The man wears tall leather boots, his shirt bound at the waist with a wide woven belt. His fists are clenched, his expression is firm, almost defiant. The woman beside him looks away, distracted by something outside the frame. Around her neck hang several rows of beads; her dress is richly embroidered, the kind of handiwork that could take weeks of patient labor.
They are brother and sister — Abram and Anna Pavlov.

Their portrait appears in an academic paper on the traditional costumes of the Semeiskie, a distinct community of Old Believers in the Trans-Baikal region of Siberia. Both were born into that culture. To take this photograph — which would later end up in a scholarly work — they had to travel several hours from their native village of Bichura to a studio in Verkhneudinsk, the town we now know as Ulan-Ude.

Anna and Abram grew up in the family of Lazar Pavlov, who, to the local authorities, presented himself as a beekeeper. By 1929, he owned thirty-three hives.

In truth, Lazar was a priest — or, as the Semeiskie said, a ustavshchik: a man responsible for leading prayers and keeping the ancient church rules. His son Abram followed in his footsteps. Another Abram, Lazar’s brother, also served as a priest. Faith, in the Pavlov family, was an inheritance, passed down like land or craft.

But by the time Anna and Abram posed for that photograph, serving the church had become dangerous.

The Soviet regime was tightening its grip; the persecution of clergy was already in full swing. For safety, the men of the Pavlov family continued to call themselves beekeepers. Yet Lazar never concealed his beliefs. When, in 1930, he, his son, and his brother were arrested, he told his cellmates quietly:

“If we suffer for the truth, the Lord will repay us for it”.

For centuries, the ancestors of the Semeiskie had lived in the town of Vetka, on the eastern frontier of what was then Poland, loyal Orthodox subjects of the Moscow tsar.

Their lives might have continued that way — provincial, devout, uneventful — if not for a reform that would split Russian Christianity in two.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Orthodox Church was in trouble. Over the years, countless sacred texts had been translated from Greek into Russian, often by hand. Each scribe interpreted as he understood, introducing his own words, rhythms, and mistakes.
From copy to copy, the deviations accumulated. By the 1600s, the Church was awash in inconsistencies: prayers differed from region to region, and even the spelling of Christ’s name varied.

The idea of standardizing church books — and doctrine along with them — had first arisen in the time of Ivan the Terrible, but nothing was done. A century later, Patriarch Nikon took it up again. With the backing of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, he launched a reform in 1653 aimed at bringing Russian Orthodoxy back in line with Greek liturgical norms.

From now on, believers were to make the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two.
They were to bow only to the waist, not to the ground.

Processions were to move counterclockwise, against the sun.

The name of Jesus was to be written with two Is instead of one.

Books or icons that showed otherwise were to be burned.

For Nikon, this was more than theology — it was statecraft.

A unified rite would strengthen Russia’s spiritual legitimacy and its geopolitical ambitions, especially in Ukraine, recently absorbed into the empire. Religion, after all, was politics in the seventeenth century.

The reform was meant to unite — but it ended up dividing more deeply than anyone could imagine.

Not everyone in Russia accepted Nikon’s decrees.

Thousands of believers clung to the old ways — crossing themselves with two fingers, bowing to the ground, worshipping as their ancestors had.

The state called them Raskolniki, “the schismatics.”

They called themselves starovery — Old Believers.

The Church excommunicated them. The authorities persecuted them. Entire communities fled into forests, mountains, and the farthest reaches of the empire. For centuries, they lived on the margins — punished, hunted, or simply ignored.

Only in 1905 did Tsar Nicholas II finally issue a decree ending the persecution. But by then, the trauma was inherited, and the distrust of state power ran deep.

So when the empire began pushing eastward in the eighteenth century — toward Siberia and beyond — it was the Old Believers who were “invited” to populate those new frontiers.

The reasoning was practical as well as political: these people were known as industrious farmers, capable of coaxing life from frozen soil. They could make the wilderness bloom — and, conveniently, they could do it far away from the heart of the state they distrusted.

The plan worked.

As the governor of Irkutsk, Nikolai Treskin, would later write, the Old Believers “even made the stones bear fruit.”

The resettlement took nearly seventy years, from the mid-1700s to its close.

Some went willingly; others were forced.

Among them were Old Believers from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — the territory of present-day Belarus. Many had already fled persecution abroad, and now the tsar invited them to return and settle new lands east of Baikal.

