When several thousand
Doukhobors refugees arrived to
Saskatchewan from
Russian Transcaucasian provinces in 1899, the largely agricultural community was faced with deciding what form of settlement, land ownership, and overall economic organization they would choose for their new community. At one end of the range of possibilities, the settlers could become individual homesteaders, each family living on and farming its allotment of , as envisioned in
Dominion Lands Act and encouraged by the Canadian authorities. At the other end of the range, people could live in multi-family
villages,
collectively owning their amalgamated land grants and other resources, and just as collectively working on them and owning the fruits of their work, as was later practiced in
kibbutzim. There were, of course, also many intermediate options - as, e.g. in a typical
19th century Russian peasant community, where land was owned collectively, but partitioned (and regularly repartitioned) among families for individual farming. While the option of individual ownership appealed to wealthier Doukhobors, and was very much encouraged by the authorities, the majority of the Doukhobor settlers, including their elders, expected to live in villages (according to the Russian tradition, which even later
Stolypin reform could not successfully destroy) and to own the land collectively, in accordance with the Doukhobor religious belief. On the practical level, whatever their private beliefs, most of the poorer members of the community simply could not afford to strike out on their own, and would follow the
communal-minded leaders. Thus in practice most of the early Doukhobor economic activity was communal; the earnings of the members were pooled together, and the expenses of each member were paid out of the community budget. In the annual reports of Doukhobor annual meetings discussing these income and expenses, the name of
The Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood was used to designate the overall organization. In the early years (1904, 1906 (Doukhobor Genealogy Website)), these meetings took place in the now-defunct village of Nadezhda, some 10 km of
Veregin, Saskatchewan. In May 1906,
The New York Times reported of "the first general meeting of the Doukhobor Trading Company", in the same village of Nadezhda. In accordance with the Doukhobor philosophy, the meeting took care not only of the community financial affairs, but also of
animal welfare. The forms of land ownership remained a thorny issue. Against the background of the government requiring the Doukhobors to register individual ownership of land as per the
Dominion Lands Act, and the majority of the Doukhobors refusing to do so, their charismatic leader,
Peter Vasilevich Verigin, who fortuitously arrived from Siberian exile in the late 1902, proposed a seemingly satisfactory solution in early 1903: asking his followers to register individual ownership, while still in fact owning the resources and working in the land in common. However, this compromise was not to be long lasting. On the one hand, some zealots in the Doukhobor community felt that even registration "as a formality only" was against their principles. On the other hand, as Anglos' demand for Saskatchewan land increased,
Frank Oliver replaced
Clifford Sifton as the
Minister of the Interior, the authorities attitude toward Doukhobors become increasingly uncompromising. Soon after assuming office (1905), Frank Oliver demanded that, in order to keep their land, the Doukhobors naturalize as British subjects, swearing the
Oath of Allegiance to the Crown. As one of their religious conviction was that one does not swear allegiance to anyone but
God, this would be an insurmountable obstacle for many. Toward 1906, the authorities would also start to enforce the
Dominion Lands Act rule that the homesteaders actually lived on their individual lots or (as per the "
Hamlet Clause") at a village (hamlet) no more than away from their land. == Migration to British Columbia and Peter V. Verigin's incorporation of CCUB (1908–1924) ==