Part 9

“The _gaspadine_ will take _chai_?” asks the patriarch. From the woman’s room beside the oven the girl brings a samovar. She sets it on the floor, beside an earthenware jar standing near the door, and dips out the water to fill it. Then with tongs she takes a long red ember from a niche cut in the side of the oven, and drops it down the samovar funnel. Round loaves of frozen rye-bread are brought out and set to thaw. A plate of eggs is produced from the cellar. One rolls off as the girl passes, and falls to the floor. Instinctively you start. Not so the others. The egg has dropped like a stone and rolled away. But it is quietly picked up and put to boil with the rest. It is frozen so solidly that there is not even a crack on the shell.

Jacov meanwhile is making earnest inquiry of the “old one.”

“How are your cows, Dimitri Ivan’ich? Your horses, are they well? And your sheep? All well? And have you had good crops? Is there still plenty of pasture-land in this village? _Good!_ GOOD!--and how is your wife?”

Poor withered wife; she is bustling around looking after the children, and trying to help her daughter-in-law. Not so the “old one,” the ancient man of the family to whom these courteous questions are addressed. The patriarch stopped his labors at fifty, and sits slumbering away his second prospective half-century in honored idleness. “Everybody works but father!”

The samovar is humming now, and the table is decked with a homespun-linen cloth ready for the _obeid_. The first formality, as dinner is about to begin, must be observed. The various members of the family turn, one after another, toward the ikons, reverently crossing themselves. Then the host produces a bottle of a colorless liquid, shakes it up and down, and brings the bottom sharply against his palm. The cork shoots out, and he pours into a little glass a drink of the national beverage, vodka, which one is supposed to swallow at a gulp.

Every time a guest enters, a bottle of vodka is brought out, costing 49¼ kopecks, half the average day-laborer’s pay in this district. On feast-days the visitors go from house to house drinking,--and these _prasdniks_ number some fifty-two days in the Russian year. Every business deal is baptized with vodka. Every family festival, the return of a son from the army, the marriage of a daughter,--all are vodka-soaked. As one passes through villages on a saint’s day, he may meet a dozen reeling figures and hear the maudlin songs from the courtyards where the men have gathered. The part played by vodka in the people’s life is appalling.

In the house now, all, beginning with the “old one,” partake of this stimulant, solemnly gulping down their fiery potions. Then the family sits down in due rank and order, the “old one” in the cosiest corner, with the samovar convenient to his hand. You, as the guest, are beside him on the bench that lines the wall, then comes Jacov, next the son, then Ivan Kurbski the _yamshik_, and on stools along the inner side of the table, the grandmother and assorted infants. The mother alternates between the table and the oven.

The samovar is tapped for tea as the first course of the evening. For all who come, tea is the obligatory offering, in a cup if the visitor be familiar, but for special honor in a glass with a ragged lump of sugar hammered from a big cone-shaped loaf. This one nibbles as he drinks, for sugar is a luxury, not to be used extravagantly. The brown rye-bread, which has been thawed at the gaping oven-door, is next brought out, and raw blubber-like fat pork, in little squares, eaten as butter, and boiled potatoes, and the boiled eggs, curdled from the freezing.

At Little Christmas, the _prasdnik_ day which comes in early January, _pelmenis_, or dumplings, egg-patties (grease-cooked), and meat will be served, with cranberries and white bread. In Butter-Week everybody gorges on buttered _blinnies_, or pancakes, garnished with sour cream. Even a substance showing rudimentary traces of a common ancestry with cake may be produced.

As the shadows of the northern evening close down, a piece of candle is lighted to-night in our honor. Generally the burning brands for the samovar, propped in a niche cut at the height of a man’s shoulder in the outer edge of the oven, throw the only light. Presently the candle is used up and the brands give a fitful flame, leaving the corners black as Erebus.

From the baby’s cradle comes now a plaintive cry, and one of the little girls goes over to dandle it. Up and down, to and fro, for hours together she works, singing her monotonous lullaby. The children, who have been lifted down from their eyrie above the oven, play on the sanded floor. The men remain oblivious and smoke their pipes, letting fall an occasional word, which comes forth muffled from their great beards.

Ox-like, all sit for a while, sipping occasional cups of tea. Then the woman and the girl go out and get wood, remove the pots from inside the oven, and build up a roaring fire. The children are rolled up for sleep in their little blankets on the floor. The men reach for their furs and felts. They go to the left of the oven, the women to the right, and the children are between, making a long row in front of the fire. Soon all are sunk in heavy sleep. The little girl alone sits up to rock the baby. As you doze off in the genial warmth of the newly-stoked oven she is still crooning her lullaby in the dim fitful light of the firebrands.

