Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Spring Scenes in Samara
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wandering from village to village in search of bread, came and
asked for food. The pitiable folk seemed in hopeless despair.
In the outer room they kept talking and whispering, now
and again breaking out into sobs and crying. The number of
starving beggars roving about is increasing alarmingly. One
crowd after another has passed through the village during the
day, very many of whom have been children. As I was eating
my breakfast this morning I saw a large number of child-beggars
approaching my lodging-place across the plain. It
was no new sight, but very painful on that sunny April morning
to see these pinched and starving little ones. One girl of about
nine, carrying a little child, looked as if she might have been
thirty or more. A little way off stood a boy, looking on the
ground with a sorrowful expression.
“Where do you come from, little children?” I asked.
“From the village of G——” (in the neighbourhood).
“Who is the little one in your arms?” I asked the girl.
“ My little brother.”
“Where are your parents?”
“They have died in the ‘disease’” (spotted typhus).
“Have you no relatives?”
“Many have died in the disease, and others have gone away.”
“What is your name?” I asked the boy just mentioned.
“Ivan Petrovitch A.”
“Where are your parents?”
“I have no parents!” And the poor little fellow burst into
tears. The other children told me that his father died a
month ago, and that his mother was buried yesterday. All of
them, I discovered, were orphans.
Yet it was one of the things that astonished me most in
Russia, to find that so many of the upper-class people in the
cities tried to deny the existence of any extraordinary famine,
and that while the cities themselves were swarming with the
starving peasants. Once a well-fed and warmly-clad “gentleman”
on the cars said to me, in an authoritative tone, “The
distress of the mushiks is not so great as people make out.
They are accustomed to no other condition, and are contented
and happy. The mushiks are cattle.”
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