It would be much more satisfactory to one’s self to try and write a book about the peasantry of Russia, rather than attempt to say all that one wants to say in a single chapter, for there could hardly be any more interesting and promising people in the world than the peasant folk of Russia. The future of the empire depends upon the development and improvement of its agricultural population, as they form three-fourths, according to the last census of three years ago, of its grand total of over 171,000,000 souls. Russia thus leads in the white races in the matter of population, and possesses that splendid asset, which Goldsmith feels to be vital to a nation’s advance and with which nothing else can compare when lost:—

It is upon coming to write even briefly and in an impressionist kind of way upon a class which forms the huge majority of Russia’s population that the vastness of her empire and the different conditions under which her people live begin to be in some small degree apparent. It is no wonder that thoroughly well-informed and experienced writers, who have lived long and travelled far in the country and who are evidently quite to be trusted, should yet write so differently.

One will write as if the Russian peasant was only a degree better in his intelligence than the animals which share his filthy hovel, and no less brutish in temperament and nature. Fearsome pictures are drawn in some books I have read of the almost impossible conditions and indescribable filth in which men, women, and children, fowls, pigs, horses, cattle, and dogs herd together in a stifling atmosphere and sickening stench, where to enter is out of the question unless one is to be covered with vermin and contract some illness. All this may be true to the writer’s own experiences, and he can only write and describe things as he has found them; but I too will do the same.

It is worth while to remember from the first that the lives of the peasant population of Russia must be as different in summer and winter as tropical heat is from arctic cold. In the winter all must crowd in together when the household is poor if life has to be preserved and defended against that appalling cold, when the one condition of the survival is warmth, or even heat. All outdoor occupation ceases, of course, with the one exception, it may be, of cutting, stacking, and carting wood. A peasant population, with a not very advanced civilization as yet, and little education—only twenty per cent. of the whole population can read and write—must, like the animal world, hibernate, come as it were to a standstill, rest physically and mentally, and prepare for the unremitting activities of the summer.

I remember once when staying in an inn at the top of an Alpine pass being impressed with the extraordinary energy and vivacity of the head waitress. She was simply untiring, always in good spirits, always at hand when wanted, unfailing in her attentions; however late a guest was up she was moving cheerfully about, however early one was down she was down before him helping to get things ready. When I was leaving I said to her, “I’ve been wondering when you get your rest?”

She smiled brightly, and said cheerfully, “In the winter, sir.”

That’s when the Russian peasant gets his rest also, and with the spring he begins his energetic life of farming and agriculture, of carting and labour. The long days are busy and all too short, the brief nights are hardly more than an interval. The whole land is full of movement, the air is full of song and music, the holidays marked by game and dance. Nothing could be more unlike the bitter cold and gloom of Russia’s long and terrible winter than the glow, brilliance, joy, and never-ceasing activities of her amazingly rich and life-giving summer. Her peasantry must present the same contrasts in homes and seeming temperaments, and two writers may therefore be widely asunder in their descriptions, and yet both write truthfully of the things they have seen and known at different times of the year.

To me the Russian peasant is, as to others who have known him at his best, an amiable, attractive, intelligent, thoroughly good-natured and altogether lovable creature. It is quite true that he can do, has done, and may again do some perfectly appalling things, but it has been when thoroughly worked up, as one of a crowd, and when every one else has lost his head. Terrible things which were not allowed to be known in Europe outside their frontiers, and now will probably never be known, were done during the revolution of seven years ago. But the Russian peasants are like children, as yet, and any one who knows and loves children knows perfectly well also what they are capable of, if they have any spirit in them, when thoroughly worked up, and when they too have for the time being lost their head and feel capable of almost anything that will hurt and pain and annoy. The peasants are in this, as in many other things, like children.

