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Negotiated Memory
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Julie Rak
Negotiated Memory:
Doukhobor Autobiographical
Discourse
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For Joan
© UBC Press 2004
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Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rak, Julie, 1966-
Negotiated memory : Doukhobor autobiographical discourse / Julie Rak.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7748-1030-0 (bound)
1. Dukhobors – Canada – Biography – History and criticism.
2. Autobiography. I. Title.
FC106.D76R34 2004 305.6′89071 C2003-907326-2
UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing
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Contents
Acknowledgments / vi
Introduction/ viii
1 Beyond Auto-Bio-Graphe: Autobiography and Alternative Identities / 1
2 Doukhobor Beliefs and Historical Moments / 34
3 Vechnaiia Pamitin the Diaspora: Community Meanings of History and
Migration / 55
4 Negotiating Identity: Doukhobor Oral Narratives / 84
5 Witness, Negotiation, Performance: Freedomite Autobiography / 115
Conclusion: Negotiating the “I” and “We” in Autobiography / 143
Notes / 146
References / 153
Index / 161
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Acknowledgments
I am glad to say that my list of acknowledgments for this project is long.
I am very conscious of producing this work standing, as it were, on the
shoulders of many people whose encouragement, example, and some-
times collaborative effort have made it possible for me to do it at all.
Completion of this work has been made possible by Support for the
Advancement of Scholarship and Humanities and Fine Arts Research
grants provided by the University of Alberta, 1998-2001, and by a grant
from the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme. I thank the Honour-
able Lois Hole, lieutenant-governor of Alberta, for her financial support.
I thank Koozma Tarasoff, Jim Popoff, the staff of Iskra,Mike Chernenkoff,
Steve Lapshinoff, Vi Plotnikoff, Jim Kolesnikoff, Jan Kabatoff, and John
MacLaren, who provided me with much valuable information, assis-
tance, and encouragement at key stages of my research. Many Doukhobor
people have invited me into their homes and made me feel welcome dur-
ing this project. There are too many of you to mention here, but please
know that I am very grateful to all of you. I thank Jack MacIntosh of Spe-
cial Collections at the University of British Columbia Main Library for his
invaluable assistance. Thanks to Edward Hickcox for acting as an on-site
research assistant during the final stages of the project. I am very grateful
to my mentors and colleagues who have either read this manuscript or
have had to hear me talk about it: Lorraine York, Daniel Coleman, Nina
Kolesnikoff, Heather Zwicker, Shirley Neuman, Daphne Read, Dianne
Chisholm, my graduate research assistant Karen Clark, and, of course,
the Wriot Grrrls writing group – Cecily Devereux, Andie Palmer, Aara
Suksi, and Heather YoungLeslie. I thank all of the students who took my
course Subjectivity, Identity, and Autobiography between 1998 and 2001.
They have helped to form my thinking about the issues I deal with here. I
would also like to thank all of my translators: Elena Ilina, for the material
from A.M. Bodianskii’s collection and A. Efanow’s diary; Jim Kolesnikoff,
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Acknowledgments vii
for all the oral narratives and for reading manuscripts with me; and Carol
Theal, for the material from the Agassiz diary.
Portions of this book have appeared in somewhat different forms. Part
of Chapter 3 has appeared as “‘Vechnaja Pamjat’ in the Diaspora: Commu-
nity Doukhobor Autobiography” in The Doukhobor Centenary in Canada
(Ottawa: Slavic Research Group at the University of Ottawa and the Insti-
tute for Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa, 2000), 322-41. Some
of Chapter 5 has appeared as “Doukhobor Autobiography as Witness
Narrative” in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (Special Issue: Auto-
biography and Changing Identities) 24, 1 (2001): 226-41. Another part
of Chapter 5 is forthcoming as “One Hybrid Discourse of Doukhobor Iden-
tity: The Freedomite Diary from Agassiz Prison” in Adjacencies: Minority
Writing in Canada,ed. Lianne Moyes, Domenic Beneventi, and Licia Can-
ton (Montreal: Guernica Editions).
