However, as a moral and religious revival, inspired by the exiled community leader Peter Vasilevich Verigin and by Leo Tolstoy's philosophy of non-violence, by 1895 many of the Doukhobors living in Transcaucasia resolved to destroy the weapons they owned.
Having wintered in the Irkutsk prison, the survivors of the Pozdnyakov's party[3] continued down the Lena River next spring, and eventually arrived to the place where other Doukhobors — those who had refused further service while already conscripted — had been exiled earlier.
He managed to accomplish: crossing Siberia to meet Verigin in Obdorsk (disguised as a fishmonger, as no Doukhobor visitors were allowed to see Verigin); spending four days at Leo Tolstoy's at Yasnaya Polyana; spending a fortnight in the Transcaucasia, reporting to the exiles' wives on the situation in Yakutia and inviting them to join their husbands (which many of them did some time later); and returning to his place of exile in Yakutia.
With an Appendix including documents about beatings and rapes of Doukhobor women by the Cossacks" («Рассказ духобора Васи Позднякова.
After arrival to Saskatchewan, he, and some other survivors of the Yakutia exile, found the state of the affairs in the Doukhbor community there, in particular Verigin dictatorial leadership, quite a mismatch to those prospects of "radiant future" about which he was hearing from Veriging in 1898.
In 1914 a number of Pozdnyakov's essays - on the life of the Doukhobors in Transcaucasia, in Siberian exile, and in Canada - appeared in The Monthly of Literary, Science, and Social Life («Ежемесячный журнал литературы, науки и общественной жизни»); one of them recounts his 1898 visit to Tolstoy, and carries Chertkov's comment that it was during those four days in 1898 that Pozdnyakov's Tale was written.