A year in Russia

by Maurice Baring

Then we started for the hay meadows, which were about ten miles distant. On the road we met other peasants in carts bound for the same destination. They all gravely took off their hats to each other. After an hour and a half’s drive we arrived at the Moscow River, on the bank of which there is a tea-shop. Tea-shops exist all over Russia. The feature of them is that you cannot buy spirits there. We stopped and had tea. Everybody was brought a small teapot for tea and a huge teapot of boiling water, and very small cups, and everybody drank about four or five cups out of the saucer. They eat the sugar separately, and do not put it into the cup.

Then we crossed the river on a floating bridge, and driving past a large white Byzantine monastery arrived at the green hay meadows on the farther river bank towards sunset. Then the haymaking began. The first step which was taken was for vodka bottles to be produced and for everybody to drink vodka out of a cup. Then there was a great deal of shouting and an immense amount of abuse. “It doesn’t mean anything,” Feodor said. “We curse each other and make it up afterwards.” Then they drew lots for the particular strip they should mow; each man carrying his scythe high over his shoulder. (“Don’t come too near,” said Feodor; “when men have taken drink they are careless with scythes.”)

When the lots were drawn they began mowing. It was a beautiful sight to see the mowing in the sunset by the river; the meadows were of an intense soft green; the sky all fleecy and golden to the west, and black with a great thundercloud over the woods to the east, lit up with intermittent summer lightnings. The mowers were all in different coloured shirts—scarlet, blue, white, and green. They mowed till the twilight fell and the thundercloud got near to us. Then Feodor came and made our cart into a tent by tying up the shafts, putting a piece of matting across them, and covering it with hay, and under this he made beds of hay. We had supper. Feodor said his prayers, and prepared to go to sleep, but changed his mind, got up, and joined some friends in a neighbouring cart.

Three children and a deaf and dumb peasant remained with me. The peasants who were in the neighbouring tent were drunk; they began by quarrelling, then they sang for about four hours without stopping; then they talked. Feodor came back about half an hour before it was light, and slept for that brief space. I did not sleep at all. I wasn’t tired, and the singing was delightful to hear: so excessively characteristic of Russia and so utterly unlike the music of any other country, except that of Mongolia. What strikes me most about it is in the first place the accuracy with which the parts are taken, and in the second place the curious rhythm, and the close, ending generally on the dominant. The children chattered for some time about mushroom gathering, and the deaf and dumb man told me a lot by signs, and then they went to sleep.

As soon as it was light the mowers all got up and began mowing. I do not know which was the more beautiful effect, that of the dusk or of the dawn. The dawn was gray with pearly clouds and suffused with the faintest pink tinge, and in the east the sun rose like a great red ball with no clouds near it. At ten o’clock we drove to an inn and had tea; then we drove back, and the hay, although it was quite wet, for it had rained in the night, was carried there and then. “The women dry it at home,” Feodor explained; “it’s too far for us to come here twice.” The carts were laden with hay, and I drove one of them home, lying on the top of the hay, in my sleep. I had always envied the drivers of carts whom one meets lying on a high load of hay, fast asleep, and now I know from experience that there is no such delicious slumber, with the kind sun warming one through and through after a cold night, and the slow jolting of the wagon rocking one, and the smell of the hay acting like a soporific. Every now and then one wakes up to see the world through a golden haze, and then one falls back and drowns with pleasure in a deep slumber of an inexpressibly delicious quality.

When we re-crossed the river we again stopped for tea. As we were standing outside an old woman passed us, and just as she passed one of the peasants said to me, “Sit down, Barine.” Barine, I suppose everybody knows, means a monsieur, in contradistinction to the lower class. “Very like a Barine,” said the woman, with a sarcastic snort, upon which the peasant told her in the plainest and most uncomplimentary speech I have ever heard exactly what he thought of her personal appearance, her antecedents, and what she was fit for. She passed on with dignity and in silence. Then, after a time, I climbed up on the wagon again, and sank back into my green paradise of dreams, and remember nothing more till we arrived home at five o’clock in the evening.

St. Petersburg, August 6th.

At a moment like this, when one meets with various conflicting statements made by people in authority, Government officials or Liberal leaders, as to what the Russian people, the real people, are thinking and feeling, it seemed to me that it would be worth while to put aside theoretical speculations for a moment, and to try to obtain some small fragments of first-hand evidence with regard to what the people are saying and thinking. With this object in view I have spent the last four nights in the train between Moscow and St. Petersburg. My field of observation was necessarily small, but it cannot be called unrepresentative or anti-national.

The first thing which struck me was a small incident which occurred at a railway station at Moscow, and has a certain significance. I was engaging a cab, and near me an officer was doing the same thing. The cabmen were expressing reluctance to accept the officer’s terms, and my cabman turned round to me and said: “That man comes every day; he is drunk, and he drives and drives, sometimes to the other end of the town, and never pays a single kopeck.” “Why do you drive him if he never pays you?” I asked. “There is nothing to be done—he is an officer,” answered the cabman. This is a small example of how the lawlessness of the existing system of government in Russia affects the poorer classes.

I travelled from Moscow to St. Petersburg by a slow train in a third-class carriage. In the carriage was a mixed and representative assembly of people—a priest, a merchant from Kursk, a photographer from Tchelabinsk, a young volunteer: that is to say a young man doing his year’s military service previous to becoming an officer, two minor public servants, an ex-soldier who had been through the Turkish campaign, a soldier who had lately returned from Manchuria, three peasants, two Tartars, a small tradesman, a carpenter, and some others. Besides these a whole band of gipsies (with their children) encamped themselves on the platform outside the carriage, and penetrated every now and then into the carriage until they were driven out by threats and curses.