186

COMPLETION OF RUSSIAN UNION.

"Great," and father of the "Terrible" Ivan, that this
magnificent land, whose rich harvests "looked like waving
forests," was added to the possessions of the Grand Dukes
of Muscovy. The last Russ republic, Pskov, had fallen
ten years earlier; and Novgorod Severski, the last
princely appanage, fell two years later, and thenceforth,
as M. Rambaud says, "there was only one Russia" who
could now turn her united arms against her foreign
enemies the Tartars and the Poles.

The town of Riazan itself is on the south bank of the
Oka, some distance above Murom (to which it was
originally subject), and about one hundred and twenty
miles from Moscow. The old city of the same name was
obliterated during a Tartar incursion, and its remains are
to be seen thirty miles from the present Riazan. The
latter was first known as Pereslav-Riazanski, a con-
temporary town with Pereslav-Zalieski, in Vladimir, and
both named after the still more ancient Pereiaslav on the
Dnieper near Kiev. The two little streams that fall
into the Oka here are the Lybed and the Trubej, so
called by the original emigrants after the brooks that
flow through the old Pereiaslav, just as Anglo-Saxon
colonists bestowed the familiar names of the old country
on their new homes—as, for example, you will find a
"London, on the Thames, County Middlesex," in Upper
Canada.

Pereslav, on the Oka, rose to fortune on the ruins
of Old Riazan, and appropriated its very name. Even
the odour of sanctity that clung to the walls that
the Tartars battered down has been transferred hither.
The imperishable body of St. Basil, first bishop of
Murom, made a miraculous voyage up the Oka on a

OLD AND NEW RIAZAN.

187

mantle, bearing in its arms a wonder-working image of the Virgin, and rested a while at Old Riazan. Then as the infidels would not leave the canonized corpse in peace, it continued its marvellous voyage up-stream; and bones and image now attract thousands of worshippers to the Cathedral of the Assumption in New Riazan, one of the vastest religious edifices in Russia. Great store of treasure and curiosities, including a cup, gilt with the gold signet of Baty Khan, the dust of warrior-princes and sainted bishops and laymen, armour and chalices, quaintly painted altar-screens and icons, enrich the interior of this and the other churches of Riazan. The episcopal palace was once the seat of the powerful sovereigns of the principality; and the old defences of the city and kremlin can still be traced. In the town and neighbourhood there are numerous monasteries of great extent and sanctity, as indeed we find to be the case wherever a few thousand Russians are gathered together; and like all the other provincial centres in this rich agricultural region, Riazan has its stated cattle fairs and important grain markets, the resort of throngs of sturdy, well-to-do peasantry from the surrounding district, and of corn-dealers, shippers, millers, distillers, hide and tallow merchants, horse-rearers, butchers, and others from distant quarters where nature has not been so lavish in her bounties.

Riazan's next neighbour, Tula, on the other hand, is more than any other town in Russia a place of manufacture. Its pre-eminence in this respect is not a thing of yesterday. For about three hundred years, since the epoch when iron ore was discovered in the neighbourhood, it has resounded with the rang of the hammer and

188

TULA.

the whir of the loom, and its people have been celebrated for their skill as gunsmiths and cutlers. Peter the Great brought artificers from Western Europe to teach the workmen of Tula the most improved methods of constructing gun barrels, locks, and flints, the casting of cannon, and the fabricating of swords and pikes. On his way back to Moscow, after his first unsuccessful expedition against Azov, Peter halted several days at Tula, and in the new ironworks, built by the Dane, Marselis, "amused himself by hammering three large iron sheets with his own hands,—every hammer blow," as Mr. Schuyler says in his Life of the Great Czar, "driving away a regret and fixing a resolution."

Ever since, it has been the armoury of Russia, and at the present day the great bulk of its population are engaged in the imperial arms factories and other establishments for the manufacture of rifles, hardware, and cutlery, while it is also noted for its production of samovars, the brazen apparatus for preparing tea which every Russian carries with him on a journey. A great impetus has been given to its trade in recent years by the discovery of coal deposits in the neighbourhood; and Tula, with its smoky stalks and ranges of many-windowed brick factories, looks more like a busy, grimy town transported from Yorkshire or Lancashire, than a stiff and starched provincial capital in Great Russia.

In the streets of modern Tula, where every sight and sound is an evidence of the sweat and struggle of industry, it is not easy to recall the times when the inhabitants crowded terror-stricken behind the ramparts at the rumour of the approach of devastating

TROUBLOUS HISTORIES.

189

hosts of Crim Tartars or Turks, or to believe that it was
at one period infamous as a resort of lawless despera-
does. It was at Tula that Otrepief, the first and ablest
"false Dimitri," gathered a following about him; and
the city was for a time his capital, where he received
ambassadors, and took possession of the royal robes and
treasures brought from Moscow. Again and again the
turbulent townsmen rose under new leaders, and the
place was besieged, sacked, and burned by pretenders
and usurpers, patriots and Poles, till at length, abandon-
ing the old site, they began a career for their city on a
new footing, having learned to some purpose the lesson
that there was more profit in peaceful pursuits than in
civil broils.

Kaluga is another town which has been compelled by
misfortune to shift its site and its ways; but probably
the visitor and the reader will not care to undergo the
tedium of spending much time in hunting up the
souvenirs of its past within the white-washed walls of
its cathedrals and convents that overlook the lazy Oka,
and will be content also with a flying glance at the small
town of Malo-Jaroslavetz (Little Jaroslav) not far off,
where the conqueror of Europe, the lawgiver to kings,
the great captain of his age, drank the cup of humiliation
to the dregs.

Napoleon, leaving Moscow smouldering behind him,
and finding winter fast approaching, endeavoured first to
gain Kaluga, whence the way would have been open
for his army into a richer and more genial region,
which had not been swept clear of supplies by the pas-
sage of two enormous armies. At Malo-Jaroslavetz he
suffered the first defeat in the retreat; and perceiving, as

190

AN HOUR OF DESPAIR.

no eye could better do, the unassailable position of the Russians, he gave way to despair, and retiring, says Segur, to the cottage of a weaver, "an old, crazy, filthy wooden hut," and to a dirty dark room divided into two parts by a ragged cloth, the master of the Tuileries fell into a state of stupor from which none of his generals could rouse him. Next morning the army turned their backs on the bright gleam in the southern sky, and their faces towards Smolensk and the chill and surly north, and resumed their ever-memorable retreat.

Kursk and Voronej, outposts of yore against Tartar inroads, and to-day thriving towns, embosomed in orchards, the centre of busy agricultural operations, and predominating wide reaches of rich grassy steppe lands, might claim some notice. The former was the scene of heroic struggles between Polovtsis and Kievans, Cossacks and Nogais; and the latter the station where Peter the Great built his flotilla—"the first Russian fleet of war," if we except the model frigates the Czar had previously built and exercised on the lake of Pereslav-Zalieski—with which he wrested Azov from the Turks. Voronej is notable also as the birth-place of the peasant poet Nikitin, and other bards and leaders of the people, and as the designated seat of a "new Russian" university. But apart from these, few of the places we meet with in traversing the "Granary of Russia" possess any attractions beyond the very modest share of them common to the country towns of the Empire of the Czar.

Like other things constructed for use rather than show, these towns of Great Russia are eminently un-picturesque. A few wide, ill-paved streets at right

COUNTRY TOWNS IN GREAT RUSSIA.

191

angles to each other, and united by a maze of narrow
crooked lanes not paved at all; blinding dust in dry
weather, and mire mid-leg deep after rain; at all seasons,
except, perhaps, during keen frost, pervaded by "a rank
compound of villanous smells," among which a dis-
criminating nose might detect greater variety of evil
odours than is attributed to Cologne; droves of cattle
and horses from the Don country and the Ukraine,
guarded by ragged Tartar and Cossack drivers; heavy-
booted moujiks enveloped in greasy sheep-skin coats
bringing in loads of grain, hay, roots, and vegetables for
sale; spruce citizens, with their wives and daughters often
fashionably or at least gaily dressed, stepping cautiously
along the dilapidated pavement, and past the refuse of
tanneries, distilleries, and tallow and soap works, pro-
foundly unconscious that there is anything to offend the
eye or nose or impair the pleasure of their afternoon pro-
menade;—these delights may be promised to the enter-
prising traveller who undertakes the exploration of a
typical Russian town. They are not of a kind fitted to
stimulate the fancy; the novelty soon wears off. If you
glance at the houses that line the principal streets, you
may find not a few that have a striking and even hands-
some and tasteful appearance. The structure of even
the loftiest church and most spacious town hall may be
of timber; but white-wash and paint have been laid on
with a liberal hand. Only in spots where the hot sun
and the biting frost have combined to tear away its
disguises will the humble material of the building be
disclosed.

Where, following the fashion of the French, who
in Russia at least are regarded as in the van of civil-

192 OFFICIALISM AND ITS FRUITS.

ization, trees are planted to form a boulevard, or
orchards and gardens intervene between blocks of build-
ing, a bright and gay effect is produced by the contrast
of vivid colours. These edifices, you will find, have
been built with ambitious aims, and are of ample pro-
portions. Few towns of any pretension are without
their advanced seminaries for males and females, their
military and ecclesiastical training schools, their library
and museum, their literary and scientific assemblies, their
musical and artistic coteries, often their small theatre
and opera house. Too frequently, however, these admir-
able institutions have been provided to meet wants that
have yet to be created. The gymnasia are sometimes
almost as numerous as the scholars; the university is
thought flourishing that can count half-a-dozen students
for each member of its professorial staff.

Intelligent Russians complain that the fruits of these
trees of knowledge are not so fair as had been expected—
that the universities breed only pedants and revolutionaries.
But that may be the fault, not of the knowledge taught, or
even of the method of teaching it, but of the system that
has set the machinery to work. The official mind deems it
necessary that such and such a town should be supplied
with the means of higher class education or of culture
in art and science. In Russia the state lays upon itself
the burden of taking the initiative in these matters.
A paternal government acts and speaks and even thinks
for its children, thus saving them a vast deal of trouble.
All the opinions, political and religious, that are held to
be safe are tied up in red tape, and laid away in pigeon-
holes. There is no scope in wide Russia for individual
thought, or for speech and action following upon it. All

URBAN SOCIETY.

193

whose views do not conform to the official model are
held to be suspect and dangerous. It is not strange
that the attempt to guide philosophy, art, and science on
these hard and fast lines should have ended in failure, or
in eccentricities that in the eyes of the originators of the
system are worse than failures, and that Russia should
be strewn with more wrecks of abortive schemes of
modern improvement than with ruins caused by war and
revolution.

As a rule, there is little original tendency towards
culture in Russian urban society. The higher or official
class—a military caste that will not deign to mingle
with those beneath—are concerned with their own
scandals, intrigues, and minute jealousies. Their spare
hours are devoted to card-playing, in which an extraor-
dinary amount of time is spent in Russia, to balls and
evening parties, to church exercises if the cast of mind
is religious, or to French novels if the taste is literary.

