Out of the depths of this ancient, but still little known, land, have these goods been brought on the backs of camels. A few months earlier I had watched long camel trains of Persian traders crossing the Nucha Desert, leisurely plodding the hot, sandy stretches with the goods of their country with which they thought to please other eyes. At Nijni I was not tempted to buy any of these goods, for in my rooms in St. Petersburg I had enough table-covers and hand-embroidered squares to supply a host of friends with souvenirs. I had picked them up in Tiflis, in Transcaucasia, during one of the pitched battles between the Armenians and Tartars. The Armenians had taken possession of a hill in the town just above the Persian quarter, and began firing upon the Tartars whose quarter adjoins the Persians’. The Tartars returned the fire smartly, but as neither of these nationalities are notoriously good shots, the innocent Persians, who unluckily were between the two camps, were the chief sufferers. When the Russian troops came up they fired indiscriminately upon the Armenians and Tartars; likewise upon the Persians, who could not be distinguished. The result of the mêlée was the almost complete demolition of the Persian quarter. These unhappy merchants and traders started in panic for their native country, and those who had managed to save any of their goods at all were glad enough to sell them in quantities for a song. But even at Nijni these Persian stuffs are inexpensive. I saw groups of admiring muzhiks clad in what some one has called their “national costume of rags” venturing to invest a hard-earned ruble in a gaudy table-cover.

Interesting as are the bazars with all their varied displays, the crowds of patrons were surpassingly fascinating. Beautiful Tartar women, with faces half-veiled lest the eyes of a strange man should rest upon them. Mohammedan molla in silken robes of many colors like little Joseph’s, with snowy turbans wound round their shaved heads, setting into bold contrast the polished olive skins of their faces. Peasants in shoals who stare and stare. Housewives who question and price a thousand things, and sometimes risk a purchase.

It was with a feeling of refreshment and no little regret that I boarded a Volga flat-bottomed steamer to proceed on my journey to Kazan.

Kazan had long been a troubled government. The nearer one approached to the famine belt, the stronger were the sentiments of insurrection. So complete was the failure of crops in some counties of Kazan this year that the harvest would not suffice for a single month! The estimated amount of government relief needed for Kazan government for that year alone was thirty-two million rubles—$16,000,000—a sum so vast that it was already known that the central government, as usual in straitened circumstances, would be obliged to cut it down so largely that appalling suffering was inevitable.

Taking a small boat that for a few months each year plies up and down a tributary of the Volga, I made a three days’ journey into the interior of this province, stopping for part of a day with a well-known Kazan landlord, a marshal of nobility, Prince Ouktomsky.

The monarchy has no more loyal supporter than Prince Ouktomsky, but when I asked him the attitude of his peasants toward the Emperor, he regretfully confessed that their disillusionment had gone so far that there was no hope of the present Czar ever regaining their confidence. “The defeats in the East completely shattered their faith,” he said. As for the Duma, he was reluctant to admit that its dissolution had influenced them, but

when I talked with the peasants at work on his estates, I found that their silence was deep with foreboding and their looks were sinister. “The next Duma will contain many more peasants,” he said, “because the Constitutional Democrats have discredited themselves. The peasants will not trust them again. Neither will they boycott the elections.” The peasants with whom I talked supported this view. The Viborg manifesto failed utterly to impress them, and since the Constitutional Democrats were in the majority in the late Duma and yet failed to help them in their plight, they will try to return only peasants to the next Duma.

News of the assassination of General Minn, of evil memory, and the bomb incident in M. Stolypin’s house in St. Petersburg had not yet penetrated to the remote villages of this province, although both events had happened nearly a week before. In one of the villages I handed a newspaper, containing an account of both incidents, to one of a picturesque group to read aloud. Had there been any lingering doubt in my mind as to the revolutionary spirit of these people, it would have disappeared in this moment. Details of the bomb affair were listened to with breathless interest, but when it was learned that M. Stolypin was uninjured, there were expressions of chagrin, of disappointment, and regret.

