UC-NRLF 
 
 375 
 

IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
IN A RUSSIAN 
 VILLAGE 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES RODEN BUXTON 
 
 THE LABOUR PUBLISHING COMPANY, LTD 
 
 6, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON 
 1922 
 
ED 
 
 1 TO 3E 
 
 RETAINED 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I HAVE long wished to write down the many 
 curious things which I heard and saw among the 
 Russian villages. If, in addition to the pleasure 
 this gives me, my recollections are found to have a 
 political or historical value, so much the better. But 
 I shall quote no general statistics, and pronounce 
 no political judgements. I shall report nothing but 
 what I personally experienced, and what was said 
 to me in conversation ; I may say little, but what 
 I do say will be all first-hand. 
 
 My chief hope for this book is that it may help 
 to make others think of Russia, not as an abstrac- 
 tion, not as a unit, but as a very large number of 
 very interesting human beings, most of them 
 lovable. 
 
 52400 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 FAQS 
 
 I. A June Morning in Ozero ... 9 
 
 II. My Host His House His Family 
 
 His Live Stock . . .13 
 
 III. Emilianov's Land The Drop in Cultiva- 
 
 tion Reasons for it . . 17 
 
 IV. How the Landlords disappeared from 
 
 Ozero 21 
 
 V. How the Land was distributed in Ozero . 26 
 
 VI. The Rival Schools Social Revolutionaries 
 
 and Communists . . . .29 
 
 VII. The "Committee of Poverty" How the 
 
 Class Struggle began in Ozero . . 32 
 
 VIII. My VisitorsThe MolokaniOne hun- 
 dred and five Years old The 
 Kirghiz Horse-herd The Charm of 
 the Peasant 35 
 
 IX. " No Petrol, no Matches, no Grease "A 
 Prophecy of coming Famine Agri- 
 cultural Communes Are they God- 
 less P Emilianov's Opinion . . 41 
 
 X. Communists The Military Commissar 
 The Communist Party in Ozero 
 Kolchak or the Soviet Government 
 The Peasants' Choice ... 44 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 XI. The Shortage of Manufactured Goods A 
 Government Shop In the Family 
 Bath ...... 49 
 
 XII. The Food Requisitions " Why don't you 
 
 pay up?" .... 53 
 
 XIII. The Meeting of the Ozero Soviei^-The Lost 
 
 Receipt The Soviet President . . 56 
 
 XIV. The Schoolmaster The PriestTipping 
 
 the Wrong Man .... 59 
 
 XV. My " Arrest and Imprisonment " An 
 Unopened Letter Farewell to the 
 Emilianov Family ... 63 
 
 XVI. Wire Entanglements Petrov's Peculiari- 
 
 ties Was I spied upon ? . .68 
 
 XVII. A stern, unbending Priest His Concern 
 for my Soul His Defiance of the 
 Government ..... 72 
 
 XVIII. The Clerk-Captain His Plans for reviving 
 
 Country Life Ovid among the Goths . 78 
 
 XIX. General Baltiski A Tsarist Officer in the 
 
 Service of the Republic . . .82 
 
 XX. Fishing Trekking ' ' Bolshevik A trod- 
 
 ties " . . . . . .86 
 
 XXI. Up the Volga' Aunt Lisa "-Back to 
 
 Nijni Novgorod . . . .90 
 
 XXII. The Last Talk A Painful Question- 
 
 Muddy Waters .... 94 
 
IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 A June Morning in Ozero 
 
 THE central point in my Russian recollections is 
 a certain morning in June, 1920, in the village of 
 Ozero. Ozero is a village in the Samara " Govern- 
 ment " or Province. It lies to the east of the Volga, 
 and not very far from the borders of Asia. 1 It is, in 
 fact, as far east as the head of the Persian Gulf. 
 No Englishman, as far as I could ascertain, had 
 ever been seen in Ozero before. 
 
 I wandered out into the village street, on that 
 particular June morning, with a sense of deep con- 
 tentment, of which the memory is still vivid. As 
 Secretary to the British Labour Delegation, I had 
 gone through an exhausting round of visits, inter- 
 views and entertainments. I had struggled for three 
 weeks, note-book in hand, to record an unceasing 
 stream of new impressions, without a moment to 
 reflect at leisure. And all that I had seen and done 
 had not satisfied my main desire. 
 
 Ever since I knew that I was to accompany the 
 Delegation, I had cherished the ambition of getting 
 right off the beaten track alone, of burying myself 
 
 1 It is in the heart of what became, in 1921, the famine area. 
 It is only too probable that but few of the people described in 
 these pages are now surviving. 
 
iu IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 in the depths of the country. There had been many 
 obstacles to surmount before the ambition could be 
 realised. But I had managed it ; and here I was, 
 with a clear week before me as an inhabitant of 
 Ozero. For the first time since my arrival in Russia 
 I was free to look round and enjoy. 
 
 My aim had been to choose a village that was 
 typical of other Russian villages. I was not restricted 
 in my choice. I did not know the name of this one 
 until I approached it. I had intended to go further, 
 but I had spent two days in driving across the 
 great rolling downs, and my driver informed me 
 that he had an uncle living here, and that the people 
 living in the village were " very good people." That 
 seemed to me as good a recommendation as any 
 other, and I could see no special feature which 
 distinguished the village from the others I had 
 passed. 
 
 It was very large, like all the others in that 
 region, where the population is concentrated and 
 people walk incredible distances to get to their 
 fields. The village street, along which I now strolled 
 with my hands in my pockets, was nearly a mile 
 long. It was immensely wide, a desert of deep dust, 
 reminding me curiously of an Australian township. 
 The houses were one storey buildings of wood, and 
 at the side of each was a wide gateway, generally 
 with a quaintly carved beam across it, which led 
 into the dvor or farmyard. This stretched out to 
 the back in a long strip. All the woodwork was 
 bleached by the sun to a more or less uniform 
 colour a light, shimmering grey. A few side 
 streets, not quite so wide, stretched away at right 
 angles. 
 
A JUNE MORNING IN OZERO n 
 
 Shuffling along through the dust at a leisurely 
 pace, I reached the centre of the village. It was an 
 immense, irregular square of bare, greyish earth. 
 Here stood the church, with the usual cluster of 
 domes of various sizes, shaped like bulbs, and pale 
 green in colour. There were cheap but brightly 
 shining red tinsel ornaments at the gate and at the 
 corners of the churchyard. 
 
 About 100 yards from the church stood the Soviet 
 house, to which I had driven up on arrival the night 
 before, requesting hospitality. It is the duty of the 
 village Soviet to provide this for any holder of a 
 travelling permit, as well as to speed him on his way 
 with a country cart, or (as the Russian phrase is) 
 " with horses " (loshadami). I felt uncomfortable in 
 demanding these facilities. It seemed a cheeky 
 proceeding. But they were always provided with 
 perfect courtesy. 
 
 Turning away from what, for want of a better 
 name, I may call the square, I set out to examine 
 in what the outskirts of the village consisted. I 
 found a miscellaneous collection of buildings barns 
 for corn, houses of the poorer peasants, a windmill or 
 two, and, in between these, large expanses covered 
 with blocks of what appeared to be mud, set wide 
 apart to dry in the sun. They were, in fact, of two 
 kinds. One was actually earth in course of being 
 dried into large brick-like slabs for building (called 
 samari) ; the other kind consisted of dung and 
 straw, shaped into slabs, being dried for fuel (called 
 kizyak) . Acres of land were covered by these curious 
 objects. 
 
 Out beyond this began the polye or field the 
 arable land of the village. No hedges, nothing to 
 
12 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 catch the eye ; a vast space, difficult to measure 
 with the eyes, of short green corn. 
 
 And beyond the polye but out of sight of the 
 village stretched the interminable steppe across 
 which I had come. 
 
 The hectic fervours of Petrograd, the stern 
 responsibilities of Moscow all alike were far behind 
 and far away. All was quiet, peaceful, slow-moving, 
 long-remembering. This was, outwardly at any 
 rate, the old Russia, the Russia that has endured, 
 and still endures. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 My Host His House His Family His Live Stock 
 
 I MUST now add a word or two about my arrival 
 the night before, and the quarters in which I found 
 myself. 
 
 My Russian was sadly defective, and though I 
 have a knack of picking up a good deal of a language 
 while living with the people and hearing it all day 
 long, I was anxious to secure a Russian companion 
 who could speak a little English. I found one at 
 Samara in the shape of my friend Petrov, an 
 employee in the telegraph service. He proved 
 invaluable, and all my notes, especially on detailed 
 or technical questions, were carefully checked with 
 his assistance. 
 
 Petrov and I had been foisted at n p.m. upon 
 our destined host, who might well, I thought, have 
 met us with glum looks. Far from it. 
 
 " We are truly pleased to receive you," he said in 
 grave and deliberate tones, after we had exchanged 
 the usual salutations. " But I am not worthy of 
 this cigar." (I had just presented him with my 
 last.) 
 
 Eggs were produced in quantities ; bread of a 
 superior kind to that of Moscow ; and actually a 
 thing not seen since leaving Esthonia butter. The 
 samovar was set going, and tea and conversation 
 wound up the evening. 
 
14 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 " And now/' said he, " would you prefer to sleep 
 on the bed or on the floor ? The bed is a good bed, 
 but it is not without parasites." Nor, as it happened, 
 was the floor, which I chose in preference. But I 
 was much too tired to mind. 
 
 In the morning I had time to take in the domestic 
 arrangements. There was one biggish living-room, 
 with two or three benches along the wall, and two 
 small tables. At one of these, placed in the corner, 
 where the eikon was hung with a tiny candle before 
 it, we had our meals. This corner was the place of 
 honour. It contained also a shelf, where stood the 
 Bible and a collection of agricultural pamphlets. 
 
 Out of this room, towards the back, opened two 
 tiny bedrooms. I tried one the second night, but 
 the vast pile of sheep skins and miscellanous clothing, 
 which served as a mattress, harboured more animal 
 life than was pleasant ; and I moved out after this 
 on to a sort of raised veranda along the back of the 
 house, where there was just room to lie. Early on 
 the first morning the family pig invaded my retreat 
 by climbing the steps. He was far more astonished 
 to see me than I was to see him. After that I 
 barricaded the steps against him and slept in 
 perfect comfort. 
 
 My host's name was Alexander Petrovich 
 Emilianov. He was of the " middle " (sredni) 
 type of peasant, which formed the great majority of 
 the village. About one-fifth of its people were 
 considered " poor " peasants. Of " rich " peasants 
 there were only four or five, I was told. 
 
 Tall, upstanding and vigorous, with short, brown 
 beard, in a much- worn cloth suit and top-boots 
 Emilianov reminded me of a Scots gamekeeper in 
 
MY HOST 15 
 
 East Lothian, one of my earliest and best friends. 
 I soon found that he was a man of shrewd intelligence. 
 He could read with ease. At church, which I 
 attended on the following Sunday, it was his function 
 to read the Epistle ; he stepped out from the standing 
 crowd and read it in a loud and sonorous voice, 
 facing the priest (who had just read the Gospel). 
 He was evidently well versed in the Bible, and could 
 hold his own in theological argument. 
 
 I could always rely on him for a well-balanced 
 opinion on matters agricultural or political. His 
 kindly and courteous manners were combined with 
 a certain dignity and reserve. He never obtruded 
 himself, even in his own house, when others were 
 talking. 
 
 Emilianov's wife, Maria by name, was hospitality 
 itself. She did not share in our meals, and only 
 rarely in the conversation at other times. But she 
 hovered round, wreathed in smiles. She was usually 
 in the kitchen, but appeared to be equally at home 
 when shearing the sheep. She had an odd, husky 
 voice, the result of some affection of the throat, and 
 as we ate she purred over us like a fat old cat, 
 whispering " kushaite, kushaite " " eat, eat." She 
 plied us with pancakes, sour milk, cheese, cabbage 
 soup, fish from the neighbouring lake, eggs, and 
 occasionally even meat. I was in clover. We all 
 ate our food out of one iron pot, just as it came from 
 the stove. We each dipped our big, painted wooden 
 spoon in it the kind of spoons they sell in London 
 as curiosities. 
 
 The family at home consisted of two little girls of 
 ten and five, Lyonushka and Dunka (familiar forms 
 of Helen and Eudoxia), who lived in a perpetual state 
 
16 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 of suppressed laughter at my strange behaviour, 
 and Nikola, a small and solemn little boy of four or 
 thereabouts. They were all most affectionate to 
 their mother, and I never saw her correct them. She 
 was variously addressed as " Mamushka," " Ma- 
 mush," or more familiarly, " Ham." Then there was 
 a married daughter living close by. There was also 
 a son, Serji, away at Archangel, where he had been 
 fighting the English. But no one cared or thought 
 much about whom he was fighting against ; the 
 thing had long ago become too confusing to follow. 
 In face of the great contortion of events outside, the 
 village was simply puzzled. 
 
 To complete my picture of Emilianov's home I 
 should certainly add the live stock. It consisted of 
 five " horses " (weedy little ponies of about fourteen 
 hands), three cows, six sheep, and a few pigs, geese 
 and chickens. There were also two dogs. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Emilianov's Land The Drop in Cultivation 
 Reasons for it 
 
 MY first preoccupation was, of course, to find out 
 everything about the land. With this in view, 
 I asked Emilianov to show me his own land, to 
 which he readily assented, though somewhat 
 amused that I should wish to go many miles to see 
 three strips which had nothing to distinguish them 
 from any others. So next morning his four-wheeled 
 cart was made ready, a pile of sheepskins and a 
 large sack of hay being arranged as a seat for 
 Petrov and me. Very acceptable they were, for 
 the bumping was terrific and the distance consider- 
 able. In fact, allowing for our long pauses for 
 conversation and discussion, and a meal on the 
 grass, the expedition occupied the greater part of 
 the day. 
 
 He had three strips one of wheat, one of rye and 
 one of millet. The other crops grown on a smaller 
 scale in the neighbourhood were sunflower (from 
 whose seed a kind of butter is made) and water 
 melon. The allocation of the strips had been 
 decided, he told me, by drawing lots. Each strip 
 was situated in the field or polye devoted to that 
 particular crop. The system of strips is meant to 
 secure that each holder gets both good and bad 
 
 R.V. B 
 
i8 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 land. The word for " land distribution " means 
 literally " shredding " (polosovanye). 
 