The merchant is wholly taken up with the affairs of his
business and his guild. If he is rich, he gives magnifi-
cent entertainments, at which figure champagne, Dresden
china, grand pianos, and costly foreign dishes, together
with nobles, officers of rank, and artistic and literary
celebrities, if these rarities are procurable. But his
motive is ostentation, with perhaps a dash of that real
desire to be hospitable which is seldom absent in a
Russian; and as for the official guests, Mr. Mackenzie
Wallace tells us that it is perfectly well understood that
their presence implies no intimacy or invitation in return,
and it is even hinted that a high military magnate will
not disdain to accept a handsome present in return for
the honour of his appearing as a "table decoration" at

(718)

13

194

MERCHANTS AND ARTISANS.

the board of a rich merchant. But when the feast is
over and the guests are gone, the host returns to his
primitive old Russ mode of life, differing little, save in
abundance and variety of his food and superior quality
of his clothes, from that of his work-people and de-
pendants. The luxuries and refinements of modern
society afford him no pleasure or amusement; they
serve only as a means of displaying his wealth and
importance.

As for the ordinary artisans and burghers—the rank
and file of the town population—most of them have
hitherto found their time more than sufficiently taken
up with the struggle to provide for their daily wants in
food and raiment. The possibility of their having ideas
and opinions of their own, of being capable of forming
dangerous combinations and discussing the sources and
the objects of national power, was hardly dreamed of by
the bureaucracy which dictated the laws. Great political
and economic movements—war, emancipation, the develop-
ment of trade, the spread of education, the propagation
of revolutionary ideas—have been long working like a
strong ferment below the seemingly rigid forms of
Russian society. If the government have failed to teach
the people many things, they have thoroughly taught
them the lesson to plot and to conceal. Socialist theories,
under various disguises, especially that negation of all reli-
gious belief and denial of the individual right in property
known as Nihilism, have spread, by some law of contraries,
with amazing swiftness and secrecy through all ranks of
a society heretofore distinguished for the blind intensity
of its faith and its deep reverence for the traditions of
the past.

PORTENTS OF REVOLUTION.

195

The people are becoming infected by a suspicion that their temporal and spiritual guides have been misleading them—that their blood has been spilt, their hard-won money wrung from them, and their penances, prayers, and alms exacted, only to bind faster the bandages with which their masters seek to control their limbs and cover their eyes. The artisan class of the towns are always more exposed to outer influences than their brethren in the country, and these ideas have made most rapid progress among the work-people of the industrial centres. But no class of society seems free of the taint of disaffection. The army and the clergy, the nobles and the peasantry, the women more audaciously than the men, even officers of the imperial household and members of the body-guard of the Czar, have been shown, or at least have been suspected, to have taken part in the desperate and determined conspiracies against the life of the sovereign and the order of Russian society.

Under the whited surface painted by officialism, strange and secret processes—change and monitions of change—are going on which officialism itself cannot reveal, and the tendency of which the plotters themselves cannot estimate. It is no longer in the towns that we now look in vain for that immobile Russia of the Middle Ages that so long existed side by side with modern Europe. Even in the country villages, where the Russian life pure and simple may still be studied, we cannot be certain how far a society, apparently so dull and stolid on the surface, is mined and ready for a revolutionary explosion.

## CHAPTER IX.

### PEASANT LIFE IN GREAT RUSSIA.

O find a village of the primitive Russian type —such as may be counted by the thousand within the limits of Great Russia, between the White Sea and the southern steppes, and from the old Lithuanian frontier to beyond the Ural Mountains—the best plan is to leave the beaten routes of travellers, where railways and steamers, and all the influences they bring in their wake, have modified patriarchal manners and disturbed the sleepy calm of the hamlet. It will even be necessary to abandon the lines of broad *chaussées*—some of them as fine specimens of road-making as are to be found in Europe—which have been constructed at great cost between the larger towns; and, getting as far away as possible from these beaten tracks, to plunge into the depths of the blank spaces, often as large as English counties, that, as shown in the maps, intervene between them. To reach your destination, it will be necessary to resort to means of conveyance peculiar to Russia, and to undergo the dire experiences of what in that realm is called a country road.

Having obtained your *podorojna*, or order for

POSTING IN RUSSIA.

197

horses,—nothing in Russia can be done without an official permit,—you will probably find at your disposal three or four instruments of torture: a *telega*, or springless cart; another cart, furnished with a hood, and called a *kibitka*; and a *tarantass*, a lighter vehicle mounted on poles, and furnished with the *donga*, or arched bow over the horses' heads, which figures so prominently in Russian equipages.

Few are carried so far by their curiosity as to explore these solitudes in the depth of winter; but by choosing that season, they will at least avoid the terrible ruts and holes and the unfathomable abysses of mud through which they must plunge and jolt when the track has been softened by rain. If the journey be long—and most journeys are long in the dominions of the Czar—changes of horses will be necessary, and provision has been made for this from time immemorial by the establishment of posting-stations along the route.

A sense of melancholy and loneliness is perhaps the feeling that is uppermost in the breast of the stranger as he approaches a secluded hamlet in Great Russia. These small rural communities have a character and an organization peculiar to themselves. Glancing along the single street, and peeping in at the rude doorways, you detect something of the temperament and the destinies of the people, and of the outward circumstances that have moulded their present condition. You look in vain for the fragile cottages of the Ukraine, with their shade of beech and cherry trees, their flower-plots, and their climbing vine or honeysuckle by the porch.

The houses are solidly built of great rough-hewn logs, with roofs of scarcely less substantial structure, pitched

198

A VILLAGE STREET.

high in order to throw off the winter load of snow. On
the doorway and windows little art has been expended;
but, in the north especially, the end ridges of the roof,
the rain-gutters, and balconies are often curiously painted,
carved, and fretted. Instead of being scattered about
in "admired disorder," like the huts of the peasants of
Kiev or Poltava, where each house seeks to assert, by its
attitude and situation, its individuality and its indepen-
dence of the other, the dwellings in the villages of
Great Russia stand as rigidly in line as their clumsy and
loutish shapes will allow—like a Falstaffian regiment
of Bullcalfs and Mouldys on parade. The houses,
whether their number is ten or a hundred, are ranged
on each side of the village street, and few of them
straggle from the ranks. The thoroughfare itself is
probably knee-deep in mire, and choked with filth
unutterable, which it is no one's business to remove. It
is the favourite wallowing-place of the pigs of the
community and the playground of the village urchins.
Poultry and lean mongrel curs are continually exploring
it in search of garbage; and the feet of the cattle and
horses, and the wheels of the rude waggons, stir up anew
its unsavoury depths. The dwellings stand apart from
each other, each with its own surroundings of cart-
shed, byres, and other outhouses. The villager will, if
possible, have his cabbage-plot, and in a favourable
situation for fruit there will be orchards, but, as a
rule, little or no space is spared for such useless and
thriftless productions as flowers. While in Little Russia
the eye may range over open and smiling sky and
plain, in Great Russia, except in the extreme south,
the forest is never far distant, and the heavens are

A SECLUDED LIFE.

199

seldom long clear of cloud or of fog. On one side at least, and often on all four sides, the dark wall of the woods bounds the view, and seems to throw its shadow over the village life. From the first flurry of October snow until the hasty arrival of the belated spring six months of wintry weather may be counted upon. Often the storms are so heavy and prolonged that the village is buried to the eaves of the houses, or even deeper, under the snow, and cut off for a season from all inter-course with its neighbours.

But at the best of times, when the roads are hardest and harvests most plentiful, the influences of the world without have difficulty in penetrating into these secluded hamlets. The village elder, or some other representative of the commune perhaps, carries the surplus grain or other produce of the village lands to the great fair held in the nearest market town, and returns with a modest supply of foreign luxuries—the necessaries of life are grown or woven at home—and with news of the court or the camp, of the latest miracle or victory; and then the village falls asleep again for a few weeks. They live a narrow and restricted life in the midst of almost illimitable spaces. The commune and its affairs are their universe; the village elder is their Great Power; the village council the repository of political wisdom, and the village pope or priest of spiritual grace. Czar and Metropolitan, Councils of State and Holy Synods, the tramp of armies and the march of modern progress, are things remote, undefined, incomprehensible—to be viewed with awe and accepted by faith, like other unseen mysteries, but, like these, in-capable of being conceived by the simple peasant mind.

200

THE ORIGIN OF THE COMMUNE

Such, until recently, has apparently been the mental attitude of the Russian villager; but even in his slow ears, as has been hinted, tidings of strange disturbing import have been whispered. He has heard —birds of the air have carried the matter—that he is far in the rear of the race, when he might be in the van; that the other nations claiming to be civilized have asserted and secured their rights; that the State has other duties towards him than to exact the communal taxes and sweep away a proportion of the village youth into the ranks of the army; that serf emancipation is but the prologue to other reforms; and that it is time to bear himself like a man and claim his just rights.

In the organization of the Russian village, there is something that prepares the mind for democratic if not for socialistic ideas. Each little rural community in Great Russia—the stronghold of autocracy and centralization —is in one sense an independent republic. When these lands were first settled, the immigrants had to camp, and clear the soil, in the midst of enemies. They clubbed together to cut down the forests and to defend their hearths and fields; co-operation was equally necessary to hunt down the bears and wolves, and clear away the snow-wreaths after the storms of winter. Men could not live apart in detached farms and crofts as in modern England; and the Russian is a social creature and pines for the presence of his fellows. The land itself was to be had for the occupying; the difficulty, until comparatively recent times, was to persuade or compel the peasant to reside on it.

And so arose the communal rights and authority,

THE VILLAGE "WORLD."

201

established by indefeasible and unwritten law, under
which twenty-five millions of Russian subjects hold their
property. Each house in a village belongs to the head
of the family occupying it. The land that the inmates
till, however, is the property, not of themselves, but of
the community of which the family forms a unit. It is
periodically redistributed by lot, under the direction of the
elder and the *mir*—the village council or "world," balloted
for by the inhabitants "in public meeting assembled."

A member of the commune cannot free himself of
his duties by neglecting them. He must work for the
common good; and his laziness, waste, or intemperance
is a public matter, which his mir takes care to look
after. He cannot, without its consent, abandon his
family and his lot in the little "world" and go out into
the great world in search of fortune and freedom.
Even if he is allowed to settle for a time as a trader or
a workman in one of the large towns, he is often not
relieved of the burden of his duties, and is even liable
to be recalled and punished for real or trumped-up
offences against the village commonwealth. For the
mir, by immemorial usage, rather than by express
written law, possesses extensive plenary powers over
its subjects. It may eject them summarily from the
community, and from all right in house and land, and
turn them adrift into space; and it may, at least it
does, punish them, not only by fine but by corporal
chastisement. The representatives of a certain number
of village communes—perhaps as many as a hundred—
form the *volost*, or district authority; and the *zemstvo*, or
provincial assembly, has been vested with new powers
of local self-government and jurisdiction.

202

LANDOWNERS AND SERFS.

Emancipation, which has changed in so many ways the very foundations on which Russia's prosperity rests, has but strengthened and enlarged the communal system and extended its application into new fields. Not only was freedom given by a stroke of the pen to the bulk of the population of Great Russia, but the agricultural serfs were put in the way of becoming the communal owners of the lands they formerly tilled for the state and for the nobles; and from the house of bondage they were suddenly raised to the dignity, so much desired in some other lands, of being peasant-proprietors. As to the immediate effects of emancipation on the condition of the Russian peasants, and on the revenues of the Russian gentry, there are wide differences of opinion.

As might be expected from the great variety of soil, climate, and systems of agriculture, the benefits and the disadvantages of the change have been felt in very different proportions in different parts of the country. Thus in the provinces north of the Oka, where the climate is harsh and the soil so poor as hardly to repay the cultivator by means of "high-farming," emancipation has virtually only transferred the peasants from the rule of the nobles to that of the commune. The dues payable to their former lords and masters exceed often the rent value of the village lands; while the old proprietors themselves, deprived of part of their lands, and unable from want of labour to profitably work the rest, have abandoned their country seats and sought commercial pursuits or official employment in the towns.

