HOW RUSSIA'S PEASANTS LIVE

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 91, 16 April 1908, Page 2

HOW RUSSIA'S PEASANTS LIVE

IS THE. LAND OF THE CZAR , BOOMED! ,

,' The population of Russia to-day is estimated, in round figures at 147,000,----000 persons. Of this number 10,000,----000 are peasants, and they lag so far behind the times in regard to education, manners, customs, and general enhghtenment that they have been compared' to the medieval German peasant of the fourteenth century. Indeed, so ignorant are they that a young man who can read is regarded by them as a ;wonder. They believe ■in witches, demons and wood-devils, and live under, such conditions that m ordinary times in the Russian villages 5 per cent of the children from birth to five years die, and 350 to 400 per 1000 of those from birth to one year. Truly, an awful rate bf infant mortality' Is it surprising that people ask, is Russia doomed? or that the country should have been so soundly beaten in warfare by the enterprising Japs? As a matter of fact, the Russian peasant does not live—he merely exists. ' Nitchevo' (' it is nothing'), he merely says when anything happens to mm. Nothing matters, nothing couid be worse, and ' Nitchevo '"is his panacea for all evils. And yet the Russian moujik is really a fine fellow. Ordinarily, Mr H. P. Kennard tells us m his book, -I" The Russian Peasant J (Werner Laurie), he is a splendid, well-built , man, large-limbed, large-headed, and healthy. He is equally unaffected by SOdeg of frost or twonty glasses of vodka. He is clothed in uneured sheepskins, and carries in winter more clothes than the average Englishman could stand up in.

He is unspeakably stupid, however, ana his dream of happiness is to gorge, to sleep as much as possible through the winter, and dance and sing in the summer. But tne stranger's first objection to the moujik is that he smells—not because he does not wash himself. As a matter of fact, in every village there are public baths—baaza—and the peasants wash themselves there unfailingly every Saturday in order to be allowed to go to church on Sunday,- for the Orthodox Church enjoins cleanliness. lhe moujik, however, apparently thinks that he has done all that is required of him by the church if he washes himself; for, according to Mr Kennard, you can smell his izba, or hut,1 long before you reach it. As a rule, there are two rooms to an izba, a living-room and an outhouse, and, while the f6rmer is usually clean and white-washed, the latter is fearfully dirty. Moreover, his uncured sheepskins do not give off the most pleasant or odours, and when, as during the Russian famine of 1906-7, three or four families combine, and live in the best hut, pulling down the others in order to use the timber for fuel and the thatch as forage for horses and cattie, it will be readily understood that the odour of that particular izba was not generally improved. Tne Russian peasant is always poor, and generally in debt. He ploughs the land in the same way that his father ploughed it, and gets as little for his labour. His main worry m life is how to pay the Governor s taxes. If he says he cannot pay he is flogged; or perhaps he will sell pare ot his next year's power of work work for nothing for several months) to raise a loan; and, of course, he is worse off than ever the following year. The moujik's festivals to-day are the same as those of a century or so tF°' -n i re is a description of one. It will show the extraordinary mummery practised in connection with marnage,_ although, at the same time, the description contains a very good hint to bold and daring spinsters in this leap year of 1908. On Christmas night at dusk the marriageable village girls go out into the streets and meet their young men and one says, « What is your name?" Ine young man answers, " Foma " and she replies, "My husband's name is loma."

Some days later, at the girl's home, relations are gathered together; there

comes a knock at the door, the starosta and the young man enter carrying loaves of bread. The starosta says something like this:— ''We are German people, come from Turkey. We are hunters, good fellows. There was a time once in our country when we saw strange footprints in the snow, and my friend the prince here saw them, and we thought they might be a fox's or marten's footprints, or it might be those of a beautiful girl. We hunters, we good follows are determined not to rest till we nave found the animal. We have been in all the cities from Germany to Turkey and have sought for this fox, this marten, or this princess, and at last-we have seen the same strange footprints in the snow again, here by your Court. And we have come in. Come let us take her, the beautiful princess, for we see her in front of us —oi can it be you would keep her till she grows a little older?"

Thus does the nkrajik ask for a wife.