 We must have driven ten miles or so in all. The 
 land of the village consists of no less than 22,000 
 acres (9,000 desiatin). But of this only one- third is 
 ploughed and sown each year ; the rest lies fallow. 
 This is the " three-field " system. And what is 
 ploughed is merely scratched. The yield is trivial 
 compared with that of more advanced countries. 
 Between the villages lie vast tracts of virgin soil, 
 much of it as good as that which is cultivated. 
 
 I now had my first ocular demonstration of the 
 way in which agriculture has suffered from the 
 disasters which have overtaken Russia. There had 
 been a sharp fall in the amount of land ploughed 
 and sown for the harvest. Of the 7,000 acres 
 which would normally have been cultivated, only 
 about 2,200 had been ploughed up for this year 
 a fact of ominous significance for the whole of 
 Russia. 
 
 I asked Emilianov the reason. He replied that it 
 was due above all to the mobilisation of horses and 
 carts for transporting supplies, both for the civil 
 population and for the army. This, I found, was 
 the almost invariable explanation. It was this, he 
 said, which had caused his neighbour to sow only 
 twelve acres instead of thirty-five. Another reason 
 given was that so many ploughs, drills, and reapers- 
 and-binders had gone out of repair, and could neither 
 be mended nor replaced. 
 
 I was particularly interested in the question 
 whether the amount or uncertainty of the Govern- 
 ment's food requisitions had helped to cause the 
 reduction in the area ploughed and sown, and I put 
 
EMILIANOV'S LAND 19 
 
 the question to a number of different people. To my 
 surprise, no one seemed to attach importance to this 
 point. They would not admit that there had been 
 any voluntary reduction. " Not enough horses, not 
 enough ploughs "to that we always returned. 
 " Horses are dying out," said one, at the end of a 
 long conversation. It was his way of conceiving the 
 final disaster. 
 
 We drove on and on, my astonishment increasing 
 with every mile at the strangely uneconomic 
 character of this system, if system it could be called, 
 of agriculture. The poor little pony struggled 
 through one dry creek after another water courses 
 only during the weeks when the snow is melting, and 
 for the rest of the year mere obstructions to traffic 
 till my bones ached again. 
 
 The air was brilliantly clear ; you saw some land- 
 mark, a grove of poplars perhaps in a hollow, which 
 looked a. mile off, and found it took over an hour to 
 reach it. Great hawks kites, I think floated over 
 us, and on the wilder parts we put up a curlew or 
 two. Otherwise, save for the crows (hooded or 
 black), there was hardly any animal life except, 
 indeed, the innumerable grasshoppers, whose song 
 formed a continuous pedal accompaniment to all 
 other sounds. 
 
 Before the Revolution my host had had eight 
 acres about the average holding in that region. 
 He had now no less than eighty-five. This was the 
 tremendous fact that I had turned over and over in 
 my mind as we bumped along. Tremendous, 
 surely ; for my host's case was a type, not only of 
 thousands, but of millions of others. How came 
 Emilianov to have ten times as many acres as 
 
20 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 before ? Of what nature was the convulsion which 
 had resulted in this immense change, with all the 
 human and social consequences which it must of 
 necessity have carried with it ? 
 
 Most of my questions turned on this point, as may 
 well be imagined. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 How the Landlords disappeared from Ozero 
 
 " LOOK there," said Emilianov, pointing out from 
 the edge of the village field over the limitless rolling 
 steppe. " All that was the land of the landlords 
 (bariri). You may drive forty versts in a straight 
 line from here and see nothing else." I came to 
 realise that, in effect, the villages and their " fields," 
 large as they seemed, were but islands in an ocean 
 of large properties. On all sides they had been 
 hemmed in by the estates of the great landlords. 
 
 " Who owned all this land ? " I asked. 
 
 " All sorts of landlords. One was a Cossack. Two 
 were Samara merchants. One was a German, 
 Schmidt, who bought his from the Crown. Some 
 was held by the Monks. One was an estate of Maria 
 Feodorovna, the Tsaritsa." 
 
 " What has happened to them ? " 
 
 " They are mostly gone," he replied in a matter-of- 
 fact tone. " Some are in Samara. Most of them 
 have left Russia, I suppose." 
 
 He showed some hesitation at first in telling me 
 the details. But as we got to know each other better 
 he became more communicative, and I was able 
 gradually to piece together two stories of individual 
 cases. I may add at this point that many of the 
 things he told me, particularly with regard to dates 
 and figures, have been very definitely confirmed by 
 
22 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 subsequent inquiries which I have been able to 
 make. Here is the first story : 
 
 A Cossack landlord owned some 4,500 acres. The 
 first trouble came in 1917, under the Kerenski 
 regime. The Revolution had taken place in March. 
 By the middle of the year, deserters from the Army 
 were streaming over the country in all directions, 
 generally carrying their rifles with them. A party 
 of such soldiers, returning from the front, demanded 
 a part of his land, and also a sufficient quantity of 
 seed to sow it. He refused, but offered to sell them 
 the seed at 5 roubles 15 copecks the bushel. They 
 were angry, and told him that if he did not give it 
 them they would take it themselves. He went to 
 Pugachev, the chief town of the district (uyezd), and 
 prevailed upon the military authorities there to 
 send a detachment of soldiers to Ozero. These 
 soldiers seized upon a poor peasant and placed him 
 under a guard. The villagers came in a crowd, freed 
 the prisoner, took away the arms, and arrested the 
 soldiers themselves. Their officer was afraid, ran 
 away back to Pugachev and returned with a fresh 
 section of soldiers, whom he tried to infuriate by 
 telling them that three of their comrades had been 
 killed by the people in Ozero. On arrival, however, 
 they found that this was a lie, and went over to the 
 side of the villagers. The landlord had said, " This 
 seed is neither yours nor mine." The villagers 
 placed an ominous interpretation on this remark. 
 They said among themselves, " He means to burn 
 it," and acting upon this supposition, or excuse, 
 they said, " Give us the keys, we shall go and take 
 it." He gave up the keys, and they went and began 
 to divide up the seed. After this the landlord fled. 
 
HOW THE LANDLORDS DISAPPEARED 23 
 
 Matters remained thus for some time. The 
 villagers divided certain portions of the land for 
 sowing, but the rest remained deserted. Neither 
 the landlord nor his manager ever returned. The 
 peasants discussed the matter, and came to the 
 conclusion that they had better divide up the whole 
 estate. They had meant to take only a part of it, 
 and to leave the remainder to him. They now 
 divided up not only the land, but all the stock and 
 the stores. Finally they pulled down the house and 
 carried off the materials in every direction. 
 
 This was in August, 1917. The landlord had 
 ploughed and sowed and prepared the ground, but 
 the peasants reaped his harvest that year. 
 
 The second story was even more interesting to me, 
 because I was able to test it from personal inter- 
 course with the " victim." Fevron was an elderly 
 man who, in earlier life, had occupied most of his 
 time as a merchant, trading between Turkestan and 
 European Russia. He told me he had bought over 
 100 camels in Turkestan in former times. At that 
 time the camels averaged 100 roubles apiece. They 
 were now worth 140,000 roubles. With the profits 
 of his trading he had bought 500 acres of land. His 
 stock then consisted of twenty camels, twenty horses, 
 fifty sheep and twenty cows. He had a large com- 
 fortable house, conspicuously situated near the 
 centre of the main street, with a flight of half a dozen 
 wooden steps leading up to the door, and a garden, 
 or sad, in front. (Gardens in our sense are unknown, 
 but a garden of half a dozen little trees, planted for 
 ornament, is a noteworthy possession.) 
 
 In the summer of 1917 some of the villagers came 
 to him and said that he had got to give up his land. 
 
24 IN -A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 He argued and bargained with them, saying that he 
 was prepared to give up some of it. The result was 
 that he had to give up some of it that time, and 
 more of it after the October Revolution. 
 
 He has now only forty-five acres instead of 500, 
 and instead of twenty camels, only four. These he 
 showed me, as they lay on the straw placidly chewing 
 the cud, in a farm yard far too large for his needs. 
 He spoke with affectionate regret of the patriarchal 
 possessions which he had lost. 
 
 He was truly a patriarch. I was unable to reckon 
 up his family accurately, but there was quite a 
 considerable number of married sons and daughters 
 living in the house, with large families of their own. 
 The old man had a fat face, a slow but genial smile, 
 a very dark complexion and a flowing beard. When 
 he sat at the top of his outside steps, ready to 
 converse with anybody who came along, he reminded 
 me of the pictures of old Paul Kruger, sitting on the 
 stoep in front of his Presidential dwelling at Pretoria. 
 
 Fevron has thus earned the reward of being 
 obliging and compromising at the critical moment. 
 He has, as I have said, a little land left and he con- 
 tinues to live in his house, which is by far the nicest 
 in the village. He could not be allowed, however, to 
 keep this house entirely to himself. His big parlour 
 has been turned into the local Communist Club, 
 while a small adjoining room has become the office of 
 the Military Commissar. 
 
 I had several talks with him, and learnt from him 
 many interesting facts. We had dinner one day at 
 one end of his parlour, while two or three youthful 
 members of the local Communist Party, looking 
 rather awkward and uncomfortable, sat at the other 
 
HOW THE LANDLORDS DISAPPEARED 25 
 
 end, and we could see the Military Commissar 
 scribbling away at his table through the half-open 
 door of the other room. 
 
 Outwardly, Fevron was on quite good terms with 
 these people, and gave them a friendly nod when 
 they passed, but speaking to me in low tones, so that 
 they could not hear, he described them in much less 
 flattering terms. He would often contrast the 
 anarchy of to-day, as he called it, with the regime 
 which immediately preceded it. I should say he had 
 been a member of the Cadet Party, though he did 
 not tell me so. In spite of the fact that his troubles 
 had begun during the Kerenski period, he was loud 
 in his praises of the improvements that had been 
 made at that time. The Zemstvos (councils for 
 large rural areas, elected on a property franchise) 
 had done wonders between February and October, 
 1917, both in organising co-operation, and in pro- 
 moting new schools. I myself saw some evidences 
 of their activity in the books which I occasionally 
 saw in Soviet houses, bearing the stamp, " Zemstvo 
 Public Library." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 How the Land was distributed in Ozero 
 
 THE landlords' land was seized in Ozero in the 
 summer of 1917 that is, during the Kerenski 
 regime, and before the Communists came into power. 
 I was told afterwards that by October of that year 
 there was not a single great estate left in the Samara 
 " Government." But it appears that the formal 
 allocation of the land did not take place until after 
 the October (i.e., Communist) Revolution. With the 
 land, the stock and implements (inventar) were 
 distributed also. 
 
 The Soviet of the Uyezd, Pugachev, allotted a 
 certain quantity of land to each village in its area, 
 Ozero among others. The Soviet of Ozero was 
 specially elected for the purpose of dividing up the 
 land, all the villagers having the right to vote. The 
 Soviet then distributed the land according to an 
 absolutely fixed principle, namely, five desiatin per 
 " soul." No one was to have more than he and his 
 family could work. Emilianov's family, including 
 wife and children, amounted to seven, and that is 
 why he had thirty-five desiatin, or, approximately, 
 eighty acres. Appeals could be made to the Volost 
 (or District) Soviet, and on one occasion I heard 
 such an appeal being tried. 
 
 " And what do the peasants think of it all now ? " 
 I asked Emilianov. 
 
HOW THE LAND WAS DISTRIBUTED 27 
 
 " It's a fine thing, the Revolution. Every one is 
 in favour of it. They don't like the Communist 
 Party, but they like the Revolution." 
 
 " Why don't they like the Communist Party ? " 
 
 " Because they are always worrying us. They are 
 people from the towns and don't understand the 
 country. Commissars powerful persons are con- 
 tinually coming. We don't know what to do with 
 them. New orders (prikazi) are always coming out. 
 People are puzzled. As soon as you understand one 
 of them, a different one comes along." 
 
 " What party do most people belong to here ? " 
 
 " None at all. They are non-party (bezpartini)." 
 
 " Do they think the land is really their own 
 now ? " 
 
 " They look on their holdings as their own private 
 property, to do what they like with. When the 
 father dies, the son takes it." 
 
 " But the Soviet Constitution says that all the 
 land of Russia belongs to all the people of Russia." 
 
 " Yes, but the peasants don't know that. Any- 
 how, they take no account of it." 
 
 " I thought the village land was all managed by 
 the Mir. What has become of the Mir ? " 
 
 " What is the Mir ? " asked Emilianov in return. 
 
 This was a shock to me. I had read in many books 
 of this ancient village council, as one of the central 
 facts of Russian life. Could it be that Emilianov had 
 never heard of it ? 
 
 " I thought it was an old council which managed 
 the land of the village," I explained stumblingly. 
 
 " Ah, you mean the staretzi (elders)," he replied. 
 " Oh yes, but that was in the Id days. They 
 managed the land once, and very badly too. They 
 
28 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 were a lot of foolish old fellows. But they were 
 abolished long ago." 
 
 I also learned from Emilianov that until a few 
 years ago the village used to have what was called 
 the " Community's Portion," which was cultivated 
 in common. This was given up before the Revolu- 
 tion, because people found it inconvenient to leave 
 work on their own holdings. Some common store 
 was necessary, because there were contributions to 
 be made to the poor ; there were the general expenses 
 of the village government, and it was a custom to 
 keep a reserve of grain against famine. These pur- 
 poses, however, were provided for by collecting 
 something from each individual for the public needs 
 and storing it in the village barn, which held, he told 
 me, 40,000 poods. 
 
 The Government had recommended a revival of 
 the former system under the name of " Soviet 
 Strips." The villages, however, would not hear of 
 it, thinking it was some " Communistic affair." 
 
 " Well," I said, " the people have got the land 
 now, and they've got it the way they like best." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " But tell me do they think all this is going to 
 last ? Do they think the land will always be divided 
 as it is now ? " 
 
 " Yes, most of them do." 
 
 " And do you think so ? " 
 
 Emilianov scratched his head. " Who knows ? " 
 he said doubtfully. " No, I do not think so. This 
 is certainly not the final arrangement." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Rival Schools Social Revolutionaries and 
 Communists 
 
 ALL these things came to me first as isolated facts, 
 but as I listened to them, one after another, they 
 began to piece themselves together. Little by little 
 the picture began to clear itself and the outlines to 
 be filled in. 
 