In the "Black Earth" region, on the other hand, where

EMANCIPATION.

203

the climate is more genial, and the land fertile and capable
of supporting a much larger population than at present,
the serf-proprietors have generally benefited largely, even
in pocket, by the social revolution from which some of
them boded overwhelming ruin; while the peasantry
are in a position that demands only industry and sobriety
to make them comfortable if not affluent. In the one
instance the possession of the land is felt to be a burden,
and in the other it is a privilege; but under the best
circumstances, the strict ties that bind the villagers
within the limits of their petty world, and prevent them
from seeking their fortunes elsewhere, or exercising their
individual will in the smallest matter outside their own
threshold, grow more and more galling. In the long
run, the substitution of free for serf labour must prove
a blessing to the country—indeed, for good or evil the
change could scarcely have been longer delayed—and the
late Emperor Alexander II. deserves great credit for the
bold and energetic manner in which he grappled with,
and so far solved, a vast problem.

Beyond the arable land adjoining the villages are to
be found the pasturages where the cattle of the com-
mune are turned out to feed; and probably the wood-
land and peat-moss to which each household resorts for
fuel and building material. Most of the old enemies
against whom the original settlers joined their forces—
Tartar raiders, Cossack foragers, brigands, "broken men,"
and all the loose conflicting elements of society in a
state of disintegration—have passed away before the
inexorable march of civilization and industry.

The wolves, however, remain, though in greatly reduced
numbers. Packs of them haunt the forests, especially in

204

WOLF HUNTS.

the more northern provinces; and after deep snow and long-
protracted frosts, hunger emboldens them to prowl even
into the village streets by night in search of prey. A
belated wanderer, especially if he is old and feeble or
fatigued by the march, would stand a poor chance of
escaping their fangs; and in the more remote districts,
even the traveller who has a couple or more of good
horses harnessed to his sleigh may taste the dangerous
excitement, made so familiar to us by tale and legend, of
being pursued by the wolves. When the cattle and sheep
have been safely housed, their fierce and wily enemy,
coming "like a thief in the night," has been known to
climb upon the top of the shed, scratch away the pro-
tecting snow, remove the covering of boards with his
powerful teeth, and leaping down among the helpless
beasts, destroy in one debauch of blood the unlucky
peasant's whole stock. Then is the time for the out-
raged owner and his neighbours to turn out in force
against the common foe. An ingenious method is some-
times adopted for making a large "bag" of wolves. A worn-
out old horse is harnessed to a lumbering cart, that plods
heavily through the snow, as if inviting an attack from
the hungry prowlers that eye it from the shelter of the
wood, and gradually draw nearer in the confident hope
of obtaining an easy prey. But concealed in the cart
are the best shots of the village, and when the pack
gather together close at hand for their final rush, a
volley into the midst of them sends them scampering
back to the thicket—all save the leaders, whom the
keen eyes of the marksmen have singled out, and who
are left dead on the track.

One of the great occasions of rejoicing in the

VILLAGE MARRIAGES.

205

village—fasts and “name-days” or saints’ days are of
weekly and at some seasons almost daily occurrence—is
the marriage of a young couple belonging to the com-
munity. Marriage in Russia is a specially solemn sacra-
ment and consecration, attended by minute and pro-
tracted religious observances, and visits of ceremony
between the two families that are to be united. It is
also a matter that personally affects the whole of the
commune.

In former times numerous families dwelt under one
roof, and one male head represented them in the com-
munity and wielded an unquestioned authority within
his own household. But this patriarchal system, though
still existing to a great extent, is fast breaking up,
and every married couple now seek to set up an inde-
pendent family of their own, and have their propor-
tion of the village land duly allotted to them. The
young moujik who has thoughts of setting up in life
by no means has his choice restricted to the maidens
of his native place. Though the nearest hamlet may
be many versts away, lonely moor and gloomy forest
are not sufficient to keep the young people of the
neighbouring villages from coming into contact, and the
elders rather encourage the practice of going beyond
the bounds of the “mir” for a wife. The marriage
will naturally take place in the winter time, when the
harvest has been got in and all the work of the field
stopped.

When all the nuptial ceremonies are over — when
Dimitri Sergievitch has been crowned as “king”
and “head” of Natalie Ivanovna, and Natalie, in her
turn, has been solemnly consecrated as the “queen” of

206

FESTIVE CUSTOMS.

Dimitri's home and affections—the guests, whose religious feelings have hitherto been kept in high tension, relax, and begin with all their might to eat, drink, and be merry. The fun, to a super-refined or even moderately fastidious taste, may be coarse and uproarious; and the quantities of vodka drunk may be larger than is good for the understandings of the wassailers. But in what country does not such excess occasionally occur? and are we in these islands justified in flinging the first stone at the Russian moujik, who has so few pleasures in this life, for not rejoicing with moderation? The drinking propensities of the Russian peasants certainly do not form a specially attractive feature of the national customs; and few affairs of consequence—religious, political, or even judicial—can be transacted without the aid of strong spirits. But it has often been questioned whether the examples of extreme insobriety that may be seen in most Russian towns and villages—and more frequently, it is alleged, in these post-emancipation days—may not be traced as much to the weak stomachs and excitable temperaments of the poorly-fed peasantry as to the potency or quantity of the liquor consumed.

The feasting over, and the jokes cracked, the marriage guests escort the newly-married pair to their home, the horses scampering, *ventre-à-terre*, over the powdery snow, and the shouts and snatches of choruses of the excited drivers vibrating in the keen air.

It is under such exhilarating circumstances that we prefer to glance at the life of the Russian peasant. To perceive that his ordinary lot is a hard and laborious one, you have only to look at his coarse and rude garments, his toil-worn figure, his roughly-built hut;

A PEASANT HOME.

207

or to thoroughly satisfy yourself on the subject, step carefully across the mud puddle before his lowly door and enter the sanctuary of his home. The Russian home is a sanctuary in a literal sense, for it has its family shrine and its household gods. The sacred icons and relics, and pictures and figures of Virgin and saint, are the prominent and often the only ornament of the family room; a portrait of the Czar sometimes disputing the place of honour with the holy symbols.

Otherwise, the rough, undressed walls, the soot-begrimed roof, the uneven earthen floor, the rude and scanty furniture, and the close, unwholesome air, are anything but suggestive of the holy and the beautiful. So, you will think, is the appearance of your host, who, besides the stains of daily labour, bears about him a savour of one who has an instinctive aversion to soap and water. There can, however, be no mistaking the warmth and sincerity of his welcome. The seat of honour by the stove is at your disposal; and the mistress of the house brings from some secret hoard, not only black bread and milk, but some luxury in the shape of mushrooms or dried fish, with perhaps a "nip" of vodka. The inmates are curious and interested in your affairs and in the marvels of the foreign world, over which they shake their heads, half in wonderment and half in deprecation. They are simple, kindly, hospitable; shrewd, too, within "the enchanted circle of their conceptions," as a Russian writer expresses it; and patient and long-suffering almost to a fault.

With all his air of simplicity, however—which is sometimes more than half-affected—it would hardly be wise to trust the word of a Russian peasant, or in-

208

MOUJIK VIRTUES AND FAILINGS.

deed of a Russian of any rank. In a bargain he will
probably cheat you, if he can. His regard for truth is
of the slenderest; and he will tell you a lie—"open,
gross, palpable"—with an air of innocence which could
not be surpassed by the original wearer of the sheep-
skin coat on his back. What can you expect? For
centuries his "betters" have tyrannized over and often
ill-used him at their pleasure; and fraud and deceit are
the natural weapons of the weak.

In noting other features of his character also, while it
is impossible not to perceive many blemishes, it is unfair
not to keep in view the excuses he has for even his
worst faults. He is lazy, shiftless, apathetic, you say,
coming from the busy West; but entering the country from
the side of Asia—and it should be remembered that the
bulk of Russia lies to the east of Mecca—you wonder at
the energy and industry of the peasant. The Russian
labours hard while he is at it, and if he works spas-
modically—in spurts, and not by long-sustained, deter-
mined effort—let it be remembered that it is only
lately, if it is even yet the case, that he has begun to
work for his own behoof. His strong sentiment of
reverence, his friendly helpfulness to his fellow, and his
love of country are good points that cannot justly be
ignored; though it is true that his religious beliefs shade
away into gross superstition, and that it is often not
easy to discriminate his patriotism from prejudice and
ignorance. But though you cannot help thinking, as
you shake hands with your entertainer, how much his
appearance could be improved with the aid of a pair
of scissors and some soap and water, and that you would
even sacrifice some portion of his piety and patriotism

THE VILLAGE CHURCH AND VILLAGE PRIEST. 209

in order to have him more truthful, honest, and sober,
it is impossible not to part with kindly feelings from
one who bears the burden of his hard lot with such
cheerful good nature. The wonder is that so much good
has survived, and not that so many rank weeds of evil
have sprung up in so neglected a soil.

One cannot enter or leave the village without noticing
the timber-built church, which, however lowly, will have
its belfry and bell; and bears witness of the devotion of
the humble worshippers in bright-painted walls and gilded
weather-cock, and in the carvings and decorations placed
about the altar. Near by is the house of the village
"pope" or priest. There may be little to distinguish
the dwelling from its neighbours,—the elder's house may
be larger, and the village tavern possess more rooms,—
and it is often the case that the worthy pastor himself
is in nowise distinguished from his flock in learning or
intelligence.

One of the causes of the backwardness of the rural
parts of Russia is undoubtedly the ignorance and low
social position of the "White" or parochial clergy.
Many of them are devout and hard-working men,
striving, not unsuccessfully, to raise and to purify
those who have been given into their spiritual charge.
Many others are "no better than they should be," even
in morals—a parasitical race, a little more narrow-
minded, lazy, and dishonest than those they live upon.

In excuse for them it must be said that these country
clergy are miserably ill-paid. They have no social
standing, and no stimulus to intellectual improvement.
A parish priest is "passing rich" on £30 a year. His
average stipend is said to be between £22 and £25, and

(718)

14

210

WHITE AND BLACK CLERGY.

a share of the glebe. On this salary he has to maintain
his family. He must daily rise between four and five in
the morning, however far below zero the thermometer
may be, read the liturgy before midday, and have vespers
at sunset. Special services are required of him on in-
numerable other occasions during the year—on saints’ days
and holidays; at births, baptisms, betrothals, marriages,
and deaths; in blessing processions and new buildings;
and in times of harvest, pestilence, or public disaster.
He keeps the parish register, and a minute record of all
his offices for the eyes of his ecclesiastical superiors. He
observes the long fasts of the Church, and on the great
yearly festivals he goes the round of his parish, and says
a prayer at every house. “On these festive occasions,”
says Mr. Lansdell, “refreshments stand on the sideboard,
and *vodka* is offered to drink.” Small wonder that the
secular priest is often a beggar and a drunkard.

For the “White” clergy there is no hope of promotion
to spur them on to higher aims and efforts. Between
them and their “Black” brethren—the monastic orders
—there is a great gulf fixed. To the latter belong, as
to the monks of the Middle Ages, all the prizes in the
ecclesiastical lottery. From their ranks are drawn the
bishops, archbishops, and other functionaries of the
Church, who wield a political as well as a sacerdotal
authority. In the convents and monasteries are concentrated
the theological learning and talent found in the
Russian Church. It is easy to understand that jealousy
and dislike exist between the “White” and the “Black”
ranks of churchmen. The former are naturally disenterted,
and are largely suspected of sympathy with
schism and of the practice of the Old Ritual. The in-

MONASTERIES AND MONASTIC LIFE.

