From time to time this thirst for the ideal, this dissatisfaction with the actual, gave rise to a series of collective suicides. We may recall the celebrated propaganda of the monk Falaley, who preached that death was man's only means of salvation. He gathered his unhappy hearers in a forest, and there expounded to them the emptiness of life and the best method of escaping from it. His words bore fruit, and the simple peasants who heard them decided to have done with "this life of sin."

One night eighty-four persons congregated in an underground cavern near the river Perevozinka, and began to fast and to pray. The peasants gathered round their improvised camp, built of straw and wood, ready to die when the signal was given. But one woman, taking fright at the idea of so horrible a death, fled and warned the authorities. When the police arrived, one of the believers cried out that Anti-Christ was approaching, and the poor creatures then set fire to the camp and died—as they thought—for Christ.

A few fanatics who were saved received sentences of imprisonment and deportation, but one of them—Souchkoff—succeeded in escaping, and continued to spread "the truth of God." Whether it was his own eloquence or the misery and despair of the people that helped his doctrine, it bore at any rate such fruits that soon afterwards sixty families in one locality made up their minds to die en masse, believing that simple murder—the murder of the faithful by the faithful—would hasten the day of supreme deliverance. A peasant named Petroff entered the house of his neighbour, and killed the latter's wife and children, afterwards carrying his blood-stained hatchet in triumph through the village. In the barn of another a dozen peasants gathered with their wives, and the men and women laid their heads upon the block in turn, while Petroff, in the rÔle of the angel of death, continued his work of deliverance. He then made his way to a hut near by where a mother and three children awaited his services, and finally, overcome with fatigue, he laid his own head on the block, and was despatched to eternal glory by Souchkoff.

But the kind of death recommended by Chadkin about the year 1860 was even more terrible. In this case it was not a question of a wave of madness that came and passed, but of the prolonged torture of death by voluntary starvation.

Chadkin's teaching was that as Anti-Christ had already come, there was nothing left to do but escape into the forests and die of hunger. When he and his adherents had reached a sufficiently isolated spot, he ordered the women to prepare death-garments, and when all were suitably arrayed, he informed them that in order to receive the heavenly grace of death, they must remain there for twelve days and nights without food or water.

Frightful were the sufferings endured by these martyrs. The cries of the children, as they writhed in agony, were heartrending, but Chadkin and his followers never wavered. At last, however, one of the sufferers, unable longer to face such tortures, managed to escape, and Chadkin, fearing the arrival of the police, decided that all the rest must die at once. They began by killing the children; next the women and the men; and by the time the police appeared on the scene there remained alive only Chadkin and two others, who had forgotten in their frenzy to put an end to themselves.