 The Land Revolution from the peasants' point 
 of view began to live before my eyes. And beyond 
 that, back and back into earlier times, I seemed to 
 see the long melancholy story of the struggle of the 
 peasant and the lord (barin). I recalled what I had 
 heard or read of the half-legendary figure of Stenka 
 Razin, outlaw in the eyes of the landlord, hero in the 
 eyes of the peasant a sort of eighteenth century 
 Robin Hood ; of the local risings, the murders of 
 landlords, during the period of serfdom ; of the 
 emancipation of the serfs in 1861 by no means an 
 unmixed benefit, since it was followed by widespread 
 enclosures of land, recalling the story of the village 
 labourer in our own country ; then of the various 
 efforts at reform in recent times ; of the agricultural 
 strikes, and their savage repression ; of the Social 
 Revolutionary Party, which played so ingeniously 
 upon the old local patriotism of the villages, while 
 grafting upon it the phraseology of modern Socialism ; 
 
30 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 and finally the climax of 1917 and 1918, in which the 
 pent-up flood burst out at last. 
 
 A great and prolonged controversy took place as 
 to the manner in which the confiscated lands should 
 be disposed of. I had an interesting conversation on 
 this point with the Military Commissar of another 
 village, Pyestravka. He told me that the dispute 
 was between " Socialisation " and " Nationalisa- 
 tion." The Social Revolutionaries wanted the 
 former, meaning by it the acquisition by the village 
 (or the " Commune," as they call it) of all the land 
 taken from the landlords, without any terms being 
 made with the Central Government. Each Com- 
 mune was to decide on its own methods of taking 
 over the land, of distributing it, and of working it. 
 Their ideal was the " free labour Commune," and 
 they believed in " spontaneous " action. 
 
 The Communists, on the other hand, according to 
 my informant, wanted " Nationalisation." They 
 saw that the supply of food to the towns was a 
 question of life and death for the Revolution. They 
 realised that the country could starve the revolu- 
 tionary town population into submission, unless the 
 latter took drastic measures to protect itself. Hence, 
 they believed in Soviet farms, established on the 
 best cultivated farms of the old landlords, and 
 worked like State factories by the Central Govern- 
 ment. These were to serve also to educate the 
 peasants in scientific methods. They believed in 
 large scale as opposed to small scale agriculture. 
 They believed in agricultural communes and 
 other co-operative institutions, which should receive 
 machinery and other necessaries in return for 
 specified food contributions, and generally, in assert- 
 
THE RIVAL SCHOOLS 31 
 
 ing and maintaining the right of the Central Govern- 
 ment to have its say in agricultural affairs. On 
 a smaller scale they advocated " Soviet strips " 
 (polosa) in every village, for the growing of food for 
 the towns. As to the division of the land at so much 
 per " soul/' where was the fairness in allowing the 
 village to do this when the population was always 
 changing and new immigrants coming in ? 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 The " Committee of Poverty " How the Class Struggle 
 began in Ozero 
 
 AFTER the land distribution in the summer of 
 1918 came an episode in the history of the village 
 upon which, I confess, I am not quite clear. I am 
 inclined to think that I came here upon a point on 
 which my friend Emilianov was not an impartial 
 witness. This was the so-called " Committee of 
 Poverty " (byednota) or " Committee of the Poorer 
 Peasantry." 
 
 A decree was issued, said he, in June, 1918, to the 
 effect that the Soviet should be formed of " poor " 
 peasants, who should, in addition to the ordinary 
 functions of the Soviet, see to the collection of the 
 food requisitions for the towns. There were special 
 requisitions at that time on the rich peasants. The 
 object was that the Soviet might not be dominated 
 by these " rich " peasants. A meeting of all the 
 village was called, at which the chairman read out a 
 list of candidates for the " Committee of Poverty." 
 People who wished to be elected had written their 
 names in this list. Each name, as it was read, was 
 discussed, and several candidates were rejected as 
 not being " poor." The voting was by a show of 
 hands. About forty were elected, with a " presi- 
 dium " of three, the President being Chetvergov (the 
 same man who was, at the time of my visit, the 
 
THE "COMMITTEE OF POVERTY' 33 
 
 President of the Soviet). The Committee went on 
 for a while, but it " did not understand its duties." 
 After a few months (November, 1918) it was dis- 
 solved. The ordinary Soviet took its place once 
 more. 
 
 Such was Emilianov's story. He was somewhat 
 reticent about it. I had to pump him a good deal. 
 He spoke of this Committee with a contempt which 
 was not habitual to him. 
 
 But there was a background to all this, as I 
 learned from other inquiries. 
 
 In the summer of 1918, owing to the counter- 
 revolutionary movements and the foreign invasions, 
 the Republic was faced with a crisis. It was a matter 
 of life and death for the Soviet Government to 
 obtain food for the urban population. The available 
 corn reserve was in the hands of the " rich " and 
 " middle " peasants, and they were withholding it. 
 What was to be done ? The solution adopted was 
 (broadly speaking) to appeal, against these elements, 
 to the " proletarian " section in each village the 
 " poor " peasants. 
 
 I regret that I did not learn more about this class. 
 I visited two or three of them in their houses, which 
 were mostly of one room and built of mud bricks. 
 I did so in company with Emilianov. His attitude 
 towards them (though they seemed to be friendly 
 enough) was still that of a kindly superior like that 
 of a tenant farmer visiting a labourer. 
 
 Hitherto, I presume, the class division had been 
 between the villagers as a whole and the landlords 
 as a whole. Now came a class division within the 
 village itself " poor " peasants on one side, " rich " 
 and " middle " peasants on the other. 
 
34 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 The Social Revolutionaries, who seem to have 
 been the dominant party in the Samara " Govern- 
 ment " at that time, favoured a policy which 
 regarded the interests of all villagers as broadly 
 identical. They were, therefore, opposed to the 
 " Committees of Poverty." 
 
 The Communists, on the other hand, contended 
 that this would in effect establish the middle 
 peasantry as a rural bourgeoisie ; that private 
 property would be entrenched more firmly than 
 ever ; that the " rich " and " middle " peasants 
 would exploit the " poor " peasants ; and, worst of 
 all, that grain would not be obtainable for the towns 
 except on extortioners' terms. It was only the 
 " poor " peasants, they contended, who had a real 
 common interest and common feeling with the 
 proletariat of the towns. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 My Visitors The Molokani One hundred and five 
 Years old The Kirghiz Horse-herd The Charm 
 of the Peasant 
 
 As soon as my presence in the village became 
 known I found myself the centre of a considerable 
 amount of interest. One or two visitors dropped in 
 the second day, and on the succeeding days they 
 came in twos and threes. I need not have stirred 
 out of doors. I held, in fact, a kind of court in 
 Emilianov's big room. 
 
 No one knew why I had come there. My own 
 explanation that I had come to see for myself how 
 people were living in Russia was obviously impos- 
 sible of credence. That a man should journey to 
 Russia, travel three days down the Volga, drive two 
 days, without stopping, across the steppe, and settle 
 down for a week in Ozero, for no other purpose than 
 to see how Ozero folk lived no, that would not do. 
 But though they evidently thought thus, they were 
 much too polite to say so. Nor did they appear to 
 care very much. They were just interested in the 
 fact that a man from England, for some reason best 
 known to himself, had come here and was on show. 
 
 The most flattering welcome I received was from 
 a man who travelled some six miles from a neigh- 
 bouring village. 
 
 C 2 
 
36 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 " Why did you come ? " I said. 
 
 " I came," said he, with the sweetest smile on his 
 much bearded and bewhiskered face, " because there 
 is a text which says, ' when you hear of a wise man, 
 run and knock at his door.' ' 
 
 This man was a Baptist, or " Spiritual Christian." 
 Quite a number of different sects are represented in 
 the Samara Government. 
 
 It was curious how often our conversations ended 
 in some kind of theological discussion. I remember 
 a conversation with Emilianov and two other 
 peasants which began with the shortage of steam 
 tractors, and ended with the question whether other 
 children were born to Mary after Jesus. Religion in 
 one form or another seemed to be constantly in the 
 thoughts of these peasants. I myself was primarily 
 interested in politics, but in spite of my efforts to 
 turn the conversation on to that subject, it was 
 remarkable how often it got diverted after a short 
 while in the direction mentioned. 
 
 While speaking of the sects I must mention that 
 which interested me the most, namely, the Molokani. 
 Nearly half the village belonged to this persuasion. 
 Their services closely resemble those of the Quakers, 
 and are called " Meetings for Worship." I attended 
 one of them at mid-day on Sunday. A considerable 
 part of the time was spent in silence, though there 
 was also some reading of the Bible, one hymn and 
 two or three extemporary addresses. It was my 
 landlord friend, Fevron, who took me to the meeting, 
 being a member of the sect. I sat by his side at the 
 head of a long table. There was something not quite 
 democratic about this arrangement, and I suspected 
 that his position as a landlord, though ignored by 
 
MY VISITORS 37 
 
 the State, had not been quite forgotten by his 
 religious community. 
 
 He told me that the sect was founded about 1780, 
 and was greatly persecuted in the early days. The 
 authorities used to take the children of the Molokani 
 by force and put them into the monasteries. During 
 the War many of the Molokani had been, he said, 
 conscientious objectors. Two of his sons were let 
 off from military service during the War ; one was 
 teaching, the other doing hospital work. It was 
 only, however, since the Revolution that a definite 
 decree on the subject of conscientious objectors had 
 been passed, relieving those from service who could 
 show that they held anti-militarist opinions before 
 the War. 
 
 Fevron also took me to see a most remarkable old 
 man called Rodion, also a Molokani, who was said 
 to be 105 years old. He was apparently quite 
 healthy, and his hearing, at least, was perfect. He 
 was dressed in a long white coat and top-boots, and 
 lived as the patriarchal head of a great family house, 
 peopled by his various descendants much as 
 Fevron's was, but on an even larger scale. When I 
 was introduced to him, he at once began by saying, 
 ' You may think you are a stranger here ; but you 
 are not. We are all sons of one Father." He begged 
 me to take back a message of love and greeting to the 
 Quakers. " We all know about the Quakers here/' 
 he said ; " Quakers always tell the truth. They are 
 also friendly to Russia." 
 
 I should, perhaps, add here that in the Volga 
 district there is a great mixture of races as well as of 
 religions. On my way through other villages, in the 
 " Governments " of Simbirsk and Kazan particularly, 
 
38 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 I saw not only Tartars and Bashkirs and Mordvas, 
 but also Chuvaschi and Cheremishchi, parts of the 
 same race to which belong the Finns in the North 
 and the Bulgars in the South. In Ozero itself, as far 
 as I remember, I only met one man of alien race. 
 He was a Kirghiz from the Asiatic steppes. His 
 occupation, I was told, was that of a " horse-herd " ; 
 he was employed to look after great droves of horses 
 sent out to graze, and he lived for weeks with them, 
 alone in the wilds. He certainly looked as if he was 
 always in the saddle ; he was very short, and 
 waddled rather than walked. As to features, he 
 was the most Mongolian Mongol I ever saw ; while 
 his complexion was as dark as that of a Red Indian. 
 The sweat always stood out in beads all over his 
 face, and he looked as if washing was not much in 
 his line. These peculiarities made it the more 
 remarkable that my friend Emilianov appeared to 
 feel no sort of race prejudice about him. I remember 
 the two squatting side by side on the floor of the 
 little veranda where I used to sleep, with their backs 
 against the wall, smoking one cigarette after another, 
 and conversing on terms of perfect equality. 
 
 I should, perhaps, become tedious if I were to 
 describe many of my conversations. Yet there was 
 nothing which made me feel more vividly that I 
 was having a glimpse into the soul of these people, 
 so different from any with whom I had ever had 
 intercourse before. In a sense, they were simplicity 
 itself. Few of them could read or write. They 
 heard little of the outside world, for a newspaper 
 only rarely reached the village. Yet they were 
 far indeed from stupid. They were great lovers 
 of argument, and by no means deficient in the 
 
MY VISITORS 39 
 
 art. Their observations were always practical and 
 shrewd. 
 
 And with all this there was nothing harsh about 
 them, but a singular sweetness of temperament. It 
 showed itself not only in their courtesy to the 
 stranger, but in the harmony which, as far as I was 
 able to judge, existed among members of the same 
 family, and in their remarkable kindliness to one 
 another. 
 
 If there is a spring of savage cruelty which breaks 
 out in times of excitement, there is also a readiness 
 to help others and share with others, which far 
 surpasses the cold and nicely calculated charity of 
 Western peoples. 
 
 It would be absurd in me, after so short an 
 experience, to try to sum up the philosophy of the 
 Volga peasant. It remains a closed book to me. 
 Only I could feel an undercurrent of sadness in their 
 natures, which may spring (as some writers tell us) 
 from a pessimism more real and deep than we in the 
 West can easily imagine. 
 
 How strange is the fact that, in their language, the 
 word for " harvest " should be strada, " suffering " ! 
 It has, surely, a certain significance. The thoughts 
 of these people, generation after generation, have 
 turned on the hard, grinding labour of harvest-time 
 not as ours do, on the joy of the garnering, the 
 " harvest-home." 
 
 In the village street of Ozero in the warm summer 
 nights there were usually three or four groups 
 collected at different points with their balalaikas (a 
 sort of mandolin), alternately singing and con- 
 versing. Suddenly a terrific quarrel would arise. 
 Ugly, discordant, angry voices would rend the air, 
 
40 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 and it was difficult to believe they were not coming 
 to blows. This would continue for five or ten 
 minutes, perhaps. 
 
 Then it would suddenly subside, and a brief pause 
 follow. Then, through the darkness, the balalaikas 
 would begin tinkling again. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 " A T o Petrol, no Matches, no Grease " A Prophecy of 
 coming Famine Agricultural Communes Are 
 they Godless? Emilianovs Opinion 
 
 I WELL remember an old man who had fought in 
 the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. His name was 
 Daniel Efimovich Sazonov. He dwelt much on the 
 misery caused by the War which to him meant, 
 not only the Great War as we understand it, but the 
 various prolongations of it up to the very time at 
 which he was speaking. " Every one I meet," said 
 he, " speaks to me of sons and brothers far away 
 in Poland, in Germany, in Finland, on the frontiers 
 everywhere. Then we have to cultivate extra land 
 for the families of the soldiers who are fighting. 
 
