Why is this suffering visited upon thirty millions of people who are powerless to help themselves? Their oppressors are blessed with material prosperity. The very flour dispensed by the government is flagrantly adulterated in order that corrupt officials may glean a few thousand more rubles to spend on their dancing-girls and French champagne. The Russian famine frauds have been sources of graft these many years, and members of the government as high up as the assistant minister of interior[18] implicated in the scandals.
The morning I arrived from Simbirsk the Samara newspapers published in prominent positions the following announcement:
“Whoever donates one ruble and a half (seventy-five cents) saves a man from starvation one month.”
A village priest in an outlying village wrote to a gentleman to whom I brought introductions: “Our peasants are already reduced to one meager meal a day. Parents, overwhelmed by their misery, are abandoning their children and are going off that they may not see them die.” Seven priests in joint conference in the district called Buzuluk appealed to the Red Cross Society: “There is no bread for the people, nor fodder for the cattle. The peasants are picking over the hay they have gathered for their horses—little as it is—and are extracting for their own use spears of the grass called goosefoot. In a few weeks even this will be gone.”
The famine relief workers were everywhere beside themselves with the enormity of the problem. Never in the history of Russia had the need been so great, and never had the relief been proportionately so little.
Armored trains, machine guns, Cossacks, and soldiers maintained on a war basis, had so strained the financial resources of the government that only the scrapings were left for the alleviation of the famine. The most powerful of nations would find it difficult to meet the exigencies of such a dire situation. Crippled Russia might well be overwhelmed by the seeming hopelessness of the task. Pressed to the verge of starvation, as these millions of peasants were, they were forced into making sacrifices of inestimable consequences. They were selling their ploughs, their wagons, their own labor for years ahead. They were submitting to obligations as arduous as serfdom. Six peasants, for example, in the village of Bugulma, borrowed $50 from a local priest, and in return gave him the use of six acres of land for sixteen years! Here and there a prosperous priest, or a peasant who had money, loaned it to the starving peasants at rates of interest amounting to 200 and 300 per cent. I heard of four cases of 300 per cent. All of the money which could be thus secured by the peasant went for immediate needs, no provision being made for seeds for the next year, and as the implements were nearly all being sold it will be years before the peasants of the famine districts get back to even the deplorably miserable condition of this year.
The purchasers of the farm implements and the horses and cattle were the remnants of the old Asiatic nomad tribes, who, through long centuries, roamed over the lands where Europe and Asia merge. Generations ago Samara was important as one of Russia’s eastern frontier posts. At this point the Asiatic invaders—the Tartars, the Bashkirs, the Kirghiz, the Kalmucks—were beaten back into the mysterious unknown lands which at intervals through centuries seemed veritably to vomit them forth. They came, not as armies are advanced in ranks and regiments, but in hordes, helter skelter, human beings in droves. Now all these swarthy peoples are nominally conquered and the spirit of conquest is dead in them. They are content to live pastoral lives and eke out a living as they may. They are nearly all “dark” people, as illiterates are called in Russia. But they somehow manage to fare better than the Russian peasants. They suffer no irksome regulations. Their wandering life makes it easy for them to escape the burdens that the government would lay upon them, and so it comes that they are able to profit by the dire distress of the peasants. For a song they purchase what the peasant has sweated blood to acquire. The Tartars, especially, are ready purchasers of horses, for horsemeat is their common diet. In the village of Tolkai, for example, I witnessed a sale of peasants’ horses to Tartars that was memorable. Colts were sold for forty cents. A horse still able to work could be bought for five dollars. Horses showing signs of starvation went for two dollars and a half and three dollars. Two rather dilapidated horses went for four dollars and a quarter the pair.
Having sold their horses, their cattle, their implements; having pulled the thatch from the roofs of their outhouses and homes; having burned even their own houses for fuel;—all of these things having been acquired through years of toil, how many years must lapse before these peasants will regain the status of free and independent men!
“Where there is famine, sickness takes root and flourishes. Typhus, scurvy, and fouler diseases ravage starving villages, making yet more hideous the plight of the suffering people. The drinking water goes bad and becomes a great disease-spreading medium. Even smallpox sometimes attains the proportions of an epidemic. In house after house I visited were the frail little bodies of children faded to mere skin-coated skeletons upon whom the hand of death already rested. And save for the men and women who volunteer for service in the relief kitchens, and who may be medical students, or nurses, there is oftentimes no medical aid whatever for the sick and the dying. One phase of hunger which I had not seen before was the swelling of the limbs before death, presenting an abnormally healthy appearance.
The relief dining-rooms were entirely inadequate to cope with the situation, so that in many places I found that meals were given only to the young and the very old, while the middle-aged men and women, that is to