The despicable crime of nudity: law, the state and civil protest among Canada's Doukhobors, 1899-1935.

The Sons of Freedom sect represented the traditional, ascetic wing of the Doukhobor community in Canada, who rejected accommodation with the state and sought to live according to the "old ways" in isolation from the rest of Canadian society.

On May 1, 1932, one hundred nude Sons of Freedom were arrested by police at the village of Thrums in southeastern British Columbia. This was the prelude to subsequent arrests for the same crime in Nelson on May 9 and Grand Forks on May 13. By mid-June, close to 600 adult protesters had been arrested, charged with and convicted of public nudity and sentenced to the maximum penalty of three years in jail. Because the penalty was in excess of two years, the prisoners were the responsibility of the Dominion government. They were incarcerated in a special penal colony on Piers Island, near Victoria, at the southern end of Vancouver Island. The Freedomite children, many of whom had been taken into custody with their parents, were removed from their homes and put into orphanages, industrial schools or fosterage on the coast. The objective of the provincial child welfare authorities was to resocialize these children to "Canadian ways". What explains both the bizarre form of protest and the draconian response to it?

Nudity is an old form of both religious expression and protest against civic authority. In 1652, during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, a woman stripped naked in a chapel at Whitehall during a church service while crying, "Welcome the resurrection!" (2) James Nayler, a leader of the Ranter wing of Quakerism, rode into Bristol in the nude in 1658. Nayler was honoured by members of the populace laying clothes in his path, hailing him as "the Son of Mary" and the "only Son of God" and shouting Hosannas. According to Christopher Hill, "Ranters systematically proclaimed the right of natural man to behave naturally. In word and deed some of them deliberately flouted the inhibitions which the Puritan ethic was imposing." (3) Group displays of nudity took place at Ranter and Quaker meetings. Thereafter, from time to time in both Britain and America, millenarian groups that practised nudity as a means of theological conviction and community solidarity emerged. It is doubtful if any of these instances match the story of nudity in Canada among the ascetic wing of the Doukhobors in terms of political or legal drama.

Almost 7,500 Doukhobors came to Canada in a mass migration in 1899. They were the descendants of a group that had broken away from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century, as it became more hierarchical and closely identified with the state. Branded as heretics, practising pacifism and having little or no respect for ecclesiastical or secular authority, they incurred the hostility of autocratic czars and the state church. As a consequence, they suffered episodic persecution and exile into newly conquered frontier areas, where they would be less able to proselytize and were dispensable. (4)

Doukhobor theology was very simple--because God (the "divine spark") is immanent in every human being, mutual respect and co-operation should be the guiding principles of life. Religious faith was affirmed and passed on through an oral tradition of psalms, not biblical texts. For some periods of their history the Doukhobors farmed and lived in common. Oddly, given their anarchic instincts about society outside Doukhobor ranks, they developed a tradition of strong authoritarian and hereditary leadership in which the leader was invested with semi-divine qualities. This was justified as necessary to provide the group with the direction needed when it was under pressure from outside forces.

The government of Czar Nicholas II severely persecuted the Doukhobors after their young men avowed their pacifism by refusing to serve in the military. In 1895, in a symbolic act of defiance, the community in Transcaucasia burned its weapons. Although the Doukhobors had engaged in civil and military disobedience in Russia, no incidents of mass nudity as a means of protest are recorded.

At this time, Canada was anxious to fill up the Prairies with robust agriculturalists. The Liberal government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier accepted the Doukhobors, exempted them from military service in recognition of their pacificism and allowed them to farm land in common. Mennonite communities in Canada already enjoyed such concessions.