 " Still, God was good to my son. He was a prisoner 
 in England. The English treated him splendidly ; 
 he had never had so much to eat." 
 
 I asked him how things were going in Ozero. 
 
 " There is no petrol, there are no matches, there 
 is no grease," he replied. 
 
 " But you have the land," I said. 
 
 ' Yes, it is true, but you cannot make much for 
 yourself. Our Soviet is always taking things from 
 us. If it does not take things it compels us to turn 
 out with our carts and transport something or other. 
 The discontent is worse this year than last. 
 
 " Besides this, times are bad, and they are going 
 
42 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 to be worse. Famine is coming. There is a prophecy 
 in Ezekiel which says, ' I will make my earth as 
 stone/ Now that is coming true. The earth this 
 year is not friable as it was ; it is getting like stone. 
 It will be very bad for the rye. It will not bear " 
 (ne rodit). 
 
 Our conversation drifted on to the question of 
 " Communes/' that is, the Agricultural Communes 
 which the Soviet Government was so anxious to 
 establish. " People are afraid of them," he said, 
 " they do not understand them. They think they 
 are against God. The reason is that the Com- 
 munist Party is against God, and they think that 
 the Communes have something to do with the 
 Communist Party. 
 
 " It is true that Communists tell people not to go 
 to the Church. This is a great mistake. It is like 
 taking away a little child from the breast. They 
 take away all support from the priests, and these 
 have to be supported by the congregations, and that 
 is hard enough. The sects here, even they are helping 
 to support the poor old popes, because they think it 
 is right. In old days the sects themselves were 
 persecuted just in the same way by the Church. 
 
 " The Communists go too fast. The people are 
 confused in their minds. They want the people to 
 go forward, and yet they frighten them back. You 
 might as well beat a horse and hold him back at the 
 same time. 
 
 " Of course I know/' he said, " that what the 
 people say is not true. The Communes have nothing 
 to do with religion. They are good enough if they 
 work. But they are very difficult to work. There is 
 one about twenty versts from here. They have two 
 
"NO PETROL, NO MATCHES" 43 
 
 steam tractors there. But the people are always 
 quarrelling. One says to another, ' Whose spade is 
 this ? ' The other says, ' I do not know whom it 
 belongs to.' Each one complains because his neigh- 
 bour is idle. An Artel is very much better than a 
 Commune. There, people have some property of 
 their own, though they have to work together as 
 well." 
 
 Emilianov held a more favourable view of the 
 Agricultural Communes than this. " The old man 
 was quite right," he said. " The people think the 
 Communes are against religion. That is ridiculous. 
 Communes are very good things." 
 
 " What is the advantage of them ? " I asked. 
 
 " The present system of each man having several 
 long strips is a bad one. If one man lets his strip lie 
 fallow it begins to harbour marmots, and that does 
 harm to all his neighbours. In the Pyestravka field 
 (polye) there are many fallow strips. They will spoil 
 the whole harvest. This would never happen in a 
 Commune. If people are not intelligent enough to 
 work a Commune they should start a working Artel 
 (trudovaya Artel}. Some day people will do this. 
 They will go out and build a new village, and live 
 nearer to their work." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 Communists The Military Commissar The Com- 
 munist Party in Ozero Kolchak or the Soviet 
 Government The Peasants' Choice 
 
 THE old man above alluded to was very sore on 
 the subject of Communists especially the local 
 variety. 
 
 " Are many of the peasants Communists ? " I 
 asked him. 
 
 " Communists," he said, " Communists, indeed ! 
 When they had their little scraps of land that were 
 not enough to live on, and had to rent a lot of land 
 from the landlords, they were fine Communists "then ! 
 Practical Communists ! Now they have got it, they 
 are so no longer. They are good enough Com- 
 munists when there are things to be taken some- 
 thing to get. 
 
 " No," he added reflectively, " if all people were 
 true Communists, it would be well. A true Com- 
 munist is one who gives his coat to another. Our 
 Communists call you ' Comrade,' but they are 
 mostly Communists in word, not in act. They say 
 we are all equal, but somehow we are not equal. 
 What do you think of men like our policeman ? He 
 beat a little boy the other day for some tiny fault or 
 other. A pretty sort of Communist ! " 
 
 I hardly felt this was a complete account of the 
 matter, and I made it my business to cultivate the 
 
COMMUNISTS 45 
 
 acquaintance of the official representative of the 
 dominant party the Military Commissar. I had 
 met him first in Fevron's house, a room in which, as 
 I have said, had been requisitioned for his office. 
 The normal organ of local government is, of course, 
 the Village Soviet, but it appears that the Military 
 Commissar had, at the time I was there, extremely 
 wide powers, and could certainly override the 
 Soviet's decisions in some respects. 
 
 This conflict of authorities does not sound so 
 strange to the ears of a Russian as to those of an 
 Englishman. We habitually make the assumption 
 that each authority must have a distinct sphere of 
 competence, not overlapping with that of any other. 
 This, however, is by no means the assumption in 
 Russia. It is quite possible for two authorities to 
 have powers which overlap, and the question of 
 which is to prevail in the last resort is often one to 
 which there is no precise answer. It should be 
 remembered, in connexion with the powers of the 
 Military Commissar, that the Samara district was 
 still under special military control, having been the 
 scene of heavy fighting in 1918-1919, with Czechs, 
 with Kolchak, and with marauding Cossacks. 
 
 The Military Commissar, Karebkin by name, was 
 a comparatively young man, with a fresh clean- 
 shaven face, and a bearing at once soldierly and 
 modest. He was a native of the village, and was the 
 fortunate possessor of a garden or sad with many 
 fruit-trees. His father had planted this, and being 
 a man of enterprise, had also made a raised aqueduct 
 of wood, furnished with a pump, to bring water 
 from the neighbouring lake. Karebkin invited me 
 one day to have tea with him and two young Com- 
 
46 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 munist friends, in the garden, of which he was justly 
 proud. We sat in a sort of cart-shed, open on one 
 side. We were surrounded by a dense cloud of gnats 
 and mosquitoes, but he gave me plenty of cigarettes 
 made of what they called machorka a vegetable 
 which bears little resemblance to tobacco, but is 
 pungent enough to keep the gnats at bay. 
 
 Karebkin told me of his various functions. He 
 was appointed by the military authorities, and con- 
 trolled all military affairs, mobilisation, desertion, 
 support of soldiers' families, accounts, purchase of 
 horses, etc. 
 
 But his functions were much wider. He had also 
 the " political oversight " of all the district (volost), 
 of which Ozero forms part. He was the local orga- 
 niser of the Communist Party. In this capacity he 
 arranged the plays and entertainments which formed 
 part of their propaganda. (I was much struck by 
 the ingenuity of the amateur theatres in several 
 villages.) In addition, he was Chairman of the Com- 
 mission for fighting epidemics. 
 
 Lastly, he had a voice in the distribution of the 
 land. The Soviet carried it out in the first instance, 
 but he was supposed to know the Constitution, and 
 the decrees concerning it ; if the Soviet, in his 
 opinion, did not act in accordance with these, he 
 could suggest alterations, and if they were rejected 
 could refer the matter to the Soviet of the County 
 (uyezd). 
 
 Karebkin told me that in Ozero there were seven 
 full members of the Communist Party. One of 
 these was the priest's daughter. All the Soviet 
 members, except the President, were " non-party." 
 
 It struck me that the Communists were a little 
 
COMMUNISTS 47 
 
 group of active propagandists. They regarded them- 
 selves as the leaven in a great inert lump, and freely 
 admitted the difficulty of their task. They seemed 
 to be doing a good deal to bring life into the village. 
 
 Karebkin himself struck me, not only as moderate 
 in his opinions, but as a man of some tact and judge- 
 ment. Of all the individuals I saw at Ozero he was 
 the one whom it was most easy to understand and 
 to be understood by. He was certainly more Western 
 in his outlook than the rest. 
 
 The Military Commissar in another village was 
 much more flamboyant than Karebkin. " We have 
 a magnificent programme in our schools," he said. 
 " We have a Communist Club with thirty-four 
 members. We have a Young Communists' League 
 with forty members. Our cause is going forward." 
 
 The general attitude of the peasants, so far as I 
 could judge, was that they owed much to the Soviet 
 Government in the matter of the land ; they 
 approved of the " principle of everybody being 
 equal " ; they often talked of the " true " Com- 
 munist as being an ideal sort of person. But they 
 complained bitterly of the absence of necessities, of 
 the compulsory contributions, and the worry of 
 perpetual orders and appeals, often hard to under- 
 stand. They considered that the Government was 
 responsible for all these evils alike, and that the 
 peasant was somehow in a position of inferiority to 
 the townsman. 
 
 And yet, in spite of all these complaints, when the 
 opportunity was offered them to choose between 
 Kolchak on the one side and the Soviet Government 
 on the other, the peasants do not seem to have had 
 much hesitation. 
 
48 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 They would not rise to help the " saviours " of 
 Russia. This was the nearest approach to a declara- 
 tion of democratic opinion on the part of the masses. 
 It was conclusive. They were for the Revolution ; 
 and for the moment the Soviet power was the 
 embodiment of the Revolution. They grumbled and 
 cursed at it ; but when the opportunity was offered 
 to overthrow it, they said " No." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 The Shortage of Manufactured Goods A Government 
 Shop In the Family Bath 
 
 I HAVE already mentioned the old man who 
 summed up the evils of the time in the absence of 
 petrol, matches and grease. This was typical of 
 every conversation I had, with hardly a single excep- 
 tion. Now it was one sort of manufactured goods, 
 now another. Now the shortage was attributed to 
 one cause, and now to another. But the absence of 
 various manufactured articles was the supreme 
 grievance a far greater grievance than any direct 
 interference of the Government, though this, too, 
 formed the subject of much complaint. 
 
 I learned to expect, at the beginning of almost 
 every conversation, a long list of the articles which 
 could not be obtained. The list varied according to 
 the particular needs or occupation of the speaker. I 
 had better give a comprehensive list at once. The 
 articles most frequently mentioned were ploughs, 
 scythes, wheels, tyres, nails ; kerosene, paraffin, 
 soap, grease, glass, cloth, boots and paper. Medical 
 necessaries were also often mentioned. The doctor 
 at Ozero, I was told, " has nothing but his ther- 
 mometer." There was a special grievance about salt, 
 because the peasants said it could be obtained in 
 Russia at no great distance (near Uralsk), and they 
 ought to be allowed to go and get it. 
 
 R.V. D 
 
50 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 The whole agricultural life of the village was 
 hampered at every turn by the lack of these goods. 
 Such goods as were available were supplied in Ozero 
 through a Government shop. There had formerly 
 been a Co-operative Store, called the " Self-Help 
 Consumers' Society." This name was still retained, 
 but the shop was, in fact, the Government shop. It 
 was supplied, as far as it could be supplied at all, 
 from the central shop of the " region " at Pyestravka, 
 which in its turn was supplied by the central " Supply 
 Committee " for the Samara " Government " or 
 province. 
 
 By a decree of March, 1919, so I was told, every one 
 had access to the store on equal terms, and shares 
 were no longer taken up. 
 
 On one occasion I happened to be passing the shop 
 when a new lot of supplies had just come in. It was 
 packed with people as tight as it would hold, and 
 there was an excited crowd outside. As each 
 fortunate purchaser came out, he or she was sur- 
 rounded by a group of enquirers, feverishly anxious 
 to see what had been bought, and at what price. I 
 saw people coming out with boots, shoes, whet- 
 stones for grinding, gloves for rough winter work, 
 etc. Most of the articles, however, were things of 
 lesser importance cups, teapots, spoons, etc. Of 
 the real necessities there were pathetically few. 
 
 That evening, after a hot day, it struck me that 
 now was the time to sample the family bath. 
 
 I had supposed that the Russian peasant was 
 dirty ; but in Ozero, though he does not succeed in 
 keeping his house clean, he certainly makes great 
 efforts to keep his body so. Every house of any size 
 has a little round mud hut at the far end of the 
 
SHORTAGE OF MANUFACTURED GOODS 51 
 
 dvor, and in it are the fireplace and large pan which 
 constitute the bath. Emilianov told me that most 
 people wash once a week, if not twice ; and oftener 
 if they are doing dirty work. 
 
 I asked him if I could use the bath. " With all my 
 heart/' he said, " but Maria (his wife) has been 
 shearing the sheep to-day, and she is in it just now. 
 But no matter ; my married daughter lives close by ; 
 we will walk along there, and she will let you use 
 hers." 
 
 The daughter's house was about 100 yards along 
 the street, on the opposite side. The fire was alight 
 already, and she ushered me to the door of the hut, 
 giving me a second pan with cold water, which she 
 put on the floor. Strangest of all, after apologising 
 for having no soap, she gave me a tin pot containing 
 about a quart of milk. " This is almost as good," 
 she said. " Pour it over your head, and rub yourself 
 with it." 
 
 The thought of thus wasting the precious liquid, 
 for the want of which the babies in Moscow were 
 pining away, seemed at first sight an outrage. I 
 seemed to be indulging in a luxury as guilty as those 
 of the later Roman Empire. But I soon reflected 
 that there were no means of conveying it to Moscow, 
 or even to Samara, and went ahead with my washing. 
 
 A large cauldron of water was simmering on the 
 fire. At the side of it was a high shelf or seat, about 
 4 feet from the ground. It was insufferably hot. 
 According to my instructions, I was to shut the 
 door, throw plenty of water on the fire, climb up on 
 to the seat, into the thickest of the steam, and there 
 beat myself with a small birch rod to make myself 
 hotter still. Had I attempted to carry out this 
 
 D 2 
 
52 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 programme I doubt if I should have lived to tell the 
 tale. I did not. I remained below, and left the 
 door ajar. Emilianov's daughter hovered about in 
 attendance, without the prudery of pretending that 
 she did not see what was going on, but with perfect 
 naturalness and ease. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 The Food Requisition "Why don't you pay up?" 
 
 I HAVE mentioned above that the interferences of 
 the Government aroused much murmuring. The 
 chief of these, of course, was the direct levying by 
 the Government of contributions in kind assessed 
 (in theory) according to the surplus (islishek) left 
 over after the peasants' own needs were met. 
 
