“A thoughtful and sensitive man”

They Called Him a Radical: The Memoirs of Pete Maloff and the Making of a Doukhobor Pacifist
by Pete Maloff, with Vera Maloff

Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2024
$26  /  9781773861340

Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski

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Nude protestors and burning buildings—for many of those British Columbians who have some sense of the province’s history, the word “Doukhobor” could well conjure up these images. While a new book on the Doukhobors in the province does not dispel those images, it does much to enrich our understanding of a complex and varied people.

The book’s subtitle provides the framework of this book: “The Memoirs of Pete Maloff and the Making of a Doukhobor Pacifist.”  The main title, however, drives home the fundamental conflict that surfaces most disturbingly only towards the end:  They Called Him a Radical.  The nature of this “They” and how “they” assert their judgement on a thoughtful and sensitive man makes a poignant conclusion to the story of a man’s life.

The way the book reveals the “making” of the “pacifist” is all the more compelling because, as the writer of a memoir, Maloff demonstrates that he is “made” a pacifist not through external pressures, but, instead through his own quest for values to live by.  As a memoir the book has further distinctive characteristics. First, Pete Maloff wrote it in 1948 as the second part of a much longer history of the Douhkobors, written in Russian during a period of house arrest, when Maloff was 48. Second, the translator, his granddaughter, Vera Maloff, intersperses the chapters with shorter chapters of her own.  From a practical perspective, they are crucial in providing background information and commentary both on social history and on particulars of her grandfather’s life. More affectingly, though, they create a powerful sense of time, history, and place: her opening account of searching for traces of the village where her grandfather spent most of his life is particularly haunting, and all the more because, in the next chapter, through the memoir itself, the words of her grandfather, many years dead, suddenly make him leap to life, immediate and present.

Most vital—and most effective—of Vera Maloff’s additions is the last part of the book because her grandfather records his memories only up to age 27.  Fascinating as these memories are, they stop short of the most harrowing events of his life: Vera’s account ensures that her admiration for her grandfather’s values and character suffuses the whole memoir.

An additional kind of background knowledge provided by Pete Maloff’s granddaughter will be particularly welcome to those readers who have only a hazy sense of Doukhobor history.  They will appreciate, for example, learning about the pacifist community and their rocky history under the Russian Tsars, leading in 1899 to 7,500 of them coming to Canada. The account of their lives and dislocations during the next several years in turn feed into the events of Pete Maloff’s memoirs.

Of course, it is Pete Maloff’s own voice, not his granddaughter’s, that most determines the book’s impact. Here, again, the key words, “the making of a Pacifist” explain much about the memories he selects— his earliest memories, for example, have none of the childhood escapades common to memoirs. At the same time, the very first chapter, “Childhood,” strikes chords that resonate throughout the whole book.

First of these, is the fact that the author’s memory is riveted not on his family, but, rather, on strong personalities (nearly all male)—and their voices. In the “Childhood” chapter, the boy is fascinated by one Alyosha, who, like most he remembers, is made vivid first for his appearance:  he “had a thin, long nose and reddish hair.  His moustache drooped downward like a seal’s and bristled….”  And then there are the man’s words. In fact, Maloff gives enormous life to recollected encounters exactly because he recreates each character’s views as floods of direct quotation. The effect is to set the pattern, so strong throughout the book, of men utterly steeped in opinions, ideas, and ideologies.  

In the course of reporting their words—on the importance of peace, for example, on the iniquities of civilization, or on the imperatives of true communal living—he doesn’t filter them through his own opinions. He seems, rather, to want his readers to hear, really hear.  One of the most (of many) memorable such portraits is of Anton Petrovich Sherbak, an ardent member of the Sons of Freedom. With “his black hair and beard quivering and his black eyes glittering like buttons” he speaks at length of “civilization” with steely power: “I will also say this: for this fraud, this masquerade of shrewd clowns, man will one day suffer in poisonous horror, because of his contradictions to the law of life.” And this is just a fragment. It is a massive understatement for the author to say at another point—“I went on observing and listening.”

In fact, “observing and listening” form the memoir’s substance. Even Vera, in her generation, recalls the second, and closely related early childhood memory so fundamental to the texture of the memoir: “discussions and arguments…rang in my ears,” she writes. It is not just a flow of pronouncements that permeate the chapters but also debate, discussion, even dissent.  It is hard to imagine any like community anywhere, anytime where, almost on reflex it seems, small talk is so emphatically replaced by declamation.

A third element in this chapter on childhood is likewise seminal.  As the boy reports: “At the end of the discussion, our people sang psalms and spiritual songs…” The sheer amount of group singing is astounding.  No matter what the nature of a meeting, no matter how social or serious, the Doukhobor life of Pete’s memories is sonorous with choral singing. (The internet has many examples, well worth exploring.) As he puts it lyrically at the end of this chapter: “Music, that is, choir singing, spread out to the very horizon wherever people lived.”

Fourth is an issue embodied in an apparently incidental boyhood recollection: “Many had left the villages to individual farms…among them my parents.” As he shows, repeatedly, one of the most contentious issues recorded in the memoir is the tension between adherence to traditional communal Doukhobor life, and the pull towards a life of independent choices. Indeed, one of the most disturbing of the grown Maloff’s memories is of his father, after many years of independent living, in a “public gathering” begging for forgiveness and reintegration into the community—even offering up all of his savings and pleading, “Forgive me, brothers and sisters, for my sins.” 