Old Believers traditionally lived in vast extended families — households that might span four generations: great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children. They worked the land together, raised children together, and prayed together. A single family could easily number fifty or sixty people.

When such families were relocated to Siberia, locals began calling them semeiskie — literally, “the family people.”

At first, they were settled in a handful of villages east of Lake Baikal.

But the community multiplied quickly: from 4,500 people to 17,000 within seventy years. By the twentieth century, their numbers had surpassed 50,000. The land was fertile — and so were they.

The Semeiskie spread across what are now the Chita region and the Republic of Buryatia.
One of their largest villages was Bichura — a thousand households, some seven thousand inhabitants.

They built new homes, tilled the soil, and preserved a way of life that had already vanished elsewhere.

Alongside their agricultural skill, the Semeiskie carried with them their faith.

But unlike some of the more radical Old Believer sects, they were moderate.

They didn’t reject icons painted by outsiders, nor did they refuse to sit at the same table with Nikonites — the adherents of the reformed Church. They condemned self-immolation, that tragic form of protest practiced by the most desperate believers.

They were pious, but pragmatic — devout neighbors who could coexist peacefully with Orthodox Russians and Buddhist Buryats alike.

Despite years of repression, religion remained the heart of their identity.

Priests were revered; whole villages would pool money to invite a clergyman from Moscow.

Even under police surveillance, the priests continued to travel from one remote settlement to another, conducting services in secret homes and barns.

The ethnographer Pavel Rovinsky visited Bichura in 1871 and described the celebration of the First Honey Feast — the Medovy Spas, held every August:

“They prayed through nearly the entire night; only when the sun rose from behind the hills did they all head for the river. There were at least a thousand people — from the youngest to the oldest. So much singing, so much reading! Over twenty deacons assisted the priest, forming a full choir. When the cross was dipped into the water, the whole crowd rushed in after it.”

When the echoes of revolution and civil war finally faded, the new Soviet government turned its gaze inward — toward the people it now ruled.

Its task was monumental: to build a new society, remold the human spirit, and bring every citizen under the same red banner.

In the Trans-Baikal villages, the Semeiskie met these ambitions with quiet suspicion.
Their priests warned them not to send children to Soviet schools — calling such a decision a mortal sin. Communist slogans urging women to “liberate themselves” from household labor and send their children to nurseries sounded absurd to families that had been raising half a dozen or more children for generations.

The Party, relentless in its mission, began planting cells — tiny nuclei of communism — across the country. But in the Semeiskie villages, recruitment was slow. In one settlement, only four people joined the local Party cell in 1927. In others, even fewer. By the decade’s end, across several densely populated districts, there were barely 125 active Communists — and more than a few of them still crossed themselves before dinner.

At a Komsomol meeting in 1929, officials fumed that young Party members in the villages of Kuitun and Kunalei had celebrated Easter with singing, prayer, and drunken feasting.

One of them, the report said, even climbed a church bell tower and rang the bells all day long.

In another village, a young man named Orlov was told to renounce his faith. He replied simply:
“Better to pay three kopeks to the priest than one to the Party.”

Researchers who visited the Semeiskie around that time noted that the locals often saw Communists as the servants of the Antichrist — and Lenin himself as the Beast, the number 666 hidden in his name. His image, reproduced everywhere — the bald head under a worker’s cap, the piercing eyes — struck them as eerily inhuman. “The face of the Beast,” some whispered.

Soon, the state gave them reason to fear.

By 1930, a new war was declared — not against foreign armies, but against faith itself.
The Council of People’s Commissars ordered the confiscation of church bells for industrial smelting; churches were closed, their icons stripped, their interiors converted into “houses of culture,” gymnasiums, or cattle barns.

A few years earlier, in 1925, the League of the Militant Godless had been founded — an official organization whose mission was to eradicate belief.

Its members replaced Easter with May Day, staged mock funerals for religion, and marched through villages carrying portraits of Marx and slogans that read: “There is no God!”
For their zeal, they earned free train tickets, vouchers to sanatoriums, and access to higher education.

For priests, the tickets went elsewhere.

By the eve of the Second World War, thousands of churches across the Soviet Union had been shuttered. Tens of thousands of clergymen were arrested, exiled, or shot.
Even in the remote Trans-Baikal village of Maleta, the local church was turned into a “cultural hall.”

In nearby Bichura, a new collective commune was founded — and, with a dark sense of irony, named Bezbozhnik — “The Godless.”