Through the long night all lie like logs. Toward morning, as the oven’s heat dies down and the bitter cold creeps in, sleep becomes uneasy. One stirs and then another. Finally the woman rises and wakes the girl, and they go out into the cold for wood and water. Presently the men bestir themselves, get up, and wait for their tea. The rising sun of another day casts its rays through the windows.

As the sleepers one by one arise and stretch, their blankets are folded by the watchful woman of the house, and thrust up on the children’s shelf. Some of the men go across the room and let the water from the little brass can in the corner trickle over their hands. Some do not do even this.

For the outlander of washing proclivities, peculiar problems are offered by a country of no wash-bowls, no soap, only occasional towels, and the tea samovar as the only source of hot water, a copious draft on which not only postpones breakfast but compels some of the women of the family to go out and chop ice for a new supply. Necessity evolves the tea-tumbler toilet method as our solution. You borrow one of the precious tea-glasses from the old woman, fill it to overflowing with warm water from the samovar, and prop it up on the window-sill. The top inch of water is absorbed into a sponge which is put aside for future use. Into the remaining two and a half inches a soaped handkerchief is dipped, with which one washes one’s face, touching tenderly the spots recently frozen. The reserved sponge will do to rinse off the detritus of this first operation. Two and a quarter inches of water are left, of which half an inch may be poured over the tooth-brush. With an inch and three quarters left, one has ample to lather for a shave, as well as to wet the nail-brush which is to scrub one’s hands that will be rinsed with the sponge. Half an inch remains finally to clean the brushes and razors. “There you are!” With two glasses one may have a bath.

When the breakfast of rye-bread and tea is ended, the men go out to their various winter tasks, of which the most serious is felling trees in the forests, cutting them up, and getting home the wood. The women keep stolidly at their cooking, cleaning, child-tending, and turn to the spinning-wheel and hand-loom when other work does not press.

In the weeks that follow, each night brings us to a different home, but never to a changed environment or atmosphere. This type of life is found, not only among the Trans-Baikal peasantry, but throughout all Siberia. The log houses down the long straggly village streets look out upon the same wooden-walled courtyards,--the women peering from their little windows as the sleighs jingle past. The same ikons with burning lamps look down as you enter; the same whitewashed oven and shelf and cradle are there as you push open the felted door. The women of each district wear the same traditional costume. The bearded host produces the same vodka. One of the most impressive sights, when one drives out before dawn into the frosty air, is to see at almost the same moment from every chimney the black smoke roll upwards, then dwindle to a thin gray streak. Each woman has risen and heaped green wood into the cooking-oven. It is as if one will actuated simultaneously all the people.

At places the master of the house has a trade, shoemaking or saddlery, and the big living-room is littered with pieces of leather and waxed cord as he stitches. Sometimes there are hunters in the family, and ancient flintlock muskets rest on the antlered trophies. The men gather together occasionally to drive deer. But in general, as the winter is the men’s idle time, a little wood is cut, the cattle are seen to, and for the rest, talk, tea, and tobacco, until it is time to eat and sleep once more. The women on the other hand seem to be always occupied, but they are not discontented.

[Illustration: PEASANT VILLAGE STOREKEEPER SIBERIAN TYPES]

The customs and institutions which bind together the household group are unique. In all families the _Hazan_ is supreme. To him first of all, strangers pay their respects. To him every member of the household comes for advice as to whom he or she shall marry, and which calf shall be sold. Howsoever hard of hearing he may be, there is related to him all the events of the neighborhood with infinite minuteness. He is the repository of all moneys earned by logging for a neighboring mine-owner, or for bringing out to the railroad the sledge-loads of rye. As head of the family he can summon a forty-year-old son from the merchant’s counter in Krasnoyarsk, or his nephew from the fur-traffic in Irkutsk, and bid him return to his peasant hut. If a grandson wishes to go to Nerchinsk to seek his fortune, the “old one’s” consent must be obtained before the youth receives his passport. It is all at the patriarch’s sovereign pleasure.

We come one day upon a vexatious example of this ancestral authority. A report reaches us, by chance, of a hibernating bear’s hole some fifty versts away, which one of the peasants has located. The host, noting our interest, asks:--

“Would the _gaspadine_ like to hunt him?”

