Q62: Doukhobor hood credited to KKK?

From: Keith Tarasoff, Canora, Saskatchewan, August 20, 2014

In the Thursday August 14, 2014 issue of the Kamsack Times on page 13, there is an article : ‘Discovery of unusual hooded garment at Pelly museum leads to research of Ku Klux Klan activities in Saskatchewan.’

To my knowledge this garment was worn by Doukhobors to keep warm, and had nothing to do with the type of hood garment worn by the KKK.

As we at the National Doukhobor Heritage Village in Verigin, Saskatchewan, believe the article was written with a reference in error to the real truth. We want to set the record straight. We are asking for your reaction to the article. Any insight would be helpful.

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Answer

You are correct Keith. The newspaper shows a Russian hood, called bashlyk (башлык), made by our Doukhobor ancestors. These were common in Imperial Russia.

Maureen Stefaniuk, the museum’s summer attendant, should retract any connection between their display and Ku Klux Klan in Saskatchewan. Canadians have been falsely selling Freedomites as Doukhobors for more than a century, now they are falsely displaying a Doukhobor garment as KKK.

Here are comparisons of 3 Russian-made bashliki with one of current fashion.

1. Fort Pelly-Livingstone Museum exhibit, published in Kamsack Times.
2. Photo of a Doukhobor bashlyk by William Perehudoff, 'Costumes and Handicrafts in Color,'Pictorial History of the Doukhobors (1969), page 253.
3. Photo of bashlyk displayed online at National Sholokhov Museum-Reserve, Veshenskaya, Rostov Region, Russian Federation.
4. Typical hood-hat-scarf-gloves garment sold online and in many stores.

Fur trapper hats are somewhat similar and more common.

Doukhobor bashlyki are on display at the Doukhobor Discovery Centre in Castlegar, British Columbia; and at the National Doukhobor Heritage Village in Verigin, Saskatchewan. The Fort Pelly-Livingstone Museum can confirm their garment with these 2 museums.

Russian websites show many examples and instructions for making them. Modern English names and styles for this scarf-hat-hood garment vary. Many have animal heads and ears. Sometimes they are mislabeled “snood” — a hair net, which is not a contraction of “scarf-hood.”

Among non-Doukhobor Spiritual Christians from Russia in the USA (Dukh-i-zhizniki, Molokane), their women's' head covering for religious meetings which they call kosinka (triangle), evolved from a scarf of solid fabric to lace cut in a snood-style pattern.

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The Peace Tower should stand for ‘Peace’

Recently I strolled around downtown Ottawa to the Parliament Hill and among the many war monuments. I heard a band playing and positioned myself among the tourists to again watch the Changing of the Guards, a summer ritual performed in front of the Parliament buildings.

Towering above all was our impressive Tower of Victory and Peace, the iconic ‘Peace Tower. ’

I asked myself, shouldn’t the Peace Tower represent ‘peace’ as it did 50 years ago?

In the 1950s PM Lester B. Pearson showcased Canada as a ‘nation esteemed thorough the world for its policies of neutrality, peacekeeping, and honest brokering.’(1)

In contrast, today PM Stephen Harper is determined to display Canada as a military nation.

In this same spot during the 2014 Canada Day celebrations, Harper referred to Canada as 'a courageous warrior…as the best country in the world.' (2). For the past ten years he supported the Afghanistan war, and recently assisted the NATO blockade of Russia, to attract local Ukrainian-Canadian votes. Purchasing very expensive F-35 fighter jets is debated as more important than practical search and rescue planes.

In this decade Canada is spending $120 million to commemorate wars for PR and tourism.(3) Schools are encouraged to ‘celebrate’ the upcoming 100th year anniversary of World War I, and the cadet program costing $5 million a year continues.

A permanent impact on education was changing the name of the Canadian Museum of Civilization to the Canadian Museum of History and refocusing it narrower to Canadian history, with the same Director (Mark 'Neill) for the nearby Canadian War Museum. The Director was appointed by the PM.

Absent from the Parliament Hill area are peace statues. The only one in the area is Reconciliation: The Peacekeeping Monument. No streets or bridges are named for peace in Ottawa. Only Winnipeg has a Mahatma Gandhi Way, (220 m. long) leading to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Compare to UK, England, where a statue of Nelson Mandela in their Parliament Square was unveiled in 2007, and a statue of Mahatma Gandhi will be installed next year.

