Spiritual and economic renewal among Molokans and Doukhobors

A clipping reproduced in Spiritual Christian Molokan News (January 1992, issue 2: 3) from Blagoveshchensk, from the June 1, 1991 issue of the local newspaper shows a letter from M. Saiapin. He asks that Molokan descendants from the village of Gilchin in Amur Oblast write to him so that they can "re - establish our old connections and relationships and together we can decide how to help the rebirth of the Amur District." Saiapin says that events in the 1920s and 1930s destroyed these Molokan villages. [Aleksandr I. Klibanov] (1982: 412) shows in an appendix that in 1894 in Gilchin Volost there were 429 Molokan households with a total of 3,125 residents. By 1917 most of the villages were administratively part of Tambovka Volost, and the population had grown to 1,122 households with a total of 10,676 persons. By Russian standards these were large prosperous farms but some of the population had no land, livestock or equipment. Figures given by [I. Morozov] (1974: 163 - 164) for the mid - 1920s suggest a decline in the number of Molokan households, perhaps because of the presence of Baptists in the villages, but Morozov indicates that Molokans were very heavily taxed, so perhaps some had given up and moved to cities even before the beginning of collectivization. They probably joined Molokan merchants and traders already in cities in the Amur District (see Table 1). We can assume that as long as the Doukhobors settle compactly and act collectively, they will survive. How much depended on the good will and abilities of local Communist Party leaders is revealed in a letter written by Vladimir Alekseevich Verigin from the village of Kamenskoe, Kamenskoe Raion, Tula Oblast ([Iskra], No. 1728, 1991: 3 - 4, 37). Initially each Doukhobor village elected a representative to go to Moscow to discuss resettlement, but nothing much came of meetings with staff members of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. and the Central Committee of the CPSU, facilitated by scholars who we know were studying the Doukhobors. The group then went to Tula and met with the deputy director of the Tula Oblast branch of Agroprom (the agro - industrial unit charged with overseeing rural development), after which they went to Chern Raion and met with Aleksandr Vasilevich Ignatenko, who was then First Secretary in the Raion and who had the authority to set aside enough land in declining Russian villages for the projected resettlement of five Georgian Doukhobor villages (including [Vla