Chapter XVI: 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

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

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

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.