numbers constantly threatening to besiege Pinega, and of a political
propaganda which was hard to offset, the Americans held on
optimistically. If they had made a single false step politically or if
their White Guards had lost their morale they would have had a more
exciting and desperate time than they did have in the defense of
Pinega.
XIX
THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE
Archangel Area—Occupations Of People—Schools—Church—Dress—In Peasant
Homes—Great Masonry Stove—Best Bed In House On Stove—Washing Clothes In
River Below Zero—Steaming Bath House—Festivals—Honesty Of Peasants.
To the doughboy penetrating rapidly into the interior of North Russia,
whether by railroad or by barge or by more slow-going cart transport,
his first impression was that of an endless expanse of forest and swamp
with here and there an area of higher land. One of them said that the
state of Archangel was 700 miles long by 350 wide and as tall as the
50-foot pine trees that cover it. Winding up the broad deep rivers he
passed numerous villages with patches of clearings surrounding the
villages, and where fishing nets, or piles of wood, numerous hay stacks
and cows, and occasionally a richer area where high drying-racks held
the flax, told him that the people were occupied chiefly in fishing,
trapping, wood-cutting, flax raising, small dairying, and raising of
limited amounts of grain and vegetables. He was to learn later that
this north country raised all kinds of garden and field products during
the short but hot and perpetually daylight summer.
Between villages the forest was broken only by the hunter or the
woodchopper or the haymaker’s trails. The barge might pass along beside
towering bluffs or pass by long sandy flats. Never a lone peasant’s
house on the trail was seen. They lived in villages. Few were the
improved roads. The Seletskoe-Kodish-Plesetskaya-Petrograd highway on
which our troops fought so long was not much of a road. These roads ran
from village to village through the pine woods, crossing streams and
wide rivers by wooden bridges and crossing swamps, where it was too
much to circuit them, by corduroy. North Russia’s rich soil areas, her
rich ores, her timber, her dairying possibilities have been held back
by the lack of roads. The soldier saw a people struggling with nature
as he had heard of his grandfathers struggling in pioneer days in
America.
To many people, the mention of North Russia brings vision of wonderful
furs in great quantity. In normal times such visions would not be far
wrong. But under the conditions following the assumption of central
control by the Bolsheviks and the over-running of large sections of the
north country by their ravenous troops, few furs have been brought to
market in the ordinary places. In order to find the fur-catches of the
winters of 1917, 1918 and 1919 before the peaceful security of the
settled sections of Russia has been restored, it will be necessary to
travel by unusual routes into the country far to the northeast of
Archangel—into the Mezen and Pechura districts. There will be found
fur-clad and half-starved tribes cut off from their usual avenues of
trade and hoarding their catches of three seasons while they wonder how
long it will be until someone opens the way for the alleviation of
their misery. Information travels with amazing speed among these simple
people, and they will run knowingly no risk of having their only wealth
seized without recompense while en route to the distant markets. The
Bolshevik forces have been holding a section of the usual road to
Pinega and Archangel, and these fur-gathering tribes are wise and
stubborn even while slowly dying. They absolutely lack medicine and
surgical assistance, and certain food ingredients and small
conveniences to which they had become accustomed through their contact
with more settled peoples during the last half-century.
For those Americans in whose minds Russia is represented largely by a
red blank it would mean an education of a sort to see the passage of
the four seasons, the customs and life of the people, and the scenery
and buildings in any considerable section of Russia.
In the north, the division of the year into seasons is rather uncertain
from year to year. Roughly, the summertime may be considered to last
from May 25th to September 1st, the rainy season until the freeze-up in
late November, the steady winter from early December until early April,
and the thaw-season or spring to fill out the cycle until late May. The
summer may break into the rainy season in August, and the big freeze
may come very early or very late. The winter may be extreme, variable
or steady, the latter mood being most comfortable; and the thaw season
may be short and decisive or a lingering discouraging clasp on the
garments of winter. Summers have been known to be very hot and free
from rain, and they have been known to be very cloudy and chilly.
Indeed, twelve hours of cloud in that northern latitude will reduce the
temperature very uncomfortably. The woodsmen and peasants can foretell
quite accurately some weeks ahead when the main changes are due, which
is of great help to the stranger as well as to themselves.
A little inquiry by American officers and soldiers brought out the
information that the great area lying east, south and west of Archangel
city has been gradually settled during four hundred years by several
types of people, most of them Russians in the sense in which Americans
use the word, but most of them lacking a sense of national
responsibility. Throughout this long time, people have settled along
the rivers and lakes as natural avenues of transportation. They sought
a measure of independence and undisturbed and primitive comfort. Such
they found in this rather isolated country because it offered good
hunting and fishing, fertile land with plenty of wood, little
possibility of direct supervision or control by the government, refuge
from political or civil punishment, few or no taxes, escape from
feudalism or from hard industrial conditions, and—more recently—grants
by the government of free land with forestry privileges to settlers.