 In Ozero that year contributions of produce and 
 services for the needs of the State had been made as 
 follows : 
 
 (a) Compulsory contribution of grain for the civil 
 population 36,000 poods ; 1 
 
 (b) Compulsory contribution of sheep and hay for 
 the Army ; 
 
 (c) Voluntary contributions for various purposes ; 
 
 (d) Mobilisation of horses, carts and labour to 
 transport the produce. 
 
 The amount of the compulsory contribution from 
 each village was fixed by the " Regional Supply 
 Committee " (raionni prodovolstvenni komitet) at 
 Pyestravka, the chief town of the " region. " The 
 produce was collected by the Village Soviet. It had 
 to be conveyed to Pyestravka (about fifteen miles), 
 and sometimes as far as Samara (sixty miles). The 
 
 1 A pood is just over 36 Ibe. 
 
54 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 total demand for grain was 50,000 poods the 
 amount actually contributed being somewhat less. 
 A new demand had recently been made for the whole 
 remaining stock of grain, leaving only three poods 
 per head until the next harvest. Payment was made 
 at fixed prices : wheat, 44 to 49 roubles per pood ; 
 rve > 34 roubles per pood ; hay, 12 roubles per pood. 
 (Horses were purchased direct by the military and 
 paid for at market prices ; I myself saw prices 
 ranging from 80,000 to 180,000 roubles being paid. 
 An officer and some forty men had come over to do 
 the buying, which I watched from the steps of 
 Fevron's house.) 
 
 Villages which made their contributions completely 
 and regularly were rewarded by preferential treat- 
 ment in the matter of manufactured goods. 
 
 The Samara Government was one of the " bread- 
 governments," i.e., was expected to send away a 
 large surplus, and this no doubt accounted for the 
 exceptional demands made on it. 
 
 I often tried, in my small way, to put the point of 
 view of the towns. " You have not seen the towns 
 as I have/' I said. " If you had seen how thin the 
 people are there you would give up your corn 
 readily." 
 
 " Yes, yes, we are ready to give," they would say. 
 " When they come to us and ask us to give for the 
 starving, we give. There was a Commissar here 
 from Moscow not long ago. He had a meeting and 
 made a speech. He appealed for the children. 
 Everybody gave then." 
 
 " But all the townspeople, not only the children, 
 are more hungry than you are." 
 
 " Yes, we know ; but they ask too much. It is 
 
THE FOOD REQUISITION 55 
 
 unreasonable. Besides, they always come at the 
 wrong time." 
 
 " Well, you don't have to pay taxes, as you used 
 to do." 
 
 " No, that is true. We should be very well off 
 now if only we could sell our corn freely. If we could 
 go and sell it where we liked, we should get big 
 prices not a wretched forty or fifty roubles, but 
 thousands of roubles." 
 
 At Ozero there had been none of those conflicts 
 with the military over the food collection, of which 
 we used to hear so much in our newspapers. I was 
 told, however, of one village in the neighbourhood 
 where a disturbance had occurred, and several 
 peasants had lost their lives. " It was a nasty 
 business (grazno, dirty)," my informant added. 1 
 
 1 In March, 1921, the " new economic policy" of the Soviet 
 Government was inaugurated at the Tenth All-Russian Congress 
 of Soviets. On April yth a decree was promulgated which 
 abolished the State monopoly of grain and other agricultural 
 products, and instituted in its stead the " tax in kind." This tax 
 is levied in the form of a comparatively low percentage of the 
 products of each farm, intended to supply the needs of the Red 
 Army and the workers in the towns. The percentage levied is 
 graduated according to the size of the farm (small farms paying 
 a relatively small percentage) and the number of people and live 
 stock to be supported on it. The supplies remaining after the 
 tax has been paid may be disposed of as the peasant pleases. 
 In theory this " free trade " is confined to the limits of the 
 " local agricultural district." The " tax in kind " is regarded as a 
 provisional measure. Ultimately it is hoped that food will be 
 obtained in a normal way in exchange for manufactured goods. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 The Meeting of the Ozero Soviet The Lost Receipt 
 The Soviet President 
 
 FORTUNATELY I was able to attend, one evening, a 
 meeting of the Village Soviet. The experience was 
 illuminating, as well as full of humour. 
 
 The great subject which was exercising the mind 
 of the Soviet was the question of certain sheep which 
 had been sent to Pugachev, the Uyezd town, as part 
 of the last requisition claimed from the village of 
 Ozero. The villagers said they had sent thirty-seven 
 sheep in excess of the number demanded. A further 
 requisition was now being made, and the authorities 
 had not given credit for the thirty-seven previously 
 sent in excess. A Commissar, their representative, 
 had come to Ozero to argue the case with the local 
 Soviet. He was evidently regarded with suspicion, 
 not unmingled with fear. In the attitude of the 
 village towards him I saw reflected the whole conflict 
 between narrow village patriotism on the one hand, 
 and a highly rational, but unsympathetic centralisa- 
 tion on the other. 
 
 The Soviet house was a one-storey building with 
 three rooms, raised 3 or 4 feet above the ground, 
 and approached by a flight of wooden steps. The 
 handrails which flanked these steps were the chosen 
 resort, whenever any interesting business was going 
 
MEETING OF THE OZERO SOVIET 57 
 
 forward, of as many of the villagers as could possibly 
 sit on them. There was animated discussion in 
 progress as Petrov and I entered. But it was nothing 
 to the excitement in the room where the meeting 
 was. 
 
 There were benches along three of the walls, and 
 on one of these we were squeezed in. At the table 
 in a corner sat the President of the Soviet, with the 
 Commissar on his left. The majority were standing. 
 The room was packed and hot. The Commissar, 
 cool and collected, with his satchel of documents, 
 reminded me of a solicitor in a county court at home. 
 His case was simple. " If you sent these sheep/' he 
 said, " you must have had a receipt. Produce it." 
 Consternation and confusion followed. The receipt 
 was not forthcoming. The President personally 
 searched the drawers and the cupboard. Some said 
 it had been lost ; others that it had never been 
 given. 
 
 A great debate thereupon arose. The general 
 public were present, as well as the twenty- two 
 members of the Soviet, and were allowed to speak. 
 Almost every one had a turn, but order was, on the 
 whole, maintained, and the discussion was practical 
 and businesslike in the extreme. Proposition suc- 
 ceeded proposition, and amendment amendment. 
 Some were for giving in and sending the full number 
 of sheep demanded ; some were for sending the 
 number demanded, minus thirty-seven ; some for 
 sending a deputation to present the case of the 
 village. The heat grew more intense, the smells 
 more pungent. It neared 10 p.m. and I saw no 
 prospect of the discussion finishing. I suggested to 
 Petrov that we should slip out. He assented with a 
 
58 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 sigh of relief, and the conclusion of the debate 
 " remains conjectural to this hour. 
 
 A curious instance of the variety of the Soviet's 
 functions occurred one day. I met the President 
 hurrying round the village with a worried expression 
 on his face. A Commissar had just arrived from the 
 Commissariat of Public Health ; his business was 
 the collection of medicinal herbs ! The President 
 was busily engaged in searching for some refugees 
 presumably some of the great army of refugees from 
 the Polish border, who were transplanted to the 
 Volga region during the War on the ground that 
 these were the only people with nothing to do, and 
 they might as well be employed in collecting the 
 herbs. 
 
 The President, Chetvergov, was the type of man 
 that one would expect from his story. He was 
 short and broad, with red hair and beard, and a 
 bullet head that was always thrust forward. He 
 gave me the impression of being stupid, but obstinate 
 when once his course was chosen. One could easily 
 fancy him taking the orders of the authorities to 
 " run " the Committee of Poverty, and doing it 
 doggedly, according to his lights. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 The Schoolmaster The Priest Tipping the 
 Wrong Man 
 
 ONE day I had tea with the schoolmaster. The 
 school is held in the principal room of his house, and 
 recalled the English village school of 100 years ago, 
 as depicted by George Morland and such-like 
 painters. As it was summer, when no schooling goes 
 on, the benches were piled up and filled about half 
 the room. The chief object was the schoolmaster's 
 baby, suspended in a kind of hammock with a string 
 attached to one side of it, so that you could swing 
 it from side to side without moving from your 
 seat. 
 
 The schoolmaster, like every one else in the educa- 
 tional world, deplored the shortage of books, the 
 shortage of equipment, the shortage of teachers. 
 " How can you expect the children to come to me ? 
 I only get one hundred and sixty-five." (There must 
 have been, I estimate, some 700 children of school 
 age in the village.) "It is not good enough to 
 attract them. Besides, most of them have no boots 
 to come in." 
 
 But unlike the peasants, the schoolmaster did not 
 blame the Government for the shortage of the things 
 needed for his profession. " The Government's 
 programme is very fine," he said, " but they put 
 
60 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 little of it into practice. It is not because they will 
 not, but because they cannot. They have to accept 
 as teachers men and women without education." 
 
 " What about the old priest's school ? " 
 
 " It was not much good, but it was better than 
 nothing. I think it is a mistake of the Government 
 to stop such schools. There used to be Zemstvo 
 schools as well. They are stopped, too. There is 
 only one kind now those under the Commissariat 
 of Public Instruction. All schools are called ' Labour 
 Schools' now." 
 
 "Is schooling compulsory ? " 
 
 " No, but it is going to be." 
 
 " When will the new programme come into 
 force ? " 
 
 " I don't know. The whole thing is a kasha (a 
 kind of porridge, i.e., a jumble). The staff here 
 ought to be five ; it is only two. There are less 
 children coming now than last year. Still, there are 
 more than there were before the Revolution." 
 
 " What about classes for adults ? " 
 
 He smiled. " That is coming, too. It is all in the 
 programme. There are plenty of such classes in the 
 towns, but it is only a beginning, even there. Here 
 there are none." 
 
 Walking back from the schoolmaster's house I 
 met the priest or " pope." He was shuffling along 
 the village street in the dust, with a rake over his 
 shoulder. Except for a hat of somewhat peculiar 
 " wide-awake " shape, I should not have distin- 
 guished him from a layman. He wore a long, light- 
 coloured dust-coat, and the usual battered top boots. 
 He was in fact coming back from his laborious day 
 on his land, which he cultivates since the Revolu- 
 
THE SCHOOLMASTER THE PRIEST 61 
 
 tion like any other peasant. He was a kindly, 
 gentle old man, of the simplest peasant type. 
 
 He was afterwards good enough to visit me at 
 Emilianov's. " I used in old days/' he said, " to 
 carry on the only school in the village, and I had 
 nearly as many pupils as the schoolmaster has now. 
 But the Soviet Government does not trust priests." 
 
 He seemed to be fairly liberal in his ideas of 
 religion a fact due, Emilianov told me, to the 
 presence of so many " sectaries " in the neighbour- 
 hood and perhaps to the fact, which I have 
 already mentioned, that these " sectaries " have even 
 helped the impoverished Orthodox priests in their 
 distress. He encourages people to read the Bible, 
 though very few do so except the Molokani. 
 
 I asked him what he thought of Tolstoy. He 
 replied with some impatience, " I can't understand 
 why people make such a fuss about him. All that 
 he says is simply taken out of the Gospels/' 
 
 Curiously enough, the daughter of the priest is 
 one of the very few Communists in Ozero. She was 
 away at the University at Samara, studying for the 
 medical profession. 
 
 I must not forget, while speaking of the priest, to 
 mention a little incident which took place in the 
 church. I had wandered in early one morning, 
 about 7 a.m., to see if anything was going on. I 
 found a baby was being christened. The corner of 
 the chapel which was used as the baptistery was very 
 dark, and after the ceremony was over and we all 
 began pushing our way out, a man beside me sud- 
 denly edged up to me in a rather nervous manner 
 and pressed a whole sheaf of paper roubles into my 
 hand. After a second's surprise I realised what had 
 
62 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 happened. This was the fond father of the baby. 
 He had mistaken me for the verger or some other 
 functionary, on whom he wished to bestow a tip. 
 I never before felt our common humanity in such a 
 flash. " One touch of Nature makes the whole 
 world kin." 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 My " Arrest and Imprisonment " An Unopened 
 Letter Farewell to the Emilianov Family 
 
 ONE fine Sunday morning I received from the 
 " Extraordinary Commission " at Samara a some- 
 what peremptory summons to return. The " Mili- 
 zioner " or militiaman from Pyestravka, where there 
 was a telegraph and telephone, had brought it 
 over, acting on instructions received from Samara. 
 Thereby hangs a tale ; and as this little incident 
 gave rise to a sensational story of my " arrest 
 and imprisonment " a Bolshevik atrocity, in fact, 
 leading eventually to an interchange of telegrams 
 between the Moscow Foreign Office and the Russian 
 delegation in London I had better record what 
 happened. 
 
 To do this, I must revert to a somewhat earlier 
 stage in my travels. 
 
 I have already mentioned the obstacles I had to 
 overcome in order to realise my plan of getting away 
 into the country. The Soviet authorities had under- 
 taken to convey the Labour delegation down the 
 Volga, and no doubt this gave them trouble enough, 
 since they left us perfectly free to stop wherever we 
 liked, without notice. We were, in effect, in com- 
 mand of the steamer, although there were many 
 others, including officials, inspectors and so forth, 
 also on board. But the authorities had not bar- 
 
64 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 gained for our shooting off at a tangent by ourselves 
 in addition. In my case, a little suspicion might 
 have been pardonable. It was not only that a vague 
 desire to see the country must have seemed an in- 
 sufficient motive for such exceptional efforts ; it 
 happened also that the area I wanted to poke about 
 in was under military control, having been the scene, 
 until shortly before, of much fighting. 
 
 My real reason for choosing it was partly that it 
 was at the most distant point that I could hope to 
 reach, and partly that I had heard much of it from 
 Quaker friends who had been doing relief work in 
 another part of the same province. But I could 
 hardly expect men in the throes of a revolutionary 
 war to believe such a tale. 
 