I gratefully acknowledge the following sources for permission to repro-
duce material previously published elsewhere:
To Elaine Makortoff for her poem “Of Other Generations,” Mir 2, 3-6
(1974): 44.
To D.E. (Jim) Popoff for the interview with Nick D. Arishenkoff and
Cecil W. Koochin, “Life in the Doukhobor Commune – (CCUB),” Mir 2,
3-6 (1974): 3-50.
To Eli Popoff for his transcription and translation of material from the
Joint Doukhobor Research Committee, Report of the United Doukhobor
Research Committee in the Matter of Clarification of the Motivating Life-
Concepts and the History of the Doukhobors in Canada (Symposium Meetings,
1974-1982)(Castlegar, BC: Selkirk College, 1997).
To University of Toronto Press for the passage from William Janzen, Lim-
its on Liberty: The Experience of Mennonite, Hutterite and Doukhobor Commu-
nities in Canada(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).
To the Writer’s Trust of Canada for excerpts from George Woodcock and
Ivan Avakumovic, The Doukhobors (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977).
The cover image was graciously provided by Jan Kabatoff. This is what
the artist has to say about the image: “The ‘I Remember, I Forget ... ’ mono-
print uses acrylic paint, silk-screened historic photograph and heirloom
imagery, and collage on paper. It is part of a series of monoprints that are
one-of-a-kind, even though they share similar elements. The ‘I Remember,
I Forget ... ’ series speaks of memory fragments, history, loss of cultural
identity and the passage of time. The identity of the Doukhobor women is
unknown, but this image is important to Doukhobors because the women
in it symbolize the feminine strength and stoicism that was too long
undervalued in Doukhobor culture.”
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Introduction
When the first Doukhobor immigrants stepped onto a pier in Halifax in
1899 as refugees from tsarist religious persecution in Russia, they began a
chapter in the history of the development of Canada as a nation that is
still being written and that, at times, is still under erasure. The story of the
Doukhobors in Canada remains one of the most unusual stories of mass
migration because the Doukhobors arrived at a time when ideas about
Canada’s position in the British Empire were still debated and the position
of migrants was not yet fully worked through. Soon after the Doukhobors
began to live in Canada their belief in pacifism, anti-patriotism, commu-
nal living, and vegetarianism, along with their desire to retain their own
language and their deep suspicion of institutionalization of any kind,
proved to be threatening to many who were developing ideas about Can-
ada and what it should mean to be Canadian. This resulted in a struggle
that highlights what type of nation Canada was at the turn of the last
century, and why, until very recently, the Doukhobors have had so much
difficulty living in it.
Doukhobors, out of all proportion to their rather small numbers, have
played a large part in the othering of certain kinds of ethnicity and reli-
gious expression in Canada. This is because they have been, in Louis
Althusser’s words, “bad subjects.” Not only did they resist the institutions,
laws, and beliefs that would have made them into “good” immigrants and
docile citizens but they also refused to recognize the terms of recognition
that would have made them like most other migrants. Althusser (1990,
135) says that subjectivity works through the recognition of an already-
existing state of affairs rather than through choice: good subjects “work all
right ‘all by themselves’” because they recognize their own positionality,
but bad subjects are bad because they cannot recognize themselves inside
the mechanisms that produce personhood. Therefore, the State cannot
recognize them either and can only inculcate its goodness and the right-
ness of its practices by repressing their ways of knowing. So-called good
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Introduction ix
nations need bad subjectivity in order to point the way to good and obe-
dient citizenship. Bad subjects cannot be treated as people who have his-
tories and knowledges of their own because the history of the bad subject
cannot be recounted or written inside of the State. Bad subjects are people
who are treated as if they are without their own cultural sense of memory,
without full personhood, and, at times, without the rights and privileges
that are extended to other citizens in a liberal state.
The questions that I address in this book are: if the Doukhobors have
been bad subjects in Canada and must live within systems that cannot rec-
ognize them as anything else, then what happened when some of them
used a discourse of the “good subject” – like autobiography? And why
would they have used it? In order to answer these two questions, critical
thinking about autobiography needs to change. Autobiography must be
thought of as a discourse rather than as a genre, and as a discourse that
is sustained by the trappings of identification that have underwritten
what the self is and how it has been seen in much of the Western world.