During the early years in Canada's Northwest Territories (which until 1905 included what is now Alberta and Saskatchewan), the Doukhobors were fragmented internally. (5) With their leader, Peter Verigin the "Lordly ", still in Siberian exile, some members of the group had opted to farm individually and to seek the benefits of some Canadian institutions, including schooling. They became known as the independents. Those families and individuals who wanted to replicate exactly in Canada their traditions and way of life from Russia and to insulate the community from the perils and temptations of the world outside did not receive this independence well. Encouraged by one of Count Lev Tolstoy's more fanatical followers, A.M. Bodianski (who visited the Canadian Doukhobor colonies in 1900), a group of zealots in the community began to challenge accommodations with the government on patenting homestead land, marriage laws and the requirements of vital statistics legislation. The presence of the North West Mounted Police ("NWMP") in military uniforms as the visible arm of government added to the fears of the most radical, even though the police were initially supportive of and helpful to the Doukhobors.

From Russia, Verigin sent enigmatic and mystical statements to friends in political exile in Britain. These messages were passed on to Canada and stirred the minds of the most zealous with the need to eschew materialism more generally and to find a new home in warmer Eden-like surroundings in the sun. In the late summer and fall of 1902, the radicals began turning their animals loose and foreswearing the use of animal products. In October, well over a thousand people joined a pilgrimage to find the "new land" to the south, but the authorities stopped them in Winnipeg.

Stability returned to the community with the arrival of Verigin from Russia late in 1902. Many who had taken to a more independent existence returned to the communal fold, adding to the strength and self-confidence of the orthodox majority. However, a small number of zealots, Sons of God, or svobodniki as they described themselves, were unhappy about both materialism within the community and any accommodation with government. Their discontent culminated in the first display of public nudity.

In the early summer of 1903, a group of radicals marched in the nude on a proselytizing mission among the Doukhobor villages in the vicinity of Yorkton (now in Saskatchewan). One of their number, Alex Makhortov, described their nakedness as a return to the simplicity of Adam and Eve, "to show nature to humanity, how man should return to his fatherland and return the ripened fruit and its seed". (6) Some community members, including Verigin, were irked by this behaviour and chastised the marchers. On Verigin's orders, they seized the women and children but failed to induce the men to call off their pilgrimage. As the men approached the outskirts of Yorkton, at this point fully clothed, the NWMP stopped them and ordered them back to their villages. They thereupon stripped, and when they proceeded into the town several residents forcibly sought to dress them. For their pains, the pilgrims were arrested and spent three months in the Regina jail. The experience of being arrested and confined by agents of the state fed into the persecution complex that most Doukhobors felt and the radicals thrived on.

Although theological considerations may have initially loomed large in this first instance of pubic nudity, the pilgrims quickly noted its strategic potential. Marching in the nude was a way of symbolizing humankind's communion with nature and the animals, and a return to its blessed state and to the simplicity of traditional Doukhobor life. However, when the zealots began to appreciate the extreme reaction their conduct caused among the police and non-Doukhobor residents, some realized that this was a valuable way to challenge and embarrass the authorities.

Yet, nudity as a form of group affirmation and protest among Canada's Doukhobors remained largely moribund for approximately 20 years after these events. Authorities quickly halted occasional incidents by arrest and prosecution or by committal of the individuals to lunatic asylums. Some zealots went on another march in 1907. They reached Fort William, Ontario, where they conducted a nude parade on New Year's Day, 1908, before the authorities returned them to Saskatchewan. In the main, however, Verigin's firm role and the community's social and economic success under his leadership effectively marginalized those on the fringes of the community. When a group of American religious fanatics who practised nudity, the Adamites, led by James Sharpe, turned up in Saskatchewan in the summer of 1908 to take care of the Doukhobors who they believed were leaderless, Verigin sent them packing. (7)

Although the trouble with the dominant community and the authorities that had resulted from the displays of nudity laded, tension between the Doukhobors as an ethnic minority and the Canadian state continued on other issues, most notably on the matter of landholding. To the Doukhobors, Canada's first great betrayal was its insistence that in patenting their homestead rights the Doukhobors had to swear the oath of allegiance. The new minister of the interior, Frank Oliver, a known slavophobe, had reneged on permission for the group to farm in common and ordered the sale of unused land in their colonies to non-Doukhobor settlers. Verigin defused the anger and frustration these acts of "perfidy" caused to him and his followers by moving the community away from the problem. In 1907 and 1908, on behalf of the community, he bought extensive tracts of land in fee simple in his own name in the mountainous frontier region of southeastern British Columbia. By buying land, he avoided the oaths of allegiance required under the Prairie homestead law. Verigin managed to persuade well over half the community of Doukhobors in Saskatchewan to relocate in British Columbia, leaving behind most of the independents, some communal Doukhobors and some zealot families to continue a community presence.

