Hi, Dante.  Refugees: yeah.  Like most of the 1890s "sheepskin coat" immigrants that were persuaded (hoodwinked is also a word some use) to settle in the prairies.

"Wouldn't they go to protests nude?"  
They staged non-violent parades to protest government interference  in their lives--(education, for instance.) Why nude? They disrobed to simply get closer to God. 

The "break-away sect": the Sons of Freedom.  Yes, the Doukhobors were NOT a homogeneous lot, to put it mildly.  They also blew up a train car to kill a leader; torched their own homes and--in the most bizarre case of self-destruction--a huge and financially successful agricultural-food production center in a hamlet called Brilliant, outside Castlegar, B.C.  And it WAS brilliant--railway spur next to the massive jam factory allowed the Doukhobors to ship their products nationwide.  Entire trains full of the product from their own riverside orchards and gardens.  All burned to the ground by Doukhobor fanatics.