[1] Along with a number of other villages in northwestern Azerbaijan, Slavyanka was settled in 1844 by the Doukhobors, members of a Pacifist dissenter Christian group resettled to Transcaucasia by Nicholas I from the Molochna River settlements in today's Zaporizhzhia Oblast of Ukraine.

According to Vereshchagin, the Doukhobors "lived an honest, reasonable, and prosperous life", but, under the pressure of the struggle for existence in the borderlands, had become less strict in their practices, many taking up smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol.

[5] During the confrontation with the Czarist government in the mid-1890s over the conscription and oath of allegiance, in June 1895 Slavyanka became the site of the area's Doukhobors destroying their weapons in the well-known "Burning of the Arms" event.

[2] The government responded by exiling a large number of the local Doukhobors elsewhere in Russian Empire; some died of starvation, exposure, and diseases in the process.

[8] The other, north of Veregin, Saskatchewan in the so-called "South Doukhobor Colony", was established in 1899; in 1905, its residents mostly moved to two other villages, and this Slavyanka was soon abandoned.