In Doukhobor cuisine, the main ingredient is cabbage, and the soup also contains beets, potatoes, tomatoes and heavy cream, along with dill and leeks.
In 1802, Tsar Alexander I encouraged resettlement of religious minorities to the so-called 'Milky Waters" (Molochnye Vody): the region of Molochnaya River (around Melitopol in today's southern Ukraine). This was motivated by the desire both to quickly populate the rich steppe lands on the north shore of the Black and Azov Seas, and to prevent the "heretics" from contaminating the population of the heartland with their ideas.
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Still, the Large Party Doukhobors continued to consider him their spiritual leader and to communicate with him, by mail and via delegates who traveled to see him in Obdorsk, Siberia.
The Cathars and Patarenes, the Waldenses, the Anabaptists, and in Russia the Strigolniki, Molokani and Doukhobors, have all at different times been either identified with the Bogomils or closely connected with them.
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 Zaporizhia Oblast of the Ukraine.
The site of the future village of Veregin - which also happened to be the closest point where the new rail line came to the village of Otradnoye (some 10 km north of Veregin) where the residence and headquarters of the Doukhobor leader, Peter Verigin was at the time - was chosen as the place for the railway station to serve the Doukhobor reserve.