“What! Do you approve of these terroristic acts?” I exclaimed. A silence fell over the company until a young peasant, with a frank and rather striking face, answered: “Yes, we believe in the killing of ministers. They are bad men. They are our oppressors. It is good that they should die.” For a peasant this was very “advanced” thinking.

I left Prince Ouktomsky’s toward the end of a summer afternoon, for the estate of Professor Vassiliev, some five hours’ journey away.

Three hours after leaving the Ouktomsky estate we passed a certain convent. My peasant driver was very insistent that I and my interpreter should pass the night here.

“But how is that possible?” I exclaimed. “If it is a convent, surely men may not tarry here over night.”

“May God forgive me,” replied the horseman, “but in many months the sisters have had no opportunity to welcome such handsome travelers as you. If you will only stop here you will be received like great men.”

When my interpreter further questioned the fellow he told me a tale that recalled Boccaccio and the Florentines of the Middle Ages—which I was assured was truly Russian!

Two hours later we passed Professor Vassiliev’s gates. Dogs greeted our arrival, and the professor himself raised a window to call out, in Russian:

“Who’s there? What is it?”

“Good-evening, professor,” I answered, in English, “you speak English, do you not?”

“English! Yes, I do—but who are you?”

“An American,” I replied.

“Impossible!” exclaimed the good man. “But come in. Whoever you are you’re heartily welcome.”

And heartily welcome we were made. Not only the professor, but his delightful wife, and his charming oldest son and daughter, all spoke perfect English, and their cordiality was beyond anything I had anticipated.

We talked until past midnight, and then a room was prepared for my interpreter and myself. I chanced to have with me a copy of Professor Paul Miliukoff’s admirable book, “Russia and Its Crisis,” being lectures delivered at the University of Chicago. Professor Vassiliev and his son were overjoyed at this, and begged me to let them have it over night.

“Miliukoff himself may not have a copy,” they told me; “it is a forbidden book in Russia.” Next morning they told me that they had both read it through during the night while we slept—and returned it with profuse gratitude.

Professor Vassiliev conducted me over his estate and afforded me opportunities for conversations with many peasants, and everywhere I found my earlier impressions confirmed. The peasants had advanced by leaps and bounds within a few months, and in the words of the professor: “Kazan was then ripe for insurrection, if only the firebrand were applied, with the assurance that neighboring provinces were rising also.”

Professor Vassiliev was a staunch liberal, a Constitutional Democratic deputy to the first Duma, and a hereditary landowner. Yet he looked upon the expropriation of land in Russia, not only as desirable, but as presently inevitable. “At the same time I am a monarchist,” he added; “but, though a monarchist, I must say that the blunders of the present monarch have damaged him forever with the peasants. The war shook their belief in him. His treatment of the Duma added to their skepticism, and the sending of the Duma away was the final blow.”

“As for the expropriation of land in Russia,” continued the professor, “I believe in the principle, and I shall be glad when my lands are taken—with the rest. I would leave to the proprietors only their house gardens.” When the man who has much to lose is willing to lose all for the good of his neighbors, then, indeed, is the spirit of true citizenship met in its purest form.

These visits to Prince Ouktomsky and Professor Vassiliev, and the conversations with their peasants, went to confirm the impressions gathered in Kostroma, and Nijni-Novgorod. The peasantry no longer cherished dreams of autocratic infallibility. The idea of revolution had gained strong headway, especially since the Duma. An idea cannot be held back by Cossacks, by rapid-firing guns, by bayonets, or by the legalized lawlessness which is screened by so-called martial law. The government, through its fatuous policy of oppression and reaction, had now awakened the sympathies of practically all of its people to revolution. Active revolutionists, in any country, are in a seeming minority up to the crisis. When the wave of success attains formidability, the ranks of the then new régime suddenly become filled and solidified. The present government, partly owing to the financial support it receives from the peoples of England, France, Austria, and other countries, still maintains a show of strength. But examination reveals the obvious condition—strength merely to demoralize the ranks of the revolution, while lacking the strength to rule or to administer.

