Though, generally speaking, Turkestan is shut for the purposes of immigration, nevertheless a great number of people go there every year, there being a great demand for labour of all kinds. Cotton growers give even as much as two roubles fifty copecks per day. Good wages are paid on the irrigation works. Artisans are needed in the towns and villages. Turkestan is rich, and can support any working man who goes there. It is good to go there and make some money before taking up land, and also to get some experience of the climate and conditions. As regards the taking up of land when allowed, grants in the measure of 165 roubles are given in the provinces of Sirdaria, Samarkand and Ferghan, and in the measure of 250 roubles to settlers in the frontier regions of Zaalaisk and Pamir, half of which is not returnable.
THE SHADY VILLAGE STREET—ONE LONG LINE OF WILLOWS AND POPLARS
It is impossible to give the whole of this “combined circular” in extenso, but I think I have included or summarised all that is vital. It indicates the scaffolding of empire building. The people at home feel cramped or restless. They send out their khodoki, the pioneer messengers. The messengers select a portion of new land and return to Russia. The families of the emigrants follow. But first they must sell off or abandon all manner of cumbersome property; and good-bye has to be said to friends, to the old village, to church and churchyard, and the dead. Most difficult of all for many Russians is the leaving the dead behind. There is the whole agony of separation, the being cut off from Russia and going forth as a new child into Siberia or Central Asia. Then the long, monotonous train journey, and the road journey at the end of it; the caravan on the Central Asian road, and it is in the caravan that the colonists begin to taste of new life, and many feel they would like to go on wandering so all their lives. But they reach the place the messenger has found for them, and then commences the great work of making a habitation of man where no habitation has ever been before. Prayers and thanksgiving, and then work. There is no possible living without work, and the rather easy-going ways of the old land have to be given up and a new life begun of arduous labour and unflagging energy. To their aid comes hope and the passion for making all things new. No Russian would work so much were it not interesting; it is real life, the wine of experience.
First of all, trees are planted. How pathetic to see the long rows of three-foot-high poplar shoots and willow twigs! A month on this sun-beaten road leaves no doubt in the emigrant’s mind as to what is the first necessity—shade, shade. Trees are planted all along the main Government dyke. The colonist chooses the place for his house; he digs a trench all round it and lets in water from the dyke, and he plants trees along the trench. Then he buys stout poplar trunks and willow trunks, and makes the framework of his cottage. He interlaces little willow twigs, and makes the sort of wilted green, slightly shady, slightly sunny house that children might put up in a wood in England. But that is only the beginning. To the willow house he slaps on mud puddings. This is the filthiest work. He makes a great quantity of mud, and treads it up and down with his bare feet till he gets the consistency he requires, and then, with his hand, fetches out sloppy lumps of it and builds his walls. In a few days the mud hardens, and he has a shady and substantial dwelling, and one that in an earthquake will swing but will not collapse. His roof he makes of prairie grass, great reeds ten feet to fifteen feet in length and thick and strong, or of willow twigs again and turf. In his second year he has a little hay harvest on his roof. He ploughs his little bit of desert. He exchanges some of his oxen for cows. He strives with all his power—as does a transplanted flower—to take root. He looks forlorn. You look at his poor estate and say: “It is a poor experiment. The sun is too strong for him; he will just wither off, and the desert will be as before.” But you come another day and you see a change, and exclaim: “He has taken root, after all; there is a shoot of young life there, tender and green.” Along the road I noticed villages of all ages; of this year, of last year, of four years gone, of twenty years, forty years.
There are now several thousand Russian villages in Central Asia—year by year scores of new names creep into the map in faint italics. It is astonishing to English eyes, because we are accustomed to think that maps of Asia do not change. We like to preserve the old Asiatic names of places, and our map-makers seem to have prejudice in favour of Teuton nomenclature similar to the prejudice for spelling the names of Russian places with German pronunciation equivalents. Asia becomes predominantly Russian, and not by virtue of troops stationed at outlandish posts, but by virtue of this process of settling.