Life in Canada's most westerly province was initially good in an economic sense for the approximately 5,000 Doukhobors who moved there between 1908 and 1913, but it was marred by a number of points of social and legal conflict with the intensely racist non-Doukhobor population and their political representatives in Victoria. The most serious bones of contention related to vital statistics and schooling. The Doukhobors refused to register births and deaths, which they saw as a means whereby the state could keep tabs on them and mark them for wartime conscription. They rejected compulsory school attendance for their children, seeing it as likely to subvert community traditions and values and to lure young people away to the "wicked world" outside.

The strong reaction in the dominant community to these "law breakers" induced the B.C. government in 1914 to introduce the notorious Community Regulation Act. This statute imposed communal criminal responsibility for breaches of law relating to vital statistics, public health and school attendance. It permitted the seizure of community property in lieu of unpaid fines for these infractions. Doubts about the legislation's legal validity and, in 1915, an accommodation on school attendance between Verigin and the provincial attorney general, William "Napoleon" Bowser, delayed enforcement of the law and heralded a brief era of relative peace.

In the early 1920s, a combination of criticism and pressure from the outside community ill-disposed toward a group of people considered to have been "shirkers" and "profiteers" during the war, and economic difficulties within the community itself, renewed tensions between B.C. Doukhobors and their neighbours. The conflict centred on educational law and policy, particularly on amendments to the Schools Act designed to place the burden of new school building for Doukhobor children on local communities, as well as enforcement of existing school attendance requirements. (8) The latter involved charging Doukhobor parents with breaches of the Schools Act, and early in 1923, upon their failure to pay fines, enforcing the Community Regulation Act by sending squads of B.C. Provincial Police onto Doukhobor land to seize goods. In April, in the midst of the resulting tension, the zealots re-emerged and showed their resentment by displays of public nudity, an attempted school burning and intrusion into school classes in the Grand Forks region. The outraged non-Doukhobor community swiftly demanded action to uphold the law and to arrest and test the sanity of protesters. Attorney General Alexander Manson succumbed to the latter suggestion. Meanwhile, educational authorities enforced school attendance laws. A rash of ominous and clandestine torchings of schools (eight incidents between May 1923 and April 1924) was an apparent warning to any Doukhobors who would "shake hands with the Devil" on the education issue.

Neither the Doukhobor leadership nor the government (which seemed more intent on enforcing the school law than on bringing the arsonists to book) were able to stop this destructive trend. Only after the death of Verigin the Lordly in a suspicious explosion on a Canadian Pacific Railway train in the Kettle Valley on October 29, 1924, and a message from his son and successor in the Soviet Union, Peter Petrovich Verigin (the "Purger"), did the faithful comply with the school attendance laws. Peace returned to the Kootenays. From 1925 to late 1928, Doukhobor children attended schools in larger numbers and many of the burned schools were rebuilt.

The truce was temporary. Peter Verigin the Younger made it clear that he favoured a degree of accommodation with the government on education and encouraged members of the community to send their children to school. At the same time, he flattered the radical Sons of Freedom (now a clearly defined faction), referring to them as the conscience of the community and as "the ringing bells of Doukhoborism". (9) They took this role and inverted the meaning of Verigin's pronouncements to do the opposite of what he suggested. Thus, when Verigin advocated compliance with school attendance laws, the Sons of Freedom understood his real desire was that children should be kept at home and educational institutions destroyed. For its part, Victoria refused to do anything to make the school system more sensitive to the cultural and linguistic desires of the Doukhobors. During late 1928 and early 1929, the Sons of Freedom again took to marching, stripping and disrupting schools to condemn what one of their leaders, Peter Maloff, described as a system that was turning Doukhobor children into "slaves of Satan". School enrollments declined dramatically as both zealot and sympathetic or anxious community parents withdrew their children from school.