As soon as the statistics of the Russian peasantry come to be examined a startling fact comes to light. More than half their number—582 out of every 1,000—die before they are five years old. This means, as in the more inclement parts of our own country, that those who survive are a hardy race, strong and virile. The mortality is greatest amongst male children—over 600 out of every 1,000—and those, therefore, who do live are strong enough for anything and of amazing vitality, as we have seen in the present war.

Not only are they vigorous and strong in physique, however, but there is nothing lacking in their intelligence, or Russia would not have the charm and fascination she possesses. Probably no country in the world, unless it be still agricultural France, can compare with Russia in the character of its peasant industries or their importance as part of the national revenue and resources. Probably the people will be stimulated to greater industry in this direction by the removal of the vodka temptation, and both cease to feel the desire for it and get something in its place. Just as a man I once knew who was led to give up drink and gambling at the same time, when wondering how he could possibly live without them, had to change his house and remove to another with a garden. There in gardening work he found his compensation, and at the same time added to the resources of his household. Thus may it be in Russia.[2]

The list of the Russian peasant industries is a long and interesting one, but I won’t take up time in enumerating them, as they can be found in the Russian Year Book, or probably in most encyclopaedias. I may perhaps mention a few which have especially interested and attracted me, and will no doubt be brought before our own people in the Russian shops and exhibitions which are almost certain to be opened before long, and it must be remembered that I am speaking of peasant productions only.

There is the beautiful “drawn thread” work, lace-like in character, that all my friends say is unlike anything to be found in our own country, the making of which is promoted by the Princess Tenisheva and other Russian ladies, as well as embroidered and worked linen of all descriptions. Toys, and particularly large ornamental wooden spoons, of all kinds are made in great quantities by village folk, and painted boxes such as the Japanese make, but with Russian scenes upon them, in delightful shades of colour, and with rich and brilliant lacquer inside and out. Then there are hand-woven laces of different varieties, and, above all, the Orenburg shawls, exquisitely dainty and so fine that the largest of them will go through a wedding-ring, and yet warmer than Shetland wool. These also are hand-woven, and come from the province of Orenburg, just beyond the Urals.

Ironwork, again, is a speciality in Siberia, where they are said to be the best iron-workers in the world, though a friend of mine to whom I mentioned this, when I was showing him some perfectly wonderful and artistic specimens which had been given to me when I first went to Siberia, said, “That’s because they have the best iron in the world.” The stone or gem-cutting industry is an important one. Furs, from sheep and wolf-skins up to bears, as well as those of foxes, sables, elk, and reindeer, and other animals, are perfectly dressed by the peasants for their own use, as well as for sale. I have some exquisite work in coloured silks upon hand-woven cloth which had never been out of the tents where they were made till given to me, and above all I cherish a silver box which had been made in a Kirghese uerta or tent, far away upon the steppes, and was given to me when I had had services there after my long drive in the tarantass. It would hold about a hundred cigarettes, and was given to me for that purpose, is oblong in shape, with a lid of sloping sides, and is made from silver roubles hammered out and ornamented with that beautiful damascening that is said to be a lost art except for the peasants of the steppes. It is such a beautiful bit of workmanship that any one looking at it would think it had come out of a Bond Street silversmith’s, until he turned it over and saw that the bottom is a plain piece of iron, rough and unornamented. Let no one think the Russian peasant unintelligent or unskilful or wanting in dexterity or resource. The wonder to me is that, with the few advantages and opportunities he has had, he is so capable, intelligent, and quick to learn as he is. And what is important for us to remember is that he loves to learn from an Englishman.

Then, again, we are told that he is brutish in temperament and of low ideals, and never seems to rise above his squalid surroundings. I don’t agree that his surroundings are squalid. Simple they are, without a doubt, as the Canadian shack of three brothers I know is simple, and has nothing in it but beds and tables and chairs, their boxes and saddle-trees, etc., and all is bed and work, but it is not squalid. They have been brought up in a good and refined home, and yet find nothing incongruous in their present abode amongst the pine-woods.