The next province I went to was Simbirsk, the next province below Kazan on the Volga. “Mountain of the Winds” was the name given to Simbirsk city by early Volga-side dwellers. “Plain of the Whirlwind” might Simbirsk government well be called at the time I passed through. Conservatism would scarcely be expected among the constituents of Aladin—that daring, outspoken labor-group leader in the Duma. “Revolutionary”—he was called by people who heard his impassioned speeches. But the Honorable Maurice Baring, after listening to him many times, recalled the words spoken by Mirabeau of Robespierre: “That young man will go far. He believes every word he says.” Of Aladin’s beliefs I knew nothing at the time, for this was all before his visit to America, where (together with Tchaykovsky the “Father of the Russian Revolution”) he did more, perhaps, than any Russian has ever done to arouse the American people to Russia’s wrongs. Of the man I knew little; only this:—the peasants trusted him, and in as large degree as the Constitutional Democrats had lost the confidence of the peasants, Aladin and the “toil group” had won it. This was not because of Aladin, however, but because the peasants were now unequivocally and avowedly revolutionary, and they trusted the man who dared shake his fist at ministers, hiss them, and shout loudly for their demission, and who had publicly referred to the peasants as men, not as “children”; whose championship of the men in sheepskin had been neither apologetic nor patronizing.

Simbirsk is an illiterate government. Five sixths of the population cannot read or write. It is hard, indeed, for an English mind to conceive the status of education in a country of pretended standing, as we find it in Simbirsk. The government (Zemstvo) school appropriation averages ten copecks (five cents) per head annually. Only nine tenths of one per cent. of the men, and five tenths of one per cent. of the women receive more than a primary-school education, while only four in a thousand ever finish the “gymnasia” (high school), and four in ten thousand reach the universities. In spite of these tremendous handicaps it is patent to the most careless traveler through these parts, that in a simple, direct way the people know what they want.

“We want a Duma that we can trust, and that shall be the highest power over us,” said a middle-aged peasant to me, as he paused in his work in the fields.

“Were you satisfied with the Duma you had?”

“The Duma was all right, but the ministers were bad and it was wrong of the Emperor to send it away.”

The way in which the Constitutional Democrats had dropped out of sight since issuing the Viborg manifesto had told strongly against them. Prince Baratieff, a Constitutional Democrat, a Simbirsk deputy to the Duma, told me frankly: “Formerly the Constitutional Democratic Party enjoyed the confidence of the peasants of this government, but since the dissolution I think they have moved more to the left.”

During the course of this journey I searched diligently for conservative peasants—peasants who still believed in God and the Czar, as of old, but the peasants themselves were always the first to say: “Before the Duma we thought differently.” It was a Simbirsk peasant, however, in a village twenty miles inland from the Volga, who said: “We had always believed in the Czar as our Emperor by ‘divine authority,’ but now we see that if we put a crown on a hitching-post and call it ‘Czar by divine authority,’ it is the same.”

About this time the government announced that it was prepared to alleviate the agrarian stress by placing certain appanage, or crown, lands at the disposal of the peasants—for a consideration.

“How do you feel in regard to the Emperor’s latest step in putting the appanage lands at the disposition of the peasants through the Peasants’ Bank?” I asked of a group of six peasants whom I was questioning in Simbirsk. A chorus of derisive exclamations immediately followed. “We believe no more in anything that comes from the government—or even the Emperor. We have had too many pieces of worthless paper read to us. It may sound good now, but in the end it will not be for our good.”

As a matter of fact, if all of the appanage lands of Simbirsk government were distributed among the peasants of that district, the allotments would average only one eightieth of an acre per capita. Furthermore, a large part of the 480,000 acres—the aggregate amount of imperial lands within the government—are wooded, and consequently unavailable for immediate agricultural purposes. It may be explained that the appanage lands are lands set apart for the support of members of the imperial family.

“How did you hear of this imperial proposition so soon?” I inquired, knowing that so remote a village could not yet have received newspapers.

“It was read out in the church on Sunday,” they answered.

“Then the priests must believe in it.”

“That is why we don’t,” they went on. “The priests are ‘Black Hundred,’ and we believe no more in them.”

“What do you believe in?” I asked.

