In recent years an influx of folk furniture imported from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, northern Russia in particular, has made it easier to compare the pieces made by Russian immigrants after their arrival in North America with examples that demonstrate the original context in which the forms, construction methods, and decorative motifs were born. This comparative approach also addresses the perennial issues of tradition, adaptation, and innovation in the transfer of these elements from the old world to the new. This article is an attempt to systematically examine the furniture made by one group of Russian immigrants, the Doukhobors who settled in the Canadian West, and compare it to Russian pieces. But to understand and interpret the objects the Doukhobors made, and the context in which these people began as a nonconforming religious sect, we must first return to their origins in eighteenth-century Russia and their arrival in Canada at the end of the nineteenth century.