but never to a changed environment or atmosphere. This type of life is
found, not only among the Trans-Baikal peasantry, but throughout all
Siberia. The log houses down the long straggly village streets look out
upon the same wooden-walled courtyards,--the women peering from their
little windows as the sleighs jingle past. The same ikons with burning
lamps look down as you enter; the same whitewashed oven and shelf and
cradle are there as you push open the felted door. The women of each
district wear the same traditional costume. The bearded host produces
the same vodka. One of the most impressive sights, when one drives out
before dawn into the frosty air, is to see at almost the same moment
from every chimney the black smoke roll upwards, then dwindle to a
thin gray streak. Each woman has risen and heaped green wood into the
cooking-oven. It is as if one will actuated simultaneously all the
people.
At places the master of the house has a trade, shoemaking or saddlery,
and the big living-room is littered with pieces of leather and waxed
cord as he stitches. Sometimes there are hunters in the family, and
ancient flintlock muskets rest on the antlered trophies. The men gather
together occasionally to drive deer. But in general, as the winter is
the men’s idle time, a little wood is cut, the cattle are seen to, and
for the rest, talk, tea, and tobacco, until it is time to eat and sleep
once more. The women on the other hand seem to be always occupied, but
they are not discontented.
[Illustration: PEASANT VILLAGE STOREKEEPER SIBERIAN TYPES]
The customs and institutions which bind together the household group
are unique. In all families the _Hazan_ is supreme. To him first of
all, strangers pay their respects. To him every member of the household
comes for advice as to whom he or she shall marry, and which calf
shall be sold. Howsoever hard of hearing he may be, there is related
to him all the events of the neighborhood with infinite minuteness. He
is the repository of all moneys earned by logging for a neighboring
mine-owner, or for bringing out to the railroad the sledge-loads of
rye. As head of the family he can summon a forty-year-old son from the
merchant’s counter in Krasnoyarsk, or his nephew from the fur-traffic
in Irkutsk, and bid him return to his peasant hut. If a grandson wishes
to go to Nerchinsk to seek his fortune, the “old one’s” consent must
be obtained before the youth receives his passport. It is all at the
patriarch’s sovereign pleasure.
We come one day upon a vexatious example of this ancestral authority. A
report reaches us, by chance, of a hibernating bear’s hole some fifty
versts away, which one of the peasants has located. The host, noting
our interest, asks:--
“Would the _gaspadine_ like to hunt him?”
There is no question on this score, so the peasant is quickly brought
to the hut. Numerous friends crowd in with him, for one person’s
business is everybody’s business in these primitive communities. For a
liberal equivalent in roubles the man agrees to act as guide, and the
start is to be made early next morning. All is arranged and he goes out
with his body-guard to make the necessary preparations. By and by there
is a stir. Our sledge-driver comes in with a long face. Then half a
dozen peasants add themselves to the family quota in the hut. Soon more
come, until the stifling room is as populous as a Mir Assembly. They
are all talking at once, and there is a great hubbub. At length one
voice louder than the rest seems to call a decision for them all. They
turn backward again, and with many gesticulations bustle through the
felted doors into the snowy streets, and through the village to a house
which they enter in a body as if with intent of sacking it. Instead
they bring out and over to our hut a slight bearded old man, bent with
the weight of many winters--the father of the peasant guide.
Humble but resolute, he faces the assembly.
“No, I cannot consent that he lead the _gaspadine_ to the Medvetch Dom.”
“But assure the ‘old one’ that his son will only point out the den and
then go away.”
The “old one” answers:--
“The bear does not come to steal my pigs. Why should I get him shot?
Besides, a bear chewed up three Buriats last year. It would be sad to
be devoured even for the _gaspadine’s_ fifty roubles.”
The reward is doubled, and forty kopecks’ worth of vodka produced. Many
advisers give aid, and one suggests that “the son may mount a tree one
hundred _sagenes_ from the mansion of the bear!”
But still the father refuses. “No, I will not allow him to take out his
horse and hunting-sledge.”
The son, whose half-dozen full-grown children are looking on, shakes
his head dolefully. A big eagle-nosed peasant, of hunting proclivities,
comes in.
“I will give my hunting-sleigh if he will go,” he calls.
