Family groups are represented in the councils of the community by their recognized heads, usually active old men. In these later troublous times, when so many of the men have disappeared in the maelstrom of the European war or are engaged in the present civil strife, women are quite naturally the acting heads of many families; and the result has led some observers to conclude that the women have better heads for business and better muscles for farming than have the men. It is certain that in some communities the women outshine in those respects the men who still remain. The same council of family heads which guides the local affairs of each village, or group of villages, also attends through a committee to the affairs of the local cooperative store society which exists for trading purposes and acts in conjunction with the central society of Archangel. Each little local store has a vigilant keeper now frequently some capable young widow, who has no children old enough to help her to till some of the strips of land.
The election and the duties of the headman have been dealt with heretofore. His word is law and the soldiers came to know that the proper way to get things was to go through the starosta. In every village is a teacher, more or less trained. Each child is compelled to attend three years. If desirous he may go to high schools of liberal arts and science and technical scope, seminaries and monastic schools.
Of course, some children escape school, but not many, and the number of absolute illiterates under middle age who have been raised in North Russia is comparatively small. The writer well recalls that peasants seldom failed to promptly sign their names to receipts. Around our bulletin boards men in Russian camp constantly stood reading. One of the requests from the White Guards was for Archangel newspapers. One of the pleasantest winter evenings spent in North Russia was at the time of a teachers’ association meeting in the Pinega Valley. And one of the cleanest and busiest school-rooms ever visited was one of those little village schools. To be sure the people were limited in their education and way behind the times in their schools but they were eager to get on.
Also, in every small center of population there is a Russian State Church. In America we have been accustomed to call these Greek Catholic Churches, but they are not. The ritual and creed are admittedly rather similar, but the church government, the architecture, the sacred pictures and symbols, and the cross, are all thoroughly Russian. Until the revolution, the Czar was the State head of the Church, and the Ecclesiastical head was appointed by him. In the North at present whatever aid was extended in times past from the government to the churches—and to the schools as well—is looked for from the Provisional Government at Archangel; and under the circumstances is very meagre if not lacking altogether for long periods. The villagers do not close the churches or schools for such a minor reason as that, however. They feed and clothe the teacher and heat the church and the school. The priest works his small farm like the rest of them—that is, if he is a “good” priest. If he is not a “good” priest he charges heavily for special services, christenings, weddings or funerals, and begs or demands more for himself than the villagers think they can afford (and they afford a great deal, for the villagers are very devout and by training very long suffering), and the next year finds himself politely kicked upstairs to another charge in a larger community which the villagers quite logically believe will better be able to support his demands. Such an affair is managed with the utmost finesse.
Within the family all share in the work—and the play. The grown men do the hunting, fishing, felling of timber, building, hauling, and part of the planting and harvesting. The women, boys and girls do a great deal toward caring for the live-stock, and much of the work in the field. They also do some of the hauling and much of the sawing and splitting of wood for the stoves of the house, besides all of the housework and the spinning, knitting, weaving and making of clothing. The boys’ specialty during the winter evenings often is the construction of fishnets of various sized meshes, and the making of baskets, which they do beautifully.
On Sundays and holidays, even in these times of hardship, the native dress of the northern people is seen in much of its former interesting beauty. The women and girls in full skirts, white, red or yellow waists with laced bodices of darker color, fancy head-cloths and startling shawls, tempt the stares of the foreigner as they pass him on their way to church or to a dance. The men usually content themselves with their cleanest breeches, a pair of high boots of beautiful leather, an embroidered blouse buttoning over the heart, a broad belt, and a woolly angora cap without a visor. Suspenders and corsets are quite absent.
On week-days and at work the dress of the North Russian peasant is, after five years of wartime, rather a nondescript collection of garments, often pitiful. In the winter the clothing problem is somewhat simplified because the four items of apparel which are customary and common to all for out-of-doors wear are made so durably that they last for years, and when worn out are replaced by others made right in the home. They are the padded over-coat of coarse cloth or light skins, the valinka of felt or the long boot of fur, the parki—a fur great coat without front opening and with head-covering attached, and the heavy knitted or fur mitten. In several of the views shown in this volume these different articles of dress may be seen, some of them on the heads, backs, hands and feet of the American soldiers.
What American soldier who spent days and days in those Russian log houses does not remember that in the average house there is little furniture. The walls, floors, benches and tables are as a rule kept very clean, being frequently scrubbed with sand and water. In the house, women and children are habitually bare-footed, and the men usually in stocking-feet. The valinka would scald his feet if he wore them inside, as many a soldier found to his dismay. Sometimes chairs are found, but seldom bed-steads except in the larger homes. Each member of the family has a pallet of coarse cloth stuffed with fluffy flax, which is placed at night on the floor, on benches, on part of the top of the huge stone or brick stove, or on a platform laid close up under the ceiling on beams extending from the stove to the opposite wall of the living-room. The place on the stove is reserved for the aged and the babies. It was the best bed in the house and was often proffered to the American with true hospitality to the stranger. The bed-clothes consist of blankets, quilts and sometimes robes of skins. Some of the patch-work quilts are examples of wonderful needle-work. In the day-time it is usual to see the pallets and rolls of bedding stored on the platform just mentioned, which is almost always just over the low, heavy door leading in from the outer hall to the main living-room.
In North Russia the one-room house is decidedly the exception, and because of the influence of the deep snows on the customs of the people probably half the houses have two stories. One large roof covers both the home and the barn. The second story of the barn part can be used for stock, but is usually the mow or store-room for hay, grains, cured meat and fish, nets and implements, and is approached by an inclined runway of logs up which the stocky little horses draw loaded wagons or sleds. When the snow is real deep the runway is sometimes unnecessary. The mow is entered through a door direct from the second story of the home part of the building, and the stable similarly from the ground floor.
The central object, and the most curious to an American, in the whole house is the huge Russian stove. In the larger houses there are several. These stoves are constructed of masonry and are built before the partitions of the house are put in and before the walls are completed. In the main stove there are three fire-boxes and a maze of surrounding air-spaces and smoke-passages, and surmounting all a great chimney which in two-story houses is itself made into a heating-stove with one fire-box for the upper rooms. When the house is to be heated a little door is opened near the base of the chimney and a damper-plate is removed, so that the draft will be direct and the smoke escape freely into the chimney after quite a circuitous passage through the body of the stove. A certain bunch of sergeants nearly asphyxiated themselves before they discovered the secret of the damper in the stove. They were nearly pickled in pine smoke. And a whole company of soldiers nearly lost their billet in Kholmogori when they started up the sisters’ stoves without pulling the plates off the chimney.