THE RUSSIAN FAMINE.

Franklin Times, Volume 9, Issue 686, 22 November 1921, Page 5

THE RUSSIAN FAMINE.

“DYING OFF LIKE FLIES.” A vivid light is thrown on the horrors of the Russian famine by Major W. T. Blake, who has been to that unhappy land by aeroplane. Major Blake says :• My itour of Russia and Poland has left me with an ineffaceable impression of the anguish of the famine-stricken! 'millions. A score of vivid episodes through which one has lived!; a hundred tragic pictures flashed upon the brain; an infinite number of touches of terror, of pity, of despair, help one to realise something of 1 phe gigantic nightmare horror of the groat Russian famine. I have seen the refugees in Russia and in Poland. They are flowing in a mighty stream from East to West; an appalling torrent of starving humanity flying before the spectres of famfine and death, stumbling and falling on the way, ofen never to rise again ; seeking always their salvation in the West, though it is a slender hope, for hunger pursues them over the Russian fronties. Only the homeless are allowed to leave Russia. This sternedict has had one strange and terrible effect. Peasants are actually burning down .their homes just to qualify for escape as homeless persons. They are willing—eager even —to give their homes and their household goods to the flames so that they may jbe free to join that great neverceasing procession of the hungry. Trains from Minsk, iri Russia, bring thousands of sarving refugees over the fronties. It is a moving sight to ' watch the trainloads of starving wretches entering ; Baranovitchi, the chief refugees centre in Poland. All of them are thin and in rags—-many are naked on arrival and too weak to do more than fall out of the train and collapse. At Baranovitchi one morning I entered one of the huts of boughs, about six feet square, in which eleven people ( i were sleeping. The stenck nearly drove me outside, and at my entrance a cloud of flies rose with a buzz like that of a distant aeroplane. Seized by some elemental emotion, men and women tramp for miles and miles through a sheer waste ; of . desolation seeking out the spots wkere'their old mud huts and cabins used to stand. Small naked children crawled about, their ribs sticking out like barrel hoops, swollen through hunger. Men and women, worn out with dysentery, too feeble t 6 move their limbs, which are literally like broomsticks, stagger about the compounds. What - is going to happen this winter ? A more tragic question has never faced humanity. Autumn is nearly upon us, and then will come October with pitiless snows and black biting frosts. “When * the snows come how will these poor creatures exist /’ I asked a local official at Barqnovatchi. His answer lit up the grimness of the prospect—a searchlight ray turned upon the future. “In the winter,” he said, “they do not cross the frontier. - They freeze—■ they freeze to death.”