The process of colonisation is, however, slower than the process of colonising the British Empire. The population is said to increase at a greater rate, but the organic development is slower. The facilities for getting to Siberia and Central Asia are greater, but the prospect held out is not so alluring, not so fascinating. There is more work to be done by the immigrant here than in Canada or Australia or Africa. There are no large fortunes to be made in a few years, no speculative chances, no great whirling wheel of life set going. On the other hand, Russian colonisation is sounder colonisation, more solid and lasting. It has a better quality and it promises more for the future, unless we British are going to wake up to the facts of our situation.
X
FELLOW-TRAVELLERS
IT is not necessary to say much about Verney, the capital of Seven Rivers Land. It is so subject to earthquakes that it is difficult to see in it a permanent capital. No houses of two storeys can with safety be built, so it is more suited to remain a military centre and fortress than to be a great city. In order to look imposing, shops and stores have fixed up sham upper storeys; that is, they have window-fronts up above, but no rooms behind the fronts. Singer and the cinema are here, though an enormous number of Singer shops have been compulsorily closed all over the Russian Empire during the war. Verney has its bazaar, its inns and doubtful houses, its baths, dance halls, clubs, restaurants. Although it is so far from a railway station and such an enormous distance from the wicked West, it has its frivolity and sin and small crime. It has no electric cars. It has no Bond Street or West End. One may say, however, that it has its Covent Garden. Verney is a great market for fruit and vegetables. Its native name means the city of apples, and for apples it is famous. All travellers from China are given Verney apples when they pass through. Carts heaped high with giant red radishes are driven through the town, and the strawberry hawkers make many cries. Many horses are adorned with fancy garments, and I noticed donkeys with trousers on. Women ride about astride, and are evidently used to horseback, tripping along leaning forward over the horse as it springs to a gallop, sedately coming up the high street at a walk, erect like little fat soldiers. Then, Kirghiz women astride of bulls are to be seen, and I saw one carrying twin babies and yet on bull-back, dexterously holding the cord from the ring in the animal’s nose, and guiding it whither it should go. Verney has its newspaper. It has some hope of culture, and in the High School two dozen students matriculate each year and go off to the Universities of Kief, Moscow, and so on. Verney folk are grumblers at home, but when they get to Russia they develop great local patriotism and sigh for a bit of Verney bread, even of the stale bread of Verney. At the Universities the students of Seven Rivers Land keep together, and know themselves as a body having certain views and opinions of their own. Then, after their course, they come back to their home land and bring tidings of Russia. I talked with some students, and found them not unlike our own colonial students in their outlook and their attitude to the Empire. They help, but, of course, a far away place like this needs a lot of helping in the matter of culture. They bring back books and musical instruments. When I went out at night, strolling through the moon-illuminated city, I listened to the tinkling of pianos, and it was interesting to reflect that each instrument, besides coming thousands of miles by train, had also come five hundred miles in a wagon along these Central Asian roads.
There is a suggestion of America in the life out here. When you ask the way you are directed by blocks, not by turnings, and you may be sure the town is a planned one, with the streets running at right angles to one another. Only Nature, with her earthquakes, has tumbled it, given you chasms to jump over, and made it dangerous to walk in the outskirts of the town at night. There is much advertisement of wares and of persons, and a keenness to prosper and get rich. “Getting rich flatters your self-esteem,” I read, and again, “Buy Indian tea and get rich.” It is quite clear to me that buying Indian tea really makes poorer, for it is altogether inferior to Russian tea; but, then, these people have not our experience, they do not know the history of tea-drinking in England; how once we also had good tea, but that, in the national passion for cheapness and “getting rich,” we have come to drink popularly that vile thick stuff we now call tea. Verney has its rich bourgeois—rich for Verney—men with ten or twenty thousand pounds capital. Among such is, or was (for perhaps he has been interned or expelled), a German sausage-maker, who started his career in the market-place with five pounds of sausages on a plate, and is now a respected merchant with shops and branch shops and a fame for sausages throughout Central Asia.