During 1929, the resumption of school burnings led the dominant community to renew its call for vigorous action to enforce the law. Verigin responded by expelling the radicals from community land. When 109 Sons of Freedom stripped in mid-August on being confronted by B.C. Provincial Police outside Nelson, provincial authorities acted quickly. All the protesters were charged with public nudity and sentenced to six months in jail, at that time the maximum penalty for the offence. Eight teenagers arrested with their parents were put into care under the provincial Infants Art as having "no parent capable and willing to exercise proper parental control over the child". Ultimately, they were transferred to industrial schools. British Columbia's Tory government of Simon Fraser Tolmie, elected in 1928, pronounced itself ready to take a "get tough" line with the Doukhobors. In the words of the hard-nosed attorney general, R.H. "Harry" Pooley, the government proposed

   to sequestrate a number of their younger children by proper court
   action under the Neglected Children's Act and place them under such
   bodies as Children's Aid societies for education. (10)

If the Doukhobors behaved themselves, said the attorney general, they would get their children back; if not, "they will lose more children until we have them all under training in institutions". (11) Pooley was also thinking of a longer-term solution to the problem of Freedomite adults. In a letter to Premier Tolmie in September 1929, he advocated convicting the ringleaders of the protesters on "rioting charges" and sending them to D'Arcy Island, a former leper colony near Victoria, for an extended period.

The first experiment in solving the Freedomite problem by imprisoning the adults and "resocializing" the children was not a success. The experience only accentuated bitterness among the Sons of Freedom and strengthened their feelings of persecution. Believing that the adults had been sent up for too short a period and that it was impossible to turn the minds of teenage children, Pooley proposed to concentrate on younger and thus more impressionable children "whose education can be attended to". (12)

Freedomite resistance to both state policies and action by Verigin to expel them from the community and its lands only whetted their appetite for further challenging the system. School burnings and nude parades continued in both British Columbia and Saskatchewan. The Tory governments of both provinces were open and responsive to racist sentiment in their midst and called for vigorous action to rid the country of the "Doukhobor problem". They persuaded the malleable Conservative government of Richard Baines Bennett in Ottawa that concerted action was necessary to achieve this end. The three administrations fastened upon a twofold strategy. First, they would deport the Younger Verigin (who the RCMP had branded as both a Bolshevik and closet leader of the Sons of Freedom). Second, they would neutralize the Sons of Freedom by incarcerating the adults for much longer periods, meanwhile resocializing their younger children by placing them with God-fearing non-Doukhobor families and child welfare and juvenile delinquency facilities well away from their homes. (13)

The latter part of the strategy was secured by the simple expedient of amending s. 205 of the Criminal Code, making public nudity an offence with a maximum penalty of three years in jail in place of the previous maximum penalty of six months. The offence was to be prosecuted only on they flat of a provincial attorney general. In debate, Minister of Justice Hugh Guthrie admitted that this was the "Doukhobor clause" in the Code, as he pointed to pressure from both Saskatchewan and British Columbia for the change. During a visit to Ottawa earlier that year, Attorney General Pooley reported himself as "pounding away" at Guthrie "on the Doukhobor question", with the result that the minister had agreed to amend the Code. With the notable exception of the Independent Labour member for Winnipeg North Centre, J.S. Woodworth (who protested the tendency to lump all Doukhobors together as mindless zealots), the debates were notable for their histrionics on the government side, especially from WK. Esling, whose Kootenay West constituency included most of the Doukhobors in British Columbia, and for the levity elsewhere in the house. The prize for insensitivity was earned by a Mr. Pouliot, for the suggestion: "The Ku Klux Klan should lend their nightshirts to the Doukhobors." (14)