Notwithstanding all this, the Government of Archangel State, with its
hundreds of thousands of square miles, has never been self-supporting,
but has had to draw on natural resources in various ways for its
support. This has been done so that there is as yet not noticeable
depletion, and the people have remained so nearly satisfied—until
recently aroused by other inflammatory events—that it is safe to say
that no other larger section of the Russian Empire has been so free
from violence, oppression and revolution as has the North.
It has been so difficult to visit this northern region in detail that
knowledge of it has been scant and meagre. Although many reports have
been forwarded by United States agents to various departments of their
government ever since Russia began to disintegrate, such was the lack
of liaison between departments, and so great the disinclination to take
advantage of the information thus accumulated, that when the small body
of American troops was surprised by orders to proceed to North Russia
there was no compilation of information concerning their theatre of
operations available for them. An amusing error was actually made in
the War Department’s ordering a high American officer to proceed to
Archangel via Vladivostok, which as a cursory glance at the map of the
world would discover, is at the far eastern, _vostok_ means eastern,
edge of Siberia, thousands of miles from Archangel. And similar stories
were told by British officers who were ordered by their War Office to
report to Archangel by strange routes. England, who has lived almost
next door to North Russia throughout her history, and who established
in the 16th century the first trading post known in that country, seems
to have been in similar difficulties. The detailed information
regarding the roads, trails and villages of the north country which
filtered down as far as the English officers who controlled the various
field operations of the Expedition turned out to be nil or erroneous.
Thereby hang many tales which will be told over and over wherever
veterans of that campaign are to be found.
The lack of transportation within this great hinterland of Archangel,
as can be verified by any doughboy who marched and rassled his supplies
into the interior, is an immediate reason for the comparative
non-development of this region. It has not been so many years since the
first railroad was run from central Russia to Archangel. At first a
narrow-gauge line, it was widened to the full five-foot standard
Russian gauge after the beginning of the great war. It is a
single-track road with half-mile sidings at intervals of about seven
miles. At these sidings are great piles of wood for the locomotives,
and at some of them are water-tanks. While this railroad is used during
the entire year, it suffers the disadvantage of having its northern
terminal port closed by ice during the winter. After the opening of the
great war a parallel line was built from Petrograd north to Murmansk, a
much longer line through more unsettled region but having the advantage
of a northern port terminal open the year around. These two lines are
so far apart as to have no present relation to each other except
through the problem of getting supplies into central Russia from the
north. They are unconnected throughout their entire length.
Similarly, there is a paucity of wagon-roads in the Archangel district,
and those that are passable in the summer are many miles apart, with
infrequent cross-roads. Roads which are good for “narrow-gauge” Russian
sleds in the winter when frozen and packed with several feet of snow,
are often impassable even on foot in the summer. And dirt or corduroy
roads which are good in dry summer or frozen winter are impassable or
hub-deep in mud in the spring and in the fall rainy season. For
verification ask any “H” company man who pulled his army field shoes
out of the sticky soil of the Onega Valley mile after mile in the fall
of 1918 while pressing the Bolsheviki southward. Good roads are
possible in North Russia, but no one will ever build them until
industrial development demands them or the area becomes thickly
populated; that is, disregarding the possibility of future
road-building for military operations. Military roads have, as we know,
been built many times in advance of any economic demand, and have later
become valuable aids in developing the adjacent country.
Another reason for the non-development of the north country in the past
is the lack of available labor-supply. People are widely scattered. The
majority of the industrious ones are on their own farms, and of the
remainder the number available for the industries of any locality is
small. Added to this condition is a very noticeable disinclination on
the part of everybody toward over-exertion at the behest of others;
coupled with a responsiveness to holidays that is incomprehensible to
Americans who believe in making time into money. While the excessive
proportion of holidays in the Russian calendar is deprecated by the
more far-sighted and educated among the Russians, there is no
hesitation on that score noticeable among the bulk of the people.
Holidays are holy days and not to be neglected. Consequently the supply
of labor for hire is not satisfactory from the employer’s standpoint,
because it is not only small but unsteady. The Russian workman is
faithful enough when treated understandingly. But if allowance is not
made beforehand for his limitations and his customs, those who deal
with him will be sorely disappointed.
