He told me the history of two villages in Kiefsky Government in Russia. They had heard of America, but thought it was a place in a fairy-tale—not a real place at all. They were even incredulous when the Jews began to depart for America in numbers. But they were destined to understand.
The villagers were people who asked themselves serious questions and searched their hearts. They ceased going to monasteries and making pilgrimages and kissing relics, and instead gathered together and read the Gospel.
Many were arrested for going to illegal meetings. Those who were sent to prison or to Siberia went gladly, as on the Lord's business, to be missionaries to those who sat in darkness.
But there was so much persecution that a great number of the villagers thought of following the example of the Jews and emigrating to America. It was in 1894 that they resolved to go; but at that time a large party of Stundists, who had gone out to Virginia the year before, came back with tidings of bad life and poor wages, and damped the enthusiasm. Ten families, however, were tempted by what the Stundists said, and they took tickets to go to the very district of Virginia that the Stundists had abandoned.
On their way out they fell in with a party of German colonists going back, after a holiday, to North Dakota. Such tales they told that five of the families changed their minds and determined to throw in their lot with the Germans.
The five families received land free, homesteads, they were given credit to purchase horses and cattle and carts and agricultural implements, and they liked the new country and wrote glowingly to the others in Virginia and in the two villages of Kiefsky Government. As a result, twenty-five new families came at once, and in a few years there were 200 families installed.
Each man brought 20 to 30 dollars but no more, and each became indebted to companies for 1000 to 1500 dollars, a debt which they hoped to pay, but which hung on their necks like the instalments their ancestors had to pay to the Land Banks of Russia for the land they had been granted.
However, they ploughed and sowed and hoped for harvests, built log cabins and even American houses. They had hard times, and were on the verge of starvation—famine and death staring at them from the barren fields. They were forced to make an appeal through the newspapers of Eastern America, and as a result truck-loads of provisions were sent to them, and "clothes to last five years."
Succeeding years made up for their sufferings. There was a plentiful flax harvest; and though in 1909 hail destroyed the wheat and in 1910 and 1911 there was drought, the Russians bore up. And 1912 was a most fruitful year, some farmers garnering as many as 25,000 bushels of wheat.