THE REAL SIBERIA
John Foster Fraser
Our First Meal - Russian Refreshment Rooms - Waiting for a Wash - The Emigrants - Their Habits and Customs - A Woeful Picture - The Volga - Tartars and Cossacks - A Russian Village - Why the Railways avoid the Towns - Ufa - The Urals
THAT first night, with a single blinking candle for illumination, I lay on an improvised bed I made myself, listening to the regular jog-thud, jog-thud, of the carriages over the metals. Twice the conductor - a stout, black-bearded, mayoral gentleman in military kind of frockcoat, with a white and purple tassel on the shoulder - came with a couple of supernumeraries, thinner men, to open and shut the doors for him, and inspected my ticket. There must be an odour of large tips about the foreigner. Anyway, he received my ticket with a bow, examined it carefully as though it were the first thing of its kind he had ever seen, and then handed it back to me with another bow.
I was glad when the weary dawn arrived. I was gladder still when the train pulled up at a station, and I joined in the dash and the scramble towards the buffet, where scalding tea was to be had and mince-meat stuffed dumplings, satisfying, and most indigestible, to be bought for a trifle.
How the Russian eats! He has no fixed mealtime, but takes food when he is hungry, which is often. He has about six square meals a day. He has at least a dozen lunches, a little bit of salt fish or some caviare, a piece of broad and cheese, an onion and some red cabbage, a sardine and a slice of tomato, all washed down with many nips of fiery vodki. He never passes a station without a glass of tea - marvellous tea, with a thin slice of lemon floating in it. I got a fondness for Russian tea, and foreswore bemilked decoctions for ever.
Russians have a sufficient dash of the East in them to be careless about time. Whether they arrive at their destination to-morrow or next week is a matter of indifference. But the inner man must be attended to. So at every station there is a buffet, sometimes small, sometimes large, but always good, clean, and painted white. There are one, two, or three long tables, with clean cloths, with serviettes covering slices of white and Russian rye bread; plants are on the table, and are circled by rows of wine bottles, with the price written on the label. On a side table are hot dishes, half fowls, beef steaks, meat pies, basins of soup. There are plenty of waiters dressed as are waiters in Piccadilly hotels. Everything is bright and neat. And this is at wayside stations with not a house within sight; with, indeed, nothing but heaving dreary prairie around. It is the same all along the line. There is a difference in the size of the buffets, but never in excellence. I am enthusiastic about these Russian refreshment-rooms. And if ever the Muscovite thanks the Great White Czar for anything he should thank him for the food on the railways. Foreigners grumble about the slowness of the Russian trains. They are not particularly slow. The time is spent at the railway stations while the passengers eat. And while Russians have appetites in proportion to the size of their country those waits are not likely to be shortened.
Dragging the train on which I travelled were two engines, black and greasy, and with huge funnel-shaped chimneys. They consumed an enormous quantity of wood. But there was no scarcity, for at every station there are stacks of wood sawn into convenient chunks.
At one end of the train was the post-waggon, with two brass horns ornamenting its outer panels, and a green painted letter-box, bearing a picture of a sealed letter hanging outside. In other lands the mail is sent by the fastest trains. In Russia it is sent by the approximately slow.
All the other cars were for passengers - one car painted blue for first-class passengers, two painted yellow for second-class, and seven painted green for third-class passengers.
So the majority were third-class, a higgledy-pig-gledy community of decent-looking artisans and their wives and hordes of children wandering East to settle, and a fair sprinkling of harum-scarum young fellows, always smoking cigarettes and diving into every buffet and shouting for pevo (beer), and making mock attempts to pitch one another out of the window.
The mass, however, of my fellow travellers were the moudjiks, shaggy men with big sheep-skin hats that gave them a ferocious air, wearing rough-spun cloaks and often with sacking tied around their feet instead of boots. The women were fat and plain, though the colours of their dresses were often startling in brilliancy. Gaudy orange was popular.
The lavatory accommodation, even in a first-class car, was limited, and as it was for the joint use of both sexes it was a cause of frequent embarrassments.
Ablutions had to be performed singly, and for two hours each morning there was a little crowd of unwashed and semi-dressed men and women standing about the corridor, all smoking cigarettes, women as well as men, and each eyeing their neighbour with side glances of distrust lest there was some under-hand move to get possession of the lavatory first.
Among the provoking things of life is the way Russian hotels and lavatories on Russian trains supply you with water to cleanse yourself. There is no tap to turn on the water, but there is a button, which, on pressing with your hand, releases a trickle. The moment you cease pressing the button the supply is cut off. When you are actually pressing the water trails along your elbow and soaks your shirt sleeves, or douses your clothes and boots. The only refuge is selfishness.
