Heart of the famine region—Terrible pictures of starvation—Peasants feeding the thatch from the roofs of their houses to cattle—Auctioning cattle and horses for a song—How the workers and breadwinners suffer first—Inability of the government to cope with situation—Peasants pledge their labor for years to come to secure food for their families for the present time—Another arrest—Expulsion from the province.
AMARA province marks the heart of the “hungry country,” which includes all of the Volga provinces and most of the provinces of Great Russia. Samara is the most important of these provinces, owing to its situation. Samara city, the capital of the province, is the chief point on the railroad between Moscow and Siberia, and being also on the Volga, it has developed into a large shipping port. In good years when harvests are plentiful, Samara throbs with life and activity. The volume of trade which it handles is enormous; its connections extend to all parts of the world. But when famine smites the land, Samara seems to cower into unwonted insignificance. The busy air of prosperity grows clouded and dull and the shadow that envelops the city is but a somber reflection of the awful reality—the blight of famine and starvation—that has descended upon the country. There are big landlords in Samara province, as in neighboring Volga provinces, who work land for profit. Ordinarily they ship immense quantities of grain to Europe. The raising of these crops gives employment to several hundred thousand peasants who come from other provinces for the sowing and the reaping, and who rely upon these earnings to help them through the winter. This summer the peasants came into the agricultural district, as usual, but they wandered weary miles east, and north, and south, only to be turned away from each place in disappointment and despair. Work there was none. The crop failure was almost absolute. The scanty returns yielded by the sun-baked earth could easily be gathered by local laborers whose own harvests were mere mockeries. And so these thousands of peasants who journeyed eastward in search of work were finally turned back toward their own provinces, empty-handed and hungry. They wandered back as tramps, penniless, broken, to face the winter under circumstances hardly better than that of those who stayed at home. In a country crossed by several large rivers as is this hungry country—the Volga, the Don, the Kama, and many little streams—an irrigation system might easily be introduced. The proposition is a perfectly simple one from an engineer’s point of view. The question is, who should undertake the work? The peasants can not, the great landlords who are rich will not, and the government is too thoroughly honeycombed with corruption to ever consider a plan of this kind. That such a scheme must eventually be resorted to there is no doubt. Under existing conditions there is a partial famine in several of these provinces every year while the whole area is annually exposed to such dreadful famine as marked the years 1892 and 1906.
When I passed out of Simbirsk I had covered one more stage of our journey down the Volga, before turning eastward across the country toward Ural and Siberia. This
Starving peasants in a Tartar village
brought me to Samara. Ever since leaving Moscow I had been chiefly interested in the peasants and their change of attitude since the Duma had come into existence, but in Samara I could have thought for nothing save the famine. I had read of famines and thought I knew about what to expect in a starving land, but the depressing reality of the suffering, the heroic, despairing battles to prolong life even a little while, had never before come so close to me. From the city of Samara I made journeys in three directions—across the Volga and west, south, and east. In all of the starving villages I passed through the same heartrending scenes were repeated—food supplies absolutely exhausted; thatch being torn from the roofs to feed to the horses and cattle; families doubling up, i.e., the occupants of one house moving over into a neighbor’s in order to use the first house for fuel; relief kitchens so short of relief that only one meal in two days could be dispensed; during the forty-seven hours between meals the people lay prostrate on their backs so as to conserve every particle of strength; parents deserting their children because they could not bear to watch them die.