation of Georgia, and he is determined to follow the centuries-old hymns that have been passed down through the generations.

There is no priest and no iconography. It's just men and women praying together, as the Doukhobors have done since the pacifist Christian sect emerged in Russia in the 18th century.

Thousands of their ancestors were expelled to the fringes of the Russian Empire almost two centuries ago for rejecting the Orthodox church and refusing to serve in Czar Nicholas I's army — much like the thousands of men who fled Russia two years ago to avoid being drafted to join Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

Today, only about 100 Doukhobors remain in the tight-knit Russian-speaking farming community in two remote mountainous villages.

“Our people are dying,” 47-year-old Svetlana Svetlishcheva, Ilya's mother, tells The Associated Press, as she walks with her family to an ancient cemetery.

Prayer never stops

Some 5,000 Doukhobors who were banished in the middle of the 19th century established 10 villages close to the border with the hostile Ottoman Empire, where they continued to preach nonviolence and worshipped without priests or church rituals.

The community prospered, growing to around 20,000 members. When some refused to pledge allegiance to the new czar, Nicholas II, and protested by burning weapons, the authorities unleashed a violent crackdown and sent about 4,000 of them to live elsewhere in the vast Russian Empire.

Nonviolence is the foundation of Doukhobor culture, says Yulia Mokshina, a professor at the Mordovia State University in Russia, who studies the group.

“The Doukhobors proved that without using force, you can stand up for the truth,” Mokshina says. “They fought without arms but with their truth and internal power.”

Their plight caught the attention of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, also a pacifist, who donated the profits from his final novel “Resurrection” to help around 7,500 Doukhobors emigrate to Canada to escape persecution.

And all the while, the prayers never stopped, not even when the Soviet authorities relentlessly cracked down on religious activities.

“There hasn’t been a single Sunday without prayer,” Yuri Strukov, 46, says with pride, in the village of Orlovka, where he has lived for 30 years.

A shrinking community

Like others in the rural community, Strukov owns cattle and produces cottage cheese, sour cream and a brined cheese called suluguni, which he sells in a nearby town. His way of life is challenging — he braves freezing temperatures during winter and droughts in the summer, and the remote village is a three-hour drive from the nearest big city — which does not appeal to many Doukhobors any longer.

“The community has changed because it became small," Strukov says. "The fact that there are few of us leaves a heavy residue in the soul.”

In Soviet times, the Doukhobors maintained among the best collective farms in the region. But the nationalist sentiment that bubbled up in Georgia as the collapse of the Soviet Union loomed prompted many to return to Russia in the late 1980s.

“We didn’t relocate, we came back,” says 39-year-old Dmitry Zubkov, who was among the first convoy of 1,000 Doukhobors who left Gorelovka for what is now western Russia in 1989. Zubkov and his family settled in the village of Arkhangelskoye in Russia's Tula region.

Strukov also thinks about moving.

After several waves of Doukhobors departed, ethnic Georgians and Armenians — Orlovka is close to the Armenian border — moved in, and he says relations between them and the ever-shrinking community of Doukhobors are tense. His four family members are the last Doukhobors living in Orlovka.

But the prayer house and his ancestors' graves keep him from leaving.

“The whole land is soaked with the prayers, sweat and blood of our ancestors," he says. "We always try to find the solution in different situations so we can stay here and preserve our culture, our traditions and our rites.”

Keeping the traditions alive

Doukhobor rites have traditionally passed from one generation to the next by word of mouth, and Strukov's 21-year-old daughter Daria Strukova feels the urgency to learn as much as she can from senior community members.

“I’m always worried that such a deep and interesting culture will just get lost if we don’t take it over in time,” Strukova says.

She says she considered converting to the Georgian Orthodox Church as a student in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, where that faith wields great influence. But her doubts were dispelled as she listened to a Doukhobor choir during a prayer meeting.

“I realized that this is what I missed, this is what I couldn’t find anywhere," she says. "I know now that the Doukhobor faith will always be with me till the end of my life.”

Zubkov says Strukova's wavering faith is not unusual among Doukhobors in Russia. Once they assimilate into Russian society, experience big cities, speak the same language and share traditions with the locals, of course they will be tempted by the predominant religion.

“People didn’t want to stand out," he says. "Unfortunately, we have been assimilating very fast.”

Around 750 Doukhobors settled in Arkhangelskoye more than 30 years ago. Now, only a few elderly women attend Sunday prayers, and only a couple of Doukhobors sing traditional anthems at funerals.

Zubkov predicts that within a decade the culture will disappear from Arkhangelskoye altogether.

Enduring faith

The Doukhobors whose families started anew in Canada more than a century ago don't feel a strong connection to the villages that are sacred for the Strukov family. They say what is important is their faith and the pacifist principles that underscore it.

“We do not hold any specific place and historical places ... in some kind of spiritual significance,” said John J. Verigin Jr., who leads the largest Doukhobor organization in Canada. “What we try to sustain in our organization is our dedication to those fundamental principles of our life concept.”

But Ilya, in Gorelovka, is comforted by the knowledge that his community, culture and faith are rooted in a place established by his ancestors.

“I see myself a tall grown-up going to the prayers every day in Doukhobor clothes," Ilya said. "I will love coming here, I love it now too.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.