That’s what a Russian peasant’s home is also, simple and yet attractive. It is built of logs, the interstices well plastered up with moss and clay to keep out all cold air, cool in summer and warm in winter by reason of the thickness of these outer walls; and it usually has an inner entrance or small room, before the large and chief living-room. There will be two or more small square windows in the latter, an ikon in a corner with a lamp before it and a shelf for flowers below—every one on entering looks towards it, bowing reverently and making the sign of the Cross—a very large stove of bricks, whitewashed, upon the top of which rests a wide shelf, carried along the wall as far as is necessary for the whole family to be able to find sleeping-space upon it. There will also be a long wooden bench, a great table, a few wooden stools, and a great cupboard, and, nearly always, cheap coloured pictures of the Emperor and Empress, whose portraits are to be found in all shops, inns, post offices, and places of public resort.

These are the simple surroundings described and made familiar to us by all writers of Russian stories of which peasants form a part, and all over the empire they are found just as Tolstoi, Dostoviesky, Turgenieff, and others bring them before us in their interesting tales. Take for example Tolstoi’s Where Love is there God is also, Master and Man, and other parables and tales. When Martin Avdeitch is looking out from his small abode through his one small window upon the passers-by as simply as man could do, and yet with shrewd and discerning eyes, he is ready for the old pilgrim who comes into his life just at the right moment, and shows him the way to God.

Or take Nikita in Master and Man, in the same volume. In some ways he is extraordinarily simple, and does not appear to know how shamefully he is being exploited by his avaricious and grasping master. We are told in the story that he does know even though he goes on as if he didn’t, and does his duty by him as if he were the best of masters, just as he does by an unfaithful and unfeeling wife. It would be difficult to imagine a peasant one would more love to know and understand than Nikita, strong, capable, affectionate, and shrewd, as he comes running before us in the story, to harness the horse for his master, the only man on the place that day not drunk, talking to the little brown cob which noses him affectionately, and in the end making a tremendous struggle for his own and his master’s life, and winning through himself. Thus he goes on steadily as long as he lives, with no other thought but that of duty, until he lies down beneath the ikon, and, with the wax candle in his hand just as he had always wished, passes away at peace with every living creature and with God.

There are no peasants like the Russians, or who think as they do. They are young, one feels, and “The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” and that is just what those who know them best find out.

A friend of mine told this story the other day at a meeting, at which we both had to speak, and I am sure it will bear repetition. A moujik, or peasant, was driving a German commercial traveller across the open country, and in the course of their conversation together his companion said to him:—

“Your countrymen are nothing but a lot of idolaters. You worship those ikons of yours, and bow down to them as the heathen do,” and so on. The moujik was very indignant, and grumbled out his disapproval of all this.

“Worship our ikons indeed! We don’t.” And as they went driving on he suddenly drew up, and, pointing to a tree, demanded of the astonished traveller:—

“Do you mean to say that I would worship that tree?”

“No, no. Of course not! Drive on.”

With a very disapproving grunt he drove on, and when they reached their destination, where there was a painter at work upon an outside door, the moujik, pointing to the paint-pot beside it, again demanded of the traveller:—

“Would you say I could worship that paint?”

“No, certainly not! You could not be so silly.”

“But yet you say I worship an ikon, which is only painted wood, and can’t see that I only use it to help me to worship God.”

Let the reader reflect upon the way in which that peasant had been thinking over the charge made against him of idolatry, thinking what idolatry really was, and how far he felt himself from it. Let him try and imagine how one of our own agricultural labourers would think over such a subject if he were entering into conversation with us as he was digging in our garden, or driving us in a farmer’s cart to a country station. I am writing this chapter in a quiet part of the country, and I can’t conceive of any of the labouring people here even approaching that line of thought upon which the mind of that moujik began at once to move, though slowly enough no doubt, when he was told he was little better than a worshipper of idols.

