Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 January 1892 — “THE GREAT HUNGER.” [ARTICLE]

“THE GREAT HUNGER.”

FAMINES ARE PERIODICAL OCCURRENCES IN RUSSIA. Some Account of the Present Famine in That Country and Other Noted Starvation Crises. Famine in Russia is periodical like the snows, or rather it is perennial like the Siberian plague. To be scientifically accurate, one should distinguish two different varieties of it, the provincial and the national, the former termed golodovka, or the little hunger, and the lutter golod, or the great hunger.

Now not a year has elapsed this century in which extieme distress in some province or provinces of the empire has not assumed the dimensions of a famine, while scarcely a decade has passed away in which the local misfortune has not ripened into the national calamity. Nor is the nineteenth century an exception in this regard. If we go as far back as the yeur 1100 and follow the course of Russian history down to the present year of grace, wo shall find that while the “little hunger” is an annual occurrence, as familiar astho destruction of human lives by wolves, the normal number of national famines fluctuates between seven and eight per century. It is curious that tho circumstance that wo can thus speak of the periodicity of this terrible scourge, much as tho astronomers and meteorologists discourse of that of a comet or an abnormally warm summer, should be balm to tho hearts of Russian shinovniks who are delighted to shift to the shoulders of Providence or Nature responsibility for tho fruits of their own mismanagement. The present century, which has yet eight years to run, has already had its ! full share of those visitations which some ! optimists regard as automatic checks on over-population; in 1801, 1808, 1811, 1812, 1833, 18-10, 1860 and 1891. These are the national golods. The provincial famines frequently equal them in severity if not in extent, and so complete and child-like is tho pooplc s trust in Providence and the Czar, who, it is hoped, will utilize in good time the abundance of tho harvest in the neighboring provinces to relieve their needs, that the crops are allowed to lie rotting in some places until the peasants in others are beyond the reach of hunger and of human help. Tho fifth and six decades of the present century ushered in scenes of misery which would have provoked a bloody revolution among peoples in whose breasts duty had implanted that spirit of manly resistance which is proportioned in most men to tho wrongs they ure destined to endure.

Travelling some five or six years ago through a large district afflicted by tho famine of the godolovka variety, I found myself behind the scenes of the lowest theatre of human existence which it is possible to conceive. Multiplying by an enormus figure the sights one sees in tho lugubrious wards of a typhus hospital and intensifying the horror they inspire by substituting huugor for disease, criminal neglect for inevitable necessity, ouo may form some idea of a state of things which should have rendered the system that produced it forever after impossible. Kazan wns then tho center of tho famine-stricken district and the countryfolk round about journeyed hundreds of miles on foot, dragging themselves feebly along in search of food and finding only graves. Many of them lay down by the roadside, in ditches, in the yards of desertod houses and gave up the ghost without a murmur against their Little Father, the Czar, “it was touching and edifying to witness their Christian submission and unshaken faith in God,” exclaimed many of the highor tshinovniks, who seemed to feel that nothing in their life became them like the leaving it. In 1887-1888, when the abundance of tho harvest in Russia seemed to partake of the nature of tho miraculous, tho distress in certain districts was to the full us intense and disastrous ns at present. “In many villngos the people ai'c absolutely destituteof food,” run the accounts published ut tho time; “largo numbers nave to tuke to bogging, but ns tho same monotonous misery reigns all round, after having crawled from neighbor to neighbor, they have nothing for it but! to drag themselves back to theirdiovols I and sicken of ‘hunger. In the Government of Smolensk the peasants lived during tho year “on bread made partly of rye und partly of tho husks of rye, often eaten with tho wormeaten bark of the oak or tho pine, which stills without satisfying the cravings of hunger.” Lack of fodder killed the cattle in thousands, but not before a resolute effort had been made to savo them by feeding them on the straw-thatched roofs of hovels. Last year, writes E. B Lanin in tho London Fortnightly Review, there was another partial famine of considerable proportions, scarcely noticed by the English press, the progress of which wns marked by the usuut concomitants: merciful homicide, arson, suicide, dirt-bread, typhus and death. Tho evil is undeniably chronic; the symptoms are always the same, and the descriptions of them published ten or fifty years ago might be served up afresh to-day or next year as faithful photographs of the life in death of millions of Russian Cliristiuns. Scarcity of food lias long sincocometo be looked on as a necessary condition of tho existence of the people who manage ta supply a great part of Europe with corn. Ihe Czars have been uwaro of it for centuries, and have done all that they could be expected to do to prepare for In 1724 Peter I. dccroed tho establishment of district granaries to reserve corn, und Catharine 11.. thirty years Inter, commanded her Minister to set about putting his ukase into execution. I here is a leap year in the annals of distress; the famine extends over a much larger area, but is not a whit more intense than it v.as last year, five, ten, or fifteen years ago. Tho district affected extends from Odessa on the shores of tho Black Sea through Little Russia, athwart the rich black loam country celebrated for its marvellous fertility, straight through the country watered by tho Volga, across the Urals, growing wider and wider till it reaches Tobolsk; in other words,it covers a tract of land 3,000 miles long and from 500 to 1,000 miles broad, which supports a population of only forty millions. These Atlases on whose shoulders a great part of the weight of the Russian empire rests, are, in a gradual way, undergoing the process of petrifaction which their prototype experienced on a sudden when he gazed at the countenance of Medusa. Southern California is experiencing another hotel building boom.