RUSSIA’S SAHARA.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 November 1921, Page 10

RUSSIA’S SAHARA.

BURNT-UP WHEATLAND. “As I saw it, it was not Samara, but the Sahara.” Thus the special correspondent of the Timos sums up his drive through the Volga country around Syzra n. “Usually,” he continues, “it is a smiling expanse of cornfields, for this is the most fertile region of this most fertile of provinces. I have never seen a cultivated place burnt so bare. On many farms there was not a vestige of vegetation, but some grey thin crops 4in high. Among these Lilliputian cornfields the travellers felt like Gullivers. “It is easy to see why everything has been ruined. The sun burned with an intensity such as I have known only in the tropics. Whirlwinds of dust rose on every side, and the earth swam and quivered in the heat. Stormclouds gathered daily, and the blessed rain seemed imminent, but the clouds dispersed, and the remnants of this terrible harvest were still further ruined. “We frequently passed skeletons of horses and cattle, while groups of peasants plodded wearily along the road, some dragging carts, because the horses had died on the wayside. Where the refugees have congregated they are living in indescribably unhealthy conditions. It is certain that typhus this winter will be even worse than during the two previous winters, when it raged tu an absolutely unprecedented degree.” The correspondent describes the utter fatalism of the peasants in the face of their afflictions. Some blame the plundering of landlords’ estates since the revolution, pointing out that when there a scarcity under the old regime the landlords did not allow the peasants to go hungry. The peasants did not really want to despoil the owners, but strangers would do so if they did not. “Now we are being punished for our sins,” they say. But the prevailing mood is hopeless, patient resignation. “We all are going to die,” is heard everywhere. It is useless to ask what they propose to do when there is nothing further to eat, for it always comes to the same thing—the peasants ask: “Why go to the towns? We w-ill die anyway, and may as, well die here.”