My Love of Freedom as Lived by my Pacifist Grandparents from Russia

How fortunate I am to greet each dawn in safety with love and freedom to dream of tomorrow to leave a legacy? Another good day of freedom to work, play, raise a family and fulfill one's purpose ... the way we all deserve to live.

So how does life get so attacked and dishonored when the facts are clear:

Freedom is living without subjection or domination by any despotic or foreign government.

Government has a purpose to provide essential services and ensure fundamental rights of safety, justice, and laws.

Democracy is based on the majority will of the people who vote for freely elected representatives to support their concerns or mandates.

Civilizations have been developed over centuries, build cities, advanced technology and created a nationhood with its own government, language, and traditions to ensure individual rights.

Even though civilizations have been filled with enemies and wars as illogical solutions to disagreements, international laws and contracts were formed to maintain peaceful resolutions. For nearly 80 years law and order was maintained in Europe and its allies because cooperation and peace have lasting virtues. The terrible lesson was learned never to repeat again.

So how did brutal terror strike again, invading and destroying neighbors, a brotherhood and a civilized nation?

The bitter truth is that only a handful of men controlled by an aging mega maniac have mercilessly torn apart everything humanity has earned the right to believe in. It's such a bitter pill forced to suffer. So the evil must somehow be exorcised.

My heart breaks watching TV news with live streams of barbaric destruction of beautiful cities and people but it cannot be unwatched to know the wrath of an illegal invasion by a tyrant. The bravery and resolve of the Ukraine people have inspired and transfixed the whole world in their fight for independence and freedom. Your president epitomizes as hero for democracy for all time.

My life is safe and comfortable, because by fate I am blessed to be a third generation Canadian. If not early immigration, my family would be living in terror watching Odessa skies with air strike sirens.

Perhaps my family's story will give you hope to believe that freedom does exist and is the light and spirit worth fighting for.

My grandparents left their villages in southern Georgia as part of the 7500 Doukhobor emigration in 1899; first to the Canadian prairies and then to the valleys of British Columbia.

A quick background describes the Doukhobors as Russian Christian peasants who objected to the excessive rituals of the Orthodox Church. The Czarist government persecuted them because they adopted pacifism, renounced militarism and burned their guns in a huge pile refusing to fight in one of their wars. They were able to emigrate to Canada where they were granted conscientious objector status and were exempted from military service.

Soon enough the group established dozens of communal village settlements often cultivating the land by women drawing the ploughs. With shared hard work, they developed a supportive agro-industrial complex with irrigation systems, orchards, jam factories and lumber mills while building one of the largest communal organizations in the country.

My grandfather chose to seek independent land ownership and enterprise rather than being part of a communal lifestyle. He learned to speak English and soon bought some land in the valley, logged it, horse-plowed it into hay fields, built a log house without nails, raised sheep for wool, a garden to sell produce, even set up a small mercantile storefront to sell supplies to neighbors. He was the first man to own a model T-Ford in the valley and in his later years, drove a Volkswagen that he painted lime green (I don’t know why) so he could take his grandchildren on picnics.

He married my Grandmother as his second wife and raised a daughter, son and stepson. When my father and mother married, it was customary for the new couple to move into the family home to be divided into two smaller private sections.

This was the birthplace for my four brothers and myself on a homestead filled with work, responsibility and non compromising love and attention.

Still fondly recalled, those were my childhood days watching Grandmother’s spinning wheel draw out thin grey woolen thread soon to be knitted into thick knee-high stockings and mittens large as small hams but warm like fresh muffins. She was the queen of sourdough bread making tall loafs with tiny bubbles sliced broadly and smeared with honey and peanut butter always on the table for guests. There was nothing better than rolled out dough fried on a cast iron pan on an old smoky wood stove to crispy brown patches goodness to be enjoyed with cool yogurt and cucumber slices.

