TRAGEDY OF RUSSIA.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 October 1921, Page 5

TRAGEDY OF RUSSIA.

FLIGHT OF THE REFUGEES. STAMPEDE FROM MOSCOW. ALARMING MORTALITY. By Telegraph.—Press Assn.—Copyright. London, Oct. 3. The special correspondent of the Chicago Tribune in Moscow writes a moving description of the frantic stampede of famine-stricken refugees into the Caucasus and Turkestan, which are now seriously infected with disease. The crops in Turkestan are good, but the penniless refugees are unable to purchase food.

The correspondent visited several hospitals and found the mortality among typhoid end cholera patients more than 50 per cent. A thousand hospitals have ■been organised between Astrakhan and Samara, in rfearly all of which patients were dying daily who could be saved if fed. The doctors themselves were ill, because they were living on the same rations as the patients. The latter, though barely able to walk, are trying to escape from the hospital in order to beg. SCENES ON THE V. LGA. LISTLESS WAIT FOR DEATH. UNPRECEDENTED HORRORS. London, Sept. 12. Describing Russia’s sufferings from famine, the horrors of which far exceed anything hitherto known in Europe, the special correspondent of the Times tells a plain tale of his tour through the Volga region. He visited large towns like Samara and Syzran, and descended the Volga River by steamer, investigating places where the steamer stopped. He journeyed afield through villages where luck of regular communications makes the position of the starving population even more terrible than elsewhere.

“Samara,” he says, was thronged with refugees, clustered in a dense crowd on a square near the railway station, and also beside the Volga piers, in both cases because they hope to quit the scenes of their sufferings. But transport is pitifully inadequate, and hundreds of families wait hopelessly day after day, living in appalling conditions. Their only shelter consists of strips of rags stretched across the poles of carts. Usually, however, there is no protection overhead. Families are herded into these uncouth tents—old men with emaciated. bodies, shrunken eyes, and death written on their faces; women scarcely able to drag their feet along; and innumerable children, sitting listless and too exhausted to move, or talk, or play. These are in hundreds.” “W'E ALL SHALL DIE SOON.” In one Story .the correspondent tells how he saw the terrible sun harden the soil like stone. The few seeds that reached the surface had withered. The people lived on the scanty remnants of the last, harvest, which was itself a fail ure. They eked out an existence on acorns, bark, leaves, clay, and insects 'crushed into a paste, and even animal droppings—anything capable of holding flour together. When the. last morsel of flour was gone they sold everything at any price in order to migrate. They got absurdly small prices. A horse fetched the price of a family’s weekly supply. Flour then was packed with pots and pans in the last cart, the poor wretches imagining that they could reach the fertile soil of Siberia, and even India.

“Absolute dumb despair,” the correspondent continues, “is written upon every face. An old peasant said: ‘One of my children died yesterday, and another three days ago. We all shall soon.’ The remainder of his fatu...

listened with expressionless faces as i! they had lost al] emotions. Such a death is the most natural thing in the world, and they are waiting their turn. You can see any day in Samara and other famine towns corpses of men and women who have died of starvation. 'Sometimes they died in pain from hunger, sometimes in agony from disease, as their bodies proved. “At the Volga pier I asked a sailor how he lived. He replied simply: ‘We all live on speculation ’ When steamers go to Astrakan the crews buy salt, melons, and similar produce, and sell it when they return. Thus they are able to keep body and soul together. When the Volga freezes, about mid-November, and navigation ceases, I asked what ho and others would do. He replied: ‘I suppose we shall die, like everybody else.’ ” .ROUBLE MILLIONAIRES STARVING, “Though ragged, half-starved and terrified by the dangers of hunger and disease, the peasant fugitives from Samara are mostly rouble million t,'res. The shortest river journey costs sev-nd thousands of roubles, and a respectable official salary is only 4000 roubles a month —barely sufficing for a day’s sustenance. These wealthy fugitives fought for tickets and gleefully waved them in the air as they rejoined their families. They boarded the steamer carrying bundles of filthy clothing, asd there is no wonder that the steamers are the most dangerous means of spreading cholera during the summer. The fugitives openly showed the disease-carrying vermin which were tormenting their emaciated -hodig&r “Some hungry eyes wistfully watched the boat depart, but the vast majority, bowed with misery and pain, not hoping to escape, did even look up. The lipper decks, which were once the promenades of holiday-making aristocrats, were choked with bundles, amid which the owners were huddled. The vessel was stripped bare of mattresses, cushions, curtains, and everything likely to harbor vermin.

“A divisional commander of the Red Army, who was aboard, admitted that the famine was largely the consequence ,o; the army’s requisitions in 1920, regardless of the necessities of the peasants. Many peasants seek revenge by forming robber bands along the Volga, to raid towns which they believe contain food. At one landing-place the passengers saw a distraught mother screaming over her dead baby and cursing a family near-by which was eating its last crust, and accusing the members of hoarding food while her baby died. They did not trouble to explain. They were too near their last gasp. They merely ignored her grief. 1 steamers ply only twias a

day, it seems a miracle of organisation, compared with other transport in Russia, largely because the crews are able to maintain themselves by speculation, as narrated previously. But as these opportunities are diminishing, some of the crews have already deserted, and the pMition is beeooaing <»riti«ftl.”