Persecution for faith was nothing new to the Old Believers. They had endured it for centuries.
But what came next struck even deeper than the loss of their churches: the state began taking away their harvests — the very bread that sustained them.

In 1929, Joseph Stalin made a promise to the nation.

Within three years, he declared, the Soviet Union would become “one of the world’s most bread-rich countries — if not the richest.”

It was a strange boast, given that much of the country was already starving.

Droughts swept across the provinces. Harvests failed. Yet quotas for grain delivery — khlebozagotovka — only grew.

Peasants were required to hand over grain to the state.

Officially, they were surrendering only their “surplus.” In reality, it often meant the last sack of flour they had left.

The policy made little distinction between prosperous farmers and those barely surviving.

In the Semeiskie villages of Transbaikalia, it hit hard.

One local man, Ivanov from the village of Malyi Kunalei, told investigators later that he had been ordered to deliver one hundred poods of grain — more than 1.6 metric tons. The problem was, he didn’t grow grain. He was a beekeeper. His household of eight owned a single cow, one horse, and twenty hives.

To avoid arrest, Ivanov surrendered nearly all the grain he had purchased for his own family’s use — more than fifty poods. What remained would feed them for barely a month.

Another peasant, Shubin from Krasny Yar, was told to surrender eighty-five poods, then thirty-four more, then forty. From his small plot, he had harvested only 120. He gave everything — and still fell short. The authorities seized his livestock and sold off his household goods.

“First they take your bread,” he said bitterly, “then your shirt.”

Stories like these spread through the villages.

Father Lazar Pavlov, the beekeeper-priest from Bichura, wrote later:

“Many said: ‘We give up our bread, they take it away, and when we have none left, they will not return it to us.’

Even the poor began to murmur. They said, ‘The government is ruining us. They leave us to starve.’”

By 1929, taxes on peasants in Transbaikalia had risen fifty percent in a single year.

At the same time, a new campaign began to sweep across the land — collectivization.

The slogans were simple and merciless:

“Who does not join the kolkhoz is an enemy of Soviet power!”

Joining a kolkhoz — a collective farm — meant giving up your land, your animals, your tools, even your seed. Everything became “common property.” You still worked the fields, but the harvest no longer belonged to you.

For centuries, the Semeiskie had survived by family labor and faith — both were now declared obsolete.

Those who refused to join faced heavy taxes, public denunciation, even prison.

Markets were shut down. Homes were searched. Whole families were branded kulaks — “rich peasants,” a label broad enough to fit almost anyone with a cow or a pair of boots.

And then came raskulachivaniye.

In Maleta, a peasant named Poluyanov was found to have hidden a store of grain — 250 poods, along with pork, lard, and tea. Everything was seized.

In Bichura, another Ivanov was stripped of three horses, ten cows, seven sheep, and a pig.

When the police demanded more, they added a tax of 250 rubles — the equivalent of a year’s income.

“I used to feed others,” Ivanov later said. “Now my own family starves. I hate this power so much I’d rather flee the country.”

In the evenings, by candlelight, men gathered to talk — first in whispers, then in anger.

They spoke of rising up, of taking back what had been stolen.

“If we do nothing,” one said, “they’ll strip us to our shirts.”

By 1929, more than 1,300 “kulak uprisings” had been recorded across the Soviet Union.
Within months, the number would triple.

In Transbaikalia, the air was heavy with rumor.

The rebellion began almost by accident.

In late February 1930, the authorities uncovered a network of secret meetings in Bichura, Maleta, and several neighboring villages. Arrests followed — but not fast enough.
Some of the conspirators escaped through the forests and regrouped in the village of Malyi Kunalei.

Their leader was a man named Semyon Konechnykh — a farmer, forty years old, hardened by hunger and anger.

Alongside him were priests, beekeepers, and peasants — among them Lazar Pavlov and his kin.

On March 2, 1930 — during Maslenitsa, the traditional week of feasting before Lent — about fifty men gathered near the village of Gutai.

They carried rifles, sabers, and old revolvers. Their plan was to take back their villages — one by one.

First Malyi Kunalei, then Krasny Yar, then Bichura.

They would free arrested peasants, seize the local councils, and demand the right to trade and own property again.

In Malyi Kunalei that night, the local militia chief and a district investigator were drinking tea with the head of the village council, celebrating the holiday. They knew of the arrests in Bichura — but not that more rebels were gathering at their doorstep.