But the shrill voice of the “old one” rings out again, “I do not
consent. I do not consent. My son shall not go to the mansion of the
bear.”
The guide shrugs his shoulders. We have hit the ledge of Russian
authority. No one will budge. The old man has his way.
As is the management of the household, so is that of the village. While
the _Hazan_ rules over the common property of the family (_izba_),
the village elder (_Selski Starosta_) is guardian over the grouped
households which make up the Mir. As the household goods belong to no
one individual, but are common property, so the land farmed by the
villagers is a joint possession whose title rests with the commune. The
family is held for the debts and behavior of all of its individuals;
and similarly, with certain limitations, the village community is
answerable for the taxes and discipline of each of its members.
On a humble scale it is the spirit of socialism incarnate. Within the
commune no capitalistic employers, no wage-taking worker-class, no
castes exist, and no individuals are born with special privileges. No
distinctions of rank or fortune lift some above their fellows. The
manner of living is the same for all. Each head of a family has a right
of vote, and elects by the freest, simplest means his own judges and
village rulers. The land, the source of livelihood, is divided among
the producers by their own unfettered suffrage.
The chief man of the community--he who drums out the voters to the
Mir, lists those who do not work sufficiently on the pope’s field,
and reports the toll of taxes to the Government--is simply an elderly
peasant clothed with a little brief authority. There is no household
in the average village which is looked up to as more genteel than the
rest. No such distinctions as prevail in America will reveal that such
a farmer’s family is musical and well-read, such another has traveled
to Niagara Falls, such a third has blue-ribbon sheep. In Russian
peasant circles all is equality, almost identity.
Here is presented the best example in the world to-day of an applied
system based upon the communistic as opposed to the individualistic
theory. It is therefore of more than local interest. Most apparent
of all results is the economic stagnation which has accompanied the
elimination of special rewards for special efforts. The man, more
daring or more far-sighted than his fellows, who would take for himself
the risk of a new enterprise, who would mortgage his house to buy a
reaper, or would seek a farther market, is fettered by his plodding
neighbors. His financial obligations, if he fail, fall on the others of
a common family, whose members have a veto on his freedom of action.
His own and his neighbor’s fields by the allotment are proportioned
in extent to the old hand-labor standard. A machine has few to serve
until the fields are readjusted to a new standard. While technically
a man may buy or rent lands outside the commune and may introduce a
new rotation of crops or agricultural tools, actually the inertia of
the peasants bound to him by the brotherhood of the Mir weighs the
adventurous one hopelessly to the earth. Who can persuade an assembly
of bearded conservatism-steeped “old ones” to buy for the Mir the
costly new machines? Perhaps, with the visible demonstration of profits
which private enterprise could make under an individual régime, the
doubting elders might consent. But who is there to show them when every
village checks back the swift to the lock-step of the clod?
Nor is it simply in material things that communism manifests its
lotus-fruit in these country hamlets. Ignorance, unashamed, broods
over them one and all. What a dead level is revealed by the fact that
one peasant in a populous village on the Chickoya, our guide upon a
shooting-trip, could not tell time by a watch, and had never seen such
an invention.
Some instances are related where the more ambitious men of a Mir have
clubbed together to bring in a teacher at their own expense. The
Semieski, or “Old Believers,” big, red-bearded, obstinate men, settled
in Urluck in the Zabaikal, who dissent from the sixteenth-century
revisions of Bishop Nikon, will not send children to Slavonic schools
and may have schools of their own. But these cases are rare. There
is among the peasantry almost no education and comparatively little
desire for it, yet how far this sentiment is from being a racial
or national failing the crowds that come to the city universities
bear ample witness. In one of the villages a teacher from Chita is
established in the side room of a peasant’s house, wherein one night
we sojourn. He has been appointed by the Commissioner of Schools
of the Cossack Government. He is of a good Nerchinsk family and is
brother to an elector of delegates to the second Duma. He is one of
the “Intellectuals”--the student class which forms almost a caste
by itself. A free-thinker, keenly interested in the rights of man,
a Social Democrat by politics, he goes shooting on Sunday with some
peasant cronies. He plays Russian airs on his _balilika_ and gets the
peasant’s daughter to dance for the guest. He produces specimens of
antimony and chalcopyrite, and discusses the geological probability of
finding silver or platinum ores in these districts. Photographs of the
amateur-kodak variety are along the walls, and on a table in the corner
are a mandolin and a pile of books. We pick up a volume,--“L’Évolution
de la Moralité,” by Charles Letourneau. The young owner, who consumes
a prodigious number of Moscow cigarettes, tells of the indifference to
education among the people.