 To cut a long story short, I did succeed in obtaining 
 the necessary permit from General Baltiski, the 
 Military Commandant of the South Eastern or 
 Turkestan front. But it was necessary also, techni- 
 cally, to obtain the approval of the Samara Soviet, 
 or rather its " Presidium " the chairman, secretary, 
 etc. which acts as its executive in day-to-day 
 affairs. And the " Presidium " had been in touch 
 with M. Losovski, a prominent member of the All- 
 Russian Council of Trade Unions, who was with us 
 on the steamer, and was, I suspected, opposed to my 
 going. 
 
 I had to submit a written request to the Soviet. 
 A few minutes before the steamer was due to proceed 
 on her journey, towards evening, the reply arrived. 
 The reply might be a refusal, I reflected, and then 
 all my efforts, and my military permit as well, would 
 be wasted. What was I to do ? It was time for a 
 quick decision. 
 
MY "ARREST AND IMPRISONMENT" 65 
 
 I may now make a confession which the lapse of 
 time has rendered innocuous, and which Losovski 
 and the Samara Chairman, if they should ever hear 
 of it, will forgive I slipped the Soviet's reply into 
 my pocket, unopened. 
 
 Seizing my bag, I had just time to escape by the 
 lower gangway, as the ropes were loosed. Losovski 
 was on the upper deck, looking over the rail. He 
 shouted to me that I had not received the Soviet's 
 permission. I shouted back that I had got the 
 General's. By this time the current had caught the 
 steamer and she was on the move. " You must go 
 back to Moscow at once," he yelled. His fury grew 
 as the distance between us widened. I stood on the 
 rickety wooden pier, with my hands in my pockets, 
 and tried to look grave. It must have been most 
 painful for him. At last she disappeared into the 
 twilight, and I stood alone. 
 
 Thus it came about that I reached Ozero, as I 
 have described at the beginning of this narrative. 
 And thus it was that, on the Sunday morning in 
 question, I received not at all to my surprise the 
 peremptory summons to which I have alluded. 
 
 When I received the summons, I bethought me of 
 the communication from the Samara Soviet, which 
 lay, still unopened, in my pocket book. I took it 
 out, tore the envelope, and read it. It was, as I had 
 suspected, a refusal of my request. 
 
 It read as follows : 
 
 "Heard: A deposition of the English subject, 
 Citizen Buxton, with regard to the granting to him 
 of the right of temporary residence within the limits 
 of the Samara Government. Resolved : Taking into 
 
 R.V. E 
 
66 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 consideration : (i) That peace with England has not 
 yet been concluded ; (2) That according to an order of 
 the People's Commissary for Foreign Affairs, questions 
 of granting rights of residence to foreign subjects 
 within the confines of the Russian Socialist Federative 
 Soviet Republic may not be settled by the local 
 authorities without special warrant from the Centre ; 
 (3) That owing to the disrepair of the telegraph 
 apparatus it is impossible in such a short time to 
 communicate with the Centre the request of 
 Citizen Buxton IS REFUSED." 
 
 I made no haste to move, but consulted several 
 of my new acquaintances. Chetvergov, President of 
 the Soviet, was very serious about it. He felt his 
 importance at stake ; I must return at once. 
 Emilianov was critical. He read the document with 
 care, and was, on the whole, for ignoring the whole 
 business. He put up the good legal point that, as I 
 had not asked for the " right of residence " 
 (zhitelstva) at all, the refusal of such right was no 
 refusal of the right to travel. 
 
 Petrov at last proposed a compromise. We 
 would get a carriage, drive over to Pyestravka, the 
 nearest town where there was a telegraph and 
 telephone, and consult the General. This we did in 
 the afternoon. On arrival, we found two telegrams 
 awaiting us. One was from the General himself, 
 urging me to return as soon as convenient. The 
 other was from the Extraordinary Commission at 
 Samara, going back, apparently, on its previous 
 decision ; it not only permitted me, but " invited " 
 me, to stay in Ozero as long as I liked ! What led 
 up to these changes I do not know, nor is it a matter 
 of much interest. 
 
MY "ARREST AND IMPRISONMENT" 67 
 
 As the General had shown me great kindness, I 
 did not like to ignore his request, and accordingly 
 decided to leave Ozero on the following day (instead 
 of the day after, as I had intended), and make my 
 way towards Samara. 
 
 The farewell was a sad one. I do not know whether 
 I captured the hearts of the Emilianov family, but 
 they had certainly wound their way into mine. They 
 entirely refused to accept .any money, though it is 
 quite customary to give it on such occasions. I felt 
 I must make what return I could, so I left behind 
 for Emilianov an old spare suit a gift which was 
 hailed with cries of delight. On Maria I bestowed 
 a yet more sensational gift. Housewives will realise 
 Maria's feelings after going short of washing 
 materials for years when I tell them that it was a 
 packet of " Lux." 
 
 All the family and most of their neighbours 
 crowded round the little cart, in which Petrov and 
 I reclined, rather than sat, awkwardly bolstered up 
 by the usual sacks of hay. These occasions must 
 always be sad, for the conventional " au revoir " 
 (of which the familiar Russian da-svidania is a 
 literal translation) is a mockery under such circum- 
 stances. It is a thousand to one against. 
 
 E 2 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 Wire Entanglements Petrov's Peculiarities 
 Was I spied upon? 
 
 THE journey back, though we took a different 
 route and saw several other villages, led us through 
 similar experiences to those of the journey out. It 
 would be tedious, perhaps, to relate them. 
 
 I will mention one, however. This was the dis- 
 covery of traces of the civil war of 1918 and 1919, 
 when the land had been ravaged, first by the Czecho- 
 slovaks, then by Kolchak, and then by the plunder- 
 ing Cossack bands, which took advantage of the 
 anarchy following upon the repulse of Kolchak. Of 
 these military operations I learned much afterwards 
 from General Baltiski ; just now I could note their 
 effects in a great line of trenches and double barbed- 
 wire entanglements. It stretched, as far as I could 
 trace it, somewhere about seven miles along a huge 
 crest of the downs. From one point of view, there 
 was something even more appalling in this sight 
 than in the terrible wreckage of the Northern French 
 towns and railway junctions. In this land, which 
 was starving for almost everything in which, 
 above all, the products of the highly developed 
 industry of Western countries were craved for, and 
 every spare ounce of Russian labour-power should 
 have been devoted to bringing them where they were 
 needed, these miles of barbed wire made perhaps 
 
WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS 69 
 
 in Warrington, Lanes had been conveyed, by an 
 infinity of patient labour in manufacture and 
 transport, to these remote and lonely places. There 
 I saw them lying uselessly not even to rot away 
 into oblivion, but to endure perhaps to puzzle some 
 Russian archaeologist a thousand years hence. 
 
 Apart from this, there was nothing very new to 
 record. 
 
 Over all there was spread the same brilliance of 
 light. It gives a curious unity to all my memories 
 of this time in the country. The lines and colours, 
 never changing except at dawn and twilight, 
 impressed themselves upon my mind till they became 
 ineffaceable. 
 
 The same immense outlines of the steppe. The 
 same interminable distances, less deceptive now to 
 the more accustomed eye. The same boundless 
 expanses of pale green and pale blue, in which the 
 steely grey of an occasional lake, or of the Irghiz 
 river when we crossed it, came as a real relief. 
 
 The monotony of that landscape, and of the 
 unmeasured extension of it which the imagination 
 conjures up to supplement the vision became more 
 and more oppressive. The many little novelties 
 which at first relieved it, had now become familiar. 
 There is an awful sadness about the land of the 
 steppes. I had never been in such great spaces 
 before except at sea, and there one has many 
 companions close at hand. Our only one was the 
 driver, who sat in front of us, hunched into a more 
 or less circular shape, indifferent to time, chewing 
 sunflower seeds one by one. 
 
 I ceased to look round me, and took to teaching 
 Petrov English. He had never met an Englishman, 
 
70 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 but had been an industrious reader of English 
 poetry, and his language was exclusively literary. 
 He would call a horse a " steed/' a girl a " damsel," 
 and so forth. 
 
 Petrov was a charming character friendly and 
 obliging, and gentleness itself. He was a convinced 
 Pacifist, which gave a humorous turn to his 
 appearance ; for as he was a telegraphist, and the 
 telegraph was under the military, he had obtained 
 a khaki uniform, and wore the aspect of a man 
 at arms a " warrior," as he himself innocently 
 described it. It bulged loosely around his slender 
 and rather stooping form ; while the peaked cap, a 
 world too large, sat unnaturally on the back of his 
 head, making way in front for a large curl of fair, 
 silky hair. This was matched by a flowing fair 
 moustache. 
 
 Like so many Russians, Petrov had a passion for 
 knowing about other countries and other peoples. 
 He was a keen internationalist, and while opposed 
 to Communism in theory, he supported the Third 
 International as the one great hope of drawing man- 
 kind together. He was a fluent Esperantist, and on 
 a later occasion (at Nijni Novgorod) I heard him 
 deliver an admirable speech in that language to the 
 local " group." So keen was he on the language 
 that he had abandoned his Russian name in private 
 communications, and called himself by the Esperanto 
 name, " Pec"enego." He signed himself by this name 
 on the photo he gave me at parting. 
 
 One of his other notable characteristics was an 
 enthusiasm for bathing, which I have never seen 
 surpassed. We could not pass a creek or a stagnant 
 pool, more than a foot deep, without Petrov hurling 
 
WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS 71 
 
 off the hot uniform and immersing himself in the 
 mud with inexpressible delight. 
 
 It occurs to me at this point that some ingenious 
 reader, deeply versed in the wiles of the Bolsheviks, 
 may think that Petrov was sent with me to control 
 my movements. Well, for aught I know, he may 
 have been ; though I do not think he made any 
 attempt to perform the task. If he did, he certainly 
 performed it exceedingly ill. 
 
 This moment (while Petrov and I bump painfully 
 along in our springless cart for many a weary mile) 
 is as good an opportunity as any other for a word or 
 two on the question whether my movements, here 
 or elsewhere, were in fact restricted with a view to 
 preventing me from learning the truth. 
 
 I came to Russia very suspicious on this point. 
 Numerous Russian friends had warned me minutely 
 how some one would be foisted upon me in the guise 
 of a " friend," a " secretary," or an " interpreter," 
 with the purpose of misleading me. I was therefore 
 keenly on the look-out for such subtleties and 
 subterfuges. 
 
 Of course there may have been some very smart 
 Scotland Yard work going on behind my back ; 
 but I have had considerable experience in the 
 Balkans of being " shadowed " and I am personally 
 convinced that my movements were entirely un- 
 restricted, both in the country and the town. The 
 truth was of a less flattering nature than some 
 travellers have imagined. It was simply that my 
 movements were not considered important enough 
 to require these elaborate attentions. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 A stern, unbending Priest His Concern for my 
 Soul His Defiance of the Government 
 
 ON the evening of the first day we arrived at a 
 certain village, whose name I will not give, where we 
 were put up in a large and airy house. After we had 
 washed and had tea, I learned that this was the 
 house where the village priest lodged. 
 
 The house was evidently that of a " rich " peasant. 
 The dvor behind was large and beautifully tidy. The 
 veranda at the back of the house (on which Petrov 
 and I slept that night) was not narrow and grubby 
 like that of Emilianov, but spacious and clean. It 
 had a swept and polished floor, and was furnished 
 with a table. The house was also a great relief 
 comparatively free from flies. 
 
 I soon noticed, however, that the house was dis- 
 tinguished by something more unusual a kind of 
 hush about all its proceedings, lending to them a 
 certain dignity. This, it was clear, was connected 
 with the presence of the priest. When I expressed a 
 wish to see him, the hostess pointed in a rather 
 solemn manner to the door into the inner room. 
 " He is busy," she said, " but no doubt he will see 
 you later on. Please remember not to smoke when 
 you go in there/' 
 
 Later on, she announced that he was ready to 
 
A STERN, UNBENDING PRIEST 73 
 
 receive us. Petrov and I entered the room, which 
 was empty. We sat down at a little table on which 
 was a tiny oil lamp. The priest, we now saw, 
 occupied a room opening out of this one. He kept 
 us^waiting a little, much as Cabinet Ministers do 
 when they wish to impress you with their importance. 
 Then his door opened and revealed a more brightly 
 lighted room within, with its eikons and its books. 
 He came swiftly towards us a small man with small 
 features with the most perfect ease and self- 
 assurance, and with a real, though somewhat cold 
 courtesy. Every movement seemed studied, and 
 the impression was deepened by the meticulous care 
 with which his hair and beard were tended. This, 
 of course, is common with priests of the Orthodox 
 Church. One may smile at it, but no one who has 
 not seen it can realise how beautiful a man's hair can 
 be made to look, if only he takes enough trouble 
 about it. 
 
 I suspect that his deliberate and rather distant 
 behaviour did much to foster the atmosphere of 
 reverence with which he was surrounded. 
 
 I plunged, in my usual blundering way, into 
 politics. I hoped to learn how the Revolution, in 
 his opinion, had affected the Church. He answered 
 me frigidly. " It has not affected the Church in the 
 slightest degree/' he said. I soon began to see what 
 he meant. To ask how the Revolution affected 
 the Church was like asking how the night mists 
 affected the moon ; for him She rode, serene and 
 changeless, above all the trivialities of political 
 turmoil. 
 
 I pressed him to explain himself, and he admitted 
 there were troubles about money, prohibitions as to 
 
74 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 teaching, infidel propaganda, and so forth. " But 
 these are small matters/' he added. " The Church 
 goes on as before." 
 
 He was not going to let me conduct the conversa- 
 tion ; and dismissing politics with a gesture of 
 contempt, he passed to the things of real interest. 
 He began to speak more sympathetically than 
 before. " I wish to talk about religion," he said. 
 
 I have always regretted that I did not rise to the 
 occasion more adequately. I was desperately tired 
 and a little bit irritated, though I hope I concealed 
 it. Then my Russian was quite inadequate to such 
 a conversation, though I knew enough of the usual 
 jargon of politics to get on with that subject. How- 
 ever, the priest drew me along, whether I would or 
 no ; and Petrov not only interpreted, but discussed 
 the talk with me afterwards, so that I feel clear 
 enough as to its purport. We touched on many 
 topics, but the problem round which the priest's 
 mind was working all the time was the state of my 
 soul. 
 
 Priest. " To what Church do you belong ? " 
 
 Self. " I was brought up in the Church of 
 England, but afterwards I became a Quaker." 
 
