Nikolskoye, where I spent two pleasant days at the hospitable establishment of Messrs. Kuntz and Albers, is the only place between Wladivostok and Ussuri of any present importance. It is a village of 8,000 inhabitants on a rich rolling prairie, watered by the Siphun. It has six streets of grotesque width, a verst and a half long each. There is no poverty. It is a place of rapid growth and prosperity, the centre of a great trade in grain, and has a large flour mill owned by Mr. Lindholm, a Government contractor. It has a spacious market-place and bazaar, and two churches. It reminds me of parts of Salt Lake City, and the houses are of wood, plastered and whitewashed, with corrugated iron roofs mainly. A few are thatched. All stand in plots of garden ground. Utilitarianism is supreme. I drove for 20 miles in the region round the settlement, and everywhere saw prosperous farms and farming villages on the prairie, Russian and Korean, and found the settlers kindly and hospitable, and surrounded by material comfort. Nikolskoye is a great military station. There were infantry and artillery to the number of 9,000, and there, as elsewhere, large new barracks were being pushed to completion. An area of 50 acres was covered with brick barracks, magazines, stables, drill and parade grounds, and officers’ quarters, and the military club is a really fine building. Newness, progress, and confidence in the future are as characteristic of Nikolskoye as of any rising town in the Far West of America.
The farther journey, occupying the greater part of two days and a night, except when near the swamps of the Hanka Lake, is through a superb farming region. Large villages with windmills are met with along the line for the first 30 versts, as far as the buffet station of Spasskoje. The stoneless soil, a rich loam 6 feet and more in depth, produces heavy crops of oats, wheat, barley, maize, rye, potatoes, and tobacco. Beyond Spasskoje and east of the Hanka Lake up to the Amur a magnificent region waits to be peopled.
Well may Eastern Siberia receive the name of Russia’s “Pacific Empire,” including as it does the Amur and Maritime provinces, with their area of 880,000 square miles,[32] rich in gold, copper, iron, lead, and coal, and with a soil which for a vast extent is of unbounded fertility. When China ceded to Russia in 1860 the region which we call Russian Manchuria, she probably did so in ignorance of its vast agricultural capacities and mineral wealth.
The noble Amur, with its forest-covered shores, is navigable for 1,000 miles, and already 50 merchant steamers ply upon it, and its great tributary the Ussuri can be navigated to within 120 miles of Wladivostok. The great basin of the Ussuri, it is estimated, could support five million people, and from Khabaroffka to the Tu-men, it is considered by experts that the land could sustain from 20 to 40 to the square mile, while at present the population of the Amur and Ussuri provinces is only ⁴⁄₅ths of a man to the square mile!
Grass, timber, water, coal, minerals, a soil as rich as the prairies of Illinois, and a climate not only favorable to agriculture but to human health, all await the settler, and the broad, unoccupied, and fertile lands which Russian Manchuria offers are clamoring for inhabitants. To set against these advantages there are the frozen waterways and the ice-bound harbor. It is utterly impossible that an increasing population will content itself without an outlet for its produce. A port on the Pacific open all the year is fast becoming as much a commercial as a political necessity, and doubtless the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railroad four years hence will settle the question (if it has not been settled before) and doom the policy which has shut Russia up in regions of “thick ribbed ice” to utter extinction.
In the Maritime Province, Russia is steadily and solidly laying the foundations of a new empire which she purposes to make as nearly as possible a homogeneous one. “No foreigner need apply”! The emigrants, who are going out at the rate of from 700 to 1,000 families a year, are of a good class. Emigration is fostered in two ways. By the first, the Government grants assisted passages to heads of families who are possessed of 600 roubles (about £60 at present), which are deposited with a Government official at Odessa, and are repaid to the emigrant on landing at Wladivostok. The industry and thrift represented by this sum indicate a large proportion of the best class of settlers. Under the second arrangement, families possessed of little capital or none receive free passages. On arriving, emigrants of both classes are lodged in excellent emigrant barracks, and can buy the necessary agricultural implements at cost price from a Government depôt, advice as to the purchase being thrown in. Each family receives a free allotment of from 200 to 300 acres of arable land, and a loan of 600 roubles, to be repaid without interest in thirty-two years, the young male colonists being exempted from military service for the same period. Already much of the land along the line as far as the Ussuri has been allotted, and houses are rapidly springing up, and there is nothing to prevent this fine country from being peopled up to the Amur, the rivers Sungacha and Ussuri, which form the boundary of Russia from the Hanka Lake to Khabaroffka, giving a natural protection from Chinese brigandage. In addition to direct emigration, large numbers of time-expired men, chiefly Cossacks, are encouraged to settle on lands and do so.
It would be shortsighted to minimize the importance of the present drift of population to Eastern Siberia, which is likely to assume immense proportions on the opening of the railway, or the commercial value of that colossal undertaking, which is greatly enhanced by the treaty under which Russia has taken powers to run the Trans-Siberian line through Chinese Manchuria. The creation of a new route which will bring the Far East within 6,000 miles and 16 days of London, and cheapen the cost of the transit of passengers very considerably, cannot be overlooked either. The railroad is being built for futurity, and is an enterprize worthy of the great nation which undertakes it.[33]
FOOTNOTES:
[32] The area of France is 204,000, and that of the British Isles 120,000 square miles.
[33] I am very glad to be able to fortify my opinion of the solid and careful construction of this line by that of Colonel Waters, military attaché to the British Embassy at St. Petersburg, who has recently crossed Siberia, and desires to give emphatic testimony to “the magnificent character of the great railway crossing Siberia,” as well as by that of another recent traveller, Mr. J. Y. Simpson, who, in Blackwood’s Magazine for January, 1897, in an article “The Great Siberian Iron Road,” after a long description of the laborious carefulness with which the line is being built, writes thus: “Lastly, one is impressed with the extremely finished nature of the work.”