There is no question on this score, so the peasant is quickly brought to the hut. Numerous friends crowd in with him, for one person’s business is everybody’s business in these primitive communities. For a liberal equivalent in roubles the man agrees to act as guide, and the start is to be made early next morning. All is arranged and he goes out with his body-guard to make the necessary preparations. By and by there is a stir. Our sledge-driver comes in with a long face. Then half a dozen peasants add themselves to the family quota in the hut. Soon more come, until the stifling room is as populous as a Mir Assembly. They are all talking at once, and there is a great hubbub. At length one voice louder than the rest seems to call a decision for them all. They turn backward again, and with many gesticulations bustle through the felted doors into the snowy streets, and through the village to a house which they enter in a body as if with intent of sacking it. Instead they bring out and over to our hut a slight bearded old man, bent with the weight of many winters--the father of the peasant guide.

Humble but resolute, he faces the assembly.

“No, I cannot consent that he lead the _gaspadine_ to the Medvetch Dom.”

“But assure the ‘old one’ that his son will only point out the den and then go away.”

The “old one” answers:--

“The bear does not come to steal my pigs. Why should I get him shot? Besides, a bear chewed up three Buriats last year. It would be sad to be devoured even for the _gaspadine’s_ fifty roubles.”

The reward is doubled, and forty kopecks’ worth of vodka produced. Many advisers give aid, and one suggests that “the son may mount a tree one hundred _sagenes_ from the mansion of the bear!”

But still the father refuses. “No, I will not allow him to take out his horse and hunting-sledge.”

The son, whose half-dozen full-grown children are looking on, shakes his head dolefully. A big eagle-nosed peasant, of hunting proclivities, comes in.

“I will give my hunting-sleigh if he will go,” he calls.

But the shrill voice of the “old one” rings out again, “I do not consent. I do not consent. My son shall not go to the mansion of the bear.”

The guide shrugs his shoulders. We have hit the ledge of Russian authority. No one will budge. The old man has his way.

As is the management of the household, so is that of the village. While the _Hazan_ rules over the common property of the family (_izba_), the village elder (_Selski Starosta_) is guardian over the grouped households which make up the Mir. As the household goods belong to no one individual, but are common property, so the land farmed by the villagers is a joint possession whose title rests with the commune. The family is held for the debts and behavior of all of its individuals; and similarly, with certain limitations, the village community is answerable for the taxes and discipline of each of its members.

On a humble scale it is the spirit of socialism incarnate. Within the commune no capitalistic employers, no wage-taking worker-class, no castes exist, and no individuals are born with special privileges. No distinctions of rank or fortune lift some above their fellows. The manner of living is the same for all. Each head of a family has a right of vote, and elects by the freest, simplest means his own judges and village rulers. The land, the source of livelihood, is divided among the producers by their own unfettered suffrage.

The chief man of the community--he who drums out the voters to the Mir, lists those who do not work sufficiently on the pope’s field, and reports the toll of taxes to the Government--is simply an elderly peasant clothed with a little brief authority. There is no household in the average village which is looked up to as more genteel than the rest. No such distinctions as prevail in America will reveal that such a farmer’s family is musical and well-read, such another has traveled to Niagara Falls, such a third has blue-ribbon sheep. In Russian peasant circles all is equality, almost identity.

Here is presented the best example in the world to-day of an applied system based upon the communistic as opposed to the individualistic theory. It is therefore of more than local interest. Most apparent of all results is the economic stagnation which has accompanied the elimination of special rewards for special efforts. The man, more daring or more far-sighted than his fellows, who would take for himself the risk of a new enterprise, who would mortgage his house to buy a reaper, or would seek a farther market, is fettered by his plodding neighbors. His financial obligations, if he fail, fall on the others of a common family, whose members have a veto on his freedom of action. His own and his neighbor’s fields by the allotment are proportioned in extent to the old hand-labor standard. A machine has few to serve until the fields are readjusted to a new standard. While technically a man may buy or rent lands outside the commune and may introduce a new rotation of crops or agricultural tools, actually the inertia of the peasants bound to him by the brotherhood of the Mir weighs the adventurous one hopelessly to the earth. Who can persuade an assembly of bearded conservatism-steeped “old ones” to buy for the Mir the costly new machines? Perhaps, with the visible demonstration of profits which private enterprise could make under an individual régime, the doubting elders might consent. But who is there to show them when every village checks back the swift to the lock-step of the clod?

Nor is it simply in material things that communism manifests its lotus-fruit in these country hamlets. Ignorance, unashamed, broods over them one and all. What a dead level is revealed by the fact that one peasant in a populous village on the Chickoya, our guide upon a shooting-trip, could not tell time by a watch, and had never seen such an invention.

