“Well, that’s a specimen of the neat way they used to do it”—so the retired inspector used to wind up his story.
§9
In Vyatka the Russian tillers of the soil are fairly independent, and get a bad name in consequence from the officials, as unruly and discontented. But the Finnish natives, poor, timid, stupid people, are a regular gold-mine to the rural police. The inspectors pay the governors twice the usual sum when they are appointed to districts where the Finns live.
The tricks which the authorities play on these poor wretches are beyond belief.
If the land-surveyor is travelling on business and passes a native village, he never fails to stop there. He takes the theodolite off his cart, drives in a post and pulls out his chain. In an hour the whole village is in a ferment. “The land-measurer! the land-measurer!” they cry, just as they used to cry, “The French! the French!” in the year ’12. The elders come to pay their respects: the surveyor goes on measuring and making notes. They ask him not to cheat them out of their land, and he demands twenty or thirty roubles. They are glad to give it and collect the money; and he drives on to the next village of natives.
Again, if the police find a dead body, they drag it about for a fortnight—the frost makes this possible—through the Finnish villages. In each village they declare that they have just found the corpse and mean to start an inquest; and the people pay blackmail.
Some years before I went to Vyatka, a rural inspector, a famous blackmailer, brought a dead body in a cart into a large village of Russian settlers, and demanded, I think, 200 roubles. The village elder consulted the community; but they would not go beyond one hundred. The inspector would not lower his price. The peasants got angry: they shut him up with his two clerks in the police-office and threatened, in their turn, to burn them alive. The inspector did not take them seriously. The peasants piled straw around the house; then, by way of ultimatum, they held up a hundred-rouble note on a pole in front of the window. The hero inside asked for a hundred more. Thereupon the peasants fired the straw at all four corners, and all the three Mucius Scaevolas of the rural police were burnt to death. At a later time this matter came before the Supreme Court.
These native settlements are in general much less thriving than the Russian villages.
“You don’t seem well off, friend,” I said to the native owner of a hut where I was waiting for fresh horses; it was a wretched, smoky, lop-sided cabin, with windows looking over the yard at the back.
“What can we do, bátyushka? We are poor, and keep our money for a rainy day.”