They Called Him a Radical: The Memoirs of Pete Maloff and the Making of a Doukhobor Pacifist

Review By Duff Sutherland

February 26, 2026

They Called Him a Radical: The Memoirs of Pete Maloff and the Making of a Doukhobor Pacifist, describes the spiritual and intellectual development of Pete Maloff, an Independent Doukhobor and peace activist. Maloff’s granddaughter, Vera Maloff, a writer and teacher who grew up near her grandparents in Thrums on the Kootenay River near Castlegar, British Columbia, edited her grandfather’s memoirs and includes valuable commentary to help readers better understand the work. Maloff wrote his memoirs in the late 1940s as part of a larger history of the Doukhobors in Canada. The memoirs detail the growth of Maloff’s passion for Doukhobor beliefs and history that led to a life of writing and peace activism beginning in his late twenties. In an earlier work, Our Backs Warmed by the Sun: Memories of a Doukhobor Life (2020), Vera Maloff documented this activism, which led to Maloff’s lengthy imprisonment by the state during the 1930s and 1940s. Maloff’s memoirs offers a sensitive interpretation of the diverse and difficult Doukhobor experience into the 1920s.

Pete Maloff was born in 1900 in a Saskatchewan communal village. Maloff’s parents left the community for a time becoming  Independent Doukhobors to escape the restrictions of communal life and to ensure that their sons attended school. When Maloff was a teenager, his family joined the Doukhobor Colony of Freedom in Oregon until unscrupulous businesspeople seized its lands. In 1915, the Russian/Ukrainian journalist Anton Sherbak accepted Pete as a printer’s apprentice at a Russian-language journal in San Francisco. Maloff’s time working for Sherbak inspired him to become a writer. The experience also brought Maloff into contact with California’s Russian community that included intellectuals, journalists, Doukhobors and fellow “spiritual Christians,” the Molokans.  Maloff deepened his beliefs through conversations and meetings with like-minded people. From 1917 on, the United States’ decision to enter the war, the Russian Revolution, and the postwar peace movement including the growing interest in alternative systems of belief and ways of living also deeply affected Maloff. In the early 1920s, the Maloff family settled in Thrums, an area that included both Independent and Sons of Freedom Doukhobors. Peter and his wife Lusha Hoodicoff raised their family on a small farm where they grew produce for sale in local markets.

Maloff’s memoirs detail a young man’s growing commitment to the Doukhobor ideals of pacifism and of a simple life of vegetarianism and work on the land. Maloff travelled, experimented with communal living, and learned about the ideas and experiences of his Sons of Freedom and Community Doukhobor neighbours. As an independent thinker, Maloff rejected the rigid beliefs and tactics of the Sons of Freedom and the restrictions on life in the communal villages under the leadership of Peter Vasilievich Verigin, “Lordly.”  Nonetheless, Maloff offers a sympathetic description of Bozhya Dolina (God’s Valley), a Sons of Freedom village near Grand Forks where he “falls under the spell” of the peoples’ singing in the early 1920s.  He also came to respect Peter Vasielvich Verigin for his lifelong commitment to “his beloved creation,” the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood. Maloff’s empathy for the struggles of the diverse community reflected, along with his peace activism, a desire to become a missionary for the Doukhobors and their beliefs.

We are indebted to Vera Maloff for the publication of her grandfather’s memoirs which offer a rare glimpse into the first generation of Doukhobor experience in Canada and beyond. Pete Maloff’s many conversations with others about how to live an ethical and spiritual life also reflected a world struggling with the effects of war, revolution, and economic dislocation during and after the war. Maloff wrote about his own experiences, and his conversations are primarily with other men. It also well worth reading Vera Maloff’s Our Backs Warmed by the Sun, for the experiences of Pete Maloff’s wife, Lusha, and of their six children. Together these works provide a valuable portrait of Independent Doukhobor experience and struggles over more than century.