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.
CLICK to ENLARGE
[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.
  1. Russia, Aziatskaia Rossiia, 1: 70; Rybakovskii, p. 71; White, Siberian Interpention, p. 45.
  2. Knox, pp. 194-95.
  3. Kropotkin, Memoirs, p. 186, Sergeev, p. 93.
  4. Bassin, "Russian Mississippi?" P. 279; Malozemoff, Russian Far Eastern Polity, p. 2.
  5. Murov, pp. 149-51; Volgin, p. 139; Sergeev, P. 36; Nashi dalekiia okrainy, p. 25.
  6. Sergeev, p. 80; Iz istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, pp. 13536.
  7. 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.
  8. Sergeev, pp. 83-85, 92111 Shindialov, p. 13; Iz istoriia revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 44.
  9. N. I. Riabov and Shtein, p. 110.
  10. Ibid., p. 112; Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai, p. 6o.
  11. Ocherki istorii sovetskogo Primor'ia, p. 24.
  12. Aleksandrovskaia, P. 33; Biankin, p. 184; Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai, p. 88; Rekk-Lebedev, pp. 10-11.
  13. 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.
  14. Khisainutdinov, Terra incognita, pp. 236, 242-44; Khudiakov, "Avtobiografiia"
  15. Alekseev, Kak nachinalsia Vladivostok, p. 201.
  16. Biankin, pp. 186-90; Kato, Shiberia ki, p. 34; Vladivostok: Gorod u okeana, p. 53; Malozemoff, Russian Far Eastern Policy, pp. 13, 34.
  17. Anosov, p. 6; Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai, p. 96.
  18. Kabuzan, Dal'nevostochnyi krai, pp. 123-24; Russia, Aziatskaia Rossiia, 1:69.
  19. Derber and Sher, Ocherki zhizni, p. 30; Gerasimov, Patrioty Dal'nego Yostoka, p. 99; N. I. Riabov and  Shtein, p. 123; Rybakovskii, p. 68.
  20. Svit, P. 3; Nesterov, p. 93; Biankin, pp. 185, 232.
  21. Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai, p. 97; N. I. Riabov and Shtein, pp. 120, 122; Ocberki istorii sovetskogo Primor’ia, pp. 25-26.
  22. Iz istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, p. 134.
  23. Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai, pp. 137-40, 190; N. I. Riabov and Shtein, pp. 154-56.
  24. Kabuzan, Dal'nevostochnyi krai, p. 135,
  25. Ibid., pp. 127, 154; Derber and Sher, Ocherki zhizni, p. 90.
  26. Shindialov, p. 14; Nashi dalekiia okrainy, p. 15.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. Derber and Sher, Ocherki zhizni, p. 68.
  30. Ibid., p. 15.
  31. Russia, Aziatskaia Rossiia, 1: 51.
  32. Obzor russkoi periodicheskoi pechati, 3: 31
  33. Armstrong, Russian Settlement, pp. 92, 196. [Russian Settlement in the North, by Terence Edward Armstrong, Cambridge University Press Cambridge (1965)]
  34. 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.
  35. SSE, 3: 731-32; Kabuzan, Dal’nevostochnyi krai, p 58.
  36. Kropotkin, Memoirs, p. 216.
  37. Balalaeva, p. 4.
  38. Ibid., p. 4; Miagkoff, Aux bords du Pacifique, p. 13; Karpenko, p. 19.
  39. Zenzinov, Road, p. 12.
  40. Kolpenskii, pp. 16 19.
  41. Eliseev, P. 5.
  42. Khisamutdinov,"Madimir Arsen’ev."
  43. Utyshev, "Pis'ma Bronislava Pilsudskogo" pp. 168, 171.
  44. "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.
  45. 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