59o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



HOPE FOR THE RUSSIAN" PEASANTRY 



By LUCY ELIZABETH TEXTOR 



VASSAR COLLEGE 



IT was in the district of Kineshma on the Volga that I first saw that 

 suggestively pitiful sight, thin-growing grain cut by hand. A toil- 

 worn peasant woman, her head covered with a scarlet kerchief, her body 

 bent, grasped the stalks in one hand and cut them with the sickle held 

 in the other. She seemed the embodiment of that patient acceptance 

 of a hard destiny so characteristic of the Russian peasant. It was 

 evening, and the meager results of the day's work lay heaped up in less 

 than half a hundred bundles lying in a line down the narrow field. 

 The ribbon of stubble, only a few yards wide and hundreds of yards 

 long was one of many that lay parallel and stretched almost as far as the 

 eye could see, separated from each other by shallow ditches or rudely 

 heaped-up earth. There were other strips of light yellow rye, of darker 

 yellow barley, of reddish-brown buckwheat, of green hemp. 



Further on lay a second set of narrow strips almost at right angles 

 to the first. Searching the landscape I discovered that except for the 

 low-lying meadows, patches of woods, and the village on the high bank 

 overlooking the river, the surface of the country was divided into 

 innumerable bands all long and very narrow, grouped together evidently 

 according to some principle as yet unknown to me. Later I learned the 

 meaning of these minute divisions and found its roots in the past. 



Previous to 1861 the Russian peasants were serfs. Except for those 

 who did duty as household servants, they were bound to land which 

 belonged to their masters. Those thus bound, by far the greater num- 

 ber, spent a part of each week in cultivating the estates to which they 

 belonged, and the remnant in working their own fields upon which they 

 were dependent for bread. When these serfs were liberated each 

 village or group of villages was given a certain amount of land in com- 

 munal ownership, the price to be paid in forty-nine annual installments 

 called redemption taxes. The community was held responsible by the 

 state for all dues. It could cultivate the fields in common, using what 

 was necessary of the harvest for these payments and dividing the rest 

 among its members ; or it could parcel out the fields and demand from 

 each family a part of the total sum due the state proportionate to the 

 value of the land allotted to the family. In the latter case the amount 

 of land given to a family was ordinarily determined by its working 

 strength, by the number of grown sons, for instance, able to help their 

 father till his fields. The essential thing in the eyes of the community 