The issue of independence, in turn, connects with another chord sounded in this first chapter.  Pete records a memorable incident when one of a visitor’s daughters, on her father’s request, picks up and reads a journal, while simultaneously translating it into Russian. One of the older listeners’ responses strikes to the core of a key Doukhobour dictate: “And to think of it; we lived our whole lives and like stupid fools we can’t read a word….” In fact, a key reason Pete’s parents struck out on their own was precisely so that their sons could break from common Doukhobor strictures against education. Yet the consequences aren’t tidy. Throughout his life Pete records, often harrowingly, how attitudes toward schooling and even books themselves (literally at times) constitute a flashpoint. 

Indeed, this word, “flashpoint,” evokes another key element of the memoir. Though barely mentioned in the early childhood chapters, a relatively small splinter group called “The Sons of Freedom” appear repeatedly—and often contentiously.  Although the term “extremist” might seem unfair or even glib in describing the group, it is hard to avoid. Take, for example, even a comparatively mundane incident where Pete finds himself helping members of the dissident movement drag a laden farm cart into a nearby market town. Why? Any use of animals was, in their eyes, unforgivable abuse.  

Much more follows. Even as an uncomprehending child, young Maloff is dismayed by a social visit where several strip naked and come close to fighting physically with other Doukhobors.  Later he documents Sons of Freedom members removing a Bible from a fellow Doukhobor and burning it on the grounds that all books are tainted by the very process of making them.  At other points he describes those who oppose music of any kind and those who do not allow any cooking, even of vegetables. When they burn down the house of a fellow Doukhobor because the house is too ostentatious, they exhibit the kind of behaviour in a local context for which in wider media they became infamous. 

While the years Pete Maloff records stop before the most notorious cases of arson and nudity of the ‘50s and ‘60s, they do include incidents he strongly condemns. Yet, characteristically, he never dismisses the Sons of Freedom altogether. As Vera puts it, he was fascinated with the way they “stayed true to their Doukhobor principles.”

Indeed, it is not just in this regard that the writer’s own values and personality rise from the page.  Whatever else they may reveal, Pete Maloff’s words also reveal a strikingly thoughtful and penetrating mind—and, along with that, enormous courage, vitality, and compassion. An early incident is striking. As an “eleven or twelve” year-old school boy, as he recalls, he instinctively released a weasel from a trap—and more to the point, confronted by the angry outcry of other schoolboys and corporally punished by his teacher, he remained steadfastly unrepentant.  His words at one point are echoed at many others: “something sharp seemed to have pierced through my very heart.” This is clearly a man with huge depths of feeling.

It is hard to imagine many other teenagers, similarly, setting out on their own to work with a printer in San Francisco or jumping aboard freight trains along with “hobos” all while dealing with hair-raising mishaps. Most remarkable, in some ways, is the fact that even as a teen he recalls “I was seized with an intense eagerness for reading.  I spent whole nights over the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov….” He adds, astoundingly, “I began to take an interest in more serious literature such as the writings of Henry George, James, and Spinoza.”  “More serious literature” than Tolstoy? And this the mind of a teenager?

For the next decade the driving sense of enquiry continues. He visits communes, attends public lectures, and engages in intense discussions: “I visited meetings of the Theosophists, the Zoroastrians, and several vegetarian societies and, though I found a few valuable ideas, as a whole these groups were marked by spiritual shallowness.”  In this foment of ideas the reader can’t help but be struck by the frequency and depth with which key issues repeat.  One of these is the “sex question”—and everything it entails in terms of what we might call serial monogamy or free love.  The other is, perhaps surprisingly, “vegetarianism.” That this should be so important, increasingly makes sense, though, as Maloff reveals how much it underlies probably the most important value of his, and most Doukhobors’ beliefs—the refusal to destroy life. This, not incidentally, is the same boy who provoked outrage by releasing a trapped weasel.

Equally striking is the almost complete omission of any mention of the author’s marriage and family.  While it may well be that, in fact, they lay at the core of his life, in these memoirs at least, focused as they are on ideas, ideas, and more ideas, they have only a shadowy existence.

A further limit of the memoirs is the fact that Maloff’s account of his life, though written many years later, stops when he is still in his late twenties. And this is where the words of his granddaughter add a crucial dimension. Her account of the Maloff family’s suffering in 1932, is but one of the most disturbing: “570 Doukhobor men and women were arrested for protesting in the nude against the loss of their land and the incarceration of their Doukhobor leader….They received a three-year sentence in a prison on Piers Island that was specially built for the peaceful protestors. The children of those imprisoned, 365 youngsters, including my mother Elizabeth and her four siblings, were taken into government institutions.” The reader can’t help but feel that the government reprisals were at least as “extremist” as the acts they condemned.

Amongst her most powerful writing are accounts of her grandfather being labelled “radical” and sometimes harshly imprisoned for taking part in peaceful protests against militarism. All of her words evoke a powerful sense of a man who, above all, refused to accept killing, even in—especially in, perhaps—times of war. In quoting his words from 1968, three years before his death, Vera gives further depth to a portrait of a remarkable man, a man who continued to speak—and act—on the principle of peace. “I stand for creative intelligence which is distinctly distilled in the unchanging truth of the cosmic law: ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.’”

In her foreword, Vera Maloff writes that she has created this book out of “love and respect.”  It is not hard to see why.

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Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. You can visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo Dombrowski has recently reviewed books by Joe Barrett, Ruth Ozeki, Collette Colligan and Gregory Mackie, Patricia Bovey, David Gurr, and Carla-Jean Stokes for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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