211

mates of the monasteries despise them as unlettered boors, in whom there is hardly a savour of holiness. The village pope is not only allowed to take a wife, but it is expressly required that he should be a married man or a widower, while the monks are vowed to celibacy and seclusion.

Great Russia is thickly scattered over with these monastic institutions, some of which we have already visited,—vast and richly endowed piles, the monuments of the piety, repentance, or policy of bygone generations of czars and boyards. The monkish caste pass a curious hybrid existence, half in a world of the past, and half in the stirring present. There are among them men of commanding talents and enlightened views, that hold in their fingers some of the most important threads that move the national policy; and there are ascetics and fanatics that keep before them an ideal of saintly perfection not a whit less eccentric than that of Peter the Hermit or St. Simon Stylites. There are prelates clothed in purple and fine linen, and bearing on their breasts not only the insignia of their sacred office, but the stars of secular orders; and there are half-naked anchorites who carry penance and mortification almost as far as the religious enthusiasts of the Middle Ages.

The total number of these monastic institutions—male and female—throughout Russia is about five hundred. In discipline and general character they are described as Egyptian rather than Roman. They are of three kinds—the *Lavra*, to which rank only Kiev, Troitsa, and St. Petersburg attain, *Cænobia*, and *Stauropegia*. Life is not all ease and recreation in these celibate establishments, as may be judged from the account of their

212

MODERN MIRACLES.

daily routine given by one of the monks of the Yurief Monastery at Novgorod to Mr. Lansdell:—"They rise at half-past two—at one o'clock on festivals—go to church till six, and from six to nine they sleep. Then they go to church again for an hour and a half, and afterwards breakfast. They are free to sleep or do as they please till five in the afternoon, when evening service brings them together for an hour and a half, after which they sup and go to bed. They have but two meals a day, never eat flesh, and when observing the fasts eat vegetables only."

It is still the Age of Miracles in Russia. Now and again there arise reports of "miraculous appearances" of the Virgin, and supernatural gifts of images or relics vouchsafed to some convent by the Mother of God or some favourite saint—George, or Sergius, or Nicolas—in reward for penance and sacrifice. Troops of pilgrims visit the old shrines for the cure of diseases, the removal of the reproach of sterility, the remission of sins; and if prayer and penance do not avail them, their faith is stimulated anew by the report of a recent miracle wrought at some less famous resort of the devout. In each reign a new saint is discovered, and after attestation of his sainthood by miracle, is duly canonized. Poor is the monastery that does not possess some relics having thaumaturgic virtues; and in many are preserved the incorruptible bodies of saint and martyr, still fresh and sweet as at the hour of death. The monks are ready to answer for the truth of all these wonders; but, as some one asks, Who shall answer for the monks? Who shall say, also, whether these same monks, living an isolated and morbid existence, with their minds fixed on one range of ideas, and

THE RURAL GENTRY.

213

their individuality merged in that of their order, are the
deceivers or the deceived ?

The only other phase of country life that need be
glanced at is that of the large landed proprietors—the
gentry and nobility of Russia. It has already been said
that in extensive districts the proprietors, since the eman-
cipation of the serfs, have removed permanently into the
towns, abandoning their country residences to neglect
and decay. That, however, is a step in a process that
has been going on for generations. Rural life has not
the idyllic charms here that it is supposed to have in
more western countries; and if the lord of the soil has
lost his most precious privileges—his absolute power
over his people—what attraction is there to keep him in
his dismal and lonely country-house? He has acquired
tastes for art and literature, or for modern amusements
and dissipations; like his countrymen of all ranks, he
has a passion for travel, or he has an ambition to win
distinction in the army or in official life. These desires
can only be gratified by abandoning the home and the
ways of his fathers. The tendency, for long, has been
for the nobility to drift farther and farther apart in sym-
pathies and daily life from the mass of the people.

In one sense there is little room for regret that the
"good old times" are coming to an end. In most respects
they were wicked and brutal times, that are best buried
out of sight. There can be no doubt that at no very
remote period there were members of the Russian aris-
tocracy who exercised their seignorial rights over the
persons and property of their underlings in a scandalous
and cruel manner; though, as we might expect from the
national character, the relations existing between masters

214

A LANDLORD OF THE OLD SCHOOL.

and serfs were on the whole of a kindly nature. It is
still not difficult to fall in with a Russian proprietor of
the patriarchal type, who resides, as his fathers did, on
his own land and among his own people in summer's
heat and in winter's frost; who has gathered about him a
numerous array of descendants and attendants, whom he
rules as a father that does not believe in sparing the rod;
who reads no books, or only one or two of a devotional
kind; who eats and sleeps and dresses after the manner
and at the times hallowed by ancient usage; who super-
intends and perhaps assists in the cultivation of his own
estate, following old-fashioned methods instead of leav-
ing it to some German overseer with new-fangled notions
of modern cropping and farm utensils; who keeps a
plain but hospitable and abundant board; who takes
care that his wife and daughters live the secluded and
contracted woman's life approved of by earlier genera-
tions of Russians, and who sees with dismay that his
sons, that have been abroad in the world, are tainted
with the foreign manners and ideas that are ruining his
country.

We would like to preserve the proprietor of the old
school as we would the fossil of some extinct animal.
But his day and generation are past, and changed times
have brought changed manners.

CHAPTER X.

ASTRAKHAN AND ORENBURG.

HE Volga in its lower course flows through the great Czarate or "Royalty" of Astrakhan. That immense territory curves round the northern end of the Caspian Sea for a distance of many hundred miles. In the map it seems to hover—if a country as large as Austro-Hungary can be said to hover—over the waters of that remote and desolate salt sea like a wide-pinioned bird, with one wing stretched towards the Caucasus, and the other touching the Ural range. While thus bounded by two great ranges of mountains, the region is a vast plain, much of the surface of which is beneath the level of the outer ocean.

The Caspian, as has already been said, is some ninety feet below sea-level. Its shores, except where they are overhung by the "cliffs Caucasian" or the buttresses of the Persian plateau, are for the most part low and tame. The shallow bays and inlets on its eastern side are fringed with barren sand-dunes and salt-marshes; and these dismal shores, except where at long intervals a Russian fort has been built, are only visited by wandering bands of Kirghiz and Turcomans. On the west

216

THE SHORES OF THE CASPIAN.

the white walls of a few old cities, such as Derbend and Baku, overhang the blue waters; and in the south are the Persian ports of Resht and Astrabad, the rich slopes of Ghilan and Mazanderan behind them, backed by the lofty ranges of the Elburz, with their sides clothed with forests and their highest summits crowned with snow.

All this does not redeem the shores of the Caspian from the reproach of sterility and baldness. From the thirsty desert to the eastward, whatever may have been the case in ancient times, when the Oxus is believed to have flowed into it instead of into the Sea of Aral, it receives no river save the Attrek. Apart from the Kur and the Ural, its other secondary affluents are of small consequence. It is by the Volga that the Caspian Sea exists. It is the enormous volume of water brought down by that great river from the forests of Russia that supplies from year to year the waste of water caused by evaporation under a broiling sun and by absorption in swamps and quicksands. The Caspian may be said to be a prolongation of the Volga—to be the basin over which it spreads itself, on finding that it has wandered into a hollow from whence there is no means of exit; and it is the Volga that gives it almost its whole commercial and political importance.

The ancients, and indeed the moderns, had most vague and incorrect notions regarding the "Hyrcanian Sea"—its size, its shape, the scenery of its shores, and its physical functions. They believed that a channel connected it with the sea of the Hyperboreans. It may have been from this misapprehension that the Volga makes so poor a figure in ancient geography, only appearing in a few

PREHISTORIC CHANGES.

217

doubtful passages as the "Rha." Its wide channel may
have been mistaken for that "inlet of the frozen ocean"
on the existence of which almost all of the old and the
medieval geographers insist.

At the same time, modern hydrographers, such as
the late Major Herbert Wood, have pointed out that
when the climatic conditions of Central Asia were
wholly different from what they are to-day—before
continual wars, with pestilence and famine in their
train, had destroyed the flourishing states and laid
waste the fine forests, the rich grain-fields, and beau-
tiful gardens of Turkestan, and left behind only a bare
and burnt-up desert; when, as the saying in these coun-
tries goes, a cat could crawl along the orchard walls
and spring from fruit-tree to fruit-tree from the base of
the Tian-shan to Khiva; or earlier still, when the Oxus
and Jaxartes poured their united flood into the Caspian—
the level of that sea must have been much higher than
at present; while in prehistoric times its basin must have
extended far over the level steppe to the north-eastward,
and its surplus waters must have poured over the low
watershed separating it from the head-waters of the
Tobol and Irtish, making this isolated salt lake actually,
as Strabo and Pliny represented it, a branch of the
Polar Ocean.

The steppes that stretch away almost illimitably from
the banks of the Volga, from Saratov downwards, still
show traces of these ancient conditions. Life and motion
and civilization are concentrated upon the river. Re-
minders of the world of the West may be seen in the
wharves of Astrakhan, the neat churches and schools,
and well-trimmed vineyards, melon-plots, and grain-fields

218

THE THRESHOLD OF ASIA.

of the Lutheran villages, and the trailing smoke from
the steamboat funnel. But when you turn your eyes
towards the steppe, you perceive that you are in Asia.
The Ural River and Mountains are usually regarded as
the boundaries between the two continents. The real
line of division, marked not only by the characteristics
of the landscape, but by the race affinities, habits, and
religions of the people, should be drawn up the Don
to the point where it approaches closest to the Volga
at Tsaritsin, thence by the latter river to the junction
of the Kama, and by the Kama to the Urals. The
lower Volga flows through what is really a section of
Asia; and the Caspian is an Asiatic lake. To the
Russian this territory is still a foreign and partially
subdued country—a "land of promise," where he is only
beginning to obtain a firm foothold. The people are
nomads, living in tents, roaming over the plain with
their flocks and herds in search of pasturage and water—
Mohammedan Kirghiz on the left bank of the stream,
and Buddhist Kalmuks on the right.

The city of Astrakhan, built on one of the many
islands formed by the delta of the Volga, is the only
large centre of permanent habitation between the Ural
River and the Terek. The present town only dates from
the Russian conquest. It is altogether a commercial
place, and has already 50,000 inhabitants. It is the
*entrepôt* of the business passing between Russia and
Persia and India, and the centre of the Caspian trade,
which now employs many hundred vessels.

Few towns have a more curiously mixed and diversified population. Like every Russian town, Astrakhan is handsomely provided with churches for the Orthodox,

ASTRAKHAN.

219

whose domes and cupolas give an imposing appearance to the city, whether approached by land or water. But there are also mosques for the sons of Islam, and meeting-places for the adherents of the Armenian and other creeds. It was once the centre from which zealous missionary enterprise was carried on by British and German evangelists. The Moravian Brethren had a flourishing settlement at Sarepta, at the point where the Volga delta begins; and the Scotch mission, with John Mitchell at its head, had its main station at Astrakhan, with branches at Orenburg and Karass, and even beyond the Caucasus. These operations have been stopped, but many of the fruits of them remain; and the name of Englishmen, still more of Scotchmen, has a good savour in the lower parts of the Volga.

