Part 10

The system makes enormously for homogeneity, welding, solidarity. The people are a “mass.” Units are lost in unity. Nothing save Nature’s imprint and law of individuality, that decree under which every created thing is some way different from every other, keeps the Russian peasant from quite losing his birthright. The commune, vodka, and resignation are the incubi of Siberia. In the towns and cities gather the energetic natures that have climbed out and above them. What these have done, their allied people--the peasants--can do. Beyond the horizon of the latter’s narrow lives lies still the borderland of possibilities. One cannot doubt the vigor of the stock, nor the certainty of its rise. This quality of rugged worth is the basis of all the great advance that the pioneers and the city populations have made. It is only in the Mirs, frozen fast in their lethargy of communism, that resurrection seems such a far-off dream. The way is long for the peasants of Siberia--long and toilsome. But their vast patience is allied to as vast a courage, and both will lift them into the larger day.

The measure passed by the last Duma, decreeing the division of the Mir lands in severalty, and private ownership of property, will be one of the most momentous and far-reaching enactments ever legislated for a people. It should end for rural Russia the stagnation, and open an era of mighty endeavor and achievement.

There are many races here among the serenely tolerant Siberians, undiscriminated against and uncoerced. While one of the Orthodox may not abjure the state religion without severe punishment, those born to an alien faith are unmolested by official or proselyting pope. “God has given them their faith as he has given us ours,” is the Russian rule.

This medley of races beneath the Russian banners gives to one’s earliest contact the conception of a heterogeneous disorganized jumble of nations and peoples. But closer acquaintance impresses upon one the dominating and surviving qualities innate in the Slav, whose unalterable solidarity is beneath and behind the kaleidoscopic types of aboriginal tribes and exiled sectarians. By race-absorption, like that which has evolved Celts, Danes, Saxon, and Norsemen into English; British, Dutch, Swedes, Germans and Italians into Americans, the Slav is dissolving, transmuting to his own type and moulding to his own institutions the varied peoples.

Though the heterogeneous blood adds to the total of Siberian country life, it is the Slavic race that determines the permanent order of this great land. Primarily too it is the peasantry who shape its destiny. Their possibilities are the limit of Russia’s ascent. Their condition is therefore of far deeper than sightseeing interest to the student. Unlike the picturesque peasantry of Holland, here they are the foundations of the state, forming not an insignificant minority but ninety per cent of the population.

Somewhat of a new spirit flickers here and there in Siberian hamlets. The peasant is superior to his Russian brother. The traditions of serfdom were broken by his severance from the old environment, and wider lands give him an abundance unknown save in a few favored parts of Europe. The political exiles have through the centuries added an upsurge of independence and personal self-consciousness, which is markedly higher than the Oriental humility of Occidental Russia.

The influence of the criminal, as distinct from the political convict, is felt primarily in the cities, such as Irkutsk and Vladivostok, to which the time-expired men drift. The convict element is always met with. It has been customary to billet a condemned, who was not wanted at home, upon some out-of-the-way village, giving him a passport for its confines alone. The victim might have been a Moscow professor or a locomotive engineer, but in the Mir he must farm the land given him. Naturally such seed as this planted in Siberian hamlets does not produce the traditional peasant faith in God and the Czar so faithfully preached by the popes.

Another influence making for upheaval is the returning recruit. We are in a peasant house when a _soldat_ comes back to the family from his service. If he has not brought any great burden of salary, he has accumulated tales enough of the outer world to hold in breathless excitement the circle of friends and relatives which gathers at once when the tinkling sleigh-bells and the barking have announced to the village his return.