“Here we have a school in a big village, with two other communities
near by. There are easily five hundred households,--with how many
children in each, you can see. Yet we have but thirty boys at school.
What can we do?”
He is discouraged, this single “Intellectual” of Gotoi. Profoundly
solicitous for the future, an idealist, boundless in hopes for the good
of his race, he sees the younger generation submerged at the threshold
of opportunity by the inertia of the old.
“‘What good will it do for him to read?’ ask the peasants, when I urge,
‘Send your boy to the school.’ What can I say? The boy comes from my
class after two years, and goes out with the men. He has no money to
buy books if he wants them. No newspapers come to the village, no
printed matter whatever, save that on the pictures which they buy in
the fairs. In a few years all I have taught is forgotten. The darkness
is over these villages. One must lift them despite themselves.”
Beyond the range of the village communes, no people show a more eager
zeal for knowledge and study. In the cities almost all of the younger
generation can read and write. The school-boys, with their big black
ear-covering caps, smart blue coats, brightened with rows of brass
buttons, and knapsacks of books, are one’s regular morning sight.
“Realistic” and “Materialistic” schools are established in many towns.
The apathy of the rural element is to be laid at the door of the system
which hinders those within the confines of the communes from reaping
the fruits of special sacrifice and effort. No one attempts to raise
himself in the Mir, where the dead weight of those bound to him is so
hopeless. If any boy, brighter than the rest, follow some lodestar,
it must be to a city. The aspirant must bury ambition, or leave the
drudging Mir with its toll of taxes and recruits. He will not study law
before the wood-fire as did Lincoln in his log cabin.
The cloud of deadening communism over their lives utters itself in
the words continuously on the peasants’ tongues. It is the northern
equivalent for that buttress of despotism--“_mañana_.” The possibility
of the Russian condition is “_nietchevo!_” If the red cock (_krasnai
petuk_) has crowed and has left the forty householders with charred
embers where stood their homes, “_nietchevo!_” They build it up of wood
and straw, with the oven chimney passing through as before. Does a
raging toothache torture, “It is the will of God,--_nietchevo_!” If the
weary day’s climb sees a gameless evening, “_nietchevo!_” If the son is
frozen in the troop-train, “_nietchevo!_” If the Little Father send to
Yakutsk the other one who has gone to the city, “_nietchevo!_” Is the
unrevised tax for a family of ten men pressing down upon three, “It has
got to be borne,--_nietchevo!_” It is this bowing to fate as a thing
begotten of the gods, when it is a force to be fought here on earth;
the long-taught submission to evil, when evil is to be conquered, to
limitation when opportunity is to be won,--it is this spirit which is
holding rural Russia still in her Dark Ages.
The origin of the present village-system goes back to the time of
serfage, when the overlord held his dependents herded together for
easy ruling. That it extended to unfettered Siberia, where the rewards
of individual effort were so obvious, cannot be laid entirely to old
custom or government compulsion. Nor is it to be explained by the early
necessity for protection against wild beasts or hostile natives. The
same dangers threatened the pioneers of our own country. Perhaps the
Russian spirit of gregariousness lies at the root of the fact that in
the Czar’s domains the peasant lives away from his fields to be near
his neighbors, while our people live away from their neighbors to be
near their fields. Whatever the cause, the outcome is that practically
the whole rural population, even in the most thinly settled districts,
is gathered into villages, and owns the lands in common.
The system makes enormously for homogeneity, welding, solidarity. The
people are a “mass.” Units are lost in unity. Nothing save Nature’s
imprint and law of individuality, that decree under which every created
thing is some way different from every other, keeps the Russian peasant
from quite losing his birthright. The commune, vodka, and resignation
are the incubi of Siberia. In the towns and cities gather the energetic
natures that have climbed out and above them. What these have done,
their allied people--the peasants--can do. Beyond the horizon of the
latter’s narrow lives lies still the borderland of possibilities. One
cannot doubt the vigor of the stock, nor the certainty of its rise.