The earlier cities that dominated this region—Atel, the capital of the Khazar kings; Sarai, where Baty with his horde sat down like an incubus on the bound and writhing carcass of Russia; and old Astrakhan, the seat of the Turkish dynasty that followed, and was finally overwhelmed by Ivan the Terrible in 1554—were all situated on or near the delta of the Volga, though it is now difficult to distinguish their exact sites. Atel, however, is still the title given by the Tartars to the great stream; while the new city at the Volga mouth preserves the name, and is built partly with the stones, of the old capital founded by the successors of Tamerlane.

Situated so far from the centre of Russian authority, the modern Astrakhan has not escaped misfortunes from civil uprisings and foreign attacks. The rulers of Turkestan and the nomad tribes of the steppe have more

220

A STORMY HISTORY.

than once tried to regain possession of their lost inheritance. But the turbulent regiments of Cossacks of the Don that guarded the country towards the Ural and the Caucasus constituted a greater danger than the enemy they were set to watch. The country during the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth centuries contained all the materials, according to Rambaud, of "an immense *jacquerie*, being full of vagabonds of all kinds, ruined nobles, disfrocked monks, military deserters, fugitive serfs, highwaymen, and river pirates."

These malcontents were always ripe for revolt and revolution. Thus in the "time of the troubles," under their leader Zaroutski, they seized Astrakhan, and ruled it in name of one of the many pretenders to the Russian throne. The archbishop was bound hand and foot and sent to Moscow. Seventy years later occurred the great Cossack rising under the celebrated bandit Stenko Razin, the Robin Hood of Russia. He overran all the Don and Volga countries, ravaged the shores of the Caspian, pillaged Persian towns, and for six or seven years threatened to wrest South-eastern Russia from the empire. At Astrakhan one of the voivodes, or civil governors, was thrown from a bell-tower and killed; and an imitator of Stenko improved on Zaroutski's treatment of the ecclesiastical authority, by stripping the archbishop of his robes, half-roasting him, and pitching him headlong from the belfry.

The last of the great Cossack risings was that of Pugatchef, in the reign of the Empress Catherine II. Pugatchef was a Cossack deserter from the regiment of the Yaik, as the Ural River was then called, and a *raskolnik*. He gave himself out as Peter III., the mur-

COSSACKS OF THE URAL.

221

dered husband of Catherine. The discontented and the fanatical thronged to the pretender's standard, and the Volga, as far as Kazan, which he pillaged and burned, was soon in his hands. Catherine's power trembled; but the imperial troops under Suvarof and Mitchelson at length made headway against the rebel, hunted him into the salt-steppes to the eastward of Astrakhan, and captured him as he was on the point of escaping into Persia.

It was to blot out remembrance of this episode that the name of the Yaik River was changed; and the Cossacks who had taken the leading part in the revolt became henceforth known as the regiment of the Ural. To-day they are like Cossacks generally, an industrious, kindly, and hospitable race of military colonists; hardy and enterprising where warlike duties are required of them, but scarcely less energetic and successful as fishers, hunters, and agriculturists in time of peace. The unanimous testimony of travellers to the good qualities of the Cossacks is fast removing the bad name which their early turbulence and barbarity brought upon them.

Astrakhan is the great depôt for the produce of the sturgeon and other fisheries, on which the prosperity of the lower Volga and the Caspian so much depends. Great quantities of caviare are manufactured here, and exported to all parts of Russia. In this, as in other branches of its trade, Astrakhan owes much to Peter the Great. He came hither in 1722, on the occasion of his expedition against Derbend and the other cities of the Caspian; built the Admiralty, and founded trading companies with Persia and Turkestan. The English had, however, been here long before on the same mission.

222 ENGLISH TRADERS ON THE CASPIAN.

In the reign of Ivan the Terrible, who encouraged British trade with the White Sea and Moscow, and carried his admiration of us so far as to propose marriage to our Queen Elizabeth, a London merchant named Jenkinson descended the Volga and hoisted the English flag on the Caspian within a year or two of Ivan's capture of Astrakhan. Jenkinson landed on the eastern side of this inland sea, loaded his merchandise on camels, started boldly into the interior, and reached Bokhara in safety, by a route which even to-day is very imperfectly known. Other journeys were made by the enterprising Jenkinson in the interests of his royal mistress, of the Czar Ivan, or of his own pocket; and it was partly in recognition of his services that authority was given three centuries ago to English merchants to trade in the principal towns of Russia.

Leaving Astrakhan and the banks of the river behind, and striking westward into the steppe, we are not long in discovering that though on the hither side of the Volga, with our faces Paris-wards, we are actually in Asia—among scenery and people that suggest the interior of Mongolia rather than the neighbourhood of a port frequented by passenger steamers and vessels of war. The soil is sandy or saline, and the herbage scanty and coarse. Fresh water is only met with at the end of a long day's march; and the bare plain, extending to the horizon, bears no trace of fixed human habitation. At long intervals the dingy gray expanse of the steppe is faintly mottled by the still more dingy felt tents forming the *aul* of a wandering tribe of Kalmuks; or we come upon a group of savage-looking shepherds watching flocks of cattle and sheep scarcely more rough-coated and

THE ASTRAKHAN STEPPES.

223

wild than their herdsmen. Then a party of Cossack
horsemen files past on some picketing duty, or a train of
camels laden with wool or felt-cloth moves slowly across
the waste on its way to Astrakhan. We will pass on
the route small basins, enclosed by sandy ridges, and
covered by a saline efflorescence, looking in its dazzling
whiteness like newly-fallen snow. In some of these
depressions men will be seen at work cutting up the
saline deposit—the residue of what once was a bitter
lake—into cakes, and piling them up in pyramidal form
for transport. On some height a rude windmill may
occasionally be descried spreading its ragged sails; at
intervals much more remote a *kuraul*, with its Buddhist
temple of Chinese design, and wooden shanties for the
high priest and inferior lamas, will be encountered.
Otherwise there is nothing to occupy eye or mind.

Near the Caspian and the Volga stagnant pools of
water are met with, but they are mostly brackish and
undrinkable. The march is a continual climbing and
descending of sandy hillocks, which have been blown
by the prevailing winds into long ridges; or a sand-
storm drives the sharp gritty or saline particles into the
faces of the travellers, and obscures the air with whirling
dust. The region at no very remote date—as geologists
count time—has been the bed of a sea. Probably the
Euxine and the Caspian mingled their waters in this
depression. The soil and climate seem to be gradually
growing more arid. In quite modern times the Kouma
River made a small perennial contribution to the Caspian.
Its lower course, except in rare occasions of heavy flood,
is now a bare furrow between two sand-banks, with
jungly thickets and marshes at the mouth, where

224

THE INCURSION OF THE KALMUKS.

robbers sometimes find shelter; and there is no permanent
running stream between the Volga and the Terek.

The nomads inhabiting these steppes are for the
most part Kalmuks. They are a Mongolian people,
whose original home was in Soungaria, among the high
grassy valleys of the Tian-shan range, to the south and
east of Lake Balkash, and within the limits of what is
called Chinese Tartary. Their ancestors formed part of
a powerful confederation of Mongol tribes—the Tchoros,
Durbot, Hoshot, and T forgot—formed by the Soungarian
clans with the object of reconquering China, lost by the
descendants of Ghenghiz Khan. The Oirats—the Four
Allies—quarrelled with each other in later times; petty
chiefs made themselves independent and broke away
from the confederation. The Kalmuks—the “remnant”
or “residue” of the alliance, composed chiefly of the
T forgot and Durbot tribes—could no longer hold their
old ground against their enemies, and in detached parties,
under various chiefs, they began their movement west-
ward.

This last and not least remarkable of the Mongolian
migrations into Europe began in 1670, and was com-
pleted about 1703. They crossed the steppes of the
Kirghiz with their flocks and herds, their women and
children, in spite of the opposition offered by these
hereditary enemies, passed the Yaik, and spread over
the then unoccupied plains between it and the Don.
There they pastured their flocks and throve in wealth
and numbers till the year 1771, when a still more
extraordinary impulse set them in motion again towards
their home in the east.

Through some of the secret and mysterious sources by

FLIGHT OF THE "REMNANT."

225

which news travels in Asia they learned of a strange revolution in Soungaria. The Mongol inhabitants— their old allies and enemies—had been attacked by the Emperor of China, and of six hundred thousand souls not one, it was said, was left alive in the country. The Kalmuks determined to return and occupy their old home. They set out from the Volga in the winter of 1770-71, and began, on foot and on horse and camel back, with all their goods and chattels, their flocks of goats and sheep, their old people and their infants in arms, the three thousand miles' journey through the snow-covered desert.

The story of disaster and suffering has been brilliantly told by De Quincy in his "Flight of a Tartar Tribe." The Russian Government obtained word of the intended migration, and endeavoured to intercept the tribe at the Ural. They partly succeeded. The ice was not strong enough to bear the vast host of refugees, and the rear portion were "headed back" beyond the Volga into the present Kalmuk country. Half a million of souls, however, crossed the river and continued their flight across the Kirghiz Steppe, pursued by the Russians, harassed by the Kirghiz and other robber-tribes, and assailed by cold, hunger, and fatigue; and when the forlorn and destitute remnant of the "Remnant" at last reached their old haunts in the basin of the Ili, they found that the hope that had brought them so far had deceived them. The smiling valley was already occupied by Chinese military and convict colonies transported thither from the Middle Kingdom; and the choice of the wanderers lay between retracing the long road they had just traversed, or ascending to the cold hill

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15

226

BUDDHISTS IN EUROPE.

pastures and submitting to the yoke of Chinese authority and taxation. They adopted the latter alternative; and their descendants, as we will by-and-by find, are still in possession of the grassy uplands of the Kunges and Tekes valleys, where they practise the same religion and follow the same traditional pursuits of sheep and horse rearing as do their kinsmen who still linger in the steppes of the Volga.

In some respects, no doubt, the European Kalmuks have benefited by contact with civilized neighbours. In the Russian towns they have a market for the wool, hides, and other produce of their flocks and herds; and many of the comforts and inventions of Europe find their way to the Kalmuk tent. Their khan is chosen for them by the Russian Government; a slight taxation is imposed upon them; and they furnish some companies of skirmishers to the Russian army. Otherwise they are left pretty much to manage their own affairs.

Devout Buddhists as they are, their lamas wield a strong political as well as religious influence among them; and they help to preserve the native language, customs, and dress. Nothing will induce them to settle down permanently at any particular spot; even in the *kuraul* the high priest and his vicars have their brown felt tents set up by the side of their wooden huts, and remove to them in the winter. Visitors to the Kalmuk country have not been complimentary in their allusions to the manners and appearance of the tribe. Dr. Clarke, in his " Travels," commits himself to the strong statement that " nothing is more hideous than a Kalmuk."

"High, prominent, and broad cheek-bones; very

AN UNLOVELY PEOPLE.

227

little eyes, widely separated from each other; a flat
and broad nose; coarse, greasy, jet-black hair; scarcely
any eyebrows; enormous prominent ears,” are among
the features with which he endows them; and he goes
on to tell how they prepare their favourite steak of
horse-flesh by placing it below the saddle and sitting
on it during a day’s journey, and to give other broad
details of their domestic life and tastes, such as seldom
now-a-days find their way into books of travel.