If Canada is to showcase peace to other countries, statues of these world moral leaders must be in the centre of Canada's capital to complement our Peace Tower and offset all the war monuments and statues.

The Canadian Department of Peace Initiative (CDPI) hopes to create a cabinet level department to transform military spending to a peace culture. A Private Members Bill was tabled in 2011, three years ago. While lobbying for CDPI progress, citizens are also working their public relations.

Peace Tower Movement

Rededicating the Peace Tower as a public icon that promotes peace and good governance is a project led by PeaceQuest — ‘to underline the importance of peace … as a basic Canadian value.’(4)

To recast this national logo, the Ottawa Peace Festival — a coalition of 20 peace groups in the Ottawa area — will open its festival on Sunday September 21 on Parliament Hill for its 8th year, but this time to rededicate the tower.

The festival theme: ‘Peacing Together the Canada We Want’ will launch from the Peace Tower for 12 days at 17 locations around the capital. 29 events, hosted by 20 groups are free and open to the public — art exhibitions, lectures, panel discussions, films, peace walks, music, food, and lots of education. Related topics cover domestic violence, PSTD, history, pollution and climate change.

I say let’s celebrate peace, but mourn war.


References

1. Dan Gardner. ‘Lester Pearson Would Not be Impressed.’ Ottawa Citizen, 11 Aug. 2006, p. A15.
2. Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on Canada Day, ugnayan, 4 July 2014.
3. Dennis Gruending. PeaceQuest wants Peace Tower rededicated, group promotes 'counter narrative' to militarism, dennisgruending.ca, 11 July 2014.
4. Let’s rededicate the Peace Tower … to peace, PeaceQuest.ca, 23 October 2013.

Kars Doukhobor History Project Granted

A small grant to document Doukhobors in Kars, Turkey, was awarded to resident historian Vedat Akçayöz (Alchayoz), who for 15 years has advocated to protect, restore and display the heritage of the remaining sites and artifacts of over 10,000 Spiritual Christians from Russia who once lived in Kars Province.

As Director of the Kars Culture and Arts Association, he is working on a Doukhobor video documentary, photo exhibit, book, and cultural centre-museum.

The government may provide space for a long-planned Russian culture center-museum in Kars to educate the public and welcome heritage explorers. Vedat hopes to preserve classic houses in the former Doukhobortsy Pokrova village (now Porsuklu) and the former Molokan and Prygun Blagodarnoye village (now Chakmak, joined with Chalkuvar). His grandmother was Prygun.

Vedat Akçayöz in the temporary museum, in his office in Kars, Turkey. The larger photos were taken in Stavropol, Russia, of families and descendants who left Kars in 1962.

Vedat plans to present his first Doukhobor exhibit by the end of 2013 with photos and video showing the history from origins in Old Russia, relocation to the Caucasus and Kars, burning of guns in 1895, arrests and exiling to Siberia, why and how Tolstoy aided them, migration to Canada, and those remaining in Georgia.

His major problem is language. Nearly all the information is in languages foreign to him, and he has limited access to translators. Very little Russian sectarian history was published in the Turkish language.

In September Vedat was hosted in Gorelovka, Georgia, by Nikolay Sukarukov for 3 days, from 30 August to Sept 3, 2013. Though he previously visited Georgia Doukhobors 6 times, he did not understand much of their history until this year. So he returned (~200 km, 125 miles each way) to gather missing details, photos and video.

In October he is going to Azerbaijan to try to locate the 3rd burning of arms site. This is the first effort we know of to explore this historic Doukhobor site since Tarasoff failed to find the exact site in 1977.

An international joint effort was accomplished this Spring to orientate Vedat. In April, 2013 his son Alper Akçayöz, who speaks English, stopped in Los Angeles for one day, during his first 1-week vacation in the USA. He was met by historian Andrei Conovaloff from Arizona, whose grandparents on both sides were from Kars. They toured and photographed Los Angeles Spiritual Christian historic sites. Alper collected photos and video at a wedding of a congregation from Melikoy village, the large cemetery, and met descendants of Kars Armenian Pryguny from Karakala village who sang a psalom in Armenian.

Conovaloff presented 4-hours of condensed history about Spiritual Christians from Russia in Kars, which was simultaneously translated to Turkish by Alper and recorded on video for his father. 

Suggestions from Koozma Tarasoff (Canada), and Joyce Keosababian-Bivin (Israel) were included.

