The police made inquiries, which led to startling discoveries of the progress made by "self-incendiaries." The other brother was arrested, condemned to hard labour and deported to Saghalien; but, while still in prison, he poured over him the contents of a petroleum lamp, set fire to himself, and expired in the prison hospital.
There was another sect of a similar kind and founded on similar religious grounds by Stephen Kolesnikov. I had the chance of becoming personally acquainted with this group.
Kolesnikov established himself in the province of Perm. His faithful followers cut their throats amid prayers. After several suicides had been discovered, Kolesnikov was imprisoned, sentenced, and deported to Saghalien. But he succeeded in escaping from there, and hiding from the authorities, lived for years in the province of Tomsk, migrating from one locality to the other.
All these sects have In any case a certain historical or canonical foundation. But in the north of Russia there exists a sect whose origin cannot be explained on such grounds.
I came across it in the northern part of the Perm province.
I saw a great gathering of peasants, of benighted, half-savage, illiterate men, exhausted by their struggle with hard, inexorable nature; there they stood, lazily and apathetically gazing at a wall of uncouth logs