A recent observer, Mr. Wallace, bears scarcely less
emphatic testimony to the supreme repulsiveness of these
poor Mongols. “To say simply that they are ugly,” he
remarks, “is to pay them an unmerited compliment.
There is something infra-human in their ugliness. They
show in an exaggerated degree all those repulsive traits
that we see toned down and refined in the face of the
average Chinaman. As they belong to one of the recog-
nized races of mankind, we must assume that they have
souls; but it is difficult, when we see them for the first
time, to believe that a human soul lurks behind their
expressionless, flattened faces and small, dull, obliquely-
set eyes.”

All this is probably true, but there is evidence that
even the Kalmuk is improving, in look and manners,
with the times. According to our ideal of beauty
he is certainly far from handsome; and his notions
about cleanliness are most rudimentary. He still
preserves the taste for horse-flesh which existed among
his ancestors so long ago as the days of Herodotus,
and he does not scruple to make a stew of dog, cat,
or rat. But judging from the descriptions of M. Mely,
one of the latest visitors to the country of the Kalmuks,

228

A HIGH PRIEST'S ENTOURAGE.

it would now be rash to say with Clarke that "they
are more filthy in their persons than perhaps any
other nation," and that "so horrid and inhuman is
their appearance that it was difficult to distinguish the
sexes."

Instead of "gigantic figures running about stark
naked," M. Mely found the population rather elabo-
rately dressed in striking costumes of red, white, black,
and yellow, and the women markedly distinguished
in their garb from the men. By the high priest he
was entertained to an elaborately-served meal, which
included caviare, champagne, and Nantes sardines, as
well as mutton in every possible form;—the hangings
of the guest-chamber of this celibate establishment
were of *cretonne*, and represented the amours of Louis
XV. On the walls of the adjoining temple were de-
signs of gods and goddesses, on rice paper, executed by
native artists, and showing no despicable skill; and
hung around it was an imposing array of musical
instruments—enormous trumpets of brass and silver,
tambourines, gongs, and fifes—for the religious ser-
vices in honour of Buddha. From the aspect of the
country, the bare plains, the black tents, the flocks of
horses, sheep, and camels, the prayer-mills, the peak-
gabled temple, and the appearance of the people with
their flat faces, tightly-drawn eyelids, thin beards, and
pigtails, it was easy for the traveller to imagine that he
had been suddenly transported four thousand miles east-
ward, and was in the heart of Thibet, the Holy Land of
Chinese Buddhism.

The steppes between the Volga and the Ural are the
continuation of those between the Volga and the Don,

THE LITTLE HORDE OF KIRGHIZ.

229

and repeat the same features of scenery and soil. Here,
also, are salt and thirsty plains, covered by a thin growth
of coarse grass, wandering shepherd tribes, and rivers
that lose themselves in the sand.

The people that occupy this tract are the Kirghiz
of the Bukeief tribe — the Inner Horde, as they are
called—who removed hither in the end of last century,
when the land was left vacant on the departure of the
Kalmuks for High Asia. They are of more peaceful
and settled habits than their kinsmen beyond the Ural.
But this is probably owing to their neighbourhood to
the seat of Russian authority rather than from pos-
sessing more industrious and honest instincts; for they
are an offshoot of the Little Horde, which in past times
has been quite abreast of the Great and Middle Hordes
in deeds of plunder and murder.

The country ranged over by this tribe extends almost
to Orenburg and Orsk—the farthest outposts of Europe
towards the east. Both are comparatively new cities;
dusty, dreary, and formal, like all Russian towns of their
class, but noteworthy as starting-places for the journey
across the desert to Russian Turkestan and the famous
cities of Central Asia. A traveller bound on such an ex-
pedition has generally to spend some days at Orenburg
laying in supplies, selecting postilions, and making other
preparations for the trip; and in this way it has come
in for a larger share of descriptive notice than it perhaps
deserves.

The most interesting of the features of Orenburg,
as of Astrakhan, is the extraordinary diversity of type,
language, and dress presented by its population. On
the "threshold of Asia," the Tartar elements that the

230

ORENBURG.

traveller has already observed, if he has come hither
by way of Astrakhan or of Kazan, assert themselves
more prominently. "The wide streets crossing one
another at right angles," says Mr. Schuyler, "the
well-built wooden and plastered houses, the shops, the
churches, the boulevard and public square, the immense
government buildings used for barracks, storehouses, and
schools, give the place a thoroughly Russian air; while,
on the other hand, the caravanserai, with its beautiful
mosque and minaret of white stucco—the Tartar mosque,
the camels, in caravans, single or harnessed to waggons—
the crowds of Tartars, the Kirghiz on horseback, in their
dirty rags, with rude caps—the bazaar with the Bokharan,
Khivan, and Tashkend merchants, in long robes striped
with many colours, and with turbans on their heads,
showed that the inhabitants of the place were thoroughly
Asiatic."

Orenburg has been marked out as the starting-point of
a line of railway advocated by M. de Lesseps, which the
promoters propose to carry to Samarcand, and ultimately,
perhaps, to India; and if this scheme is ever carried out,
the future of the city will probably be a brilliant and
prosperous one. We do not propose just now, however,
to penetrate into Asia, either by railway train or on
camel-back, having still a large area of European Russia
to survey, and for the present must content ourselves
with the glimpse of its bazaars and caravanserais, its
desert plains and its roving horsemen, that can be ob-
tained from the streets of Orenburg.

CHAPTER XI.

THE URALIAN PROVINCES.

HE flat monotony of surface presented by the Astrakhan Steppe is broken long before we reach Orenburg. There have been symptoms that a country of running streams, and what is much more rare in Russia, of mountains, is being approached. Cultivated land and permanent dwellings reappear; trees, in thin clusters and straggling lines, begin again to show themselves; the salt wastes become less frequent; and a thicker growth of grass covers the sandy soil.

On the upper waters of the Yaik, it is no longer possible to doubt that the lower spurs and valleys of the Ural chain have been entered upon. This great mountain range, one of the most important geographical features of the Russian Empire, extends in an almost north and south direction for between thirteen hundred and fourteen hundred miles; and for the greater part of that distance it forms the boundary of Europe and Asia. Few mountain systems of such extent have so low a general elevation and so marked an absence of predominating peaks. The highest section of the Urals is the northern portion—the “Barren Ural,” as the Russians

232

THE URAL CHAIN.

term it; but seldom do the summits rise beyond five
thousand feet over sea-level, and few or none of them,
even in the extreme north, are covered with snow all the
year round. The declivity is more marked on the west-
ern than on the eastern side of the mountains; but so
gradual is the slope in some places that, even when
ascending from the European side, the traveller is
scarcely aware that he has left the plains of Russia
when he is already in those of Siberia. Formerly, when
the passage across the mountains by the main route
from Perm to Ekaterinburg was made by *tarantass*, a
stone by the side of the track, bearing on one side the
legend "Europa," and on the other "Asia," was sure to
attract notice. Now the journey between these cities is
made by rail, and the traveller learns of his passing
from one continent to the other by coming successively
to the stations of "Europa," "Ural," and "Asia."

From its highest point the "dorsal ridge" of the range
gradually declines in height as it approaches the Frozen
Ocean, into which it projects in a long peninsula, termi-
nating at Vaygatz Strait, and separating the Atlantic
from the Kara Sea. Vaygatz Island—a sort of "Holy
Land" of the Samoyedes—is probably a prolongation of
the chain; and the bare mountains of Novaya Zemlia
beyond, running in the same general direction, and pro-
jecting far into the "Polar pack," may be regarded as a
continuation of the Urals.

In the opposite direction also—towards the south—the
height of the chain decreases, and in the province of
Orenburg it separates into diverging ranges. Two of
these run down into the Kirghiz Steppe, gradually
merging into the waterless Ust-Urt Plateau, between

MOUNTAIN SOLITUDES.

233

the Sea of Aral and the Caspian, or extending east-
ward in a low "saddle" that forms the water-shed
between the Obi and the rivers of the steppe, and join-
ing the great Asian mountain systems of the Tian-shan
and Altai. Another branch follows the western bank
of the Ural River, giving rise to scanty and intermittent
streams, such as the Great and the Little Utzen, that
disappear in the sands or spread into salt marshes; and
it ends, like its rivers, and like many a caravan that
has attempted to cross these wastes, by losing itself in
the desert.

North of Orenburg, the Ural chain sharply divides
the river systems of Siberia from those of Russia proper.
All the rain that falls on the eastern side of the range
finds its way into the Tobol and other branches of the
great river Obi; while the streams running down its
western slopes are tributaries of the Kama, and drain
into the Caspian, or, in more northern parts, flow to the
Atlantic by the Petchora. Great forests of oak and
pine clothe the lower slopes of the range, and even the
higher summits are often heavily timbered with birch
and the hardier cone-bearing trees. Wild sequestered
nooks are found in these hills, about the head-waters of
the Kolva—the "tap-root" of the Kama—or in the
innumerable gorges and valleys of the feeders of the
Tobol, where the trapper and the mining pioneer have not
yet penetrated; and in the deserted northern tracts, where
there are no treasures of gold or of copper to tempt
the prospector, the only inhabitants are a few Samoyede
families, who wander with their herds of reindeer from
dreary hill-side to barren valley in search of pasture.

The Урals, however, are rapidly becoming more thor-

234

TREASURES OF THE URALS.

oughly and extensively known. Their importance consists not only in the geographical position they occupy, and the meteorological and hydrographical functions they fulfil, but also in the variety and richness of their mineral wealth. Gold and silver have been found here from time immemorial, but it is only since the time of Peter the Great and the foundation of Ekaterinburg—named in honour of Catherine I.—that they have been worked in a systematic manner. Besides the more precious metals, including platinum, there are rich mines of copper, iron, and salt, quarries of marble, porphyry, and granite, and wells of naphtha and other mineral oils. Among the precious substances found are the emerald, topaz, agate, chrysolite, garnet, beryl, jasper, malachite, serpentine, and rock-crystals of great size; asbestos, gypsum, pipe-clay, sulphur, saltpetre, and nitre. Diamonds have been found, as Alexander von Humboldt had predicted, though none of large size. One newly discovered gem—named the Alexandrite, after the emperor—has the peculiarity of displaying two colours, crimson by day and green by night. It was with the object chiefly of throwing light on the peculiarities of their geological formation that pilgrimages were made to the great "Girdle" (as the name Ural means in the Tartar tongue) by Humboldt, Sir R. Murchison, and other distinguished scientists. The mines are partly the property of the Crown, and partly belong to the great Russian families Demidof, Stroganof, Lazaref, and others, who have enormous possessions in Perm and the adjoining provinces.

The Demidof mines are at Nijni Tagilsk, just beyond the Urals, but within the province of Perm, which laps

NIJNI TAGILSK AND EKATERINBURG.

235

over into Asia. At these works thirty or forty thou-
sand workmen are employed. The quantity of wood
annually consumed as fuel at the forges, if it were built
in a stack, would form a pile of logs twice as large as
St. Paul's Cathedral. The principal minerals worked
here are magnetic and manganese iron ores, both of re-
markable richness, and also copper. Magnetic iron ore is
found near the surface, and is dug out in terraces, and
carted direct to the forges. The copper lodes are reached
by a shaft six hundred feet deep, and in these workings
Mr. Lansdell, the latest English visitor to the mines,
dug out pieces of malachite in the natural state.

Of late years the yield from the mines of the Ural
has largely increased in value; new methods of extract-
ing the ore have been introduced, and wealth and
population have flowed into and across the mountains,
which have become a Russian California or Nevada.
In spite of scientific and practical survey, much of the
resources of the region have still to be discovered; and
the "Girdle" of the empire is likely in the future to be
still more valuable, and indeed indispensable, to Russian
industry than it is at present.