“We believe in a Duma for the people; a Duma without ministers who work against our interests.”

Simbirsk was another famine district. Even for an agricultural district in Russia it was terribly poor. Twenty-four per cent. of the population had no horses at all, and forty per cent. had only one horse per household. This year the crop failure was the worst in two generations. It was estimated that $5,000,000 would be needed for food for the peasants alone, and many millions more for the starving cattle and horses, and for seeds for next year’s harvest. The peasants looked forward to the illimitable suffering of starvation through the long months of the Russian winter. Knowing full well the crying needs which shall soon beset them, and that without money the government will find it impossible to alleviate these needs, one peasant said to me, in the presence of a group:

“You wonder, perhaps, why we take strangers into our houses this way and tell them everything, as we are talking to you?”

“I have usually found the peasants frank and friendly,” I replied. “At the same time I should be glad to know why you are so free with me.”

“Because,” said the speaker, “you come from another country, and it is in other countries that the Russian government borrows money. We think that if the people of other countries only understood how hard our position is, they would not help the government to put us down.”

This was not the first peasant who had brought up the question of foreign loans to Russia. Nor was this the first time I had failed in attempting to explain to the muzhik why foreign loans are possible. In Kostroma, at the very outset of this journey, I had met with the same thing, and there, as here, failed in my attempt to explain the theory of foreign loans. To the peasant the only principle involved was that of oppression. Every ruble loaned to the Russian government was another lash across the back of a struggling, starving peasant. No other issue loomed before their eyes. Withal, the kindliness of their attitude always amazed me. To the ignorance of the people of England, of France, and of Austria, do the peasants ascribe their willingness to open their purses to the stained hand of tyranny. “If the people of other countries only knew,” they said. There was something inspiringly beautiful in the ingenuousness of sturdy men so simple—even Russian peasants—who still not only believed in the supremacy of plain morality, but who had no understanding of the “business,” the financial considerations which in the workaday world we know do supplant the innate ethics which make for right, for justice, and for fair play among men.

At the beginning I was startled when violent sentiments were expressed by peasants, but now I was accustomed to them. So recently such boldness would not have been possible, and now—it was truly amazing. In each government I had visited on this trip the same spirit prevailed and similar utterances were freely heard. The territory I traversed was so great that all theory of this being the result of agitation was done away with. These were the spontaneous conclusions of the peasants, not only in widely different sections, but in all sections I passed through.

At this point I became satisfied that at last the peasants were awake to their true situation. The Duma did it. Its propaganding influence was felt throughout Russia, and here were the fruits. The boast of the peasants that they would not wait for another Duma, that they would rise presently, was, of course, dependent upon circumstances. But whether conditions were propitious in the autumn of 1906, or the spring of 1907, or 1908, or some other year, makes no material difference in the ultimate outcome. A year or two, or a decade or two, is of small moment in the history of an empire. In the summer of 1906 it became clear that the Czar had lost his peasants—and through his own faithlessness.

At Simbirsk I entered the heart of the famine district, and from this point on my attention was almost entirely claimed by the misery of the starving people, whose pitiable suffering I had to witness in utter helplessness—appalled by the magnitude of the crime. I call it “crime” because famine, in Russia, is preventable. The régime that persists in maintaining the present archaic, economic system is responsible for all the pain, the epidemics of disease, and the deaths which follow in the wake of the calamity we call famine.

CHAPTER XVI

THROUGH THE “HUNGRY COUNTRY”

