A GAUNT SPECTACLE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3114, 24 April 1922, Page 2

A GAUNT SPECTACLE.

“When tlie snows melt next spring the Russian steppes will be strewn with skeletons.” So runs a recent message frotn Russia. There will be the bones »!’ hundreds of thousands of men. avomen. and children. They wandered, and nnllions of them are still wandering. There was nothing to eat in their homes, so they started on tlie trek for bread. Some drifted westward to the Volga and found death in the typhus ridden railway centres, or among the horrors of refugee camps along the Volga; others started for Turkestan; still others moved eastward toward Siberia, the land of gold and wheat, which has always been so alluring to the "Russian moujik, who heard little of its vastness, its hardships, and its heartlessness. Hut the country districts, have no grain, or, if peasant families have a small supply, they conceal it in the effort to prolong their own lives until another crop is harvested. In the larger towns there is food for sale at fabulous prices, but the starving refugees have neither money nor goods to exchange and can only sit down to await death or trudge on until they sink of exhaustion. The bodies that lie along the railroads are collected on cars and hauled to centres where they are plied l in frozen, snow-covered heaps to await burial. Freezing refugees remove all garments from the dead, so the frozen bodies are nude when the scavengers collect them. From Perm and Ekaterinburg to the Caspian Sea death is stalking over the steppes. Russians. Cossacks, Kalmusks. Kirghiz, and Tartars >'! ike are meeting their end with hopelessness and patience begotten of centuries of unequal struggle against political extorhon and uniavorablc climatic conditions, made worse by ignorance of scientific methods of tilling the soil. Entire village populations have died in the provinces oast of the Volga, and the animals which survive are so weak it is impossible to get adequate horse power to deliver food to the thousands af .snowbound, destitute settlements far from food stations.