 P. " Why did you leave your Church ? " 
 
 5. " Because I could not believe all that I was 
 told in it. I wanted to be more free. Do you know 
 who the Quakers are ? " 
 
 P. " Yes, I know all about them. They are good 
 enough people. But that is not the point. The 
 Church of England is the Church of your country, 
 just as our Church is the authorised Church here. 
 You ought not to have left it. It is dangerous, very 
 dangerous, for your soul." 
 
A STERN, UNBENDING PRIEST 75 
 
 S. " I cannot be always worrying about my own 
 soul." 
 
 P. " But it is the business of religion to save 
 people's souls." 
 
 S. "I think it is the business of religion to save 
 humanity, and people should think about that, not 
 about their own souls." 
 
 P. " No, you are wrong. It is the only thing that 
 matters. If each man thinks about saving his own 
 soul, then humanity as a whole will be saved." 
 
 The priest dwelt much on this theme. At last he 
 rose to go, as princes rise when they wish to bring to 
 an end an interview with a subject. 
 
 " Good-bye," he said, " I shall pray for you. 
 And " with real pity in his voice " I hope I shall 
 meet you in heaven." Then he added, as if it was 
 rather a struggle for him to say it, " But I do not 
 think that I shall." And with that he took leave of 
 us, closing, quietly but firmly behind him, the door 
 of his inner room. 
 
 I was repelled at first by this singular man, with 
 his stern, unbending dogmatism. But as I thought 
 over his attitude, and as I learned more of the state 
 of affairs in that village, my feelings began to change 
 towards admiration. It was evident that he was 
 leading and inspiring the whole village. He was no 
 Vicar of Bray. He was an open counter-revolu- 
 tionary no doubt a formidable opponent of the 
 new regime. 
 
 One of the first things I was told by the peasant 
 who drove us on the next stage of our journey, was 
 that very few would send their children to the 
 village school. I asked why. 
 
 " It is a godless school," he replied. " They do 
 
76 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 not teach the laws of God. They teach only dances 
 and songs." 
 
 But the priest was not going to let it remain so if 
 he could help it. Though it was strictly forbidden 
 for priests to teach in the public schools, he was 
 flatly defying the law. Three days a week he was 
 entering the school and giving his religious teaching 
 there. It could not be done in the dark. The 
 Military Commissar of that village was not doing 
 his duty if he did not report the fact to the Soviet 
 authorities. The priest was risking his liberty and 
 his livelihood. 
 
 I noticed another sign which, I should conjecture, 
 was not unconnected with the clerical atmosphere of 
 the village I mean the presence of beggars. I never 
 saw one in any of the other villages I visited. Here 
 there were quite a number, haunting the neighbour- 
 hood of the Church, appealing to the love of Christ 
 plucking your heartstrings as only Russian beggars 
 can. 
 
 After breakfast on the veranda, in the delicious 
 coolness of the early morning, we made ready to go. 
 Our cart, however, was surrounded at once by quite 
 a crowd of people, who had taken this opportunity, 
 it seemed, of organising a kind of deputation. They 
 were, I understood, some of the " notables " of the 
 village. And they wished to lay their case before 
 us, they said. 
 
 " We are living under a Government of brutes 
 (zvyerini). It is like Catherine the Great's time. We 
 are no better than slaves/' 
 
 Their expressions far exceeded, in their open- 
 ness and vigour, anything that I had heard in other 
 villages. 
 
A STERN, UNBENDING PRIEST 77 
 
 I seemed to see behind it all the stern little priest, 
 fighting his fight with cool determination, with his 
 eyes open, with his goal clear before him, indifferent 
 to the personal consequences. I felt that, if he 
 would have sent me to the stake with equanimity, he 
 would have gone to it with just the same equanimity 
 himself. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 The Clerk-Captain His Plans for reviving Country 
 Life Ovid among the Goths 
 
 I SHOULD, anyhow, have placed my next interview 
 side by side with the last, for the sake of the striking 
 contrast which it presented. But as a matter of 
 fact, it happened next. At the village (Vyazovka) 
 where I stopped to rest on the next day, I fell in 
 with a man who stood for the twentieth century as 
 definitely as the priest had stood for the Middle Ages. 
 I will call him the Clerk-Captain, for I never ascer- 
 tained his name. 
 
 He was stationed at Vyazovka in command of 
 some 200 soldiers, whose business it was to collect 
 stores for the Army on the Turkestan front. He was 
 in charge of this particular station or etape. They 
 had to get together, by hook or by crook, cattle, 
 sheep, pigs, hay and potatoes, and forward them to 
 the front. (Horses were bought, as I have described 
 above, in the open market.) 
 
 He had been here a whole year, and it was deadly 
 dull. His handsome young face, with short, curly 
 brown beard, positively beamed with joy as he wel- 
 comed us at his headquarters, and afterwards led 
 us round to tea at his house. It was not long before 
 we knew his whole story, which came out in a flood 
 of conversation. 
 
 He had been a clerk in a commercial office, with 
 
THE CLERK-CAPTAIN 79 
 
 no particular interest in anything but business, when 
 the War swept him into the Army. But he was a 
 man who could not be idle, and he was full of public 
 spirit. Planted down in this remote spot, he was 
 going to make things hum. 
 
 He had therefore started a great scheme for the 
 establishment of an " Artel " just like the city 
 clerk at home when he takes to a country life, and 
 tries to draw his neighbours into co-operative 
 societies, and " promote the small holdings move- 
 ment." 
 
 An " Artel," strictly speaking, is an association 
 of workers who jointly and mutually guarantee the 
 performance of certain work. As applied to agri- 
 culture, it means an association, generally of " poor " 
 peasants, who hold a certain amount of land and 
 stock in common, dividing the produce equally ; 
 but who have at the same time a certain amount of 
 private property, which they work in the ordinary 
 way. As a rule, they build a new village or group of 
 houses, in which they all live side by side. 
 
 An " Artel " is vaguely regarded as having a 
 " Communist " tendency, though not so much so as 
 an agricultural " commune," which is a more 
 thorough-going form of community life. It is 
 a bit of self-assertion on the part of the " poor," and 
 is looked on with suspicion by the " rich " peasants. 
 The Clerk-Captain told me that some of the latter 
 had said to him, " Suppose the situation changes, 
 and a new Government comes into power ; they will 
 shoot you, because you were in the Artel." Anyhow, 
 he was going to take the risk. He was bubbling over 
 with his plans, and gave me a detailed and glowing 
 account of them. 
 
80 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 " We are going to begin this autumn. There are 
 to be about one hundred of us, and I shall be a 
 member. We shall get out of this dirty place, and 
 build a new village altogether. We shall get stock, 
 machines, and wood for our houses from the Agri- 
 cultural Department at Samara. They make grants 
 of these things, as far as they will go. They give the 
 preference to Soviet farms, of course. Next in order 
 come the " communes " ; then the Artels. We 
 have to undertake to provide the Government, in 
 return, with a stipulated quantity of foodstuffs. 
 
 " We shall run our Artel on the collective principle 
 to the utmost extent possible. Of course we shall 
 have an elected Soviet. We shall divide the produce 
 of the common land in exactly equal shares. If a 
 member has a surplus, over and above his needs, 
 from his own private ground, he will be obliged to 
 sell it to the Artel. Thus the capital of the Artel 
 will gradually increase ; it will acquire more and 
 more stock and machines. Soon we shall build a 
 common warehouse. Then we shall start a garden." 
 
 With all his enthusiasm for the " revival of 
 country life/' he was still a townsman to the finger- 
 tips. You could feel it in his consciousness of the 
 monotony of it all, as well as in his sense of the 
 picnic character of this life into which he had 
 been so oddly transplanted. His humorous apologies 
 for his rustic surroundings were not those of a 
 countryman. He felt himself to be, as Touchstone 
 has it, " like honest Ovid among the Goths." 
 
 He was distinctly favourable to the Communist 
 point of view, and was in fact of the best type of 
 Communist. He was not uncritical ; he denounced 
 the stupidity of the town authorities in making their 
 
THE CLERK-CAPTAIN 81 
 
 demands so often at an inconvenient time, with too 
 little thought for the susceptibilities of the peasants. 
 He had evidently befriended a local landlord who 
 (aided by personal popularity, it seemed) had been 
 allowed to retain his house and his land intact, but 
 whose position was growing increasingly difficult 
 under the new regime. This landlord's wife was 
 driving out as we passed, and from their conversation 
 I gathered that he had been of some help to them in 
 their troubles. He patted the old horse, and re- 
 marked how well he was looking. I note this, 
 because it was the only time I ever saw a Russian 
 show that sense of a horse as an individual, so 
 familiar to us Englishmen. 
 
 R.V. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 General Baltiski A Tsarist Officer in the Service 
 of the Republic 
 
 So, by easy stages, we drifted back to Samara. 
 
 Naturally, my first care was to seek out the 
 General. I found him strolling back from " G.H.Q." 
 to his private house, a large bundle of papers in his 
 hand. There was nothing to the unprofessional 
 eye at any rate to distinguish him from the ordi- 
 nary soldier. The day of gold lace, orders, and the 
 like was over. He had a neat white uniform, suitable 
 to the broiling weather. 
 
 After the first greeting he took occasion to explain 
 that, strictly speaking, I should address him not as 
 " General," but as " Comrade." The word for 
 " Commanding Officer " was merely the present 
 participle " commanding " (komanduyushchi) , which 
 implied that the holder of the office is not necessarily 
 there for ever, but may be replaced by another com- 
 rade at any time. However, having made the 
 position clear (as in duty bound), I do not remember 
 that the General made any further objection when 
 I relapsed into the customary style. 
 
 Of about fifty years of age, with fair hair and 
 beard, only just beginning to turn grey, short, but 
 broad and erect, and in the pink of health, he looked 
 a man accustomed to command. It needed no 
 feathers or epaulettes to prove that. 
 
 He was full of apologies for bringing me back, 
 
GENERAL BALTISKI 83 
 
 though I explained that I should have had to start 
 homewards in any case the following day. 
 
 " The Soviet people got worried about it/' he 
 said. " It seems they had told you not to go. These 
 things will happen. I thought it was best to humour 
 them, so I urged you to come back." 
 
 Nor was this all ; I received a formal visit next 
 day from two representatives of the Soviet itself, 
 who " expressed regret " that they had been under 
 a " misunderstanding." I doubt whether a foreigner, 
 straying against orders in a military area in time of 
 actual war, is often treated as handsomely. So 
 ended my " arrest and imprisonment." 
 
 But to return to General Baltiski. He had taken 
 a great interest in my journey, and was anxious to 
 know all I could tell him about the peasants, and 
 their state of feeling. This I did as faithfully as I 
 could, though of course without mentioning names. 
 
 Then he turned to his own experiences in the 
 service of the Soviet Government, and appealed to 
 me very strongly to make his opinions known. I 
 mentioned the name of an officer on the former 
 Tsarist General Staff, whom I had met in London. 
 " One of my oldest friends," he said. " I was on the 
 General Staff too. Tell him all I am going to tell 
 you now. Tell him he ought to be here." 
 
 And warmed by the thought of this common 
 acquaintance, the General developed quite a fatherly 
 manner towards me. There was something pathetic 
 in his intense desire to make me a mouthpiece for 
 his appeal to his fellow-officers of the old Army to 
 come and help Russia. They could not understand 
 him, and he could not get at them. Here, perhaps, 
 was a chance for him at last. 
 
 F 2 
 
 . 
 
84 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 " This is the only possible Government," he 
 insisted. " The people now in power are not the 
 equals of Peter the Great, but they are doing Peter 
 the Great's work in holding Russia together. Kolchak 
 was an honest man, with every advantage on his side. 
 But his forces were rent by party quarrels. His 
 orders got twisted in one direction or another, and 
 didn't get executed. The Communists' orders go 
 right through to the bottom ; they get obeyed." 
 
 " What would have happened if Kolchak had got 
 into power ? " I queried. 
 
 " Nothing but this, that the whole revolutionary 
 movement would have been driven underground. 
 Later it would have come to the top again, and 
 the whole thing would have ended in another 
 Revolution." 
 
 " Would not the Allies have kept him going ? " 
 
 " No. They would have tried to, but they would 
 not have succeeded. The Allies want to abase 
 Russia and to exploit her. It is impossible. They 
 cannot do it." 
 
 " Is the Soviet Government holding its own ? 
 Are things improving or getting worse ? " 
 
 " Make no mistake about it," answered the 
 General. " Things are on the up-grade. We have 
 passed the lowest point of the curve, and we are 
 beginning to go up again. Look at the Turkestan 
 Railway for an example. Not so long ago it took a 
 month to get from here to Tashkent. Now it takes 
 five days. Have you seen Brusilov's appeal to the 
 officers who are now abroad his appeal to them to 
 come back and help Russia ? Tell my friends of 
 that." 
 
 " Yes," I said, " but I know what your friends will 
 
GENERAL BALTISKI 85 
 
 answer. They will say they are not going back to be 
 ordered about by a lot of incompetent Commissars." 
 
 " Then they don't understand the situation," he 
 rejoined. " These people allow us to work freely. 
 I can follow my own methods. There is my Chief of 
 Staff a colonel who served under me in the old 
 days." 
 
 "But," I objected, "what about the Political 
 Commissars who are attached to every Command ? " 
 
 " Well," he said, " they did interfere a bit at first, 
 but now they do so very rarely. The situation is 
 getting easier all the time. Every document has to 
 be countersigned by ' So-and-so, Member of the 
 Revolutionary Military Tribunal.' But that's not 
 such a bad thing after all. Specialists are inclined 
 to go along like a horse in blinkers. These political 
 men are often valuable. They keep us in touch with 
 the general public opinion outside. No, that's not a 
 serious difficulty. We can work for Russia. Tell 
 my friends they ought to be here working for 
 Russia." 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 Fishing Trekking " Bolshevik Atrocities " 
 
 ON my return to Samara I had learned that, by 
 waiting a few days, I could have the company of 
 Petrov and two others on my journey back to 
 Moscow, whither they were going on Government 
 business. Accordingly, I obtained permission to 
 sleep on board a Volga steamer which was lying tied 
 up at the quay. This, I was told, was probably 
 better than anything the Soviet could provide in the 
 town. I was, in point of fact, the guest of the Trade 
 Union of River Transport Workers, who controlled, 
 at this time, the whole Volga fleet. 
 
