CHAPTER II.

RUSSIA’S COLONIZATION SCHEME.

I haven’t yet introduced you to my companions. Thomas Gaskell, citizen of the United States of America, short, fair, a little bit bald, with a record of having travelled through the whole of Asia from end to end, and still only twenty-eight years of age. John Scawell, British subject, tall, dark, reserved, and just fresh from Western Australia, India, and the Transvaal. Evan Asprey, also British subject and also slightly bald, medium height, fair and good to keep close to, as he had already spent five years in Siberia, and was the only one amongst us who understood clearly more than twenty words of Russian. Here we were, then, at the commencement of Siberia, and bound to one of the wildest regions of that wild country--the Syansk Mountains on the Chinese frontier. Our mission was one entirely of peace, although the customs officials at the Russian frontier _had_ confiscated Scawell’s Mannlicher rifle and Webley revolver, and might have done the same with my Smith and Wesson, if I hadn’t had it up my sleeve at the time. We were going out just to see what Siberia was like. Half pleasure, half business. People at home thought Siberia was a land of promise. The Trans-Siberian Railway was opening the country. Germans with a loose eye for business had announced their intention of looking up Asiatic Russia. Being English, we wanted to get in also--if not the first, at least in the van.

The station at Chelabinsk was not a cheerful place to spend six hours in--for that was the amount of time which had to lapse ere the train bound for Kreveschokovo on the banks of the river Obi was billed to leave. Gratuitous information concerning the Trans-Siberian Railway was freely offered by fellow-passengers, and we began to fear the worst. Tales about three hours’ stoppages at small stations; half a day here and a day there. No bridges over the Obi and Chulim rivers; so that the monotonous train journey should be relieved by a little sledging. An affable man is the Russian traveller, and a cheerful liar. The Russian for “I know” and “I _don’t_ know” are so nearly alike that only a Russian can tell the difference, and maybe this is why he would rather tell an untruth than confess ignorance. Beneath his affability, however, the observer can easily detect a purpose. His soul-absorbing desire is to know who and what you are, where from, where going to, and what you are going to do. What do you think of Russia? How old are you? Will England let Russia have Constantinople? How many millions of roubles have you got? Have you seen absolutely the finest city, and the finest street in the world--St. Petersburg and the Nevsky Prospect respectively? If one is wise he will be frank. But the torrent of reiterated questions at every fresh acquaintance becomes boring after a bit, and oftentimes we preferred to keep in our bunks in the train rather than be compelled to go over the jargon of stereotyped replies in the buffet. English is almost unknown in this region of the Urals; next to Russian, German seems the language most freely spoken. Military officers and functionaries of upper rank know French, but English we never heard spoken in all our railway journey from Moscow. I think that sometimes we were looked upon as curiosities, if one might judge from the number of glances and finger points directed towards us, and the oft-repeated word “Anglichiny,” or “Englishman,” when circumstances compelled us to declare our nationality. But I must say that though they were inquisitive we were invariably treated with respect by our fellow-travellers.

[Illustration: EMIGRANTS AT CHELABINSK.]

But on one occasion, three overbearing Russian functionaries, who are revered as Chinovniks, tried to take advantage of our slim knowledge of things Siberian. The Russian cars, I might say, by way of preface, are built on the side-corridor principle; each _coupé_ is designed to hold four persons--two on racks, which are formed by lifting up the back of each seat and securing them by means of iron outswinging tee-pieces, and two on the main seats themselves. We had liberally bribed our porter to get us a complete _coupé_, but it was while we were partaking of a last glass of tea in the buffet that the three Chinovniks referred to, being probably dissatisfied with their own quarters, removed our baggage and installed themselves in our places. One of us had slipped out of the buffet to see that nothing was being stolen, and brought back the dismal news. There was scant hope of our getting justice, but we awaited our opportunity. Thinking themselves safe, the Chinovniks could not resist the fascination of tea-drinking, and their departure was a signal for a combined attack on their baggage, its removal, and the replacement of our own. The Chinovniks returned as the train was on the point of leaving. They glared at us. We gazed blandly back. They spoke loudly and long to us. We replied by unrolling our blankets and pillows and preparing for slumber. They raved at us; but we only looked at them with mild reproach. They fetched the conductor, who, after listening to their tale, which was shouted with three voices in his two ears, addressed a question to us, which to three of the four, at any rate, was as incomprehensible as Afghan or Volapuk. We could only fall back upon our standard saviour, and that was to cry simultaneously, “_Neo panimio paa Ruski!_”--“I don’t understand Russian!” The conductor shrugged his shoulders and looked inquiringly at the Chinovniks. The Chinovniks raised their voices in their great ire, and then the conductor did absolutely the wisest thing he could, and that was to leave the car. The Chinovniks were nonplussed, vocal persuasion had utterly failed to move us; forcible was entirely out of the question for a Russian, and so they had to leave us.

This little incident may serve as some illustration of the Russian character. I have seen two men in a car, one at each end, quarrelling in the most terrible manner, hurling invectives at each other and boiling over with rage, but never getting one inch nearer one to the other. A tenth of the inducement would be enough for a free fight in England.