Far down the street is heard the jingle of his sledge. It brings every girl to her peep-hole window, and every boy from his sawing to the courtyard door. At the gateway where the newcomer turns in, he is heralded by the commotion of the household guardians, wolf-like in appearance and nature. Everybody within the important house runs to the door. The village knows now which family is making local history. The arrival is accompanied already by two or three men who have recognized him as he descends. He tramps in with military firmness of tread, head erect. Before he greets the grandfather even, he makes the sign of the cross to the holy ikons, and, bowing down, touches his lips to the floor. Then comes the respectful kiss to the old man, next to the mother, while the younger brother, soon to go to service himself, stands awkwardly by, and the little children look half-dubiously at a form scarcely known after his four years of absence.

Then there is a scurrying of the grown and half-grown daughters to prepare _chai_ and to produce the _pelmenis_ and brown bread. The villagers drift in one by one, cross themselves, and speak their greetings, until the little house is packed, and as hot as the steam-room of a _banno_. The vodka-bottle is out and everybody has settled down for an indefinite stay. The soldier’s tales of war and garrison duty and government and revolution hold the family and the audience breathless through the long evening. As you drop asleep, the hero is still reciting and gesticulating. The guests in departing will be careful not to stumble over you, so _nietchevo_.

In one of the houses where we put up, a shop adjoins the big living-room. It has dingy recesses from which hatchets and the commoner farm utensils can be produced, shelves of homespun cloth, and gaudy cottons for the men’s blouses, and beads for the women’s bonnets. Here, as in the country-stores of our own land, during the long idle winter days there is always a crowd and endless discussion of the village events,--the health of each other’s cows, births, marriages, deaths, drafts into the army, taxes. Even in this remoteness something of the echo of great Russia’s struggle is heard over the shopkeeper’s tea-cups. We hum, unthinking, a bar of _Die Beide Grenadier_, in which a refrain of the _Marseillaise_ occurs.

A peasant looks quickly up. “It is not allowed, that song,” he says.

“Why not?”

“That is the song of the strikers.”

“But the _gaspadine_ is a foreigner. He may sing it.”

“Yes,” says the peasant, “he may sing it, but I may not. Would that I might!”

One meets quaint characters in this inland journeying--veteran soldiers of the Turkestan advance; “_sabbato_ sectarians,” who keep Saturday holy rather than Sunday; austere “Old Believers,” traveling peddlers, teamsters who have tramped beside their ponies over three provinces. One comes upon peripatetic Mussulman doctors, in snug-fitting black coats and small black skull-caps, who show their Arabic-worded road-maps and much-thumbed medical works bound in worn leather. Beside their plates at table the kindly hostess puts piles of leathery bread, unleavened, and made without lard in deference to their caste rules.

[Illustration: PEASANT TYPES]

A shop in one village is kept by a Chinaman, who, lettered like most of his race, seems a far shrewder and more intellectual person than the uneducated Russian peasants. He invites the stranger to drink tea that his special caravan brings, and presents Chinese candy with the courtesy of a grandee. When, in reciprocity, the traveler buys sugar for his _chai_, he receives it wrapped in paper covered with hieroglyphics and exhaling the faint unmistakable Chinese odor.

Going always southward, one begins to meet more and more frequently the villages of the Mongol-descended Buriats. “_Bratskie_” (brotherly people), the Russians call them, for despite the forbidding aspect that flat Mongolian features, high thin noses, yellow-brown skins, and big squat bodies give them, no more peaceful, harmless, and hospitable people exist. They are great and fearless hunters, unexcelled riders, and though still only on the threshold of civilization, are rapidly moving to better things.

All phases of the advance from the nomad to the agricultural stage may be studied among them. The pastoral Buriats, decorated like the Chinese with queues, ride around after their flocks. Their villages lie far away from the lines of convoys, unmarked on the Ministry map, which one is supposed to be following. Each family occupies a little windowless wooden hut, some fifteen feet in diameter. In front of it is planted a pole, carrying at the top a weather-faded pennant, the colors of which in Buriat heraldry indicate the tribe and name of the occupant. Behind the hut are stacks of hay and a wooden corral with sheep and horses. Beside it stands the summer tent, of felt, looking like a great inverted bowl. It is empty in winter, save for a shrine with grotesque pictured gods, fronted by offerings.