When the first shots rang out, they ran for the local club — the largest building in the village.
The rebels surrounded it and opened fire. The militia chief and the investigator were killed instantly.

The teacher and a few others tried to flee but were caught.

By dawn, Malyi Kunalei was under rebel control.

The uprising spread like fire through dry grass.

In the next village, Poselie, rebels went door to door, searching for Party officials, policemen, Komsomol members — anyone tied to the regime.

Some they beat, others they killed. A young activist named Tatiana Bykova was found hiding in a haystack. They dragged her out and stabbed her with pitchforks. When she was barely alive, a man named Nikipelov struck her with an iron bar, shouting:

“This is for drinking our blood!”

By morning, Tatiana’s body lay in the snow.

The rebels moved on — to Krasny Yar.

The pattern repeated: weapons seized, men conscripted, suspected Communists executed.
Among the victims was a local teacher, B’yankin, who had supported the closure of the church.

They shot him, chased him into a haystack, and riddled his body with bullets — fifteen wounds in all.

Also in Krasny Yar that day was a young journalist — twenty-two-year-old Vasily Blokh, correspondent for the newspaper Zabaikalsky Rabochy. He had written bright, loyal reports with headlines like “The Kulak Changes His Mask” and “More Attention to Collectivization.”

When the shooting started, Blokh ran into the street, trying to escape.

He was caught, knocked down, and beaten with rifle butts until the weapon splintered.

They left him to die in the snow — the journalist who had chronicled the “successes” of collectivization now another body in its path.

By March 3, the uprising had reached the village of Bui.

There were now nearly six hundred rebels — mostly peasants, many of them Semeiskie.

They were armed but disorganized, drunk on both alcohol and fury.

They planned to march next on Bichura, but the authorities were ready.
Local Communists formed self-defense squads.

Two trucks of Red Army soldiers were already speeding from Chita — five hundred kilometers away — through the frozen night.

At dawn, five soldiers and thirty militiamen reached Bui. The rebels fired first.

The soldiers charged.

In the chaos, several rebels were captured, and a handful of imprisoned villagers were freed.

Most of the insurgents fled. Those who stayed had little will to fight.

They were peasants, not soldiers.

They had drunk too much the night before.

And perhaps, deep down, they already knew they could not win.

By the afternoon of March 4, the rebellion was over.

In the days that followed, the villages were quiet again — eerily so.

The dead were buried in shallow graves near the schools and churches.

The wounded were taken to makeshift infirmaries.

In Maleta, a common grave was dug near the school. There lay the militia chief, the investigator, the journalist Blokh, and several others.

Then came the arrests.

Six hundred people were detained, interrogated, accused of “counter-revolution.”
Thirty-four were sentenced to death; twenty-three of those sentences were later commuted to ten years in prison.

Eleven men were executed by firing squad.

Among the prisoners were the Pavlovs — Lazar, his son Abram, and his brother Abram.

All three priests, all three beekeepers.

The rebellion’s leader, Semyon Konechnykh, fled into the taiga with ten others.

They hid there for months, hunted through the forests.

Most were captured by autumn. Only Konechnykh escaped.

His wife, Yelizaveta, was arrested in his place — accused of bringing food to the fugitives.
She was sentenced to three years in a labor camp.

After serving her term, she was rearrested and given five more.

It was a pattern repeated across the country. Those who survived the Gulag often found themselves condemned again.

And during the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the remaining veterans of the Maleta uprising were rearrested and executed — “on the basis of prior crimes.”

The Maleta uprising was one of the bloodiest peasant rebellions in Transbaikalia — and one of thousands across the Soviet Union.

In 1930 alone, over 14,000 revolts, riots, and protests were recorded.

More than 2.5 million peasants took part.

They were crushed one by one.

Over 20,000 rebels were executed; tens of thousands more disappeared into labor camps.
And the rest — those who survived — returned to the fields, now as workers of the collective state.

Decades later, when Stalin’s crimes were re-examined in the 1950s, the participants of the Maleta uprising were denied rehabilitation. Even thirty years after their deaths, the verdict stood: they had been punished “rightfully.”

Only in the late 1980s did their descendants appeal again.

This time, most were finally cleared of guilt — all except those directly accused of murder.

Among the rehabilitated were Lazar Pavlov and his two Abrahams — father, son, and brother.
Three generations of priests who, when faced with hunger and despair, took up arms — not to destroy, but to defend the last thing they had left: the dignity of human survival.