It is said that there are upwards of seventy regular holidays, most of
them of church origin, aside from Sundays; and in addition, holidays by
proclamation are not infrequent. Some holidays last three days and some
holiday seasons—notably the week before Lent—are celebrated in a
different village of a group each day. The villagers in all perform
only the necessary work each day and flock in the afternoon and
evenings to the particular village which is acting as host and
entertainment center for that day. It is all very pleasant, but it is
no life for the solid business man or the industrious laborer.
Fortunately the agricultural and forestry areas of the north, of which
this passage is written, yield a comfortable, primitive living to these
hardy people without constant work. The needs of modern industry as we
understand it, have not entered to cause confusion in their social
structure. The sole result has been to delay the development of
resources and industry by deterring the application of capital and
entrepreneurship on any large scale.
Before the war the English had active interest in flax and timber and
some general trading, and the Germans flooded the North with
merchandise, but these activities were more in the nature of utilizing
the opportunities created by the needs of the scattered population than
of developing rapidly a great country.
Soldiers in Archangel saw American flour being unloaded from British
ships in Archangel and sliding down the planks from the unloading quay
into the Russian boats. And at the other side they saw Russian bales of
flax being hoisted up into the ship for transport to England. England
was energetically supplying flour and food and other supplies for an
army of 25,000 anti-Bolsheviki and aid to a civil population of several
hundred thousand inhabitants and refugees in the North Russian area.
This taking of the little stores of flax and lumber and furs that were
left in the country by the English seemed to the suspicious
anti-British of Russia and America to be corroboration of the
allegations of commercial purpose of the expedition, though to the
pinched population of England to let those supplies of flour and fat
and sugar leave England for Russia meant hardship. In all fairness we
can only say that Russia was getting more than England in the exchange.
[Illustration: U. S. OFFICIAL PHOTO
_Market Scene, Yemetskoe—Note Primitive Balances Weighing Beef._]
[Illustration: LANMAN
_Old Russian Prison, Annex to British Hospital._]
[Illustration: WAGNER
_Wash Day—Rinsing Clothes in River._]
[Illustration: LANMAN
_Archangel Cab-Men._]
[Illustration: U. S. OFFICIAL PHOTO
_Minstrels of “I” Company Repeat Program in Y. M. C. A._]
[Illustration: U. S OFFICIAL PHOTO
_Archangel Girls Filling Xmas Stockings._]
[Illustration: U. S. OFFICIAL PHOTO
_Y. M. C. A. Rest Room, Archangel._]
Outside of the cities in the life and customs of the people exists a
broad simplicity which is unlike the social atmosphere of most of the
districts of rural America. Persons, however, who are acquainted with
the rural districts of Norway and Sweden feel quite at home in the
atmosphere of the North Russian village life.
The villages are composed of the houses of the small farmers who till
the surrounding land, together with church, school, store, and grain
and flax barns. Except for a few new villages along the railways, all
are to be found along some watercourse navigable at least for small
barges. For the waterways are the first, and for a long time the only
avenues of communication and trade. In the winter they make the very
best roadways for sleds. Wherever there was a great deal of open farm
land along a river several of these village farm centers grew up in
close proximity. The villages in such a group often combine for
convenience, in local government, trading, and support of churches and
schools. The majority of the villagers belong to a few large family
groups which have grown in that community for generations and give it
an enviable permanence and stability.
Family groups are represented in the councils of the community by their
recognized heads, usually active old men. In these later troublous
times, when so many of the men have disappeared in the maelstrom of the
European war or are engaged in the present civil strife, women are
quite naturally the acting heads of many families; and the result has
led some observers to conclude that the women have better heads for
business and better muscles for farming than have the men. It is
certain that in some communities the women outshine in those respects
the men who still remain. The same council of family heads which guides
the local affairs of each village, or group of villages, also attends
through a committee to the affairs of the local cooperative store
society which exists for trading purposes and acts in conjunction with
the central society of Archangel. Each little local store has a
vigilant keeper now frequently some capable young widow, who has no
children old enough to help her to till some of the strips of land.
The election and the duties of the headman have been dealt with
heretofore. His word is law and the soldiers came to know that the
proper way to get things was to go through the _starosta_. In every
village is a teacher, more or less trained. Each child is compelled to
attend three years. If desirous he may go to high schools of liberal
arts and science and technical scope, seminaries and monastic schools.
Of course, some children escape school, but not many, and the number of
absolute illiterates under middle age who have been raised in North
Russia is comparatively small. The writer well recalls that peasants
seldom failed to promptly sign their names to receipts. Around our
bulletin boards men in Russian camp constantly stood reading. One of
the requests from the White Guards was for Archangel newspapers. One of
the pleasantest winter evenings spent in North Russia was at the time
of a teachers’ association meeting in the Pinega Valley. And one of the
cleanest and busiest school-rooms ever visited was one of those little
village schools. To be sure the people were limited in their education
and way behind the times in their schools but they were eager to get
on.