In the homes of these least advanced Buriats we loiter no longer than we must. The wooden house which shelters them is hermetically sealed, and is crowded with people and animals. Fenced off in a corner of the first that receives us is a corral of thirteen lambs, which at uncertain moments begin to bleat suddenly in unison, producing, with startling effect, a prodigious volume of sound. When one has been roused from sleep half a dozen times a night by this chorus, he is strongly inspired to move on. The men are out during the day looking to their flocks. The women spend a good part of their time sewing furs or making felt. They are very unclean, and it is a decided relief to get out of their homes, to which the cold compels one to have recourse on a long journey. In spring, with great and understandable relief, these semi-nomads take to their felt tents and move where fancy and pasturage dictate.

One grade higher are those Buriats who have learned some rudimentary farming from the Orthodox. You will see the men threshing on a level floor beside the corral. They are dressed in long blue or magenta fur-lined cloaks and colored cone-shaped hats. Other Buriats are permanently resident in the Slavonic settlements, and send their rosy-faced children to school. They mix with the Russians, subject to almost no disabilities, and their better classes contract inter-racial marriages, which seem, to an outsider, at least, completely happy and successful.

It is no small thing, this which Russian rule has done for the Buriats. A people whom any other nation would spurn in racial ostracism, perhaps would eliminate, live side by side with the good-natured Slav in perfect accord, progressing in civilization and material well-being as high as the individual can aspire to and attain.

They are ruled by their own chiefs, whose sway is tempered by the benevolent supervision of the general government. They are represented in the Duma by men of their own selection. They freely worship the Buddhist Burhan in their lamasery near Cellinginsk, without pope to preach or missionary to proselyte. Their easy citizenship is unharassed by money taxes, and their only obligation is Cossack service in the army. But Cossack service to a Buriat is what a picnic is to a boy. Riding around on horseback, rationed by the Government, visiting a city with real tobacco and vodka sometimes attainable, sleeping on a straw-stuffed mattress with no tethered lambs to murder sleep, when they are used to a sheepskin on the dirt floor,--all this is luxury of blissful memory, during the years of the reserve. The net result is that the Buriats are entirely content. They are progressing all along the line, and are being made useful to the nation, not by unpayable taxation, but by the service which they are so especially fitted to render.

As one nears Chinese territory, by the lower waters of the Chickoya River, the villages of Slavic colonists who hold their land on tax-paying peasant tenure, have given place to the Buriat tribesmen and to the _stanitzas_ of the Cossack guard that occupy the pale of land flanking the frontier. Within this border-belt, every village _stanitza_ holds its quota of Cossacks. These soldiers are for the most part descendants of the levies from the Don region, transplanted to the Trans-Baikal by the Government’s despotic hand in the eighteenth century, and since then forming an hereditary military caste. Many of them are bearded Slavs, indistinguishable, save for their accoutrements, from their more peaceful neighbors. Others are of a peculiar cast of countenance, due to the mixture with the Asiatic tribes in ancient times, when the hunted people fled to their ancestors’ asylum, the territories beyond the Volga and on the Don. There is great variation in type among the imported Cossacks. Most are Orthodox, but a very large number are “Old Believers,” or Semieski. In all the houses now hang the yellow cap and the uniform coat, which must be ever ready against the call of duty. Arms are in the corners of the rooms, and everything has a military look, in marked contrast to the peasant homes. Crude, highly-colored prints of Japanese defeats, which circulated broadcast in Russia during the war, share the attention usually devoted exclusively to holy ikons. Portraits of Generals Linevitch and Kuropatkin, and Admiral Alexiev, are tacked to the walls. In one house we saw hanging a prized silver watch, one of those distributed by General Rennenkamp among the soldiers of his command.

