“WE SHALL ALL DIE.”

Taranaki Daily News, 26 November 1921, Page 10

“WE SHALL ALL DIE.”

HORRORS OF RUSSIAN FAMINE. PEASANTS RESIGNED TO FATE. Accounts of the Russian famine, which read like tales by Poe, come from a correspondent who travelled through the famine zone early in Setember says <the Sydney Sun. For sheer horror some of the sights which he describes could scarcely have been conceived by fietionists. The scenes on the quay at Samara are witnesses to the famine horror of the Volga provinces, he writes. The old Bolshevik rule that tickets for the steamers could be obtained only by persons in . of special Government permits has just been relaxed, and anybody may buy tickets who can afford them. But the prices are enormous. 1 watched one old man, a mixed type, running off to where a few women and boys and an assortment of bundles represented his people and possessions in | the midst of the general crowd and chaos. He waved the ticket in the air and caught up a. huge, corded sack, which he struggled under with difficulty as he carried towards the gangway. His sons, mild, smiling boys, whose faces had the almost idiotic half-witted look of peasant youths who have been thrown out of their usual environment, grappled with others of the heavy bundles. starving peasants. To my amazement I saw some of the smaller bundles moving by themselves, at* it seemed, in my direction. As I looked at them more closely in the dim light of the kerosene lamp that was the only illumination of the crowded quay, I saw that they were little children swathed in all that was left of their wardrobes.. Their mothers and sisters clutched some of the remaining bundles, and half dragged, half guided the children to the gangway. There was a long pause as /the father tried to produce his ticket to the examining sailors without letting go of the gigantic bundle he was carrying, and at last he went forward into the bowels of the boat like a cork expelled from a bottle. The others swarmed up the gangway after him, squealing and wailing. Finally they were all settled down in the stern of the vessel, wedged tight with their children and bundles in a jam of other refugees. It is no wonder, to one who sees how they travel on these boats, that this should have been the most dangerous means of carrying cholera from place to place during the summer. PENNILESS AND FOODLESS.

Other peasants got their tickets and rushed into the boat, and I went and stood on the quay to watch them. There was a lean, lank peasant there who was reflectively rubbing his back against a post, just as a pig rubs itself against the side of its sty. I waited until he had gained a little respite by this means from the vermin which were annoying him. and then I got into conversation with him. I asked him where he was going to. “Nowhere.” “Why not?” “No money.” “Where are the others going to?” “Anywhere. Everywhere. They don’t I know themselves. Wherever their eyes turn!” I asked him if it is true that the villages are emptying and the peasants streaming away to the towns and the rivers in the attempt to find a place where there is food- He told me that this was more the case in the spring and early summer, when the famine first became acute. I asked him if it is the case now that the peasants are selling their houses and horses to the rich men of the villages, the so-called “fists,” or usurers. “Who'll buy nowadays?” he replied, with a laugh. “The ‘fists’ are beggars themselves now. Who’ll buy a house when you can’t get food to eat if you live in it? And who wants to have a house?” DIED LIKE FLIES. He laughed in a manner that, had a touch of madness in it, and I Wondered if he was one of the survivors of the typhus epidemic which decimated Russia last winter, and which will inevitably return with much greater force in the coming winter. So I asked him about the typhus and confirmed my guess. “We died like flies—yes, just like flies. But what does it matter?— typhus, cholera, hunger; we shall all die now.” And he recommenced his fruitless endeavor to obtain some relief from the disease-carrying pests that were tormenting his emaciated body. Every hour or so the boat would pull up at a landing place, and we would see the usual crowd on board to sail to Tsaritsin and Astrakhan, incredulous that these towns were in the grip of the famine and would give them a more than cold reception, the others wearily sitting and waiting for death by starvation to cary them out of the, world. There were a* few more terrible sights. I remember a distraught mother screaming over the dead body of her baby and cursing a peasant family, which was sitting near and eating its last crust of bread, for hoarding food when she and her child were starving. The neighbors did not trouble to tell her that they, too. were at their last gasp; they simply forgot her and her sorrow. The reader must understand that the famine is not an instantaneous disaster, like an earthquake —or even a cholera epidemic —but rather a slow but inevitable machine of death, gradually taking off its victims, one by one. DIED FROM OVER-EATING. I got off with an old peasant away from" the others, in order that the presence of two Soviet officials, one from, the town and the other from the vil- i lage, may not embarrass us, although I °am bound to say that I have not yet noticed anything intimidating about the behaviour ’of either of them. We soon came to an empty hut, which my guide points out to me was that of a man who has just died. “What did he die of?” I ask. “Did he die of hunger?” “He died of eating too much,” replied the old man. And then, with a sardonic look, he explains what he means. “This man had not eaten anything for a long time; and then his wheat ripened, and he was so hungry that he ate it as he plucked it, husks and all, instead of taking it to the mill and having it ground. And he ate. so much that his stomach swelled up—just like this” —he describes a huge arc in front of him—“ and then he got very ill and died in two days.” "What you oaiM to do?” I ask,

stupidly, feeling that there must be some way out of the disaster. This shows that I still do not properly recognise the magnitude of the horror of the famine, for all I am seeing it with my own eyes. NOTHING TO DO BUT DTE. He soon brings me back to my senses. “What can we do? We shall stay here, and in a month, or in two months, we shall have no more food of any kind, and then we shall die. If we go to the towns, I know we shall die all the same. So we shall stay here.” He speaks without any feeling, just like a man stating an obvious fact. He points to a peasant who is busy throwing up some grain into the air on a shovel so that the wind blows away the chaff and lets the seeds drop to the ground. We speak to him, and he tells us that he sowed six acres with millet and that he has got back now less than a sixth of the seeds he planted. And he considers himself lucky to have got even this, when so many have lost everything. “We are ten souls in our family,” he says, “and this is all we have for the winder. After we have eaten this, what shall we do but die?” Passing by a church of the Old Believers, who are plentiful in these parts, we find ourselves back again near the Soviet. RUSSIA’S WORST FAMINE. I ask Matvey Ivanich how the present famine compares with others he has been through. I judge that he is old enough to remember the famine of 1891, which has until now been regarded as the wor&t ever suffered by the Russian people. He tells me that the present disaster is incomparably worse than any of the foregoing, in 1906, 1911, and 1913—he does not mention the years by their name, but I am able to place them from his description—the failure of the crops was considerable, but not to be compared with the present. I ask him to throw back his mind to 1891, and he remembers it, with the assistance of some of the others, as the year when his uncle died of cholera. “Yes,” lie says, “that was a terrible year. The famine was great, and the cholera came, and killed thousands. But in that year we had potatoes. This year even they are lost.” And all the others, like a chorus, chime in wearily as lie finished speaking. “We shall die,” they say. The peasant outside and some of his friends all of them munching their bad" bread as slowly as possible to make it last longer, shake their heads solemnly and looking up at me, repeat the words of the others.