Two hours out from Saratoff houses became fewer. As far as the eye could reach to west and north was the boundless, lone steppe. Now and then we passed a miserable village with ugly houses of stone and mud and crumbling, thatched roofs. Twice during the ride we passed the ruins of a landlord’s house, reduced to ashes by infuriated peasantry. Telegraph poles lay felled along the roadside.
Saratoff government borders on the majestic Volga. No mightier or lovelier river winds through the dominions of the Czar. Fields which might be fertile, and dessiatines with wonderful possibilities for rich production, roll backward from its banks many miles. Yet here men faint from hunger; women sink beneath the burden of days, and little children waste to shadows, and die. The ugliest of diseases root among the people and flourish like weeds in a pasture—not because nature has been scant in her provision of resources, but because all development of agricultural lands is still unknown. “Dry farming” has never been heard of; and irrigation projects which could so easily be carried out have never been thought of. But more than all the rest, perhaps, is the iniquitous system of landholding that still continues. Where one man owns one hundred thousand dessiatines,[7] two thousand men possess one dessiatine each! The man with the hundred thousand is rich and lives in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, or Paris, and only occasionally visits his “estates” here in the interior. The two thousand are born, fret through their weary lives, and die on the little patch of once good, but now exhausted, land which originally their fathers held when serfdom was abolished, or their fathers’ fathers of many generations ago bought when colonization was encouraged by Catharine, or Elizabeth, or Peter. And as the demands of life to-day have multiplied since the time of Catharine, or even Alexander I, while the peasant holdings have remained the same, the impossible condition which so extensively prevails throughout central and eastern Russia is easy to understand.
When serfdom was abolished in 1861 a certain patch of land was given to each village, and the village council, called the mir, parceled out this land to the individual villagers, re-allotting the parcels every three, five, or seven years according to the vote of each village. Since 1861 the population of many villages has doubled, and some have trebled, but the aggregate landholdings have remained what they were at the beginning. A tract of land that was barely enough for the maintenance of, say, two thousand souls in 1861 is entirely inadequate in 1907 for four or five thousand. Hence, throughout this vast district of central and eastern Russia, life has death for neighbor. The pall of famine descends upon the region in years when the crops are yielding most plentifully. Years when a frost comes, or a drought, or a blight, the situation attains the proportions of a calamity.
Dusk was gathering when we rumbled heavily into Tsaritzin, a village of 1800 inhabitants, fifty-five versts from Saratoff. Our driver pulled up before a square cottage, no better than the average, and to all appearances like the rest in the village. Before we had lifted our cramped and much-shaken limbs from the springless wagon that had brought us all the distance, two young men, strangers to us both, but bursting with cordiality and pleasure at our arrival, rushed out to greet us. They were two medical students from the temporarily closed University of Moscow, come here to direct the distribution of famine relief. We were their first visitors in several months, and, as we soon were able to see, their existence is dreary enough in this remote place. They come to serve the peasants, to administer famine relief, to look after their physical ailments and to teach them, all they can of the rudiments of education. At every turn they are hampered and harassed by the local police.
The glamour that was wont to shine round the young men and women who inaugurated the “settlement” movement in England and America, young people of education and culture who took up their living in the midst of the darkest corners of great cities to share the results of their larger opportunities with tenement dwellers, pales before the life and works of intellectual young Russia. The government closed the universities, for they were centers of revolt. But students who have lived, however briefly, in the blaze of active idealism, and who have been touched by the fire of enthusiasm to hasten the coming of Russia’s better day, are not content to return simply to their homes to await the opening of their universities at the will and pleasure of a reactionary, timid government. The free life, the glad life for Russia and all her people, is their goal. The movement tending toward that goal is their cause.
We sat down with our delighted hosts to a simple evening meal, and were still lingering over a companionable samovar when a clock in an adjoining room struck ten. The striking had scarcely ceased when a series of heavy blows descended upon the shutters of one of the windows and a voice bawled out:
One of our hosts groped through the adjoining room to light a small oil-lamp near the door. We in our room heard the crude rear door crack on its rusty hinges as it was swung wide. The tramp of heavy feet crossed the uneven floor, accompanied by the clank of spurs and the rattle of a dangling saber. A young officer of police swaggered into the room where we sat. At the threshold he paused, partly turned and bawled an order to the men behind him. The grounding of arms echoed his words.
“Your passports,” demanded the officer without preliminary.
“How many soldiers have you with you?” asked my companion.