To secure a general interest of the people the governor made every public commission (boards of directors, trustees, etc.), take an active part in the relief work. He created commissions among the nobility to superintend relief work, combining the Red Cross, the churches and other individual organizations all into one committee, so that when the Crown Prince’s committee was formed on the twenty-eighth of December 341,550 rubles had been received and distributed besides 52,020 poods, 2,080,800 pounds, of bread which had been given to those who had no right to the governmental loan.
By contributions three hundred and thirty-one kitchens were established in villages, giving meals for one-half to two kopeks per meal. Nijni, with a living population of sixty thousand, contributed one hundred and ninety thousand rubles. Places were established in Nijni where twenty kitchen meal tickets may be purchased for one ruble. The citizens buy these and give to such as they desire to help.
From Nijni we take steamer down the Volga, and through the kindness of Mr. Zeveke, owner of the American Steamboat Line, so called because American names are given to all of his twelve large steamboats, we are allowed time to visit each town on the Volga, as we pass down the river. At each place the grain has been received and being used. At Samara we find Mr. Bezant, one of our consignees, just recovering from the typhus which was contracted in his relief work. And we get direct reports from Count Tolstoi, Junior, whose work is in this province farther to the east, and Prince Dolgoruhow, another consignee in the district of Burulich; these have ten carloads of the “Tynehead’s” corn, and are saving the lives of many. At this time the Province of Samara alone had lost five hundred thousand cattle, as many horses and 1,500,000 sheep from the famine.
At Volsk we saw many people around the church. The bells in a dozen different towers all ringing; from another church a large procession of a thousand people were coming, bearing on high poles crosses and banners and icons. They are joined by the people from the first church, with their crosses and banners which are not raised till the first procession is joined, and all march in their variegated red and yellow and bright colored dresses, with bare feet and uncovered heads in the broiling sun, miles away to the open fields to pray for rain, which has still been withheld from this section of Saratoff Province.
The town of Saratoff has a population of 125,000, contains many Germans, from having been one of the German colonies founded by Queen Catherine during her reign, to encourage agricultural industries. Here as in Volsk we found the people in the fields praying for rain, and in the evening it came. Here we met Mr. Golden, an Englishman, who has been the active agent in the Saratoff district, and Mr. Muhler, a German, who has been the active worker on the east side of the Volga in Samara Province. Both these gentlemen, together with a Catholic Bishop, say that the American help, both in material and money, came so timely that it saved thousands of lives that otherwise must have been lost. It came when they could get nothing from other sources, and their thanks to America are unbounded. The relief was “as if the Lord had ordered it.” Of the “Tynehead’s” cargo, Saratoff received fifty-three carloads and the Province of Samara one hundred and four cars.
There was a small quantity of the corn that got wet when put into the ship during a rain in New York, and had begun to heat when unloaded. This was sent to Saratoff with a suggestion that they use it for their cattle, but when we reached that place the peasants had washed the corn and dried it, and said it made very good bread.
As a typical incident and as an expression of the universal feeling throughout Russia:—when we reached the platform of the station at Saratoff to start westward, a Russian gentleman who could speak a little English, and another one and his wife who could not, came to the train, with an attendant bearing champagne and glasses, and made a speech of thanks, expressing the gratitude of the people of Russia to America for the heartfelt sympathy she had so beautifully expressed. The help she had brought to their people in a time of distress made every Russian feel to want to personally express his thanks. Wishing every success to its representatives, they drank to America and bon voyage.
To see some of the smaller consignments, on our way eastward from Saratoff we stopped at an inland station and went into the country some miles near Tambof, where two carloads of corn had been consigned. Here it was being ground in the wind-mills and made into the old-fashioned New England rye and Indian loaves and baked in great, brick ovens, just as we had found in other places.
Referring back to Riga. After the last car had been sealed and the way-bills sent, we were speaking of the harmony and unity that existed in all the different branches of this relief work, and it incidentally came out that the count and his family were carrying on an extensive system of relief among the peasants in the famine district, supplying some thirty villages with rye and corn bread, obtaining their corn from southern Russia, with soup, broth and tea for the sick and Nestle’s food for the babies—the latter an experiment of his own. It was suggested that in such an extensive work as this he should have had some of the American corn, but he replied they could get on very well without it; that his family had taken that work upon themselves to do at the beginning, and would continue to do it until next August and did not need other help. I expressed a desire to see this work, which I later found was a fair sample of what is being so quietly done all over Russia that its extent is unknown until one comes upon it. And it was at Michailoviski that we had the pleasure of seeing some of this work.
Everywhere we found people of all classes giving their time to the work of relief to supplement the governmental help; and this does not mean simply directing, superintending, or planning work for others to execute, but I found men giving up their own business, the attention of their estates, to see personally to the detail as well as the general work. I found cultivated, intelligent, refined women making their homes in the huts of the peasants, where they could be nearer their work. I found countesses working in the huts of the typhus hospitals, or taking the sick into their own homes, giving up social enjoyments and personal comforts, their own plans, in order to make their work of relief more effective. If the official side of Russia is subject to criticism, as sometimes claimed, surely the quiet, personal work and self-sacrifice of its people in this calamity is an example for any Christian land.