THROUGH THE “HUNGRY COUNTRY”
Heart of the famine region--Terrible pictures of
starvation--Peasants feeding the thatch from the roofs of their
houses to cattle--Auctioning cattle and horses for a song--How the
workers and breadwinners suffer first--Inability of the government
to cope with situation--Peasants pledge their labor for years to
come to secure food for their families for the present
time--Another arrest--Expulsion from the province.
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
[Illustration: Starving peasants in a Tartar village]
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
[Illustration: Everything eaten up
Two families live in one cottage, using the other house for fuel. The
thatch has been fed to the cattle]
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
[Illustration: Famine]
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”:
Only the poor love the poor;
Only those who have little
Give to those who have less.
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.