Demos was named after his Armenian grandfather, who, with most of his relatives were exiled in the late 1800s from Erivan Governorate (Armenia) to Karakala (Merkezkarakale) village, Kars Oblast, Russia, for their heretic folk-protestant religious views.
In Kars they met and joined like-minded Spiritual Christian Pryguny, denominations of various volunteer settlers and religious exiles from Russia.
Among the Pryguny in Romanovo village was a "Boy Prophet", Efim Gerasimovitch Klubnikin, who, as early as 1855, when he also lived in Erivan Governorate, began to have visions of an unspeakable tragedy and warned that all must flee to a "place of refuge.
"[1] In 1895, neighboring Spiritual Christian Dukhobortsy in Transcaucasia staged a mass protest against the military, burned their guns, about 400 were jailed in Kars and Tiflis, half exiled, and about 2,000 died.
Writer Leo N. Tolstoy protested to the Tsar about this cruelty, resulting in aid from the Society of Friends, London, and the Canadian government to move over 7,400 (about one-third) of all Dukhobortsy to central Canada.
A Russian businessman in Los Angeles, Peter Demens had been promoting California to immigrants from Russia for a decade, objected to Dukhobortsy settling in Canada, and personally diverted most all non-Dukhobor Spiritual Christians arriving after 1901 away from Canada to Los Angeles, while the Freedomites began protesting against the Canadian government.
[3] As large groups of Pryguny, including the Shakarians and Klubnikins, began arriving in Los Angeles in 1905, most settled within a mile of the Azusa Street Revival as it was starting, and were delighted to meet spiritual faiths in America similar to theirs.
[4] Demos Sr. died while working on the construction of the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad in Nevada, and his young son Isaac became the head of the family.
Shakarian was a third-generation Pentecostal, and he believed in the "Full Gospel", that all the supernatural events in the New Testament should be understood literally, and could also occur today.