Russian Life To-day

by Bp. Herbert Bury

In this vast area of which we are thinking there must indeed be great varieties of experience and conditions of life, and it is not contrary to what one might expect to find much nearer home, that the people of one village may be clean in their habits and those of another quite the reverse. But from all I have seen, heard, and read the Russian labouring and peasant class have a great desire to be clean. Nor is this a new thing at all in the national life. It is nearly forty years ago since Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace told us, in the first edition of his work, of the important part taken by the weekly vapour-bath in the life of the Russian peasantry, and described “the public bath possessed by many villages.” How many villages of our own, even now, have a public bath? And how many of our own peasantry dream of having what is a perfectly ordinary and weekly habit of the Russians—the bath in his own house?

My Russian and Siberian friends tell me how they have always to arrange for their domestic servants to get a good bath, before they change for Sunday, every Saturday afternoon and evening. Mr. Rothay Reynolds says the same: “My friend took me to see his bath-house. Russians are exceedingly clean. In villages one may see a row of twenty cottages, and, thirty yards from them, a row of twenty bath-houses. The one the peasant showed me was a hut with a stove intended to heat the great stones placed above it. On bath nights the stove is lit, and when the stones are hot a bucket of water is thrown on them, so that the place is filled with steam. The bather lies on a bench in the suffocating atmosphere, soaps himself, and ends his ablutions with ice-cold water. In town and country it is held to be a religious duty to take a steam-bath once a week. Servants ask if they can go out for a couple of hours to visit one of the great baths in the cities. They go away with clean linen bound up in a handkerchief, and return shining with cleanliness. Admission to the cheapest part of a steam-bath is usually a penny farthing, but in the great towns there are luxurious establishments frequented by the rich.”

There is another custom connected with the bath which testifies to the hardy character of the Russian moujik. They often rush straight out of the almost suffocatingly hot bath which they have been taking inside the huge earthenware oven that they all possess and, naked and steaming, roll themselves contentedly and luxuriously in the snow. This, as a writer has well said, “aptly illustrates a common Russian proverb which says that what is health to the Russian is death to the German”—a proverb which has had striking illustration again and again this very winter. Probably some of my readers saw the account of the arrival at the Russian front, soon after war began, of the bath-train which was so completely furnished and arranged that two thousand men could have a clean bath during the day or twelve thousand in the course of the week. No doubt others have followed since then.

The bath to the Russian has a certain religious significance also, as in Moslem countries; “and no good orthodox peasant,” I have read, “would dare to enter a church after being soiled with certain kinds of pollution without cleansing himself physically and morally by means of the bath.” “Cleanliness is next to godliness” is not a bad motto for any people, and possibly Russians will like to know that we have an order of knighthood which dates from 1398, and is named “The Most Honourable Order of the Bath,” and mentioned regularly in the services at Westminster Abbey.

A great sense of initiative and personal responsibility, as well as corporate spirit at the same time, is clearly given early in life to the peasant mind in Russia, for nowhere, I fancy, in the world, except in countries where primitive ideas and customs still obtain, is there the same standard of village life and self-government. There are two kinds of communities. First, there is the village community with its Assembly or Mir, under the presidency of the Staroshta, who is elected by the village. He presides over the Assembly, which regulates the whole life of the village, distributes the land of the commune, decides how and when the working of the land has to be done; and it is specially interesting to know that in this most remarkable and exceptional village government of the Mir all women who permanently and temporarily are heads of houses are expected to attend its meetings and to vote—no one ever dreams of questioning their right to do so.

In addition to the village assembly and chief elder there is also the “Cantonal” Assembly, consisting of several village communities together, meeting also under the presidency of a chief elder. All this is, of course, a development of family life where exactly the same ideas of corporate duty in its members, and responsibilities in its head, are held.

It is evident that Russia has a great future if this view of self-government is gradually carried upwards. The right beginning in constitutional government, surely, is in the family, for there we find the social unit. A state is not a collection or aggregate of individuals, but of families, and all history shows us that the greatness or insignificance of a country has always been determined by the condition of its homes and the character of its family life. If from the family, village, and commune Russian constitutionalists work slowly and carefully upwards, giving freedom to make opinions and convictions felt in the votes, just as responsibility is understood and met in the home, until one comes to the head of it all in “The Little Father”; and if he really rules—or administers rather, for no true father rules only—just as any good father would do, Russia the autocratic and despotic, associated in the minds of so many with arbitrary law in the interests of a few, enforced by the knout and prison-chain, may yet give the world a high standard of what the government of a free and self-respecting people ought to be.

I should doubt if any peasantry in the world live so simply and frugally or, as they say in the North of England, “thrive so well on it,” as the Russians. The men are of huge stature, and their wives are strong, comely, and wholesome-looking also. Their boys and girls are sturdy, vigorous, and full of life; and yet how bare the table looks at the daily meal, how frugal the fare and small the quantity! It has been the greatest joy to me to have Russian boys and girls, in out-of-the-way places, to share my sandwiches or tongue or other tinned meats, when stopping at a rest-house, and see their eyes shine at the unexpected and unusual treat.

Black rye-bread and cabbage-soup form the staple food of a peasant family, while meat of any kind is rarely seen. The many and rigorous fasts of the Church make very little difference to the quality of the food, but only to its quantity. The thanks given by guests to their host and hostess, Spasibo za kleb za sol, “Thanks for bread and salt,” tell their own story of a bare and simple diet. Many of us have read in The Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem of the sacks of black and hard crusts the peasants take with them, which quite content them.

What a tremendous difference it must have made this winter in the Russian food transport from the base to the front, to know that, if a serious breakdown took place, or a hurried march was ordered with which it was difficult for them to keep up, and the worst came to the worst, the men would have their crusts. It has been said in years gone by, and may be true still in many places, that the Russian peasant’s ideas of Paradise is a life in which he would have enough black bread to eat.