So many memories were spent watching my grandfather who was a master craftsman capable of doing most anything with his hands from making shoes, to sewing a suit of clothes, to animal husbandry and farming where he lost his foot in a haying accident, to be replaced by a wooden foot in a special designed boot that never stopped his zeal for helping out, or playing baseball, or gathering hazelnuts in the fall to be stored in large gunny sacks for winter's protein source.

Such sweet recollections of going fishing in the creek with his long hand-picked branch rod armed only with line and hook, a can of earthworms, but still capable of catching a dozen speckled brook trout in an hour or so; then taking time to watch the grandchildren splash about in a nearby shallow pool deep enough for an inner tube float. Being vegetarian, the family enjoyed eating fish.

I can still fondly picture his grey hair and moustache streaked with lamplight teaching me to read and write the 33 Cyrillic letters in the Russian alphabet. In the evening many times the grandchildren would gather in the bedroom to recite prayers of salvation and peace with Grandmother in the aural tradition having memorized hundreds, some of which I managed to master.

I pray that such simple freedoms will again cross your paths, to roam the woods, grow a garden, visit friends and celebrate occasions with songs.

I pray that your children will experience the innocence of growing up, learning about cooperation and sharing the wisdom of their elders.

In some ways I still feel my Russian roots planted deeply in hard work, humility and respect for others and nature. In Russia, I probably have relatives roaming the steppes or working in cities having survived two world wars, government insurrections and now controlled by a Putin dictatorship. Their hopes for peace and prosperity must be all people’s faith to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

One can’t help but wonder how the country might have developed outside of totalitarianism and propaganda where people could pursue their own interests, ambitions and free enterprise like my grandparents had the chance to follow their own abilities and dreams.

As the warmonger continues to be rightly sanctioned and condemned worldwide by nations, companies and people everywhere, the question is how much the Russian citizens will also suffer in his shadow of paranoiac madness, shame, penalties and restrictions?

Putin, deliberately or not, has brought the war of hate and repression upon his own motherland. Where is his professed uncivilized infamy to be considered as a war criminal, a stigma to be attached to the Russians themselves? Having already lost many of their freedoms, how much more can return them to the Stone Age?

What if ordinary Russian people were given more independent media control and less disinformation with voting choices to determine their leadership? So far about ten thousand war protestors have been arrested to face serious penalties.

What if the shocking reality of a giant missile blasting a maternity hospital was front page news...would not hundreds of thousands of people be on the streets enough to overwhelm this monster to retreat to the hell he belongs? In Russia, masses of people need to up rise as one peaceful army that cannot be shot down or arrested in the name of individual freedoms including their own.

The internet has connected us globally for better or for worse, and it seems that people power has loud voices to support what’s right and condemn what’s wrong. World unity has to show them the reality of civilian causalities and starvation of a besieged city of 300,000 into submission.

As a pacifist, along with everybody else, my heart breaks at the inhumanity of war when civilization knows better but evil perpetrators, criminally insane without conscience, applaud their crimes to decimate innocence and democratic social order. The bones of broken families continue to contaminate history with young men used as weapons, mothers and wives weep, and children are terrified for life or die. Tears are not the cost.

Civilization knows better. Civilized people must rise. Freedom will always be the undying spirit to light our independence and human rights. If we don’t all stand up to defend our rights then one senile mind with one insane finger can press a button to destroy our planet.

As a Canadian Doukhobor, I pray for everyone's health and safety. I pray for a future of security and abundance. I pray for peace among nations and a chance to meet as friends.

Along with many others, I can also offer some physical support through Red Cross donations for humanitarian relief.

I'd like to share with you one of our Doukhobor psalms:

Let us honour peace and freedom's triumph

Let us honour peace, and freedom's triumph,

Over strife and age-old hate aflame;

World-wide brotherhood is now the answer;

Love, forgiveness, let us all proclaim.

We'll assemble as one human family,

And create a brotherhood of man.

Toil and Peace shall be our foremost emblem;

Love shall reign, supreme in all the land.

Annemarie Berukoff