SAMARA province marks the heart of the “hungry country,” which includes all of the Volga provinces and most of the provinces of Great Russia. Samara is the most important of these provinces, owing to its situation. Samara city, the capital of the province, is the chief point on the railroad between Moscow and Siberia, and being also on the Volga, it has developed into a large shipping port. In good years when harvests are plentiful, Samara throbs with life and activity. The volume of trade which it handles is enormous; its connections extend to all parts of the world. But when famine smites the land, Samara seems to cower into unwonted insignificance. The busy air of prosperity grows clouded and dull and the shadow that envelops the city is but a somber reflection of the awful reality—the blight of famine and starvation—that has descended upon the country. There are big landlords in Samara province, as in neighboring Volga provinces, who work land for profit. Ordinarily they ship immense quantities of grain to Europe. The raising of these crops gives employment to several hundred thousand peasants who come from other provinces for the sowing and the reaping, and who rely upon these earnings to help them through the winter. This summer the peasants came into the agricultural district, as usual, but they wandered weary miles east, and north, and south, only to be turned away from each place in disappointment and despair. Work there was none. The crop failure was almost absolute. The scanty returns yielded by the sun-baked earth could easily be gathered by local laborers whose own harvests were mere mockeries. And so these thousands of peasants who journeyed eastward in search of work were finally turned back toward their own provinces, empty-handed and hungry. They wandered back as tramps, penniless, broken, to face the winter under circumstances hardly better than that of those who stayed at home. In a country crossed by several large rivers as is this hungry country—the Volga, the Don, the Kama, and many little streams—an irrigation system might easily be introduced. The proposition is a perfectly simple one from an engineer’s point of view. The question is, who should undertake the work? The peasants can not, the great landlords who are rich will not, and the government is too thoroughly honeycombed with corruption to ever consider a plan of this kind. That such a scheme must eventually be resorted to there is no doubt. Under existing conditions there is a partial famine in several of these provinces every year while the whole area is annually exposed to such dreadful famine as marked the years 1892 and 1906.

When I passed out of Simbirsk I had covered one more stage of our journey down the Volga, before turning eastward across the country toward Ural and Siberia. This

brought me to Samara. Ever since leaving Moscow I had been chiefly interested in the peasants and their change of attitude since the Duma had come into existence, but in Samara I could have thought for nothing save the famine. I had read of famines and thought I knew about what to expect in a starving land, but the depressing reality of the suffering, the heroic, despairing battles to prolong life even a little while, had never before come so close to me. From the city of Samara I made journeys in three directions—across the Volga and west, south, and east. In all of the starving villages I passed through the same heartrending scenes were repeated—food supplies absolutely exhausted; thatch being torn from the roofs to feed to the horses and cattle; families doubling up, i.e., the occupants of one house moving over into a neighbor’s in order to use the first house for fuel; relief kitchens so short of relief that only one meal in two days could be dispensed; during the forty-seven hours between meals the people lay prostrate on their backs so as to conserve every particle of strength; parents deserting their children because they could not bear to watch them die.

Why is this suffering visited upon thirty millions of people who are powerless to help themselves? Their oppressors are blessed with material prosperity. The very flour dispensed by the government is flagrantly adulterated in order that corrupt officials may glean a few thousand more rubles to spend on their dancing-girls and French champagne. The Russian famine frauds have been sources of graft these many years, and members of the government as high up as the assistant minister of interior[18] implicated in the scandals.

The morning I arrived from Simbirsk the Samara newspapers published in prominent positions the following announcement:

“Whoever donates one ruble and a half (seventy-five cents) saves a man from starvation one month.”

A village priest in an outlying village wrote to a gentleman to whom I brought introductions: “Our peasants are already reduced to one meager meal a day. Parents, overwhelmed by their misery, are abandoning their children and are going off that they may not see them die.” Seven priests in joint conference in the district called Buzuluk appealed to the Red Cross Society: “There is no bread for the people, nor fodder for the cattle. The peasants are picking over the hay they have gathered for their horses—little as it is—and are extracting for their own use spears of the grass called goosefoot. In a few weeks even this will be gone.”

The famine relief workers were everywhere beside themselves with the enormity of the problem. Never in the history of Russia had the need been so great, and never had the relief been proportionately so little.

