FAMINE IN RUSSIA.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXIX, Issue 10956, 22 December 1911, Page 1

FAMINE IN RUSSIA.

The Russian press is-again filled with reports of the wretched condition of the peasants and the urgent need for immediate relief. Last year, with its good crops, was exceptional, and the chronic Russian famine has again set in. Many governments in Eastern Russia and in Siberia are affected. The peasants go hungry in that region which, the Riech (St. Petersburg) says, ie "by a strange irony known as the granary of Russia." Many of the peasants have already abandoned their villages and gone to the cities in search of work, leaving their children behind them unprovided for. They bum the property of rich landowners, shouting, "If you won't give us bread, we'll h/Vrn you up and make you hungry like ourselves." The following account is given by Riech of the enormous extent of the famine:

• "The hunger zone has spread through fifteen districts and governments, including tlie Akrnolinsk, Tiirgai, and Ural districts, and the Governments of Yeniseisk, Tobolsk, Ufa, Nijni-Nov-go'rod, Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara, Saratof, and Astrakhan. The conditions there are.so bad that they recall the terrible famine of 1891-92, which prepared such a rich harvest for the cholera epidemic of 1892, with its 300,000 victims. The peasants are selling their cattle and everything they have for next to nothing. Those who leave in search of work return disappointed, since there is no demand for labor. Various epidemics have, already broken out among the starving peasants, especially typhus. In an investigation made by the Voluntary Economic Association it was found that in eleven of the governments affected about nineteen million people are in need of immediate help. So far the society's resources are very slight, and it can scarcely offer any relief. In the Ural district alone at least £1,200,000 are required, but the call for relief there lias been met very generously. The Zemstvo in the government of Samara, estimates that at least £2,100,000 are needed to cope with the situation. ' 'ln the teeth of all this some of the governors still use the old tactics of prohibiting the local papers from publishing news of the famine. Is not this a masterful way of solving the problem."