Rare Original Photograph of a Doukhobor “Sons Of Liberty” Protest. 

These Christian anarchists came to be known as the ‘Naked Terrorists’. Western Canada and BC were subjected to hundreds of terrorist attacks with damages running into the millions. Protests frequently incorporated nudism as a form of protest, along with arson (often of their own homes). A driving force in their beliefs was a commitment to communal life and an aggressive opposition of all earthly power and a defiance of the Canadian government seizing their lands and forcing their children to attend public schools. The roots of the sect go back to the territory of today’s Ukraine, where a special group of Orthodox believers appeared at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. They held the view that God resides in every living being and therefore all earthly power is useless. Everyone is responsible only to their own conscience, not to secular or church. In response to the escalating attacks, the Canadian government cracked down hard on them, sending dozens of protestors to prison, removing children from their parents and imprisoned them in an educational camp that resembled a concentration camp. These attacks by an idiosyncratic sect with roots in Tsarist Russia remain one of the most remarkable chapters in Canadian history.