I read the other day in a book on Russia that the peasantry are very dirty in person, and never wash; but again it must be borne in mind, as another remarkably well-informed and sympathetic writer[3] says also: “When people generalize about the intense misery of Russian peasants and the squalor in which they live they should remember that Russia is a large country, that it possesses a North and a South, an East and a West, and that what is true about one place is quite untrue about another.” I shall be quite prepared, therefore, to be told by people who know Russia far better than I can ever hope to do, that their experience has been altogether different from my own, and I shall not dream of questioning or doubting the truth of what they say as far as their own experience goes.

In this vast area of which we are thinking there must indeed be great varieties of experience and conditions of life, and it is not contrary to what one might expect to find much nearer home, that the people of one village may be clean in their habits and those of another quite the reverse. But from all I have seen, heard, and read the Russian labouring and peasant class have a great desire to be clean. Nor is this a new thing at all in the national life. It is nearly forty years ago since Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace told us, in the first edition of his work, of the important part taken by the weekly vapour-bath in the life of the Russian peasantry, and described “the public bath possessed by many villages.” How many villages of our own, even now, have a public bath? And how many of our own peasantry dream of having what is a perfectly ordinary and weekly habit of the Russians—the bath in his own house?

My Russian and Siberian friends tell me how they have always to arrange for their domestic servants to get a good bath, before they change for Sunday, every Saturday afternoon and evening. Mr. Rothay Reynolds says the same: “My friend took me to see his bath-house. Russians are exceedingly clean. In villages one may see a row of twenty cottages, and, thirty yards from them, a row of twenty bath-houses. The one the peasant showed me was a hut with a stove intended to heat the great stones placed above it. On bath nights the stove is lit, and when the stones are hot a bucket of water is thrown on them, so that the place is filled with steam. The bather lies on a bench in the suffocating atmosphere, soaps himself, and ends his ablutions with ice-cold water. In town and country it is held to be a religious duty to take a steam-bath once a week. Servants ask if they can go out for a couple of hours to visit one of the great baths in the cities. They go away with clean linen bound up in a handkerchief, and return shining with cleanliness. Admission to the cheapest part of a steam-bath is usually a penny farthing, but in the great towns there are luxurious establishments frequented by the rich.”

There is another custom connected with the bath which testifies to the hardy character of the Russian moujik. They often rush straight out of the almost suffocatingly hot bath which they have been taking inside the huge earthenware oven that they all possess and, naked and steaming, roll themselves contentedly and luxuriously in the snow. This, as a writer has well said, “aptly illustrates a common Russian proverb which says that what is health to the Russian is death to the German”—a proverb which has had striking illustration again and again this very winter. Probably some of my readers saw the account of the arrival at the Russian front, soon after war began, of the bath-train which was so completely furnished and arranged that two thousand men could have a clean bath during the day or twelve thousand in the course of the week. No doubt others have followed since then.

The bath to the Russian has a certain religious significance also, as in Moslem countries; “and no good orthodox peasant,” I have read, “would dare to enter a church after being soiled with certain kinds of pollution without cleansing himself physically and morally by means of the bath.” “Cleanliness is next to godliness” is not a bad motto for any people, and possibly Russians will like to know that we have an order of knighthood which dates from 1398, and is named “The Most Honourable Order of the Bath,” and mentioned regularly in the services at Westminster Abbey.

A great sense of initiative and personal responsibility, as well as corporate spirit at the same time, is clearly given early in life to the peasant mind in Russia, for nowhere, I fancy, in the world, except in countries where primitive ideas and customs still obtain, is there the same standard of village life and self-government. There are two kinds of communities. First, there is the village community with its Assembly or Mir, under the presidency of the Staroshta, who is elected by the village. He presides over the Assembly, which regulates the whole life of the village, distributes the land of the commune, decides how and when the working of the land has to be done; and it is specially interesting to know that in this most remarkable and exceptional village government of the Mir all women who permanently and temporarily are heads of houses are expected to attend its meetings and to vote—no one ever dreams of questioning their right to do so.

