GEOGRAPHY IN RUSSIAN HISTORY 13 



In a few minutes . . . the house in which I was sitting was besieged by 

 a great crowd of women holding in their hands articles of Finnish wearing 

 apparel. In order to make a selection I went out into the crowd, but the desire 

 to find a purchaser was so general and so ardent that I was regularly mobbed. 

 The women shouting " Kupi, Kupi" — ("Buy, Buy!") 



The fact that toward the east the Eussian has pushed across Asia 

 to the Pacific does not mean that he has absorbed and Eussianized 

 what lies between. Indeed from Nijni-Novgorod where the Volga 

 turns southward, that river, to the elbow at Tsaritsin, constitutes, in a 

 sense, an ethnic boundary. Here non-slavic races — fag-ends of peo- 

 ples — are found, preserving not only their own speech and habits but 

 costumes as well. As a result a voyage on the Volga affords unique and 

 fascinating points of interest, quite apart from its scenic and geographic 

 features. A bewildering confusion of racial types appear. Asia and 

 Europe seem to meet and intermingle, but not to coalesce. The focal 

 point is at Kazan where the intermingling of strains of blood, of reli- 

 gions, of customs and of languages, is at its maximum. It is Eussia's 

 " melting pot." But thus far the heat has not been sufficient to effect 

 a coalescence of the many racial ingredients it contains. 



Turning from the discussion of the ethnic elements of European 

 Eussia to the conditions of life prevalent among them, geographic influ- 

 ences and environment appear in an equally striking manner as domi- 

 nating factors ; and nowhere more than in the ignorance and poverty so 

 general among the great mass of the Eussians. We are told that the 

 mothers of Vladimir's day bewailed as dead the little ones taken from 

 them to be taught the alphabet. To-day over seventy-five per cent, of 

 the population is illiterate. Nor is this at all surprising. Only a 

 hundred years ago, Eussians were sold in the open market at Moscow. 

 " To be sold : three coachmen, well-trained and handsome : — two girls, 

 the one eighteen, and the other fifteen years of age, both of them good 

 looking," etc., is one of many advertisements of the kind in the Moscow 

 Gazette early in the nineteenth century. Serfs and cattle were inten- 

 tionally put in the same category, as appears in such announcements 

 as " In this house one can buy a coachman and a Dutch cow." 



Not until 1861, the year made memorable in the United States by 

 the beginning of the great war that liberated the negro, was the barter 

 in Eussian souls stopped by the emancipation edict of Alexander II. 

 This barter appeared not only in the actual exchange of Eussian sub- 

 jects between one landlord and the other, but also in the unpardonable 

 control exercised by the proprietor over the moral welfare of liis serfs. 

 The story told by Prince Kropotkin is familiar to many: 



One landowner remarked to another, "Why is it that the number of souls 

 on your estate increase so slowly? You probably do not look after their mar- 

 riages. ' ' Thereupon the other went home and ordered a list of all the inhabi- 

 tants of his village to be brought to him. He picked out from it the names of 



