Later we wondered, my companion and I, why this search officer brought forty soldiers with him. Thirty-six hours later, when we were really arrested and carried off to prison, the work was done by one police officer and one rural guard.
Toward midnight we rolled ourselves in our blankets and lay down on the floor to sleep. This is the common thing in peasants’ houses. The children and the very old sleep over the square, brick stove, on a little platform designed for the purpose, but the rest of the family, and strangers, are content with the floor. All that night we heard the slow tread of feet outside the windows. Two soldiers were keeping guard. Not till the larks had been up an hour in the adjoining fields, and day was fairly come, did these sentinels retire.
Early next morning peasants from the village began to wait upon us. We were friends of their friends and that was enough. They unbared the hardness of their lives with perfect freedom. One old man told us that he had been in jail no less than eight times because he had repeatedly volunteered to carry to the Czar—their “Little Father”—the petition of the village setting forth their wrongs. It seemed still to be the firm belief of these peasants that their condition was as it was because the Czar had never come to know of their plight. It was a striking fact throughout Russia that often among the most revolutionary peasants there was even down to the spring of 1906 strong loyalty to the Czar. Their revolt was against the government hedged round the Czar, and barring the “Little Father” from his people. The first Duma dispelled this belief almost universally, but the first Duma was, at this time, a month away.
Three old muzhiks with long, white beards and clear, blue eyes told the story of how they and five others had gone as a deputation to the then governor of the province, hoping that he would open the way to the Czar for them. As a result of their faith they were stripped to the waist and flogged. Another was of a much larger deputation—more than sixty; thirty of these were sent to prison for a short time, and thirty-six received one hundred blows each. When they found that we were sympathetic listeners, they begged us to come and see the roofs of some of their houses which were being daily torn away to feed the horses. As the roofs were largely composed of straw-thatch, there was a certain amount of nourishment in them—a last resource in the fight against the universal hunger.
“Do you have big land-owners in America?” one man asked eagerly. “Are people prevented from earning enough to live on year after year?” All of the questions asked us were vital. They were frank enough about owning to revolt. “What’s to be done?” they said. “The mere renting of land is eighteen rubles (nine dollars) a dessiatine for a season. Where’s the money to come from to pay for this? The land is ours. We do the work, and we should have it.”
That very week a Cossack officer and a police officer had summoned all the people of the village together and warned them that if any of the land belonging to the landlords was touched, that “the village would be fired from the four corners, and they would not be responsible for what happened to the people in the village.” The land referred to belonged to two vast estates whose owners had not even seen them for years—several hundred thousand acres lying absolutely idle!
The welcome we received at Pesky, our next stopping-place, was, if possible, more demonstrative than at Tsaritzin. The group of “intellectuals” here numbered four, two women and two men. They had gathered there in early November and in six months we were their first visitors. One of the students was acting as village school-master. The other was devoting himself entirely to the famine relief-work.
The women were both remarkable personalities. They had first met each other in a St. Petersburg prison, where they had both been confined for political offences. One, a woman of twenty-five, large and strong, and fearless, still carried the mark of a Cossack nagaika[8] across her forearm, and in one of her shoulders was a Cossack bullet. Her husband at the time of my visit was in prison. She had received an ordinary finishing-school education and begun the study of medicine. During the war she volunteered as a nurse in the Red Cross organization and was sent to Manchuria, but she was returned home for “scattering seeds of sedition” among the army. Pesky we found to be in an even more serious condition than Tsaritzin. The total population was about twenty-one hundred and the number of meals dispensed each day was more than eighteen hundred. In other words, only three hundred souls, or less than seventy-five families, were self-supporting.
One who passes through this district well understands how the peasants have come to feel that it is better to chance the bullets and the Cossack nagaika than endure passively the long-drawn sufferings of the life on their inadequate dessiatines. They are almost without hope; and the hopeless are ever fearless. Industry intensified and lengthened to most cruel drudgery has little reward. Severest toil, early and late, and desperately constant while the season lasts, still is not productive of sufficient recompense to supply bread through the months when the fields lie buried under snow-drifts.
There was no mistaking the attitude of the peasants toward the young relief-workers, as we walked through the village streets with them. Children ran beside them, or called out to them. Old women addressed the women as “sister.” To the men they were “comrades.”