Everything eaten up
Two families live in one cottage, using the other house for fuel. The thatch has been fed to the cattle
say, the workers, were left to shift for themselves. The theory of this is that the strong ones can best endure suffering and hardship, but, of course, this method is open to question since such a policy tends to weaken the only ones in the village who might serve the rest of the village with their labor. It is very like discriminating in favor of the unfit.
At the relief stations the feeding of the inhabitants begins at an early hour in the morning, and continues through a greater part of the day since the dining-rooms are rarely large and sometimes fifteen hundred, two thousand, or an even greater number must be fed during the days. There were three dining-rooms in one village where I stayed over night and every day upward of fifteen hundred meals were dispensed—the total population of the village was under two thousand. Without these meals there would have been absolute, literal starvation. From four to six months each year these dining-rooms were open, this being in the region of annual famine. When the paltry crops begin to ripen, the village becomes self-sustaining—it’s a niggardly sustenance, but it keeps soul and body together. From their tiny parcels of land, and with their very primitive methods of agriculture, it is impossible for the peasants to store enough food to last till the next harvest. Those who can find employment in the summer-time on the estates of the large landowners. The price of labor is appalling. In this village from three to eight rubles a month—from one dollar and a half to four dollars a month! This means from twenty-four to twenty-six days of toil in the fields during long days, for in this northern land summer nights are brief, and summer days very long.
It was nine o’clock in the morning when I visited the first of the three dining-rooms. An ordinary village house had been renovated and fitted with tables and benches, and a small kitchen built in extension. The group who were eating when we entered suggested a salvation-army Christmas dinner. Ordinary muzhiks, with their wives and families, all poorly clad. The clothes they wore were largely made at home. The coats were of sheepskins, the wool worn inside, and the sun-cured skins out. The stockings and boots are of a kind of burlap, usually held to the feet and legs by cords. This footwear is common among both women and men.
The meals provided were naturally of the simplest foodstuffs—vegetable soups, porridge, and black bread, mostly. Each person received one meal a day, or in some districts one meal in two days. The dishes and spoons were of wood, made by the peasants themselves. The average cost of these meals was from forty-three to forty-five rubles (twenty-one dollars and a half to twenty-two dollars and a half) per one thousand meals—about two or three cents a meal. The young men and women who looked after this work were allowed seven dollars and a half a month! Yet so simple is the life they lead that this was ample to defray all of their necessary expenses. It does not matter what one’s private resources may be, in the midst of such extreme poverty one’s very appetite wanes, and the sin of luxury and extravagance presents itself in a new light.