Armored trains, machine guns, Cossacks, and soldiers maintained on a war basis, had so strained the financial resources of the government that only the scrapings were left for the alleviation of the famine. The most powerful of nations would find it difficult to meet the exigencies of such a dire situation. Crippled Russia might well be overwhelmed by the seeming hopelessness of the task. Pressed to the verge of starvation, as these millions of peasants were, they were forced into making sacrifices of inestimable consequences. They were selling their ploughs, their wagons, their own labor for years ahead. They were submitting to obligations as arduous as serfdom. Six peasants, for example, in the village of Bugulma, borrowed $50 from a local priest, and in return gave him the use of six acres of land for sixteen years! Here and there a prosperous priest, or a peasant who had money, loaned it to the starving peasants at rates of interest amounting to 200 and 300 per cent. I heard of four cases of 300 per cent. All of the money which could be thus secured by the peasant went for immediate needs, no provision being made for seeds for the next year, and as the implements were nearly all being sold it will be years before the peasants of the famine districts get back to even the deplorably miserable condition of this year.

The purchasers of the farm implements and the horses and cattle were the remnants of the old Asiatic nomad tribes, who, through long centuries, roamed over the lands where Europe and Asia merge. Generations ago Samara was important as one of Russia’s eastern frontier posts. At this point the Asiatic invaders—the Tartars, the Bashkirs, the Kirghiz, the Kalmucks—were beaten back into the mysterious unknown lands which at intervals through centuries seemed veritably to vomit them forth. They came, not as armies are advanced in ranks and regiments, but in hordes, helter skelter, human beings in droves. Now all these swarthy peoples are nominally conquered and the spirit of conquest is dead in them. They are content to live pastoral lives and eke out a living as they may. They are nearly all “dark” people, as illiterates are called in Russia. But they somehow manage to fare better than the Russian peasants. They suffer no irksome regulations. Their wandering life makes it easy for them to escape the burdens that the government would lay upon them, and so it comes that they are able to profit by the dire distress of the peasants. For a song they purchase what the peasant has sweated blood to acquire. The Tartars, especially, are ready purchasers of horses, for horsemeat is their common diet. In the village of Tolkai, for example, I witnessed a sale of peasants’ horses to Tartars that was memorable. Colts were sold for forty cents. A horse still able to work could be bought for five dollars. Horses showing signs of starvation went for two dollars and a half and three dollars. Two rather dilapidated horses went for four dollars and a quarter the pair.

Having sold their horses, their cattle, their implements; having pulled the thatch from the roofs of their outhouses and homes; having burned even their own houses for fuel;—all of these things having been acquired through years of toil, how many years must lapse before these peasants will regain the status of free and independent men!

“Where there is famine, sickness takes root and flourishes. Typhus, scurvy, and fouler diseases ravage starving villages, making yet more hideous the plight of the suffering people. The drinking water goes bad and becomes a great disease-spreading medium. Even smallpox sometimes attains the proportions of an epidemic. In house after house I visited were the frail little bodies of children faded to mere skin-coated skeletons upon whom the hand of death already rested. And save for the men and women who volunteer for service in the relief kitchens, and who may be medical students, or nurses, there is oftentimes no medical aid whatever for the sick and the dying. One phase of hunger which I had not seen before was the swelling of the limbs before death, presenting an abnormally healthy appearance.

The relief dining-rooms were entirely inadequate to cope with the situation, so that in many places I found that meals were given only to the young and the very old, while the middle-aged men and women, that is to

say, the workers, were left to shift for themselves. The theory of this is that the strong ones can best endure suffering and hardship, but, of course, this method is open to question since such a policy tends to weaken the only ones in the village who might serve the rest of the village with their labor. It is very like discriminating in favor of the unfit.

At the relief stations the feeding of the inhabitants begins at an early hour in the morning, and continues through a greater part of the day since the dining-rooms are rarely large and sometimes fifteen hundred, two thousand, or an even greater number must be fed during the days. There were three dining-rooms in one village where I stayed over night and every day upward of fifteen hundred meals were dispensed—the total population of the village was under two thousand. Without these meals there would have been absolute, literal starvation. From four to six months each year these dining-rooms were open, this being in the region of annual famine. When the paltry crops begin to ripen, the village becomes self-sustaining—it’s a niggardly sustenance, but it keeps soul and body together. From their tiny parcels of land, and with their very primitive methods of agriculture, it is impossible for the peasants to store enough food to last till the next harvest. Those who can find employment in the summer-time on the estates of the large landowners. The price of labor is appalling. In this village from three to eight rubles a month—from one dollar and a half to four dollars a month! This means from twenty-four to twenty-six days of toil in the fields during long days, for in this northern land summer nights are brief, and summer days very long.