It was in the early hours before the Siberian train crawled slowly out of Chelabinsk station and commenced to bump miserably over the badly laid road. The boy-stoker at the stove end of the car commenced his infernal work, and in half an hour the temperature was something abominable. The heat was bad enough, but as the car contained some twenty-four passengers, and all possessed a large number of damp furs, in all conditions of cleanliness, and possessing all varieties of odour, the atmosphere was one almost unbearable. The worst of it is, that the passengers abhor ventilation of the slightest degree. In the roof of the car there is a ventilator, but it is always tightly closed. The windows are double and immovable; the doors at each end are double, one being closed before the other is opened; and thus, day in and day out, scarcely a breath of fresh air can enter the carriage. Inside we sweated and gasped for breath; the instant we alighted at a station our hair, moustache, beard, and eyelashes would become covered with hard white frost, and the exhalations from our lungs would be converted into fine snow.

When morning came, and we arose from our uncomfortable couch, it was to find the train jolting slowly over a level stretch of country; quite uncultivated, and with here and there a melancholy clump of stunted birch trees. We were on the edge of the great Tartar steppe, which stretched north and south for thousands of miles, and which is bounded on the east by the Irtish River, from whose banks stretches eastward Siberia’s longest steppe--the Baraba, home of the Khirghiz hordes. The Urals were completely out of sight, and we had the not very cheerful prospect of a fifteen-hundred-mile journey over an absolute desert. Seen in the summer, the steppe lands are by no means displeasing, although their monotony is trying. Instead of the inevitable snow which now stretched in all its glaring whiteness before us, the steppe is a carpet of variegated bloom. The grass is stunted; not nearly as long as that of the American prairie, this probably owing to the fact that much of the water in the plains is strongly impregnated with alkali. These steppes are, with the exception of the vast plains of perpetually frozen ground adjacent to the arctic circle, the most unpopulated part of all Siberia. Beyond the few miserable villages which occur every thirty or forty miles, there is no sign of life except the occasional kibitka of the nomadic Khirghiz. North or south of the high-road the steppe goes uninterruptedly for many hundreds of miles, roadless, treeless, not a landmark to guide one, swampy, sandy, and unprofitable. Under its snowy shroud the steppe looks better.

Late in the day we arrived at Kurgan, a tolerably large town, with the railway station miles away from the nearest house. Unwilling to take the bread out of the mouths of the horse-breeding populace of Siberia all at once, it would seem that the Russian Government has purposely fixed the stations of the Siberian railroad as far away from the towns as possible, in order to give the great army of drosky-drivers a chance. Kurgan was interesting as being the first point where we saw the debarkation of outward-bound emigrants.

Emigration to Siberia is now going on very vigorously, and not before it is wanted, for the population of Russia, European and Asiatic, is very disproportionate. The nomadic tribes of Siberia, such as the Bashkires, Khirghiz, Tungus, Buriats, Votiaks, Kamchakdales, and Samoyedes scarcely count, so small are their numbers in comparison to the millions of acres comprising Asiatic Russia. The official computation of the population being (including both Russians and aborigines) one man to every five square miles. The first cause of the extremely slow progress in populating Siberia may be set down to its distance and inaccessibility from the congested districts of Russia. The only means of reaching its heart, up till the commencement of the Trans-Siberian Railway work, being by the lonely tarantass or the occasional steamers plying the tortuous waterways of the Irtish and Obi systems. The Siberian railway, however, promises to considerably alter this state of things--combined with the startling facts that Southern Russia is rapidly getting overcrowded. Another stumbling-block to the rapid development of Siberia hitherto has been the great prejudice existing against it throughout European Russia, a prejudice which may be said to be far greater than that among foreigners. For many years Siberia has been the dumping-ground for criminals of the worst class. It has been held up as a Bastille-like threat to every Muscovite. Mothers have for ages quieted their noisy children with, “Hush! or I will send you to Siberia!” And thus every man who goes to Siberia, voluntarily or otherwise, is looked upon as an exile. Although the want of communication may be set down as the first, the chief cause undoubtedly exists in Siberia having been made a penal colony.

It is said that the great famine of 1890-1 which spread throughout Southern Russia, turned the eyes of the Government Siberia-wards as a possible outlet for surplus population. The late Czar had ever taken a kindly interest in his Asiatic possessions, and it was the dream of his life to see Siberia developed to its fullest extent. The wish was commendable, but the means were lacking. It was in order to see with imperial eyes what Siberia was that the present Czar (then Czarevitch) took his memorable journey across the steppes and mountains from the Pacific coast, and then came Alexander’s famous ukase: “Let there be a railway built across Siberia--the shortest way possible.” The Czarevitch was then in Vladivostock, the Russian Pacific port. A telegram from St. Petersburg bade him remain there and await the corner-stone, which was to be laid in that town as the foundation-piece of what will, in the course of a few years, rank as the monumental railway enterprise of the nineteenth century. Alexander, right up to his death, cherished his colonization scheme, and the heritage he left his son has been energetically pushed forward.