This quality of rugged worth is the basis of all the great advance that
the pioneers and the city populations have made. It is only in the
Mirs, frozen fast in their lethargy of communism, that resurrection
seems such a far-off dream. The way is long for the peasants of
Siberia--long and toilsome. But their vast patience is allied to as
vast a courage, and both will lift them into the larger day.
The measure passed by the last Duma, decreeing the division of the Mir
lands in severalty, and private ownership of property, will be one of
the most momentous and far-reaching enactments ever legislated for a
people. It should end for rural Russia the stagnation, and open an era
of mighty endeavor and achievement.
There are many races here among the serenely tolerant Siberians,
undiscriminated against and uncoerced. While one of the Orthodox may
not abjure the state religion without severe punishment, those born to
an alien faith are unmolested by official or proselyting pope. “God has
given them their faith as he has given us ours,” is the Russian rule.
This medley of races beneath the Russian banners gives to one’s
earliest contact the conception of a heterogeneous disorganized jumble
of nations and peoples. But closer acquaintance impresses upon one
the dominating and surviving qualities innate in the Slav, whose
unalterable solidarity is beneath and behind the kaleidoscopic types
of aboriginal tribes and exiled sectarians. By race-absorption, like
that which has evolved Celts, Danes, Saxon, and Norsemen into English;
British, Dutch, Swedes, Germans and Italians into Americans, the Slav
is dissolving, transmuting to his own type and moulding to his own
institutions the varied peoples.
Though the heterogeneous blood adds to the total of Siberian country
life, it is the Slavic race that determines the permanent order of
this great land. Primarily too it is the peasantry who shape its
destiny. Their possibilities are the limit of Russia’s ascent. Their
condition is therefore of far deeper than sightseeing interest to the
student. Unlike the picturesque peasantry of Holland, here they are the
foundations of the state, forming not an insignificant minority but
ninety per cent of the population.
Somewhat of a new spirit flickers here and there in Siberian hamlets.
The peasant is superior to his Russian brother. The traditions of
serfdom were broken by his severance from the old environment, and
wider lands give him an abundance unknown save in a few favored parts
of Europe. The political exiles have through the centuries added an
upsurge of independence and personal self-consciousness, which is
markedly higher than the Oriental humility of Occidental Russia.
The influence of the criminal, as distinct from the political convict,
is felt primarily in the cities, such as Irkutsk and Vladivostok, to
which the time-expired men drift. The convict element is always met
with. It has been customary to billet a condemned, who was not wanted
at home, upon some out-of-the-way village, giving him a passport for
its confines alone. The victim might have been a Moscow professor or
a locomotive engineer, but in the Mir he must farm the land given
him. Naturally such seed as this planted in Siberian hamlets does not
produce the traditional peasant faith in God and the Czar so faithfully
preached by the popes.
Another influence making for upheaval is the returning recruit. We
are in a peasant house when a _soldat_ comes back to the family from
his service. If he has not brought any great burden of salary, he has
accumulated tales enough of the outer world to hold in breathless
excitement the circle of friends and relatives which gathers at once
when the tinkling sleigh-bells and the barking have announced to the
village his return.
Far down the street is heard the jingle of his sledge. It brings every
girl to her peep-hole window, and every boy from his sawing to the
courtyard door. At the gateway where the newcomer turns in, he is
heralded by the commotion of the household guardians, wolf-like in
appearance and nature. Everybody within the important house runs to the
door. The village knows now which family is making local history. The
arrival is accompanied already by two or three men who have recognized
him as he descends. He tramps in with military firmness of tread,
head erect. Before he greets the grandfather even, he makes the sign
of the cross to the holy ikons, and, bowing down, touches his lips
to the floor. Then comes the respectful kiss to the old man, next to
the mother, while the younger brother, soon to go to service himself,
stands awkwardly by, and the little children look half-dubiously at a
form scarcely known after his four years of absence.