 Every day I had dealt out to me an unvarying, 
 but excellent ration of bread, butter, eggs, and 
 radishes. It was brought to me by a comrade who, 
 in capitalist lands, would have been styled a 
 " steward." He and two or three others slept on 
 board. I occupied a first-class cabin (minus all its 
 old cushions and appurtenances), but slept on deck. 
 The midges at dawn and twilight were numerous and 
 fierce ; but I found a way of tying my silk neck- 
 kerchief in such a way as to cover everything except 
 the tip of my nose. 
 
 This was a somewhat monotonous time, but I 
 whiled it away completing the notes which I had 
 made in the villages (I always made notes on the 
 spot) and by watching the life around me. 
 
FISHING TREKKING 87 
 
 There was a man who used to fish from the bank 
 with a circular net, fitted to a very long rod with a 
 stout line. Just next to the net was a straight stick 
 weighted at one end, which I suppose ensured that 
 the net should go straight downwards and spread 
 out on the bottom. I watched him for hours. He 
 would fling his net upstream, let the current work it 
 down, and draw it out again. I never on one single 
 occasion saw him catch anything. I suppose he 
 would have answered inquiries with the usual 
 " Nichevo." A volume might be written on this 
 phrase. It is often translated, " It does not matter," 
 " It's all the same." As far as I could make out, it 
 may mean almost anything except, perhaps, 
 enthusiastic assent or dissent. It may mean 
 " Nothing in particular," " I don't know," " All 
 right," " It's no business of mine," " Quite fairly 
 good," " Pretty much as you would expect," 
 " So so." 
 
 Then there was the curious population of the 
 river bank. Now, in the famine time, we are told 
 that it is swarming with families on the move. Even 
 then, there were quite a number of them. The 
 Russian peasant's habit of " trekking," as they say 
 in South Africa, is quite extraordinary. There seems 
 to be always a large section of the population 
 occupied in journeying immense distances. In the 
 villages the peasants often complained to me that 
 they were not allowed to go and fetch salt from some 
 salt lakes more than 100 miles away. No one 
 thought anything of making such a journey in a 
 cart over roadless country. Here in Samara, I 
 talked with a peasant family who were travelling 
 from Nijni Novgorod, hundreds of miles from their 
 
88 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 home, where they had gone for the whole winter, to 
 see a relative. They were waiting for a permit to 
 return to their village home. They had already 
 waited a week, and did not seem to mind. They got 
 one meal per day from the local Soviet. 
 
 A man who was in Russia during the War told me 
 that the peasants, in a village where he was, heard 
 that there was a travelling circus in another village 
 many miles away. Some of them set out on a 
 Saturday in their carts, brought back the performers 
 and their whole outfit (including the merry-go- 
 round, taken to pieces) to their own village, ran the 
 circus all Sunday, and packed it up and carted it 
 back again on the Monday. 
 
 One thing began to hang very heavy on my mind 
 during these monotonous days. This was the 
 drought. There had not been the slightest sign of 
 rain since I had been in Russia. I remembered the 
 old peasant, and the prophecy which he had quoted 
 from Ezekiel " I will make my earth as stone." 
 What was going to happen to this vast, inaccessible 
 peasant population, if their crops should fail ? I 
 thought of Ozero, with the reserve in its common 
 village barn already somewhat depleted, and only 
 one-third of the usual acreage prepared for this 
 year's harvest. One evening the clouds gathered and 
 the thunder began to roll. My hopes rose high, 
 though I felt unaccountably nervous and uneasy. 
 Not a drop fell ; the clouds dispersed as they had 
 come ; and the heavens were as brass once more. 
 
 One morning I received a visit from a certain 
 foreigner living in Samara, whose conversation is 
 perhaps worth recording, because it took me sharply 
 back into a different world from that of practical 
 
FISHING TREKKING 89 
 
 realities in which I had been living. In listening to 
 him I felt again, with something of a start, the 
 atmosphere of the foreign newspapers which regale 
 their readers with " Bolshevik atrocities." There is 
 plenty to be said against the Communist regime, but 
 people in Russia do not put it in that crude way. 
 For obvious reasons I do not give his name. 
 
 He told me that he wished to put the Labour 
 Delegation on the right track and prevent it from 
 being misled by interested persons. He then launched 
 out into the familiar denunciations. Of these I did 
 not note down much, as I had heard them so often 
 before. But he made three statements which, to me, 
 after mixing a good deal with Russians of all classes, 
 were really humorous. One was, " The schools are 
 absolutely ruined. No children go to them." The 
 second was, " All religious gatherings are absolutely 
 forbidden." The third was, " The peasants have 
 everything taken from them. No peasant is allowed 
 to have more than two cows." Each of these state- 
 ments was directly contradicted by my own recent 
 experience. The second was contradicted, appa- 
 rently, by his own experience also, for later on he 
 told me that in Samara a friend of his had delivered 
 a lecture (at which prominent Communists were 
 present) on " Why we should believe in God." It 
 was in reply to a Communist lecture on " Why we 
 should not believe in God." 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 Up the Volga " Aunt Lisa " Back to Nijni 
 Novgorod 
 
 Ax last, one afternoon, a steamer called in on her 
 upward journey. It was a great event, for was she 
 not the first steamer worked with oil since Baku 
 was recovered from the British ? The steamers I 
 had seen hitherto had been burning wood. This, of 
 course, involved an appalling amount of labour in 
 collection and transport ; it prevented most of the 
 deck space from being used for cargo, and it meant 
 that the tanks constructed for the oil were wasted. 
 This was far from being the only example by which 
 the injuries of the invasions and the blockade had 
 been brought vividly home to me. I witnessed on 
 every side their deadly effect upon the transport 
 system. I saw the great railway bridge over the 
 Volga, blown up by Kolchak, or to stop the advance 
 of Kolchak I forget which. This meant the 
 snapping of an indispensable link in a chain upon 
 which depended the supplies of a whole province. 
 
 The steamer was bound for Nijni with a cargo of 
 dried fish from the Caspian. They filled the hold. 
 They hung in interminable festoons (with strings 
 threaded through their gills) all round the gunwales 
 of the ship. Their pungent smell penetrated into 
 every corner of her, heralded her arrival, and doubt- 
 less prolonged the memory of her departure. 
 
UP THE VOLGA 91 
 
 I now made the acquaintance of my two new 
 travelling companions. They were, I learned, 
 Colovin and his wife. Colovin was an official in the 
 War Department. Petrov and I occupied one cabin, 
 and they another. There were no general feeding 
 arrangements on the ship, but we had each had a 
 certain store of necessaries dealt out to us before 
 starting. Colovin and his wife invited us to share all 
 our meals with them in their cabin. 
 
 This provided many pleasant talks during the three 
 days and nights of our slow voyage upstream to 
 Nijni. The lady proved to be a Roumanian from 
 Bessarabia. She was the soul of gaiety. She was 
 very small, with tiny hands and feet. She had, 
 however, the large mobile mouth which all jesters 
 ought to have. By way of ironical reference to her 
 extreme youthfulness she had earned the nickname 
 of " Aunt Lisa " (Tyotya Lisa). 
 
 For all meals Petrov and I used to repair to the 
 Colovins' cabin, and many were the jokes as we 
 crowded into that minute space. Aunt Lisa was an 
 ingenious, though variable cook. She was certainly 
 untidy, but there was much to excuse this in the 
 circumstances ; and there was nothing slatternly 
 about her untidiness ; she was too conscious of the 
 fun of it all. The meals were at all hours. We would 
 go for six or eight hours without one, till I was 
 famishing. We would then have a solid one. Then, 
 to my amazement, within two hours or so, I would 
 again hear Aunt Lisa calling out " food " (kushafy, 
 or tapping on my door with a spoon ; and we would 
 start all over again. They seemed to eat whenever 
 they felt inclined, regardless of all regularity. 
 
 I would sit on deck and watch the mighty barges 
 
92 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 towed rapidly past, going down stream. From time 
 to time, too, would come a great raft of timber, 
 perhaps a quarter of a mile in length, wriggling its 
 way down like a gigantic water serpent, with two or 
 three little wooden houses on its back, and a whole 
 population of men, women and children. 
 
 The steamer was packed with passengers, mostly 
 camping in little family groups, with their own 
 separate cooking and eating arrangements. 
 
 We would stop for hours at some rickety landing 
 stage while the Volga dockers unloaded the fish 
 barrels to the tune of the " Dubinochka." (Strictly 
 speaking, the word means a wooden " pile," such as 
 they drive in to support the banks). The foreman 
 would start with the solo : 
 
 "Ho! my little doves. Ho! my jolly mates, 
 It's going now, it's going now. . . ." 
 
 Then the rest would strike in, the men on one rope 
 singing " It won't go " (a ne poidyot], and the men 
 on the other rope answering, " It will go " (a vot 
 idyot) in endless strophe and antistrophe. 
 
 As soon as the ship touched a stopping-place, Aunt 
 Lisa was on shore, chaffering away for eggs, milk, 
 vegetables and bread. She flitted like a bird from 
 one seller to another, taking in the whole market. 
 She had a delicate nose for values, and was a fine 
 bargainer. She always left her final shot till the 
 ship was just starting, calculating coolly the exact 
 time it would take her to bolt back across the moving 
 gangway. I well remember her helping me to 
 bargain for a little woven bag from Turkestan at 
 one of the places where we stopped. It was a great 
 sight to see the theatrical scorn with which she 
 
UP THE VOLGA 93 
 
 rejected an inadequate offer, and turned on her heel 
 like a tragedy queen. 
 
 She was imperturbable, too, in all sorts of circum- 
 stances. The oddest of these was at Nijni Novgorod, 
 where we were housed in the old Government offices 
 (now the Soviet House) in the midst of the Kremlin 
 in a room containing many tables covered with 
 dispatch-boxes and portentous inkstands, and also 
 four stiff, green plush sofas, on which the four of us 
 slept. 
 
 By the time we reached Nijni, however, I felt that 
 we had come back to ordinary civilisation (did we 
 not see Chaikovski's Queen of Spades the same night 
 at the Opera ?) We were moving in a different 
 world and beginning to feel again the hot breath of 
 the revolutionary struggle. The calm of the old 
 slow-moving Russia, which had surrounded me in 
 the villages, still persisted on the river journey. 
 When I stepped off the steamer for the last time, a 
 door closed behind me. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 The Last Talk A Painful Question Muddy 
 Waters 
 
 IT was on the last evening before we reached 
 Nijni that I had seemed to come nearest to the 
 troubled atmosphere of the towns. I had been 
 walking the upper deck alone, when a Soviet official 
 who occupied another first-class cabin put his head 
 out of the window (which opened on to the deck) 
 and started a conversation. Other people from the 
 various groups came and listened. 
 
 There was a seat running along under the windows, 
 against the wall of the cabins. I sat on this with one 
 or two others ; some sat on the ground and a few 
 stood. The twilight was coming on. I saw them 
 I can see them still against the background of 
 brown, swirling water, bounded by the long mono- 
 tonous line of mud bank. 
 
 Most of them were in some form or other of 
 country dress, though there were evidently two or 
 three men of education among them. There were 
 dark-bearded men from Astrakhan, with tall fur 
 caps. Loose white tunics were common, and so, of 
 course, were top boots. There were all sorts of 
 odd combinations. Russians are by no means con- 
 ventional in their dress ; Colovin, for instance, wore 
 a complete suit of a light mauve colour, such as 
 we should think suited only to pyjamas ; but no one 
 turned to look at him more than at other people. 
 
 The talk fell on the usual topics prices, poverty, 
 
THE LAST TALK 95 
 
 the shortage of all the things needed, the hardness 
 of life. Most blamed the Government. Some one 
 objected that it was not the Government, but " the 
 War," that was to blame for these things. When 
 would things improve ? 
 
 All agreed that Russia was ruined if she stood 
 alone. Foreigners must help. What were the 
 foreigners doing ? Why were they making war on 
 Russia ? 
 
 Everywhere in Russia I found a great hunger to 
 know what was going on outside the country. There 
 was something moving about the sense of forlorn- 
 ness and loneliness which their long isolation from 
 the world had engendered in the Russian people. 
 In the warmth of their welcome to me I always 
 seemed to see a craving for fellowship and for know- 
 ledge. I was a being who had come, without hostile 
 intent, from that mysterious outside world, and 
 presumably could report what was going on there. 
 
 " Well/' said one, " they will never help Russia so 
 long as we have a revolutionary Government." 
 
 " Then they will never help us at all," said 
 another. " We are not going back to the old state 
 of things." 
 
 This statement was not disputed. I do not know 
 whether any disputed it in their hearts, but at any 
 rate no one spoke. There was a pause. 
 
 " Supposing the foreign countries also get revolu- 
 tionary Governments ? " suggested one. 
 
 " Ah, there you are," chimed in another, " that's 
 what the Communists say. You've only got to wait 
 a little, and Germany will have a Communist Revolu- 
 tion, Poland will have one, France perhaps, England 
 perhaps, and then there you are." 
 
96 IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE 
 
 ' Yes/' replied the first, " and the Communists 
 are right. The World- Revolution is coming. It's 
 only a question of time. We must hold out till then, 
 and the foreign Governments will help us. They will 
 send us machines, and experts, and money. There 
 will be no more blockades and no more war." 
 
 They discussed the matter up and down among 
 themselves. The prevailing opinion seemed to be 
 that, if the " World- Revolution " did come, all 
 would be well for Russia ; but as to whether it 
 would come or not, there was no general agreement. 
 
 At last some one turned to me and asked what I 
 thought about it. I had hoped to escape this ques- 
 tion, for I did not want to be cutting away what 
 seemed their only ground of hope. 
 
 " How can I tell ? " I said. " How can any one 
 tell ? " 
 
 " Well, what do you think ? " my questioner per- 
 sisted. " 7s the World- Revolution coming ? " 
 
 " I do not think so myself," I said. 
 
 And with that a silence fell on the little group. 
 They lingered awhile, talking of indifferent subjects. 
 Then one by one they rose, and stole off to the 
 various family encampments in different corners of 
 the deck. 
 
 I sat watching the darkness come down on the vast 
 expanse of muddy waters, till the bank was blotted 
 out of sight, and wondered whether this was an 
 occasion on which it would have been better to tell 
 a lie. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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