In May and June 1932, the B.C. government invoked the amended Criminal Code provision in its quest to put the "Doukhobor problem" to rest. The close contact between the attorney general's department, local prosecutors and the presiding magistrate is evident in the uniform sentences of three years meted out by Judge Cartmel of Nelson. Such a result was not preordained. In Saskatchewan, where there was not such close contact between the attorney general's office and local court officials, magistrates responded to prosecutions of Sons of Freedom members for nudity by dismissing several charges and using discretion in sentencing, varying from suspended sentences and a few days in jail for many of the women to a full three years for some men. As a result, there was no mass imprisonment and no contrived attempt to convert the children. (15)

British Columbia's plan to deal once and for all with the Sons of Freedom proved to be a fiasco. The children so confidently targeted for resocialization were shipped back to the Kootenays in 1933 when the government attracted left-wing criticism for spending much more on them than on families existing on Depression welfare rates. The federal government was also anxious to economize and gave early release in 1935 to the adults who had been cooling their heels and idling their time away on Piers Island.

The legacy of this aborted experiment was even greater resentment among the Freedomites and the engendering of bitterness among the young people. Some of the latter became a new generation of protesters, who from the later 1940s to the early 1960s burned more buildings and committed other forms of depredation, including use of explosives against public facilities such as bridges and hydroelectric transmission lines. Further, the experiences of the adults and children did nothing to cure them of the practice of nudity, which by virtue of its frequent use became synonymous with Freedomite public protest (and, in the undiscriminating minds of many in the dominant population, with being a Doukhobor).

From 1962 there has been, within the Doukhobor communities in southeastern British Columbia and between those communities and the non-Doukhobor population, relative peace and quiet. The voluntary dispersal of some of the Sons of Freedom as they moved out of the Kootenays and attempted to take their message to the Fraser Valley and Lower Mainland (especially Vancouver), the imprisonment of the most zealous members of that sect and concessions by the authorities to Doukhobor tradition and custom have greatly reduced the incidence of dramatic protest. Yet the recent conflict between a rump of the Sons of Freedom and the provincial government over whether their land should be taxed indicates that the process of social healing between a small minority of Doukhobors and the world outside is not complete. (16)

Various theories have been propounded over the attractiveness to Doukhobor zealots of nudity as a form of protest, including psychological explanations that it was a product of repressed aggression within a pacific communal lifestyle. More likely, they saw it as a convenient, simple and non-violent way of demonstrating to the broader community and in particular to its political representatives and law enforcers that they rejected materialism and accommodation with materialist values. By removing their clothing in public, they were able to cause the authorities embarrassment when they sought to exercise control and, more generally, they could make themselves a nuisance. Within the Doukhobor world view and its discourse--often an amalgam of dramatic religious imagery and radical political manifesto--were elements of exclusivity and assertiveness that encouraged protest. Their earliest brush with the authorities over nudity gave the radicals ample evidence of how much discomfort this caused in the wider community. Regarding more profound motives, as time went on and as protests had no apparent beneficial effect (and arguably the opposite effect) in causing changes in government policy in relation to the law and conditions of life, it seems likely that protests were increasingly designed to force the authorities to deport the protesters to a new homeland. In a further playing out of the enforced exile tradition rather than voluntarily moving on (as they had done in moving to British Columbia), they would get the government to do it for them by wholesale expulsion from Canada. When it became evident that governments were not so inclined, the zealots upped the stakes by engaging in more indiscriminate acts of arson and the blowing-up of public facilities in the hope that this would induce the state to respond to their desires.

The discomfort and, in some instances, outrage felt by non-Doukhobors at mass displays of nudity were similarly reflective of mixed motives and attitudes. Among respectable members of society for most of the period, the appearance of large numbers of naked people would have been shocking in a culture where nudity had become, except for those possessed of artistic and pornographic minds, largely taboo and a potential corrupter of young people. More important may have been the strong racist and nativist sentiment among many settlers of British and northwest European stock, which treated other all other cultures as substandard and degraded. As Slavs of peasant stock, the Doukhobors were already suspect. Add to this a penchant for stripping on the slightest pretext, and in the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic mind they quickly became a "deviant", or worse still a "deranged" population of which the country, or at least its populated areas, should be rid. Within government circles, although some probably saw deportation or relocation as the solution, the belief was strong that, if only all the Doukhobors could be induced to comply with the law and to learn to assimilate into the Canadian economic and social system, there was a chance that they could become successful citizens.