Then there is a scurrying of the grown and half-grown daughters to
prepare _chai_ and to produce the _pelmenis_ and brown bread. The
villagers drift in one by one, cross themselves, and speak their
greetings, until the little house is packed, and as hot as the
steam-room of a _banno_. The vodka-bottle is out and everybody has
settled down for an indefinite stay. The soldier’s tales of war and
garrison duty and government and revolution hold the family and the
audience breathless through the long evening. As you drop asleep, the
hero is still reciting and gesticulating. The guests in departing will
be careful not to stumble over you, so _nietchevo_.
In one of the houses where we put up, a shop adjoins the big
living-room. It has dingy recesses from which hatchets and the commoner
farm utensils can be produced, shelves of homespun cloth, and gaudy
cottons for the men’s blouses, and beads for the women’s bonnets.
Here, as in the country-stores of our own land, during the long idle
winter days there is always a crowd and endless discussion of the
village events,--the health of each other’s cows, births, marriages,
deaths, drafts into the army, taxes. Even in this remoteness something
of the echo of great Russia’s struggle is heard over the shopkeeper’s
tea-cups. We hum, unthinking, a bar of _Die Beide Grenadier_, in which
a refrain of the _Marseillaise_ occurs.
A peasant looks quickly up. “It is not allowed, that song,” he says.
“Why not?”
“That is the song of the strikers.”
“But the _gaspadine_ is a foreigner. He may sing it.”
“Yes,” says the peasant, “he may sing it, but I may not. Would that I
might!”
One meets quaint characters in this inland journeying--veteran soldiers
of the Turkestan advance; “_sabbato_ sectarians,” who keep Saturday
holy rather than Sunday; austere “Old Believers,” traveling peddlers,
teamsters who have tramped beside their ponies over three provinces.
One comes upon peripatetic Mussulman doctors, in snug-fitting black
coats and small black skull-caps, who show their Arabic-worded
road-maps and much-thumbed medical works bound in worn leather. Beside
their plates at table the kindly hostess puts piles of leathery bread,
unleavened, and made without lard in deference to their caste rules.
[Illustration: PEASANT TYPES]
A shop in one village is kept by a Chinaman, who, lettered like most
of his race, seems a far shrewder and more intellectual person than
the uneducated Russian peasants. He invites the stranger to drink
tea that his special caravan brings, and presents Chinese candy with
the courtesy of a grandee. When, in reciprocity, the traveler buys
sugar for his _chai_, he receives it wrapped in paper covered with
hieroglyphics and exhaling the faint unmistakable Chinese odor.
Going always southward, one begins to meet more and more frequently
the villages of the Mongol-descended Buriats. “_Bratskie_” (brotherly
people), the Russians call them, for despite the forbidding aspect
that flat Mongolian features, high thin noses, yellow-brown skins, and
big squat bodies give them, no more peaceful, harmless, and hospitable
people exist. They are great and fearless hunters, unexcelled riders,
and though still only on the threshold of civilization, are rapidly
moving to better things.
All phases of the advance from the nomad to the agricultural stage may
be studied among them. The pastoral Buriats, decorated like the Chinese
with queues, ride around after their flocks. Their villages lie far
away from the lines of convoys, unmarked on the Ministry map, which one
is supposed to be following. Each family occupies a little windowless
wooden hut, some fifteen feet in diameter. In front of it is planted
a pole, carrying at the top a weather-faded pennant, the colors of
which in Buriat heraldry indicate the tribe and name of the occupant.
Behind the hut are stacks of hay and a wooden corral with sheep and
horses. Beside it stands the summer tent, of felt, looking like a great
inverted bowl. It is empty in winter, save for a shrine with grotesque
pictured gods, fronted by offerings.
In the homes of these least advanced Buriats we loiter no longer than
we must. The wooden house which shelters them is hermetically sealed,
and is crowded with people and animals. Fenced off in a corner of
the first that receives us is a corral of thirteen lambs, which at
uncertain moments begin to bleat suddenly in unison, producing, with
startling effect, a prodigious volume of sound. When one has been
roused from sleep half a dozen times a night by this chorus, he is
strongly inspired to move on. The men are out during the day looking to
their flocks. The women spend a good part of their time sewing furs or
making felt. They are very unclean, and it is a decided relief to get
out of their homes, to which the cold compels one to have recourse on
a long journey. In spring, with great and understandable relief, these
semi-nomads take to their felt tents and move where fancy and pasturage
dictate.