The religious ferment of South Russia was due to some special causes, its provinces having served since the seventeenth century as lands of exile for revolutionaries of all kinds, religious, political and social. Dangerous criminals were also sent there, and a population of this nature naturally received with open arms all who preached rebellion against established principles and doctrines.

About the year 1750, a Prussian non-commissioned officer, expatriated on account of his revolutionary ideas, appeared in the neighbourhood of Kharkov. He taught the equality of man and the uselessness of public authority, and was the real founder of the douchobortzi, who believed in direct communion with the divinity by aid of the spirit which dwells in all men. The sparks scattered by this unknown vagabond flared up some time later into a conflagration which swept away artisans, peasants and priests, and embraced whole towns and villages.

The beliefs of the sect were that the material world is merely a prison for our souls, and that our passions carry in themselves the germs of our punishments. Nothing is more to be decried than the desire for worldly honour and glory. Did not Our Lord Himself say that He was not of this world? Emperors and kings reign only over the wicked and sinful, for honest men, like the douchobortzi, have nothing to do with their laws or their authority. War is contrary to the will of God. Christ having declared that we are all brothers and sisters, the words "father" and "mother" are illogical, and opposed to His teachings. There is only one Father, the Father in Heaven, and children should call their parents by their Christian names.

Except for these leading tenets, their doctrine was variable, and they not only gave rise to about a hundred other sects, but were themselves in a continual state of evolution and change. At one time it was their custom to put to death all children who were diseased in mind or body. As God dwells in us, they said, we cannot condemn Him to inhabit a body that is diseased. One leader of the sect believed himself to be the judge of the universe, and terrorised his co-religionists. Another ordered all who betrayed the doctrines of the sect to be buried alive, and legal proceedings which were taken against him and lasted several years showed him to be responsible for twenty-one "religious murders."