Ekaterinburg, the capital of this metalliferous district,
has an aspect and a society such as would hardly be
looked for so far from the ordinary paths of commerce
and culture. The town is regularly built, and many
handsome houses line its clean and airy streets. As a
matter of course, there are numerous churches and other
public buildings, including a government mint and
botanic gardens. The restaurants and hotels are admir-
ably served; there is an admirable hospital and an
orphanage supported by voluntary contributions; and

236

THE KAMA RIVER.

there are artistic, literary, and musical coteries quite
abreast of Western Europe in their tastes and ideas.

The whole of the inhabitants of the town are more or
less dependent on the forges and other mining establish-
ments of which it is the centre. The lapidaries are famous
for the artistic skill of design and delicacy of finish of
the work they produce. Even the ragged urchins in the
streets are dealers in precious stones and ores on a small
scale; and the visitor unskilled in the detection of true
from false jewels is likely to come away from Ekaterin-
burg with the impression that the culture of the popula-
tion is more highly developed than their honesty.

The fishing, agricultural, stock-rearing, bee-keeping,
timber-cutting, and fur trades also rank high in import-
ance in the Uralian provinces; and the Kama is the
great channel by which the products of the vast region
comprehended within the governments of Kazan, Ufa,
Perm, and Viatka—an area of two hundred and sixty
thousand square miles, and containing nearly eight
million inhabitants—reach the markets of Russia and
Western Europe.

Before noticing, however, some of the aspects which
nature and man present in this remote corner of Europe,
we must say something of the famous city of Kazan, the
vestibule to the Kama Valley and the key to much of its
history. Kazan is situated not exactly at the junction of
the Kama with the Volga, but some little way above, on
the left bank of the latter stream, where it is joined by
the small river Kazanka. There is little doubt, how-
ever, that the command it possessed of the entrance to
the great eastern affluent of the Volga determined the
choice of the site, and mainly contributed to its im-

GREAT BOLGARY.

237

portance—as was the case, in like manner, with a still earlier capital of this region, Great Bolgary, which once rose on the river bank some distance below the Kama mouth.

When part of the Bulgarian nation had migrated, under their leader Aspurach, to the southern side of the Danube, the power that had long ruled the Volga began to fall into decay from the assaults of the Tartars on one side and the Russians on the other. At the time of the Mongol invasions, Great Bolgary was ripe for overthrow, and the captains of the Golden Horde did not spare it. The city disappeared. A few mounds of ruins, among which have been found Cufic and Persian inscriptions and coins bearing Armenian and Arabic texts, alone attest its former importance and the extent of its commerce. The heterogeneous collection of half-Finnish, half-Tartar peoples inhabiting the banks of the Volga and Kama fell under the power of the Khans: Kazan rose in the place of Great Bolgary.

Sayn, son of Baty Khan, is said to have been the founder of Kazan; but whoever he was, he had a fine eye for situation and strategic importance. The city soon rose to wealth and political consequence. It broke loose from the control of Serai, and formed a separate khanate, that was sometimes at war and sometimes in alliance with the princes of the Nogai and Kipchak Hordes, and almost constantly at feud with the Grand Princes of Moscow. In the palmy days of Mohammedan rule it was a great seat of Oriental learning. Its mirzas, or nobles, were men of culture, of dashing and splendid exterior, and allied, many of them, by marriage to Russian families of rank; and its muftis, mollahs, and imauns

238

THE CAPTURE OF KAZAN.

were deeply read in Arabic lore. Moscow borrowed
from Kazan models of æsthetic taste as well as notions
of polity.

At length the aggrandizing policy of the Grand
Princes began to have its effects, and reprisals came
from the side of Russia. Ivan the Great captured Kazan,
though he could not keep it; and his grandson Ivan the
Terrible finally destroyed the power of the khans after a
bloody struggle, in which the Tartar city was repeatedly
besieged by land and water. It was the first successful
siege undertaken by the Russians according to modern
rules of war. The final assault was directed by Czar
Ivan himself, and led by Prince Kourbsky; and the
bravery of the attacking force did not exceed the
desperate valour of the Tartar warriors, who retreated
from the walls to the palace of their prince Ediger,
and died fighting around him. On this memorable day,
the 2nd October 1552, the laws and authority of the
Czars were extended beyond the Volga and Kama, and
Russia stepped over into Asia.

The later history of Kazan has been on the whole
quiet and prosperous, though so late as a hundred years
ago it was ravaged and burned by the Cossack outlaw
Pugatchef, and it has suffered at other times from more
than its share of those destructive conflagrations that fall
to the lot of every Russian town. To-day it is a larger,
grander, and more learned city than ever it was under
its independent rulers. It counts some ninety thousand
inhabitants, famous throughout Russia for their indus-
trial skill and enterprise. Finely placed on the steep
slope of a hill overlooking the Volga and the Kazanka,
with rich meadows spreading round it which are parti-

TRADE AND LEARNING.

239

ally inundated when the rivers are in flood, the striking
architectural features of the city are seen to the best
advantage. Tall cupolas and minarets rise above the
walls of the kremlin or from among the masses of
private buildings and gardens, and prick the air in
fantastic designs, in curious contrast to the ranges of
smoking factory chimneys that in another direction bear
witness to the busy industrial life of Kazan.

The chief manufacture of Kazan is its morocco or
"Russia" leather; and little less important are its soap
and chemical works, its distilleries, and its workshops
for the production of cutlery, jewellery, and cloth. It is
the *entrepôt* of the commerce passing into Russia from
the Caspian, from Central Asia, and from Siberia; and
hundreds of vessels that ply on the Kama here discharge
their cargoes of fish, timber, minerals, and farm produce.
But Kazan is still more justly proud of its academical
distinction. Its university is one of the most thriving
in Russia, the Oriental languages being studied here
with especial success; and the town is largely endowed
with other means of instruction, in the shape of libraries,
museums, observatories, botanical gardens, gymnasia, and
normal, theological, and military schools.

Few mementoes of the period of Tartar rule remain
in the old capital of the Khans; and the Sumbeke
Tower, which is popularly attributed to this era, was
probably built at a much later period. Ivan the Terrible
did all in his power to obliterate every memorial of the
old regime, and even destroyed the tombs of the Tartar
kings. The frequent fires have also cleared away the
traces of the past. There are several mosques, and in
the Tartar quarter the houses are built after the model

240

KAZAN TARTARS.

of the Mohammedan East; but it is in its population—
about an eighth of which are still adherents of the creed
of Islam—rather than in its architecture, that Kazan
shows traces of its Oriental relations.

The Tartar inhabitants, however, have long ago lost
the restless nomadic instincts of their ancestors and their
passion for war and plunder. The original Mongol
stock that came hither with Sayn Khan has disappeared,
or been absorbed by later immigrants, and the language
and type of features of the Tartars of Kazan are those
of the Turki tribes that followed the banners of Tamerlane
from the banks of the Oxus and Jaxartes. They are
now the rivals of the Russians in the peaceful fields of
commerce and manufacture, and writers could be quoted
who place them above the Slavs in intelligence and
industry. There can be little doubt that the Tartar is
at least the more sober and more honest, and many of
the highest positions of trust in the land are filled by
individuals of the old dominant race. In their habits
and domestic arrangements they strive to follow the
laws of the Koran. In the interior of the houses of
the better off a multiplicity of carpets, cushions, and
divans take the place of tables and chairs, and the guest
is treated with patriarchal hospitality and courtesy.
Polygamy is recognized, though not generally practised;
the women among the richer classes are kept apart in
the harem, and though they now move abroad without
the veil, they still shroud their faces in a shawl when a
Giaour gazes at them too curiously.

The Government treats its Mussulman subjects with
tolerance and equity. Attempts were made in ear-
lier times to proselytize the Tartars to the Orthodox

TARTAR AND RUSSIAN.

241

Church. These were partially successful, so long as out-
ward conformity to the Christian faith only was required,
and large bribes were held out as the reward of con-
version. But it soon appeared that the nominal converts
were in secret as much attached as ever to their old
customs and creed; and when ukases were issued, order-
ing that means should be taken "to pacify, imprison,
put in irons, and thereby unteach and frighten from the
Tartar faith, those who, though baptized, do not obey
the admonitions of the Metropolitan," the utter failure
of the official propaganda came fully to light. The
Mohammedan population are now freely allowed to have
their own ecclesiastical organization and to practise the
rites of their faith, though the loss of civil rights and
deportation to the Siberian mines is still the penalty of
any attempt to persuade a Christian to apostatize to
Islam.

In the villages of the province of Kazan, Mr. Wallace
tells us, the two populations—Russian and Tartar—live
together in perfectly good fellowship, in spite of their
past rivalry of race and creed. "Near one end of the
village stands the Christian church, and near the other
the little metchet, or Mohammedan house of prayer.
The whole village forms one commune, with one village
assembly and one village elder; but socially it is com-
posed of two distinct communities, each possessing its
peculiar customs and peculiar mode of life. The Tartar
may learn the Russian language, but he does not on that
account become Russianized." To the simple Russian
peasant there is nothing in the fact of his Tartar neigh-
bour being an "infidel" to excite fanatical hatred such
as would be aroused by the appearance of heretical

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16

242

BASHKIRS.

opinions among people of his own kith and kin. As one of them explained: "The Tartars, you see, received their faith from God, as they received the colour of their skins; but the Molo-kani" (Milk Drinkers, who do not observe the Orthodox fasts and reject the worship of images) "are Russians who have invented a faith out of their own heads."

The Bashkirs, a race closely allied in language, customs, and type to the Kazan Tartars, and also professing the Mohammedan faith, are as yet but half broken in to stationary and agricultural life. There are nearly half a million of them, compared with a million and a quarter of the "Tartars proper," in the provinces of the Ural and in the Orenburg steppes; a people partly living in tents and partly settled in villages, where they breed cattle and keep bees. The Bashkir is generally an intelligent and pleasant fellow, and the traveller may, as a rule, rely on his skill and trustworthiness if he engages him for the onerous duty of yemstchik, or postilion; for he will not get drunk, as a Russian or a Finnish driver probably would, and as a rule he will be careful, honest, and civil. Schools have been for some time established in the Bashkir country. The race are taking kindly to agricultural pursuits, and it is probable that they will ere long entirely give up their pastoral and nomadic life; and their example will probably be followed by the neighbouring tribes of Meshtcheriaks, Teptiars, and others, as Russian colonization encroaches upon their domains.

While the tribes of Turkish descent are for the most part found on the steppes, or on the margin of the forest region, seeming never well at ease while at a distance

UGRIAN MIGRATIONS.

243

from the open country, the still more numerous Finnish races of these parts prefer to hide themselves in the gloom of the deep woods. No ethnologist has ever succeeded in unravelling to his complete satisfaction the ancestry and race affinities of these aboriginal peoples of Russia. That a thousand years ago they had things pretty much their own way in the northern and eastern parts of Russia; that they are more closely connected by blood and language with the Turanian races of Northern Asia than with the Aryan peoples of modern Europe, and themselves form a division of the human stock that includes populations so widely separated and so diverse in culture as the Magyars of Hungary and the Samoyedes of the Obi, are doctrines pretty generally admitted.

As long ago as 886, the Magyars, under their leader Arpad, left their homes in the Ural, and passing the Carpathian Mountains, overthrew the barbarian power that Huns and Avars had established on the ruins of the Roman rule in Pannonia. The language and many of the legends of the dominant race of the Danubian plains still attest how closely they are akin to the rude peoples beyond the Volga. But the entangled relationships between Tcherimis and Tchuvash, of Votiak with Mordvin, of Permian and Zyranian, Voghul, Ostiak, and Samoyede, who shall unravel?