So I plugged the basin outlet with a cork and hold the button up with a lead pencil till the basin was full. Then I washed. Thus the water supply soon gave out, and I picked up several expletives in Russian from my fellows. And after all, perhaps, they didn't mind. Before the end of my journey I came to have a liking for the Russians. But in the course of my vagabond life I have been in over thirty different countries and I've never met a people who get along so well on a minimum amount of water for washing purposes as do the Russians.
All the third-class cars were grimy. The woodwork was painted drab inside, but there was not a vestige of cushion.
I spent hours among these emigrants and found them interesting. They were horribly dirty, and as they liked to have the windows closed, despite the temperature, the cars rocked with odour. They carried all their worldly possessions with them, some foul sleeping rugs and some bundles of more foul clothing, which was spread out on the hard seats to make them a little less hard. Bread, tea, and melons was the chief food. There were great chunks of sour black bread, and at every halt kettles were seized, and a rush made to the platform, where the local peasant women had steaming samovars, and sold a kettleful of boiling water for a half-penny and a water melon as big as your head for a penny.
Besides bread-eating, and scattering half of it on the floor, and munching melons and making a mess with the rind, and splashing the water about when tea-making, there was the constant smoking of cigarettes. A peasant might not be able to afford a hunk of bread, but he had a supply of cigarettes. They are tiny, unsatisfying things, half cardboard tube, provide three modest puffs, and are then to be thrown away. You could smoke a hundred a day and deserve no lecture on being a slave to tobacco.
The emigrants were happy - there was no doubt about that. Though the faces of the men were heavy and animal, guile was not strong about them. The cars rang with their coarse laughter.
Late one night I visited them. At the end of each car was a candle flickering feebly. The place was all gaunt shadow. The men lay back loungingly, like weary labourers caught with sleep in the midst of toil. On the scat beside the man, huddled up, with her face hid in her arms, was the wife. Lying on the floor, with a bundle of rags as pillow, wore the children. I had to step over a grey-whiskered old man, who was curled up in the gangway - a feeble, tottering creature to emigrate. Close to the door was an old woman, her face hanging forward and hidden, and her long, bare, skinny arms drooping over her knees. It was all very pathetic in that dim, uncertain candle flare. There was no sound but the snore of deep-sleeping men and the slow rumble of the moving train.
I stood looking upon the woeful picture and thinking. Then a child cried, and its mother turned testily and slapped it.
The second day out from Moscow it became dull and cold, and a bleak wind scoured the plain. There was little but a sandy wilderness. The gale sounded round the crawling train with eerie moan. It picked up the sand and engulfed us in a brown gritty cloud. Everything in the carriage became thick with dust. It was to be tasted in the mouth and felt achingly in the eyes. To gaze from the windows was to look into a scudding fog that curved thick from the earth and thinned skywards. The train lumbered creakingly.
Suddenly there was a lull. Either we were running out of the sandstorm or it had spent itself. The rain came in great drops, pat, pat, pat, for a long time. Then swish came the deluge, and the carriages rattled with the tattoo of the downpour. When it had passed the air was sweet to breathe. The sun shone clear over the refreshed land. I set about with an old towel to thrash some of the grime from my belongings.
We traversed the Volga in the early afternoon. We went at a crawl over the great square network of a bridge perched high on stone pillars, whilst all devout Russians on the train stood by the windows ardently crossing themselves. It is a wide muddy river, flowing sluggishly, and draining a stretch of country twice as large as Great Britain.
There were two steamers surging a way up, and great islands of rafts were floating down on the tide. When the train halted it was easy to hear the quaint, rhythmic oar-beating songs of the Volga boatmen. They had brought their rafts from the north, beyond Nijni Novgorod, the city of the great Fair, and it would be months yet before they reached their journey's end, down in the wild country of Astrakan, on the Caspian Sea.
Towards sundown we grunted into the bustling town of Samara, and here we had an hour and a-half to wait. The platform was all excitement and uproar. Samara is on the Volga, and a flock of folk from the north and south had come by the waterway to catch the Siberian train.
There wore officials to take up posts in the far interior. There were a lot of slothful Tartars, sallow-skinned, slit-eyed, wisp-bearded, who had slouched their way from Mongolia and were now slouching back. There were fine-set Cossacks, carrying themselves proudly, their white sheep-skin hats perched jauntily, a double row of silver cartridge cases across their plum-coloured coats, that fall from the waist like a quilted petticoat, and each wore long riding boots of the softest red morocco. Above all were more peasants, unkempt and ragged, bout beneath bundles, driven hither and thither like sheep, mostly apathetic, crowding into the already overcrowded waggons, and camping on any spare patch of floor.
Again we went snorting across the steppes. Now and then we ran through clumps of darkened pine. Forest fires have been raging during the summer, and hundreds of villages were laid waste. The refugees had hastened to the railway line, expecting there they would receive assistance. For twelve miles at one place there was a string of camps.