In addition to the village assembly and chief elder there is also the “Cantonal” Assembly, consisting of several village communities together, meeting also under the presidency of a chief elder. All this is, of course, a development of family life where exactly the same ideas of corporate duty in its members, and responsibilities in its head, are held.

It is evident that Russia has a great future if this view of self-government is gradually carried upwards. The right beginning in constitutional government, surely, is in the family, for there we find the social unit. A state is not a collection or aggregate of individuals, but of families, and all history shows us that the greatness or insignificance of a country has always been determined by the condition of its homes and the character of its family life. If from the family, village, and commune Russian constitutionalists work slowly and carefully upwards, giving freedom to make opinions and convictions felt in the votes, just as responsibility is understood and met in the home, until one comes to the head of it all in “The Little Father”; and if he really rules—or administers rather, for no true father rules only—just as any good father would do, Russia the autocratic and despotic, associated in the minds of so many with arbitrary law in the interests of a few, enforced by the knout and prison-chain, may yet give the world a high standard of what the government of a free and self-respecting people ought to be.

I should doubt if any peasantry in the world live so simply and frugally or, as they say in the North of England, “thrive so well on it,” as the Russians. The men are of huge stature, and their wives are strong, comely, and wholesome-looking also. Their boys and girls are sturdy, vigorous, and full of life; and yet how bare the table looks at the daily meal, how frugal the fare and small the quantity! It has been the greatest joy to me to have Russian boys and girls, in out-of-the-way places, to share my sandwiches or tongue or other tinned meats, when stopping at a rest-house, and see their eyes shine at the unexpected and unusual treat.

Black rye-bread and cabbage-soup form the staple food of a peasant family, while meat of any kind is rarely seen. The many and rigorous fasts of the Church make very little difference to the quality of the food, but only to its quantity. The thanks given by guests to their host and hostess, Spasibo za kleb za sol, “Thanks for bread and salt,” tell their own story of a bare and simple diet. Many of us have read in The Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem of the sacks of black and hard crusts the peasants take with them, which quite content them.

What a tremendous difference it must have made this winter in the Russian food transport from the base to the front, to know that, if a serious breakdown took place, or a hurried march was ordered with which it was difficult for them to keep up, and the worst came to the worst, the men would have their crusts. It has been said in years gone by, and may be true still in many places, that the Russian peasant’s ideas of Paradise is a life in which he would have enough black bread to eat.

This bare subsistence and monotonous diet, perhaps, is responsible for the break-out from time to time when the attraction of vodka is too strong to be resisted in a life in which there are no counter-attractions. Counter-attractions there ought to be for a being who is created not for work alone, but for that recreation which, as its very name betokens, his whole nature needs if he is to do his best work. “There is a time to work and a time to play,” says the proverb writer; and if we hold that in school life “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” we can hardly wonder that, the world over, those for whom work is provided and play refused will seek, as they have ever done, to make up for its absence by the exhilaration of stimulating and intoxicating drinks. It is when writing upon the drunkenness to be seen at every Russian village holiday that one whom I have often quoted in this book,[4] truly says, “As a whole a village fÊte in Russia is a saddening spectacle. It affords a new proof—where, alas! no proof was required—that we northern nations who know so well how to work have not yet learnt the art of amusing ourselves.”

As an instance of the real and natural friendliness and essential good nature of the Russian, I may say that even when drunk I have never seen or heard of men quarrelling. They do not gradually begin to dispute and recriminate and come to blows or draw the knife, as some of the more hot-blooded people of the South do, when wine excites or spirits cheer them. They seem to become more and more affectionate until they begin to kiss each other, and may be seen thus embracing and rolling over and over together like terriers in the snow. If wine unlooses the tongue, and brings out what is usually hidden away beneath the surface, it evidently brings out nothing very evil from the inner life of the Russian peasant.