First, locate the 3 historic 1895 Doukhobor burning of arms sites, and showcase the Kars site as a historic landmark. Tarasoff says this is the single most important historic location in Kars province from which Vedat can begin to introduce Doukhobor history. The burning of arms impacted all Spiritual Christians in the Caucasus.

Second, identify the village of Karakala where persecuted Protestant Armenians joined Pryguny who resettled in Kars oblast from Russia in the 1880s. Keosababian-Bivin, born in Los Angeles, is a historian of Armenian Prygun descent who has been trying for decades to find her ancestral village. This month Vedat confirmed that an old photo matches the village nicknamed Merkezkarakale (central Karakale).

In Los Angeles, some of the zealous Spiritual Christians from Russia participated in the launch of the Pentecostal and Evangelic Christian movements, which are similar to their faiths. Some Prygun immigrants attended the nearby Azusa Street Revival in 1906. In the 1920s, the Armenian Apostolic congregation fellowshipped with Subbotniki and hosted Aimee McPherson, while Pryguny participated in her Foursquare ministry and radio show. In the 1950s, Karakala descendant Demos Shakarian hosted the first Oral Roberts crusades in California, and launched the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International. Several of celebrity Kim Kasrdashian's relatives, born in Karalaka, are buried in the old Prygun cemetery in East Los Angeles.

Vedat showed his first photo exhibit in 2008, then produced a video and appeared on local TV many times to promote his projects about Spiritual Christians. Last year he learned that the Turkish term malakanlar generally referred to all Spiritual Christian faith groups (molokan, prygun, dukh-i-zhiznik, dukhobortsy, subbotnik, etc.) not just Molokane.

This year Vedat realized he is a descendant of Spiritual Christian Pryguny, not Molokane, and has Dukh-i-zhiznik relatives in Russia and in Los Angeles, County, United States of America.

People in eastern Anatolia, Turkiye, have mostly forgotten how many different faiths from Russia were in their territory during the Russian occupation (1877 - 1922), and that many descendants are Turkish citizens. Among the non-Orthodox Christian faiths resettled from Russia were:

• Dukhobortsy (spirit-wrestlers), various divisions
• Dukh-i-zhiznik faiths, founded in 1928 in Los Angeles and exported to Kars
• Luidi Bozhe (God's People), various divisions
• Molokane (milk-drinkers during fasts, Lent), one faith
• Protestant Armenians who joined Pryguny
• Protestant Germans from Russia, many faiths, Anabaptists
• Pryguny (jumpers), various divisions
• Subbotniki (Saturday people), various divisions

Though most foreigners from Russia were repatriated to the USSR by the 1960s, more than 1000 descendants of these forgotten faiths remain scattered throughout Turkey.

Doukhobor group in Vedat's office museum, Kars, Turkey, 2011. L to R: Ken Harshenin,
Eileen Kooznetsoff, Rose Ann Bartley (Hadikin), Natalie Stewart (Hadikin), Diane White
(Stoochnoff), Walter Stoochnoff, (hand, leg shown), and Fred Kooznetsoff.

In 2009 Vedat invited heritage explorers, and in 2011 he invited more university students to get involved in research.

So far 5 groups of Canadian Doukhobors have explored their Karakhanskiye settlements in Kars province and 4 reported in Iskra.

• 2007 — Ken Harshenin (Iskra #2003, Feb. 2008, pages 16-23) on Spirit-Wrestlers.com.
• 2009 — Florence Chernoff-Lymburner (Iskra #2028, March 2010, pages 14-15), expanded with colour photos on the Doukhobor Heritage Website.
• 2010 — Carrie Eirene Stevensen, Doukhobors - Духоборы - Kars - Turkey, 7 heritage photos, on Flickr.com.
• 2011 — Group of 7 led by Ken Harshenin in photo above (Iskra #2051 - #2057).
• 2013 — Verna Postnikoff (Iskra #2070, September 2013, pages 30-32), edited with colour photos on Spirit-Wrestlers.com.

When Vedat first made contact with Spiritual Christian historians in the West (Tarasoff, Kalmakoff, Conovaloff), he hoped sponsors would bring him to North America to collect data. Instead, heritage explorers came to him.

Now he says: ‘Who knows, maybe I can show my Doukhobor exhibit in Canada. Of course, this is a dream. Why not? Martin Luther King says to us: “I have a dream.”’
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More news from Turkey about Doukhobors.