It was evening as we passed, and the glow of the camp fires on the lanky peasants, as they stood and shouted while the train puffed by, made a striking scene.
Next morning, as we rolled towards the Urals, the country became undulating and passing pretty. There was plenty of woodland and herbage, and many a time it was easy to imagine a stretch of English scenery on a large scale.
Now and then we scudded by a village. You can't imagine how ugly a village may be till you have seen one in Russia. They are all the same. The houses are of unpainted wood, all one storey, and usually built awry. They are in disrepair. There is always a yard, but it is ankle-deep in muck, and the pigs have free entrance to the house. The fencing is half broken away. There is usually one street, a hundred yards wide, but it is kept in no order. It is axle-deep in dust in summer, and in winter it is axle-deep in mire.
One thing I noticed the first day out of Moscow, and I kept noticing it right across Siberia till Vladivostock on the Pacific coast was reached - how seldom any of the stations are near towns. You constantly see a town seven or eight miles off, but not once in six times does the line run near. If you ask a Russian the reason he will laugh. Then he will tell you. When the line was planned the engineers made millions of roubles by blackmailing the towns on the route! "You give us so much money and the line will run quite close to you; don't, and we will take the line as far away as we can." The Russian official, it is said, grows rich not on his salary, but on bribery. Many an official does not deny it. It is as well understood as that he must wear uniform. If you start preaching morality among public men he answers: "You foreigners do the same, but you are not so open about it as we are."
There is very little cutting or bank building to make the line level. Where the country undulates the line undulates also. For miles it is a series of billowy mounds.
The train was heavy, and where there was any incline the two engines grunted like broken-winded horses as at a snail's pace of about three miles an hour it reached the top. Then, to change the simile, it was like a cyclist who spied a long declining sweep before him. Steam was shut off, and with a burr and a roar the train "coasted", at a dashing, reckless forty miles an hour. When it reached the dip the engines started grinding and panting, trying to keep up speed to help on the next rise. The endeavour was only partially successful We were soon down to a panting crawl again.
For an hour and a half we halted at Ufa, the most prettily situated town since leaving Moscow. It is built on the side of a nicely wooded hill, and neat villas look down from the heights. It was Sunday evening, August 25th, and, as the passing of the Siberian train is one of the excitements, the station was crowded with townsfolk. If you will look at a map, Ufa, just to the west of the Urals, looks a long way from civilisation. Yet the better class folk sauntering about this Sunday evening were very little differently dressed from what you may see in any provincial English town any Sunday evening.
But, oh! the number of officials. You never turn without elbowing an official. Half the population of Russia seems made up of officials engaged in governing the other half. Everybody in lower rank salutes everybody in higher rank, and the salute must be returned. Equals ignore one another. I would hesitate to make a wild guess how many times a Russian gendarme raises his hand to the salute in the course of a day. It must run into the far hundreds, and get very wearisome. If a superior speaks to him he keeps his hand at the salute all the time.
As soon as we left Ufa we started climbing into the Ural Mountains. Every Russian I had met broke into adjectives when informed I proposed to cross the Urals. They were beautiful, lovely, picturesque, magnificent, grand! The Russian, however, is no authority on scenery. He, of course, judges by contrast, and naturally when you have spent years on a desert you regard a hillock with some trees as charming. The scenery in the Urals is beautiful because you have travelled days on a featureless plain. The hills are humped and broken, and the train urves over their shoulders among masses of trees with leaves splashed with the rich tints of autumn. Also there were places where for miles the line hugged grey rocks. It was a peaceful Sunday evening with a crimson and saffron sunset as we curved upwards.
It was all welcome to the eye, and reminded me of parts of Derbyshire. I stood out on the gangway smoking my pipe, and tried to realise I was thousands of miles from England.
But what a part these Urals have played in the story of mankind! For thousands of miles they run north and south, a wall dividing Europe and Asia. You have only to look into faces of men who come from a race born east of the Urals and then into the faces of men born west of them to understand how divided is the human family.
In the far-off times the Tartar hordes swept from their heights carrying slaughter into Europe. Right through Central Europe you get a glimpse of a Mongol eye, you are brought into contact with a trait of Eastern character, and you see the heritage of the Khans.
We had Tartars on this train, but they were slither-heeled and fawning, and tramped the corridors wanting to sell sponges and slippers and gew-gaws. And the race they conquered centuries ace had now turned the tide, and had driven this iron wedge of a railroad due east to the waters of the Pacific. The Tartar cringes to the Russian.
We were on the Urals' top at midnight. Asia did not greet us kindly. A fierce hurricane struck the invading train. I lay awake for hours listening to the Valkyrie shrieks of the storm and the bullet pelts of the driven rain against the carriages. In the tearful morning, with black clouds trailing the earth, we rumbled down to Chelyabinsk. Beyond lay Siberia!
Chapter III: Through a Great Lone Land
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