It was nine o’clock in the morning when I visited the first of the three dining-rooms. An ordinary village house had been renovated and fitted with tables and benches, and a small kitchen built in extension. The group who were eating when we entered suggested a salvation-army Christmas dinner. Ordinary muzhiks, with their wives and families, all poorly clad. The clothes they wore were largely made at home. The coats were of sheepskins, the wool worn inside, and the sun-cured skins out. The stockings and boots are of a kind of burlap, usually held to the feet and legs by cords. This footwear is common among both women and men.

The meals provided were naturally of the simplest foodstuffs—vegetable soups, porridge, and black bread, mostly. Each person received one meal a day, or in some districts one meal in two days. The dishes and spoons were of wood, made by the peasants themselves. The average cost of these meals was from forty-three to forty-five rubles (twenty-one dollars and a half to twenty-two dollars and a half) per one thousand meals—about two or three cents a meal. The young men and women who looked after this work were allowed seven dollars and a half a month! Yet so simple is the life they lead that this was ample to defray all of their necessary expenses. It does not matter what one’s private resources may be, in the midst of such extreme poverty one’s very appetite wanes, and the sin of luxury and extravagance presents itself in a new light.

In spite of the deplorable condition of the people living in the twenty-seven famine provinces, and in spite of the marvelously long way a ruble will go in alleviating starvation, of charity in Russia there is little, save among the hungry peasants themselves. The starving are always ready to share their last half pound of bread

with any one else in distress. Nowhere in the world are Maurice Hewlett’s lines truer than in the midst of Russia’s “hungry country”:

The less poor gave their mites, and the government distributes the taxes gathered in provinces which are still able to pay, and money borrowed from abroad, that some of the starving population may be supplied with scanty meals. The rich landlords in the midst of these districts seldom contribute anything to relieve the sufferings of their own peasants. Many of them live out of Russia altogether, some, perhaps, because they find the constant distress and unquiet disagreeable. The grand dukes and connections of the reigning house prefer Ostend, Paris, and the Riviera, to Russia; abroad they escape the unpleasant sight of half a nation going hungry. The Emperor is one of the richest men in Europe, yet it is very rarely that he donates anything to charity, so far as is known.

The administration insists that it is endeavoring to solve the so-called land problem. And how? Large tracts of land belonging to the royal family were placed at the disposal of the peasants—for a consideration. A certain amount of land was available in many governments for fifty and one hundred dollars a dessiatine. One prominent landowner proposed selling one million dessiatines to the peasants at the rate of one hundred dollars per dessiatine! One hundred dollars a dessiatine! Peasants that were reduced to eating grass cut for their horses, buying land at one hundred dollars a dessiatine is an obvious absurdity. And even if some of the peasants did venture to mortgage themselves to these great landowners for years to come by buying a small strip of land, which they could not succeed in paying for in a lifetime, the land problem would still be no nearer solution than before.

In several villages I learned of the comeliest daughters of the place being sold to traffickers in prostitutes who supply maids to dealers in eastern European capitals. This selling of girls has often been misunderstood. I do not think that parents ever realize what they are doing, any more than the girls understand what they are being bound to. A man, or perhaps two men, comes to a remote village with offers of “work” for certain likely girls. A sum of money which often seems very large to the starving peasants is paid to the families in token of good faith, and the girls start away with the man, or men—as they suppose to employment in some distant city. Thus unwittingly do parents sell their own children into bondage and probably in few instances do they ever learn the tragic sequel.