Some instances are related where the more ambitious men of a Mir have clubbed together to bring in a teacher at their own expense. The Semieski, or “Old Believers,” big, red-bearded, obstinate men, settled in Urluck in the Zabaikal, who dissent from the sixteenth-century revisions of Bishop Nikon, will not send children to Slavonic schools and may have schools of their own. But these cases are rare. There is among the peasantry almost no education and comparatively little desire for it, yet how far this sentiment is from being a racial or national failing the crowds that come to the city universities bear ample witness. In one of the villages a teacher from Chita is established in the side room of a peasant’s house, wherein one night we sojourn. He has been appointed by the Commissioner of Schools of the Cossack Government. He is of a good Nerchinsk family and is brother to an elector of delegates to the second Duma. He is one of the “Intellectuals”--the student class which forms almost a caste by itself. A free-thinker, keenly interested in the rights of man, a Social Democrat by politics, he goes shooting on Sunday with some peasant cronies. He plays Russian airs on his _balilika_ and gets the peasant’s daughter to dance for the guest. He produces specimens of antimony and chalcopyrite, and discusses the geological probability of finding silver or platinum ores in these districts. Photographs of the amateur-kodak variety are along the walls, and on a table in the corner are a mandolin and a pile of books. We pick up a volume,--“L’Évolution de la Moralité,” by Charles Letourneau. The young owner, who consumes a prodigious number of Moscow cigarettes, tells of the indifference to education among the people.

“Here we have a school in a big village, with two other communities near by. There are easily five hundred households,--with how many children in each, you can see. Yet we have but thirty boys at school. What can we do?”

He is discouraged, this single “Intellectual” of Gotoi. Profoundly solicitous for the future, an idealist, boundless in hopes for the good of his race, he sees the younger generation submerged at the threshold of opportunity by the inertia of the old.

“‘What good will it do for him to read?’ ask the peasants, when I urge, ‘Send your boy to the school.’ What can I say? The boy comes from my class after two years, and goes out with the men. He has no money to buy books if he wants them. No newspapers come to the village, no printed matter whatever, save that on the pictures which they buy in the fairs. In a few years all I have taught is forgotten. The darkness is over these villages. One must lift them despite themselves.”

Beyond the range of the village communes, no people show a more eager zeal for knowledge and study. In the cities almost all of the younger generation can read and write. The school-boys, with their big black ear-covering caps, smart blue coats, brightened with rows of brass buttons, and knapsacks of books, are one’s regular morning sight. “Realistic” and “Materialistic” schools are established in many towns.

The apathy of the rural element is to be laid at the door of the system which hinders those within the confines of the communes from reaping the fruits of special sacrifice and effort. No one attempts to raise himself in the Mir, where the dead weight of those bound to him is so hopeless. If any boy, brighter than the rest, follow some lodestar, it must be to a city. The aspirant must bury ambition, or leave the drudging Mir with its toll of taxes and recruits. He will not study law before the wood-fire as did Lincoln in his log cabin.

The cloud of deadening communism over their lives utters itself in the words continuously on the peasants’ tongues. It is the northern equivalent for that buttress of despotism--“_mañana_.” The possibility of the Russian condition is “_nietchevo!_” If the red cock (_krasnai petuk_) has crowed and has left the forty householders with charred embers where stood their homes, “_nietchevo!_” They build it up of wood and straw, with the oven chimney passing through as before. Does a raging toothache torture, “It is the will of God,--_nietchevo_!” If the weary day’s climb sees a gameless evening, “_nietchevo!_” If the son is frozen in the troop-train, “_nietchevo!_” If the Little Father send to Yakutsk the other one who has gone to the city, “_nietchevo!_” Is the unrevised tax for a family of ten men pressing down upon three, “It has got to be borne,--_nietchevo!_” It is this bowing to fate as a thing begotten of the gods, when it is a force to be fought here on earth; the long-taught submission to evil, when evil is to be conquered, to limitation when opportunity is to be won,--it is this spirit which is holding rural Russia still in her Dark Ages.

The origin of the present village-system goes back to the time of serfage, when the overlord held his dependents herded together for easy ruling. That it extended to unfettered Siberia, where the rewards of individual effort were so obvious, cannot be laid entirely to old custom or government compulsion. Nor is it to be explained by the early necessity for protection against wild beasts or hostile natives. The same dangers threatened the pioneers of our own country. Perhaps the Russian spirit of gregariousness lies at the root of the fact that in the Czar’s domains the peasant lives away from his fields to be near his neighbors, while our people live away from their neighbors to be near their fields. Whatever the cause, the outcome is that practically the whole rural population, even in the most thinly settled districts, is gathered into villages, and owns the lands in common.