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These days, with the Ukraine war raging, most Doukhobors no longer aspire to return to Russia, said Mr. Verigin, who leads the largest Doukhobor organization in Canada, and studied in Moscow in 1979.

They also resisted serving in the imperial military; in 1895, thousands of Doukhobor soldiers set fire to their weapons, which led to the group’s violent suppression and exile.

At a recent choir practice at a Doukhobor cultural center, Jasmine Popoff, 34, a nurse with purple hair, led her choir in a rousing version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” — in Russian — followed by a spirited rendition in English of Queen’s “Somebody to Love.”

At the Doukhobor Discovery Center in Castlegar, the museum director, Ryan Dutchak, said that some Doukhobors over the past decades had changed their Russian-sounding last names for fear of being ostracized.

A blaze destroyed precious family artifacts, including correspondence between his great-great-grandfather, a prominent Doukhobor leader, and the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, an early admirer of the Doukhobors’ pacifism and Christian morality.