When autobiographical discourse is used by writers or speakers who do
not have access to the privileges of autobiographical identity – such as
print literacy, a sense of one’s “place” in history that others will recognize,
or the leisure time to write a book – then that discourse changes as it is
used, even as it brings certain advantages. Autobiographical discourse can
surface in places where it normally is not seen, such as legal records, news-
paper articles, prison narratives, and ethnographic recordings. And when
it appears in such places the discourse itself alters so that it can be appro-
priated for use by those who are not powerful or whose version of events
cannot be allowed to have validity. In this more flexible way of under-
standing what autobiography is and how it can be used, autobiography
can become a point of negotiation between good subjects and bad, and
it can be a way for those who are bad to become visible – regardless of
whether the outcome is an identity win or an identity loss.
Doukhobor history and cultural context must be considered as key to
the ways in which autobiography can be used to achieve visibility. During
their 100 years in Canada the Doukhobors have not often been remem-
bered for their pacifist principles, their commitment to types of commu-
nal living, or even for their non-institutionalized religious expressions.
Usually they are remembered, inaccurately, for nude protests and arson in
British Columbia. This is a result of negative press coverage and, in partic-
ular, of the success of Terror in the Name of God (Holt 1964), a sensationalist
account of the protests and depredations by Vancouver Sunreporter Simma
Holt. Complex relations inside of Doukhobor groups have meant that,
while some historical studies have been written by Doukhobors, like other
ethnic minority or religious sectarian groups, much more information has
been written about them by outsiders than by Doukhobors themselves.
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x Introduction
This makes it all the more imperative to study what has happened when
Doukhobors have written and spoken about themselves and about
Doukhobor identity, and to see the very act of entering autobiographi-
cal terrain as an attempt to negotiate what will be remembered about
Doukhobor history as well as what position Doukhobors will have in
Canada both now and in the future.
Even now, Doukhobors who refer to themselves as “Canadians,” and
who had the right to vote restored to them in 1962, do not call themselves
Doukhobor-Canadians. They do not hyphenate their identities, and for
many of them the terms of this non-hyphenation are still being thought
through. Thus, Doukhobors who live in Canada have negotiated between
Homi Bhabha’s (1994) idea of nation as the pedagogical and the perfor-
mative without accepting either the formulation of the nation as the
nation-state or the belief in the nation as a group of people.
Doukhobor beliefs and practices were always radically anti-national and
anti-institutional, and then they were combined with their commitment
to oral traditions, their history of conflict with secular and church author-
ities, and their conviction that they were destined to be exiles and wan-
derers until a prophesied return to Russia. Not only were Doukhobors
opposed to a separation of church and state, but they also opposed the
ideas of church and state in and of themselves. This meant that Dou-
khobors effectively became subjects who could not be written into the
Canadian national script except as curiosities or as a threat to nationhood.
They literally had no way to recount their own histories because they had
little legitimacy within Canada as subjects. Therefore, when, by the 1950s,
many of them had partially assimilated, some Doukhobors began to com-
bine their oral traditions with written forms in order to write as what I
term “hybrid subjects.” Their sense of who they were and how to tell their
life story falls somewhere between the ideals of Doukhoborism and the
idea of Canada. As they either wrote autobiographically or responded to
ethnographers or interviewers who asked them to tell their life stories,
these Doukhobors turned a discourse that normally excluded them and
their concerns into a point of negotiation between their sense of their
history, community, and identity (on the one hand) and the Canadian
version of history, identity, and nationality (on the other). They tried to
use the power inherent in autobiographical discourse for their own ends.
When they have needed to become visible as subjects in the Althusser-
ian sense, either outside their own contexts or, in later cases, to each other,
Doukhobor writers and speakers have also used aspects of autobiographi-
cal discourse as a way to figure out how Doukhobor identity works for
them in their own terms. At times they have also used this alternative
identity construction to resist assimilative discourses that anxiously seek
to erase the differences between Doukhobor ways of understanding the
