They add that the railway between Moscow and Sebastopol is ill-constructed and almost breaking down; that, although it is by some hundred miles shorter than that from Odessa to Moscow, the express and mail trains are so arranged that the most rapid communication between north and south is effected between Odessa and St. Petersburg, which route is travelled over in less than three days.
Whichever of the contending parties may have the best of the argument, there is no doubt that, were even the Government to be favourable to the wishes of the people of Sebastopol, there would be no just reason for jealousy between the two cities, for Odessa has already proved that she can manage to grow richer than ever upon one-half of the trade of Southern Russia, while Sebastopol might safely rely on carrying on the other half—that other half which is now already in the hands of Taganrog, Mariupol, Nicolaief, etc. For all these ports of Azof and the mouths of the rivers, besides being closed by ice for at least four months in the year, are so shallow that no amount of dredging can keep back the silting sands, and vessels must anchor at distances of ten to twenty and even thirty miles outside the harbours.
[THE DON COSSACKS]
THOMAS MICHELL
Coming from the north, the first town of any importance in Southern Russia is Kursk, three hundred and thirty-five miles from Moscow in an almost direct line, the railway passing through the cities of Tula (the Russian Birmingham), and Orel, the centre of a rich agricultural district connected by rail, on the west, with Riga on the Baltic, and on the south-east with Tsaritzin on the Volga. Authentic records attest the existence of Kursk in 1032, and in 1095 it was held by Isiaslaf, son of Vladimir Monomachus, from whom it passed alternately to the Princes of Chernigof and of Pereyaslasl. In the Thirteenth Century it was razed to the ground by the Tartars. In 1586 the southern frontiers of Moscovy were fortified, and Kursk became one of the principal places on that line of defence against the Crimean Tartars and the Poles. Its disasters and sufferings as a military outpost ceased only towards the end of the Seventeenth Century, after Little Russia (the more southerly districts watered by the Dnieper), submitted to the Tsar Alexis.
We are now almost in the heart of the Chernozem, or black soil country, so called from the rich black loam of which its surface is composed to a depth of two and three yards and more. These vast plains were known to Herodotus, Strabo, and other ancient geographers only in their present Steppe, or flat and woodless condition. It is a great relief to the eye to see at last a handsomely-built city like Kursk, perched, relatively to the surrounding flatness, on an elevation and almost smothered in the verdure of numerous gardens. There is, however, not much to see within it, for even the churches are mostly not older than the second half of the Eighteenth Century.
The more southerly part of the province of Kursk is in the Ukraine, or ancient border country. Its semi-nomadic population obtained in early days the designation of Cossacks. This word is not Sclavonic, but Turkish; and although it long denoted in Russia a free man, or, rather, a man free to do anything he chose, it had been used by the Tartar hordes to designate the lower class of their horsemen. From the princes of the House of Rurik these southerly districts passed into the possession of Lithuania, and, later, into those of Poland. Little Russia was another arbitrary name anciently given to a great part of what has been also known as the Ukraine. No fixed geographical limits can be assigned to either of these designations, and especially to the Ukraine of the Poles or the Muscovites; for as the borders or marshes became safe and populated, they were absorbed by the dominant power, and ultimately incorporated into provinces. Little Russia is, in fact, a term now used only to denote the Southern Russians as distinguished principally from the Great Russians of the more central part of the empire.
There is a strongly-marked difference in the outward appearance, the mode of life, and even the cast of thought of these two branches of the Sclav race. The language of the Little Russian, or Hohol, as he is contemptuously called by his more vigorous northern brother, is a cross between the Polish and the Russian, although nearer akin to the Muscovite than to the Polish tongue. Ethnographically, also, the Little Russians become gradually fused with the White Russians of the north-west (Mohilef and Vitebsk) and with the Slovaks of the other side of the Carpathians. The Malo-Ros (Little Russian) is physically a better, though a less muscular man than the Veliko-Ros, or Great Russian. He is taller, finer-featured, and less rude and primitive in his domestic surroundings. The women have both beauty and grace, and make the most of those qualities by adorning themselves in neat and picturesque costumes, resembling strongly those of the Roumanian and Transylvanian peasantry. Their houses are not like those of other parts of Russia—log huts, full, generally, of vermin and cockroaches; but wattled, thatched, and whitewashed cottages, surrounded by gardens, and kept internally in order and cleanliness.
Their lives are altogether more happy, although their songs, full of deep feeling, and not without a vein of romance are, like those of all Sclavs, plaintive and in the minor key. The men sing of the daring exploits of their Cossack forefathers, who were not free-booters like the old Cossacks of the Volga, but courageous men engaged in a life-and-death struggle with nomadic hordes, and later with internal enemies, Poles and rebels. The greater refinement of the women of Little Russia is attributable to the comparative ease of their lives in a fertile country, with a climate more genial than that of the more northerly parts of the empire. There the Great and the White Russians had to contend with a soil much less productive, with swamps which had to be drained, with thick forests which had to be cleared, with wild beasts which had to be destroyed or guarded against, and with frost and snow that left scarcely four months in the year for labour in the field.
The upper classes of South Russia, enriched by the cultivation of large and fertile estates, and favoured in their social development by long contact with the ancient Western civilization of Poland, exhibit a similar superiority over the bulk of their compeers in Great Russia. Except, however, in the case of the larger landed proprietors, the everyday life of the Southern Russian bears a strong resemblance to that of the Irish squireen. There is a strong tinge of the same insouciance as to the material future, and an equal propensity to reckless hospitality, to sport (principally coursing), social jollification, and to a great extent to card-playing. Indeed, there are well-appointed country seats in the South of Russia in which the long summer days are entirely spent in card-playing, with interruptions only for meals. There are horses in plenty in the stable, and vehicles of every description to which they can be harnessed; but "taking a drive" through endless cornfields along natural roads or tracks, parched, cracked, and dusty one day, and presenting the next a surface of black mud, offers but few attractions to the ladies, and vehicular locomotion is therefore resorted to only as a matter of necessity, on journeys to estates or towns often fifty to one hundred miles distant. Country life, indeed, has no great attractions in any part of Russia Proper, and ever since the Emancipation of the Serfs and the accompanying extinction of the power and authority of the proprietary classes, absenteeism has been largely on the increase, to the advantage solely of the principal provincial towns, and of certain capitals and watering-places in Western Europe. Thus, while Kursk and Kharkof owe much of their riches and progress to the immigration of landed proprietors from the northerly and eastern districts of the "Black Soil Zone," Kief is the resort of more princely landlords of the south-western districts, strongly and favourably affected by Polish culture.