I’ve knocked around the world somewhat, and have had many a long and perilous ride through unknown country, but never one that interested me more than this. I’ve said before that Russia is still back in the Middle Ages, but now, with every verst we covered, it seemed to me we were getting farther back still,—to the Dark Ages themselves.
We passed through several villages on the first day, all looking exactly alike. A wide thoroughfare that could not by any stretch of courtesy be called a street or road, since it showed no attempt at paving or making and was ankle-deep in filthy mud, was flanked by irregular rows of low wooden huts, reeking with foulness, and more like the noisome lairs of wild beasts than human habitations. Their inhabitants looked more bestial than human,—huge, shaggy men who peered sullenly at us with swinish eyes, bleared and bloodshot with drunkenness; women with shapeless figures and blunt faces, stolid masks expressive only of dumb hopeless endurance of misery,—the abject misery that is the lot of the Russian peasant woman from birth to death. I was soon to learn that this centuries’ old habit of patient endurance was nearly at an end, and that when once the mask is thrown aside the fury of the women is more terrible, because more deliberate and merciless, than the brutality of the men.
At a little distance, perhaps, would be a small chapel with the priest’s house adjacent, and the somewhat more commodious houses of the tax-gatherer and starosta—the head man of the village, when he happened to be a farmer. Sometimes he was a kalak keeper, scarce one degree superior to his fellows. One could tell the tax-gatherer’s house a mile away by its prosperous appearance, and the kind of courtyard round it, closed in with a solid breast-high log fence; for in these days the hated official may at any moment find his house besieged by a mob of vodka-maddened moujiks and implacable women. If he and his guard of one or two armed stragniki (rural police) are unable to hold out till help comes,—well, there is red murder, another house in flames, a vodka orgy in the frenzied village, and retribution next day or the day after, when the Cossacks arrive, and there is more red murder. Then every man, woman, and child left in the place is slaughtered; and the agglomeration of miserable huts that form the village is burned to the ground.
That, at least, is the explanation Mishka gave me when we rode through a heap of still smouldering and indescribably evil-smelling ruins, where there was no sign of life, beyond a few disreputable-looking pigs and fowls grubbing about in what should have been the cultivated ground. The peasant’s holdings are inconceivably neglected, for the moujik is the laziest creature on God’s earth. In the days of his serfdom he worked under the whip, but as a freeman he has reduced his labor to a minimum, especially since the revolutionary propagandists have told him that he is the true lord of the soil, who should pay no taxes, and should live at ease,—and in sloth.
The sight and stench of that holocaust sickened me, but Mishka rode forward stolidly, unmoved either physically or mentally.
“They bring it on themselves,” he said philosophically. “If they would work more and drink less they could live and pay their taxes well enough and there would be no trouble.”
“But why on earth didn’t they make themselves scarce after they’d settled scores with the tax collector, instead of waiting to be massacred?” I mused.
“God knows,” said Mishka. “The moujik is a beast that goes mad at the sight and smell of blood, and one that takes no thought for the morrow. Also, where would they run to? They would soon be hunted down. Now they have had their taste of blood, and paid for it in full, that is all. There were no Jews there,” he jerked his head backwards, “otherwise they might have had their taste without payment.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He shrugged his broad shoulders.