Also, in every small center of population there is a Russian State
Church. In America we have been accustomed to call these Greek Catholic
Churches, but they are not. The ritual and creed are admittedly rather
similar, but the church government, the architecture, the sacred
pictures and symbols, and the cross, are all thoroughly Russian. Until
the revolution, the Czar was the State head of the Church, and the
Ecclesiastical head was appointed by him. In the North at present
whatever aid was extended in times past from the government to the
churches—and to the schools as well—is looked for from the Provisional
Government at Archangel; and under the circumstances is very meagre if
not lacking altogether for long periods. The villagers do not close the
churches or schools for such a minor reason as that, however. They feed
and clothe the teacher and heat the church and the school. The priest
works his small farm like the rest of them—that is, if he is a “good”
priest. If he is not a “good” priest he charges heavily for special
services, christenings, weddings or funerals, and begs or demands more
for himself than the villagers think they can afford (and they afford a
great deal, for the villagers are very devout and by training very long
suffering), and the next year finds himself politely kicked upstairs to
another charge in a larger community which the villagers quite
logically believe will better be able to support his demands. Such an
affair is managed with the utmost finesse.
Within the family all share in the work—and the play. The grown men do
the hunting, fishing, felling of timber, building, hauling, and part of
the planting and harvesting. The women, boys and girls do a great deal
toward caring for the live-stock, and much of the work in the field.
They also do some of the hauling and much of the sawing and splitting
of wood for the stoves of the house, besides all of the housework and
the spinning, knitting, weaving and making of clothing. The boys’
specialty during the winter evenings often is the construction of
fishnets of various sized meshes, and the making of baskets, which they
do beautifully.
On Sundays and holidays, even in these times of hardship, the native
dress of the northern people is seen in much of its former interesting
beauty. The women and girls in full skirts, white, red or yellow waists
with laced bodices of darker color, fancy head-cloths and startling
shawls, tempt the stares of the foreigner as they pass him on their way
to church or to a dance. The men usually content themselves with their
cleanest breeches, a pair of high boots of beautiful leather, an
embroidered blouse buttoning over the heart, a broad belt, and a woolly
angora cap without a visor. Suspenders and corsets are quite absent.
On week-days and at work the dress of the North Russian peasant is,
after five years of wartime, rather a nondescript collection of
garments, often pitiful. In the winter the clothing problem is somewhat
simplified because the four items of apparel which are customary and
common to all for out-of-doors wear are made so durably that they last
for years, and when worn out are replaced by others made right in the
home. They are the padded over-coat of coarse cloth or light skins, the
_valinka_ of felt or the long boot of fur, the _parki_—a fur great coat
without front opening and with head-covering attached, and the heavy
knitted or fur mitten. In several of the views shown in this volume
these different articles of dress may be seen, some of them on the
heads, backs, hands and feet of the American soldiers.
What American soldier who spent days and days in those Russian log
houses does not remember that in the average house there is little
furniture. The walls, floors, benches and tables are as a rule kept
very clean, being frequently scrubbed with sand and water. In the
house, women and children are habitually bare-footed, and the men
usually in stocking-feet. The _valinka_ would scald his feet if he wore
them inside, as many a soldier found to his dismay. Sometimes chairs
are found, but seldom bed-steads except in the larger homes. Each
member of the family has a pallet of coarse cloth stuffed with fluffy
flax, which is placed at night on the floor, on benches, on part of the
top of the huge stone or brick stove, or on a platform laid close up
under the ceiling on beams extending from the stove to the opposite
wall of the living-room. The place on the stove is reserved for the
aged and the babies. It was the best bed in the house and was often
proffered to the American with true hospitality to the stranger. The
bed-clothes consist of blankets, quilts and sometimes robes of skins.
Some of the patch-work quilts are examples of wonderful needle-work. In
the day-time it is usual to see the pallets and rolls of bedding stored
on the platform just mentioned, which is almost always just over the
low, heavy door leading in from the outer hall to the main living-room.
In North Russia the one-room house is decidedly the exception, and
because of the influence of the deep snows on the customs of the people
probably half the houses have two stories. One large roof covers both
the home and the barn. The second story of the barn part can be used
for stock, but is usually the mow or store-room for hay, grains, cured
meat and fish, nets and implements, and is approached by an inclined
runway of logs up which the stocky little horses draw loaded wagons or
sleds. When the snow is real deep the runway is sometimes unnecessary.
The mow is entered through a door direct from the second story of the
home part of the building, and the stable similarly from the ground
floor.