As time went on, and in the absence of any significant attempt to understand and accommodate the reasons for Doukhobor discomfort with the demands of the liberal bureaucratic state, the B.C. government began to resort to increasingly draconian expedients to deal with group members, especially the radicals. Concerns in the non-Doukhobor community were clearly accentuated by an untutored reading of events in the Soviet Union and the revival of "red peril" fears in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Doukhobors were naturally suspect as a Slavic group who practised communalism. Added to this, they had in Peter Verigin the Younger a leader who had been "let out" of the USSR and was not sufficiently critical of extremism among his people--it seemed he might just be a Bolshevik agent sent to spread subversion in this gullible and unstable immigrant population. (17)

The appeal to the nudity provisions of the Criminal Code did not reflect any great concern for the moral welfare of the nation in the narrow sense. Rather, it resulted from a clearly calculated decision to take a minor offence in the Code, of which numerous members of the Sons of Freedom sect were episodically guilty, and convert it into a major instrument for penalizing and controlling the lives and destinies of these people. No doubt other offences, as Pooley had earlier reflected, could have been used for this purpose. But, given the mode of mass protest in question, no law was as all-embracing and devoid of technical objection as public nudity. Moreover, subject as it was to the attorney general's fiat, public nudity could be used, as it was meant to be, as an essentially political offence. (18)

ENDNOTES

(1.) An earlier version of this article was previously published in (1999) 38 J. of the West 27.

(2.) Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 318.

(3.) Ibid.

(4.) On Doukhobor history generally, see George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Doukhobors (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977); Koozma Tarasoff, Plakun Trava: The Doukhobors (Grand Forks, BC: Mir Publication Society, 1982).

(5.) On the early period of settlement in the Northwest Territories (Saskatchewan), see Jeremy Adilman, "Early Experiences in the Canadian Prairies" (1990-1991) 25 J. Can. Stud. 111.

(6.) Woodcock and Avakumovic, supra note 4, 194.

(7.) Gilbert Johnson, "The Adamites" (1970) 23 Sask. Hist. 70.

(8.) The educational conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s are examined in John McLaren, "Creating 'Slaves of Satan' or 'New Canadians'? The Law, Education and Socialization of Doukhobor Children, 1911-1935" in Hamar Foster and John McLaren, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol. 6, British Columbia and the Yukon (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1995), 352.

(9.) The rise of the Sons of Freedom is addressed in J. Colin Yerbury, "The 'Sons of Freedom' Doukhobors and the Canadian State" (1984) 16 Can. Stud. 45.

(10.) Victoria Times, August 31, 1929.

(11.) Ibid.

(12.) British Columbia Archives and Record Service (BCARS) GR2817, Provincial Secretary's Papers, Box 1, File 1, Pooley to Superintendent Thomas Menzies, September 24, 1929.

(13.) For more on these strategies, see John McLaren, "Wrestling Spirits: The Strange Case of-Peter Verigin II" (1995) 27 Can. Ethnic Stud. 93.

(14.) Canada, House of Commons, Debates, July 10, 1931, p. 3619.

(15.) John Lyons, "The Almost Quiet Evolution: Doukhobor Schooling in Saskatchewan" (1976) 8 Can. Ethnic Stud. 23.

(16.) John McLaren, "The Doukhobor Belief in Individual Faith and Conscience and the Demands of the Secular State" in John McLaren and Harold Coward, eds., Religious Conscience, the State and the Law: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Significance (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 117, 127, 129-130.

(17.) McLaren, "Wrestling Spirits", supra note 13 at 101-102, 113.

(18.) The nudity section in the Criminal Code was revised in 1955 and returned to a minor summary conviction offence subject to a fine or six months in jail, or both. The consent of the attorney general was retained. See S.C. 1955, c. 51, s. 159 (now s. 174).