Some assert that the idea which dominated the Siberian railway scheme was that of strategy. While there may exist the strategical undercurrent, no one who has passed over the line from end to end as far as it is constructed can be oblivious to the fact that at present, at any rate, one of the principal objects of the railway is the transportation of emigrants to the fertile valleys of Central Siberia. The train-bound traveller passes train load after train load of outward-bound emigrants. At the principal stations of Chelabinsk, Kurgan, Omsk, Kainsk, and Atchinsk, emigrants by the hundreds are detrained, and may be seen encamped by the roadside awaiting their further transportation north, south, or east. The numbers are evidence complete that the attractions offered by the Government outweigh entirely prejudice and the discomfort of a long journey.

The principle underlying Russia’s colonization scheme is similar to England’s policy with regard to Canada, only that the means are easier and the efforts and influence more energetic and widespread. The agents of the Government are sent to the most thickly populated or distressed portion of European Russia, and there the desirability of emigrating to Siberia is impressed upon the more industrious of the peasantry, who, in Russia itself, can scarcely make ends meet. Neer-do-wells are not catered for, but the Russian Government offers inducements to the willing, and at the same time fixes a nominal fare to Siberia, in order to keep out the absolute drones. This fare is fixed at the rate of one-twentieth of a penny per verst; and thus it is possible for a peasant to travel, say, three thousand versts (two thousand miles) for the moderate sum of six roubles (13_s._ 3_d._). From Southern Russia this would land the emigrant in the heart of Siberia.

On arrival at his destination, the colonist is given a free grant of land, ten deseteens in area, which equals about twenty-seven acres English. He has permission to cut enough wood to build his house and fencing and to provide him with fuel for one year. Thus, with a clear start, and providing the peasant is industrious and frugal, there is every opportunity for him of not only being able to feed and clothe himself and his family warmly and cleanly, but of making a small profit out of agricultural pursuits. For purposes of comparison, it may be as well to state that in Russia itself the peasant is allowed only four deseteens of land, but, as the price of agriculture is abnormally low, it is next door to impossible for him to make ends meet, inasmuch as the rude agricultural instruments he uses, and the entire absence of artificial fertilization, in a few years impoverishes his property to such an extent that it is hopeless. With the increased acreage in Siberia, a better climate, and a richer soil, his chances are enhanced, while a powerful factor is that agricultural prices all round rank from fifty to a hundred per cent. higher than in European Russia. Of course such prices will not last for ever, but as Siberia, minerally and commercially, is far richer than Russia itself, the peasant is bound to come in for some of the reflected prosperity.

The Westerner might perhaps take exception to the manner in which the emigrants are transported to Siberia. I confess it came upon me at first with a shock. The emigrants’ train is simply one of cattle trucks, each car being marked on the side for “forty men or eight horses.” There are no seats or lights provided, and into each of these pens forty men, women, and children have to herd over a dreary railway journey of fourteen or fifteen days. They have to provide their own food, but at every station a large samovar is kept boiling in order to provide them with hot water for their tea. At the points of detrainment the emigrants are compelled to camp on the steppe or on the mountain-side until provision is made for them to proceed to the land apportioned off to their use. The filth, the rags, the utter woe-begone aspect of the Russian emigrant is something inconceivable to the European, but then it must be remembered that the Russian moujik is used to roughing it all his life, and to hog, forty a time, in a cattle truck, or to sleep by the camp fire, with no more covering than the sky, is no very great hardship for him.

It must be gratifying to the Russian Government that the privileges offered to the peasant have been keenly appreciated, and the difficulty which now exists is to get the land ready for the overwhelming tide of colonists flowing into Siberia. In 1896 alone nearly a quarter of a million peasants left Russia for Siberia. At that time neither the railway nor the colonizing department could cope with the rush, and the Emperor was compelled to issue the ukase commanding the officials of the various Siberian Governments to drop all other State work and devote, for the time being, their efforts to the colonization movement. For a time things were in rather a chaotic state, and a large number of emigrants, finding no land ready for them, returned to Russia.

Anticipating my journey a little, I had at Omsk a long and interesting conversation with one of the head officials of the Colonization Department. He was on his way to Turkestan, there to confer with the officials regarding the colonization of that valuable and practically un-Russianized possession. He assured me that the rush for Siberia had not only completely astonished the authorities, but was rather startling in the fact that it threatened to deplete portions of Russia of labour. The Russian peasant is of such a simple disposition that he is apt to think the inducements offered him are the means to a comparative paradise. Thus many of the emigrants have suffered sore disappointment, and, partly from this and from home-sickness, have returned to Russia. The Government is, however, grappling manfully with the task that it has set itself, and it will take but a few short years to even up the disproportionate population of Russia considerably. One fact cannot be overlooked, and that is that the Trans-Siberian Railway, apart from its political and commercial significance, is likely to be handed down to posterity as the means by which the riches of the great white Czar were brought to the thresholds of his people.