In several villages I learned of the comeliest daughters of the place being sold to traffickers in prostitutes who supply maids to dealers in eastern European capitals. This selling of girls has often been misunderstood. I do not think that parents ever realize what they are doing, any more than the girls understand what they are being bound to. A man, or perhaps two men, comes to a remote village with offers of “work” for certain likely girls. A sum of money which often seems very large to the starving peasants is paid to the families in token of good faith, and the girls start away with the man, or men—as they suppose to employment in some distant city. Thus unwittingly do parents sell their own children into bondage and probably in few instances do they ever learn the tragic sequel.
In the wake of famine is pain, disease, and death. The results reach down through years, and ever and always innocents are the victims. The most terrible part of it all, to me, is that famine in Russia is largely unnecessary and preventable. There is land enough in the country for all of the people—if it were only differently divided, and even a part of that which is now lying idle were placed at the disposal of the people who could and would cultivate it. There is water enough in Russia to defy any drought,—if it were only conserved and guided through channels and ditches where it would reach the now dry and parched dessiatines of starving peasants. But so long as the government persists in staving off this vital issue, famine will be recurrent. The attitude of the government toward this great question is, perhaps, more directly responsible for forcing the country toward civil war than any other one thing. The measures suggested thus far by the government do not relieve the situation materially. The only possible solution to this agrarian difficulty is to allow the peasants more land, and to teach them intensive methods of farming. Hundreds of thousands of acres lie unused, untilled; the peasants can not buy it for they have nothing to buy with. They never will have anything to buy with until they get a wider opportunity to earn more and to produce more—which can only come with more land. Thousands of them are already bound body and soul for years to come to big landowners and usurers (who are frequently the village priests). The land, in the fulness of time, must be given to them. And if the government will not consent to this the Duma will “expropriate” it as the first Duma set out to do—and was speedily dissolved for the effort! If there is no Duma (as there will not be if Nicholas II has his way), then sooner or later the peasants will have to take the land. And that may well mean the French Revolution, or worse, over again.
One Sunday I started for the western part of Samara province, taking with me a Russian-American for a traveling companion and interpreter. Just beyond the railroad station called Tolkai we left the train and started across country engaging a local yamschik [driver] and a rough, springless wagon. We had not traveled more than an hour before we were stopped by a village gendarme, who demanded our passports and letters of permission to travel there. We really had an imposing array of credentials, but none of them seemed to impress our captor. Finally I produced a letter written and signed by Prime Minister Stolypin. This extraordinary high chief (of gendarmes) of the village stared blankly at the letter and said:
“Stolypin? Stolypin? Who is he?”
Turning away from us for a moment he signaled up the street, and six other gendarmes appeared, to whom the first man addressed himself as follows:
“These strangers are Americans. They have an apparatus (my camera) for making drawings of our district. They are important prisoners, so we must take good care they do not get away!”
My friend and I argued long and loud to convince the men that, in the first place, we were not agents of the United States government, and secondly, that the United States was not contemplating an invasion of Russia at that point. But all to no avail. We were carried off to the gendarmerie and duly given a restful room all to ourselves. Two gendarmes were left to guard us. My companion was a timid soul who gloomily predicted a tragic and ignoble end for us. So, largely to cheer him, I tried to gain the good-will of our guards. I made a surprisingly good start in that direction when I gave them each a little money for vodka, for it immediately developed that they were so appreciative of this generosity that they were not unwilling we should make our escape. Our driver was still lingering about outside the gendarmerie, trying to make out what was to become of us, and who was to remunerate him for the miles he had already brought us. Suddenly, deciding to be bold, we opened the door of the room where we had been put and walked out. It was the easiest thing in the world. As we drove off our two guards raised their vodka bottles in token of their regards! We calmly continued our journey.
Seven versts farther on we came upon a peasant fair where many starving peasants were auctioning off their horses and cattle for whatever they would bring. The buyers were nearly all Tartars. I got out my camera to photograph a particularly dilapidated horse fairly tottering from hunger, being sold for its meat (what there was left) to a swarthy Moslem, when a party of mounted police suddenly surrounded us, and we were again put under arrest. They carried us to the headquarters of the local priestoff, who examined us at great length and finally sent us under armed escort to the very gendarmerie we had cleared out of an hour before.
This time our guards were not so easily won over. We were detained there till afternoon, and there seemed to be some doubt as to what disposition should be made of us. At first we were informed that we would be sent back to the city of Samara, where the governor would determine our fate. Later, however, we were carried to the railroad station and told that we might have the freedom of the waiting-room (but not to step outside!), pending the arrival of a train. No train came until three o’clock the next morning, and then it was a train from Samara. Into this we were bundled, and informed that we might go where we pleased after the train had passed the boundary of that province. The adjoining province was upon the slopes of the lower Ural Mountains, so I gave that as our destination. As a matter of fact this was our direction anyway, so the only result of the incidents of the day was that I was slightly hurried on my journey toward Siberia. We left the train at Ufa, the capital of the province of Ufa.