One of our Cossack hosts is an old man, Orthodox, and of Russian origin, but with some ancient Asiatic blood, for only a stringy beard grows on his kindly, wrinkled face. With reluctant pride he tells of his three sons away on service, leaving but himself and two daughters at home. With frank happiness he shows you his medals. Every soldier at the front received a round brass service-medal; his, however, a silver cross with St. George and the Dragon on it, is given for valor. He will not drink the vodka he offers you,--rheumatism. But in order that you may smoke some alleged tobacco that greatly interests him because he gathered it himself by the roadside, in Manchuria, he starts up his pipe despite the dust-induced coughs that it begets. He is a kindly, loquacious old man.

Another Cossack, privileged to the broad yellow top on his cap and the yellow stripe on his trousers, is, for the time, our guide and gun-carrier. His flat strongly-mustached face is open and ingenuous. He tells of his _sotnia_ in Manchuria.

“I was with Mitschenko at the front during the war, in his great raid,” he says. “Ten of our _sotnia_ of a hundred were killed, forty wounded. We got behind the Japanese and burned four hundred of their wagons. We had two hundred rounds of cartridges, and more when we wanted them. But food often not, and meat sometimes not for two months. We had thirty Buriats in our hundred, but the Verhneudinsk Polk were almost all Buriats.”

In one house where ikons, oven, bench, and stockade reveal the Slav peasant’s home, the mirrors are shrouded for their forty days’ veiling. It is a place of death. The owner was a full-blooded Buriat married to a Russian woman. In silent grief she plods through her mechanically-executed duties. Their son, in red blouse, is in prayer beside his father’s body. They have pressed us to remain. The advent of strangers seems to distract their thoughts a little. From outside comes a hail, and heavily there dismounts from his pony an old grizzled Buriat Cossack. He has ridden two hundred versts to pay this last respect to his friend.

His military training makes the Cossack a little less gentle than the average peasant. When off duty, hen-roosts near a garrison are in some danger. For the rest, he is naturally brave, generous, and will share the chicken he has just ridden forty versts to lift. He will give his pipe to be smoked, and will behave with a thoughtfulness and courtesy that is not found in finer circles. His children have the free unrepressed air which speaks of genial home kindliness and sympathy. His wife is far from being a mute drudge.

Assuredly this is not the Cossack of legendary fame, the “implacable knout” of the czars. It requires almost courage, in the face of the savage of literary tradition, to assert that the Cossack is other than a dehumanized monster of oppression. Why then did he cut down with utter ruthlessness the helplessly frozen grenadiers of the Grande Armée? Why will he massacre indiscriminately men, women, and children on his path from Tien-tsin to Peking? Why will he beat with his knotted whip the striking girl students of Kiev? Who shall tell? To a certain extent he is callous to suffering because of a defective imagination. He will ride his best horse to death if need be. Loving it, he will yet leave it out in weather forty below. He is cruel, often, because he has not the substituting gift needed to translate another’s suffering into terms of his own. He is valorous because, even so far as regards himself, he cannot think beyond the immediate privation into the future of imaged dread, so he goes fearlessly into unpondered peril. He offends the traditional ideas of humanity and civilization in killing people, because of his failure to recognize a wider radius of sympathy than circles his own tribe. But if the tribe circumscribes his idea, the nation circumscribes the sympathies of others who make tariffs to crush an extra-national industry and raise armies to destroy a foreign liberty. But if outside the Cossack’s recognized circle, you are to him beyond the pale, in his home, you are, _ipso facto_, a member of the tribe, a brother in whose defense he will gayly risk his life, and spend his substance.

The deeds that are recalled to the Cossack’s discredit often fall for judgment really to those who plan and issue the orders which loyalty makes him obey. Where his allegiance has been once given, there it remains. His _hataman_ is more than a superior officer; he is the chief of the clan, the head of all the tribe, and the subordinate is united to him by the traditions of centuries of mutual dependence. Where other than blood-kin officers are put over the Cossack he mutinies, as when, in Manchuria, Petersburg-schooled lieutenants were drafted and raised to command. But give him his own rightful chief, then if the Cossack is told to do something it is done. He will cross himself and jump from the tower, as in Holland did Peter the Great’s guardsman at the word of the chief to whom he had given his loyalty.