In time to come, if all’s well, Russia is to be opened up to the traveller, and everywhere the British tourists will be welcomed, and even though the beaten track of the railway may never be left there will be abundant opportunities for observing the habits and customs of the people. A modern writer who, apparently, in passing through Siberia never went far from the railway, though he probably stayed for some time at different places on the way, and sat in third and fourth-class carriages even if he did not actually travel in them, managed to see a great deal of peasant life. The railway train is open from end to end, and a great deal may be learnt thus about the people while merely passing through. There are also the long waits at the stations where there are invariably interesting groups of the most romantic and picturesque character—the women vivacious and full of conversation, while the men stand more stolidly by, always making one long to speak and understand their language and to know more about them.

There is a story of Mr. Maurice Baring’s which illustrates what I have already said of the way in which the Russian peasant mind begins to move freely, independently, and responsibly upon lines undreamed of by those who may be addressing him, and shows how far he is from receiving merely conventional and stereotyped impressions, but is always ready to think for himself. Mr. Baring considers it an instance of his common sense. The reader may also have his own ideas of what it illustrates, but the story is this:—

“A Socialist arrived in a village to convert the inhabitants to Socialism. He wanted to prove that all men were equal, and that the government authorities had no right to their authority. Consequently he thought he would begin by disproving the existence of God, because if he proved that there was no God it would naturally follow that there should be no Emperor and no policemen. So he took a holy ikon and said, ‘There is no God, and I will prove it immediately. I will spit upon this ikon and break it to bits, and if there is a God He will send fire from heaven and kill me, and if there is no God nothing will happen to me at all.’ Then he took the ikon and spat upon it and broke it to bits, and said to the peasants, ‘You see God has not killed me.’ ‘No,’ said the peasants, ‘God has not killed you, but we will’; and they killed him.”

It is not difficult to imagine that closing scene, knowing Russia. There would be no excitement, but all would be quickly and effectually done.

The same writer draws our attention to Turgenieff’s wonderfully appealing sketches of country life, though not many of his works have been translated for English readers as yet. He alludes especially in an essay of last year on “The Fascination of Russia” to his description of the summer night, when on the plain the children tell each other bogey stories; or the description of that July evening, when out of the twilight from a long way off a voice is heard calling, “Antropk-a-a-a!” and Antropka answers, “Wha-a-a-at?” and far away out of the immensity comes the answering voice, “Come home, because daddy wants to whip you!”

Perhaps the reader may feel nothing as he reads, but all who know and love Russia, and are stirred by thoughts of its life and people will feel that it was abundantly worth while to write down such a simple incident. They will understand and feel that stirring within, which Russia never fails to achieve again and again for those who have once lived and moved amongst her peasantry, and come under her strange spell and felt her charm.

Gogol, the greatest of Russian humorists, has a passage in one of his books, where, in exile, he cries out to his country to reveal the secret of her fascination:—

“‘What is the mysterious and inscrutable power which lies hidden in you?’” he exclaims. “‘Why does your aching and melancholy song echo unceasingly in one’s ears? Russia, what do you want of me? What is there between you and me?’ This question has often been repeated not only by Russians in exile, but by others who have merely lived in Russia.

“There are none of those spots where nature, art, time, and history have combined to catch the heart with a charm in which beauty, association, and even decay are indistinguishably mingled; where art has added the picturesque to the beauty of nature; and where time has made magic the handiwork of art; and where history has peopled the spot with countless phantoms, and cast over everything the strangeness and glamour of her spell.

“Such places you will find in France and in England, all over Italy, in Spain and in Greece, but not in Russia.

“A country of long winters and fierce summers, of rolling plains, uninterrupted by mountains and unvariegated by valleys.

“And yet the charm is there. It is a fact which is felt by quantities of people of different nationalities and races; and it is difficult if you live in Russia to escape it; and once you have felt it you will never be free from it. The aching melancholy song which, Gogol says, wanders from sea to sea throughout the length and breadth of the land, will for ever echo in your heart and haunt the recesses of your memory.”[5]

[2] Just as I go to press Mr. Lloyd George has told the House of Commons that productivity is already increased 30 per cent. in Russia.