In the wake of famine is pain, disease, and death. The results reach down through years, and ever and always innocents are the victims. The most terrible part of it all, to me, is that famine in Russia is largely unnecessary and preventable. There is land enough in the country for all of the people—if it were only differently divided, and even a part of that which is now lying idle were placed at the disposal of the people who could and would cultivate it. There is water enough in Russia to defy any drought,—if it were only conserved and guided through channels and ditches where it would reach the now dry and parched dessiatines of starving peasants. But so long as the government persists in staving off this vital issue, famine will be recurrent. The attitude of the government toward this great question is, perhaps, more directly responsible for forcing the country toward civil war than any other one thing. The measures suggested thus far by the government do not relieve the situation materially. The only possible solution to this agrarian difficulty is to allow the peasants more land, and to teach them intensive methods of farming. Hundreds of thousands of acres lie unused, untilled; the peasants can not buy it for they have nothing to buy with. They never will have anything to buy with until they get a wider opportunity to earn more and to produce more—which can only come with more land. Thousands of them are already bound body and soul for years to come to big landowners and usurers (who are frequently the village priests). The land, in the fulness of time, must be given to them. And if the government will not consent to this the Duma will “expropriate” it as the first Duma set out to do—and was speedily dissolved for the effort! If there is no Duma (as there will not be if Nicholas II has his way), then sooner or later the peasants will have to take the land. And that may well mean the French Revolution, or worse, over again.

One Sunday I started for the western part of Samara province, taking with me a Russian-American for a traveling companion and interpreter. Just beyond the railroad station called Tolkai we left the train and started across country engaging a local yamschik [driver] and a rough, springless wagon. We had not traveled more than an hour before we were stopped by a village gendarme, who demanded our passports and letters of permission to travel there. We really had an imposing array of credentials, but none of them seemed to impress our captor. Finally I produced a letter written and signed by Prime Minister Stolypin. This extraordinary high chief (of gendarmes) of the village stared blankly at the letter and said:

“Stolypin? Stolypin? Who is he?”

Turning away from us for a moment he signaled up the street, and six other gendarmes appeared, to whom the first man addressed himself as follows:

“These strangers are Americans. They have an apparatus (my camera) for making drawings of our district. They are important prisoners, so we must take good care they do not get away!”

My friend and I argued long and loud to convince the men that, in the first place, we were not agents of the United States government, and secondly, that the United States was not contemplating an invasion of Russia at that point. But all to no avail. We were carried off to the gendarmerie and duly given a restful room all to ourselves. Two gendarmes were left to guard us. My companion was a timid soul who gloomily predicted a tragic and ignoble end for us. So, largely to cheer him, I tried to gain the good-will of our guards. I made a surprisingly good start in that direction when I gave them each a little money for vodka, for it immediately developed that they were so appreciative of this generosity that they were not unwilling we should make our escape. Our driver was still lingering about outside the gendarmerie, trying to make out what was to become of us, and who was to remunerate him for the miles he had already brought us. Suddenly, deciding to be bold, we opened the door of the room where we had been put and walked out. It was the easiest thing in the world. As we drove off our two guards raised their vodka bottles in token of their regards! We calmly continued our journey.

Seven versts farther on we came upon a peasant fair where many starving peasants were auctioning off their horses and cattle for whatever they would bring. The buyers were nearly all Tartars. I got out my camera to photograph a particularly dilapidated horse fairly tottering from hunger, being sold for its meat (what there was left) to a swarthy Moslem, when a party of mounted police suddenly surrounded us, and we were again put under arrest. They carried us to the headquarters of the local priestoff, who examined us at great length and finally sent us under armed escort to the very gendarmerie we had cleared out of an hour before.

This time our guards were not so easily won over. We were detained there till afternoon, and there seemed to be some doubt as to what disposition should be made of us. At first we were informed that we would be sent back to the city of Samara, where the governor would determine our fate. Later, however, we were carried to the railroad station and told that we might have the freedom of the waiting-room (but not to step outside!), pending the arrival of a train. No train came until three o’clock the next morning, and then it was a train from Samara. Into this we were bundled, and informed that we might go where we pleased after the train had passed the boundary of that province. The adjoining province was upon the slopes of the lower Ural Mountains, so I gave that as our destination. As a matter of fact this was our direction anyway, so the only result of the incidents of the day was that I was slightly hurried on my journey toward Siberia. We left the train at Ufa, the capital of the province of Ufa.

CHAPTER XVII

IN THE LAND OF LOST LEADERS