The savage valor of the warriors in Verestchagin’s picture, _The Cossack’s Answer_, is typical of the spirit of these soldiers. Surrounded by battalions of the foe, fated to annihilation when the summons to surrender is rejected, the leaders, laughing uproariously in approval, hear their _hataman_ dictate the insulting reply that dooms them all. If one would ride to China he can have no better guards and comrades than the Cossacks.

We are close to the border now, climbing the last crest which separates the Chickoya from the Cellinga Valley, our toiling tired ponies white with frost. All day the long sweep of the hills has been taken through heavy snow. The landscape is barren, desolate, and lifeless save for the occasional sight of a distant Buriat horseman. The sun is slowly sinking.

The crest at last! The driver points with his whip to the dark masses of houses below, wreathed in the curling smoke of the evening fires. Here and there is a brilliantly painted building or tower, and sleighs and horsemen are passing in the streets. “Troitzkosavsk!” he says. He points further ahead to another more distant town, whose most dominant features are the great square tea-caravansaries and a mighty church, green-domed, with a gilded far-glimmering cross. The huddled houses end sharply toward the south, as if a ruler had marked off their limit in a straight stretch of white. Along this pale are little square sentry-boxes, striped black and white. In the evening sun a distant glint of steel flashes from the bayonet of a pacing sentry. “Kiahta!” the driver says. Then, across the white strip where a wooden stockade girds a settlement of gray-walled compounds, fluttering with tiny flags, gay with lofty towers and temples flaunting their red eaves, he points a third time: “Kitai!” (China).

He picks up the reins, and lifts the whip; “Scurry!” he cries to the horses. The ponies leap forward, throwing their weight against duga and collar, and we sweep down the hill toward the nearest Russian town, Troitzkosavsk, four versts from the border.

As we come down to the main road hard-by the town, officers of the garrison drive past with their spick-and-span fast trotters, city-wise, as one sees them in Irkutsk. Behind rolls a Mongol cart driven by a burly Chinaman. A Buriat, come to town to replenish his supply of powder and ball, follows on his shaggy pony.

Down a long street, flanked first by log cabins with courtyards and fences like those in the peasant villages, then by stucco-plastered houses, cement-walled government buildings, and great whitewashed churches, we pass and reach the centre of the town. Then we turn up a side street to the house of a mine-owner, to whom we are accredited.

Nicolai Vladimirovitch Tobagov meets us at the door of his log house, clad in gray flannel shirt and knee-boots. A not unnoteworthy product of Siberia is this man,--squarely built and yet wiry, with nervous strength expressed on his bearded face. He is self-made, risen from the masses. A peasant-boy, he started life as assistant to a surveyor, learning to read and write by his own efforts. During this apprenticeship he studied his chief’s books on geology, by the light of the brands for the samovar in the peasants’ houses where they were billeted nightly.

He located placer gold in a number of spots, at a time when the oblast was a lawless “no man’s domain,” without any legal means in existence for acquiring title to property. Guarding in silence his secret, he waited years, until at last a mining-law was enacted for the oblast where his prospects lay. When this law ultimately made private ownership possible, he started in to realize. A friend lent him the money for a mill, which he constructed, according to book-descriptions, on the model of those in California. At first it failed to work, and broke again and again. His riffles were set too steeply. They had let the gold scour away, and his neighbors reported that there was no gold to collect. But he fought it through to victory, returned every borrowed kopeck with interest, bought new machines, and prospered; till now, besides controlling several mines, he possesses a great domain in the river valley, some hundred versts away, with fields of wheat and rye and hay-meadows.