Some of these races are rapidly losing their peculiar type by amalgamation with the Russian colonists and adoption of their language and habits; and in a generation or two the old Permian and Zyranian dialects, into which St. Stephen of Perm translated the Scriptures five hundred years ago, may, like many of the

244 RETIRING FINNS AND ENCROACHING SLAVS.

other Finnish dialects, cease to be spoken as a living
tongue, just as has happened with the Cornish and
Cumbrian languages in our own country. Others of
them, such as the Voghuls, are found on the Asiatic side
of the Urals, in remote swampy and forest districts into
which Slav immigration has hardly begun to penetrate,
and are still a people almost in a state of nature, living
by the chase of the elk and bear, the trapping of fur
animals, such as the marten, the sable, and the beaver,
and by fishing, and who acknowledge the authority of
the Czar by an annual tribute of undressed skins.

The Samoyede lives far away, beyond even the limits
of the birch woods, on the desolate tundra lands adjoin-
ing the Icy Sea, in a region where no one is likely to
disturb him or envy him his heritage. On the other hand,
the Votiaks, Tchuvashes, and Tcherimis are surrounded
by Russian populations. They live in little communities
apart, forming, as it were, islands, promontories, and
peninsulas in the encroaching ocean of Slav immigration.
Here they still speak their ancestral tongue, and practise
their semi-pagan rites, and dress, eat, and live after the
manner of their Finnish forefathers. "Their true
habitat," says Latham, speaking specially of the Tcher-
imis, "is the oak-tree forest, with its underwood of
buckthorn, spindle-tree, and hazel," occupying the ridges
between the streams that feed the Volga and the Kama.

The limits of the region where Finnish customs and
languages still prevail may be traced by the clearings
and the river-courses—colonization, as in other countries,
having followed the channels and valleys of the rivers.
But it is not to be supposed that the enclosure and iso-
lation of these aboriginal peoples mean that they have

COLONIZATION AND CHRISTIANIZATION.

245

been exterminated or driven forcibly back into the wil-
derness, as is the case in countries colonized by the
Anglo-Saxon. The Russian has not our unconquerable
pride and sense of national superiority. He does not con-
sider himself so infinitely exalted above the people among
whom he makes his home as to disdain to intermarry
with them, or to feel it intolerable that they should
occupy the same social footing with himself. A natural
process of absorption of the original elements of the popu-
lation has therefore been an accompaniment of Russian
colonization; and throughout the northern parts of the
empire there are large admixtures of Finnish blood, even
in districts that now seem most characteristically Slav.

In the Kama Valley this process may be seen in
active operation, and something has already been said
of the rapidity with which the "Russification" of the
country is proceeding. The "religious difficulty" does
not interpose as an obstacle to the mixture of Russ and
Finn, as it does in the case of Russ and Tartar. Offici-
ally the whole of the Finnish populations, with the ex-
ception of a few tribes that in earlier times were con-
verted to Islam, are classified as Orthodox Christians.
In reality, however, the nominal adoption of the "Russian
gods" has made but little change in the religious beliefs
of these races. Their observances, so long as their
paganism was undiluted, consisted chiefly of magical
rites performed by their "medicine men" to ward off the
evil influences of the spirits of the wood, the river, and
the snow, and to keep the unquiet ghosts of the dead in
their graves, and familiarly-worded prayers to their gods,
accompanied by presents for good harvests and successful
fishing.

246

FINNISH PAGANISM.

It was no difficult task to induce these primitive pagans to add the Virgin Mother and St. Nicolas to their pantheon, and even place them in the first rank of the invisible powers that dispense blessings and calamities among the children of men; but they did not think it necessary to lay aside their old divinities, to whom they still put up petitions and offer sacrifices. According to Wallace, Tchuvash peasants have been known to pray first to their own deities and then to the Greek saints for the good things of this life, or for vengeance on a neighbour. A Tcherimis, after recovery from illness, will sacrifice a young foal to Our Lady of Kazan, whose miraculous image was found unscathed in the ashes of a great conflagration, and whose shrine in the Bogoroditsky Convent, close by the kremlin of the old Tartar capital, is the most sacred spot in Eastern Russia. After all, this curious piebald faith of the Finns differs in form rather than in kind from the superstitious beliefs and practices of the Russian peasantry, and among the lower orders of both races Christianity and paganism blend insensibly into each other.

To reach the localities where the Votiak and Tcherimis are thoroughly “at home,” it is necessary to make a long trip up the Kama or some of its tributaries. The Kama is a fine, deep, and swift-running stream, with scarcely a shoal or a cataract throughout its twelve or fourteen hundred miles of length; while many of its affluents—particularly the Viatka and the Bielaya—are also adapted for navigation. Its principal riches hitherto have been the fish that abound in its waters, the fine timber that clothes its banks, and the mineral treasures found around its springs in the Ural range. But agricul-

A CHARMING PICTURE.

247

ture is now taking a prominent place among the occupa-
tions of the region; extensive clearings are found along
its course, and large quantities of grain are grown and
cattle raised on the rich deep soil from which the virgin
forest has been cleared.

M. Armengaud has given a brightly-coloured picture
of the "smiling villages and fertile fields" of the
government of Viatka. "Fine churches of brick, of an
architecture at once grave and graceful; labourers' houses
of two stories, with ornaments carved in the wood; a
population healthy, robust, alert, with figures full of
freedom, eyes sparkling with gaiety, and a laugh
sonorous and communicative; peasants clad like *bour-
geois*; domestic animals well cared for and well nour-
ished; active little horses, full of fire and vigour," are
among the signs of progress and prosperity enumerated.
Nor is this all. "For the first time astonished Russia
sees her plebeian children careful of their persons, and
attentive to the demands of the toilet and hygiene.
Much more, she discovers them occupying themselves
with education, and finds them with books in their
hands. The peasant possesses the songs of Béranger
translated into Russian; and if you watch the young
daughter of the house, you will surprise her in some
solitary corner with a novel of Dumas *père* in her
hand."

This is all very charming, and perhaps generally
true, but the colours of the sketch may be heightened a
little in order to bring out more effectively the contrast
offered by Finnish village life, to catch a glimpse of
which a long and rough drive through the oak and pine
forests is necessary. Writers differ in opinion on the

248

VOTIAK AND TCHUVASH.

question whether the Tcherimis or the Votiak is the
dirtier in his person and dwelling and the more uncouth
in his garb. Where "doctors disagree" on so fine a point,
it would be unjust to pronounce an opinion; and it
will probably be thought enough to know that the filth
and squalor amid which the Finnish peasant of either
tribe contentedly lives are inconceivable, and intolerable
to a moderately fastidious eye and nostril.

It is generally admitted that the Votiaks, who number
two hundred thousand in Viatka, of which probably
they were the original occupants, surpass all competitors
in their taste for strong drink. A large proportion—
perhaps the majority of them—have fiery red or auburn
tresses; while the ordinary type of Finn is swarthy of
skin and lank and dark of hair. The broad, flattened
face, however, bears testimony of relationship to Turk
and Tartar; while, like the rest of their kin, the Votiaks
are generally undersized, and clumsy in their movements,
and somewhat slow in intellect. They are a saturnine,
sad-mannered people while among strangers, whatever
they may be with their intimates and over their cups,
and more than half conscious of their backward condi-
tion, and glad to skulk back again to their woods with
their little purchases and gains. They are said to be
revengeful and moody in temperament; and their re-
sentment takes odd forms.

M. Rambaud, with a Frenchman's passion for a
generalization, says that when the Tchuvash "wish to
revenge themselves, they hang themselves at their
enemy's door." At the same time, these ancient peoples
are not without virtues to set against their blemishes;
and they are said to compare favourably with their

QUAINT COSTUMES.

249

Russian neighbours in truth-telling and honesty. To their costumes, however, little commendation can be paid. They are antediluvian and ugly. Their legs are swathed in innumerable folds of filthy rags that even a Neapolitan lazzaroni would be ashamed to wear. The Votiak women bear about on their heads a prodigious structure, chiefly composed of white birch bark, bound with linen bands, and adorned with silver trinkets, coins, streamers, fringes, and embroidery. The Tchuvash ladies don a peaked helmet, and have their backs cased in a covering of leather and metal, "like the trappings of a war-horse." Their sisters among the Tcherimis, says Rambaud, "wear on their breasts two plates forming a cuirass, and ornamented with pieces of silver, transmitted from generation to generation. A numismatist would make wonderful discoveries in these walking museums of medals."

Poor Finnish folk! We may smile at their antique notions of the beautiful and the becoming, but there is something tragic in the thought that they are condemned thus to mould and rust in the damp nooks of their woods, or to be transmuted and absorbed by the conquering race. Their day of grandeur dates at least a thousand years back. This basin of the Kama, and all Northern Russia from Lapland to the Urals, formed in medieval times the powerful state of Biarma, or Beorma, a name that survives in the modern Perm. It seems to have been a kind of Finn confederation, in which the dominant tribe was the Tchuds, now nearly extinct. They carried on commerce with India and Persia by the Volga and the Caspian Sea, and repelled many an incursion of Norse and Icelandic rovers. England held com-

250

BIARMA-LAND AND ITS GODS.

munication with Great Biarma long before the name of Russia was heard of in these islands. Other of Halgo-land, one of the sea-captains of King Alfred, made a voyage of discovery to this hyperborean power; and the king, with his own royal hand, wrote an account of the expedition in Anglo-Saxon.

The capital of Biarma is believed to have been situated high up the course of the Kama, probably near Tcherdyn, where considerable ruins are still seen, and gold and silver ornaments, wrought with Indian and Persian designs, have been exhumed. The existence of the precious metals seems to have been known even at this time, and Biarma was a sort of El Dorado of the Scandinavian pirates. Marvellous tales were told of the treasures of gold and precious stones in the palace of the Biarmian kings, and in the magnificent temple of their god Yumala. This structure was said to be built of odoriferous woods, richly carved, and so thickly set with precious stones that it gleamed like a sun over the adjacent country. As for Yumala himself—the Zeus, the Jove, the Odin of the Finns—he bore on his head a crown of jewels, round his neck an immense collar of gold, and in his hand a chalice worth a king’s ransom.

By-and-by came the “Good Companions” of Great Novgorod, ascending and descending the streams, drawing their skiffs over the low water-sheds, spreading over the whole north and north-east of Russia, and conquering the Finn peoples by means of the “arms of precision” of the day. The first Novgorodian colony was founded in the twelfth century. A commercial city sprang up at Khlynof—now Viatka—and a flourishing republic was established, and maintained its independence

BACKWOODS SOCIETY.

251

dence till after the downfall of the parent city on the
Volkhov. The conquests of the Tartars of Kazan; the
proselytizing zeal of St. Stephen, who, about 1372, built
the first Christian church, drove out the sorcerers, stopped
the sacrifices of reindeer, and cast down the "Old
Golden Woman" who had usurped the place of Yumala;
and, lastly, the aggrandizing policy of Ivan the Great
and Ivan the Terrible, completed the overthrow of the
Russ republic and the Finnish state. By the fall of
Kazan, the authority of the Czars was extended to the
Urals, and soon crossed them.

At the modern town of Perm, and the villages and
hamlets sparsely scattered along the Upper Kama and
its tributaries, there are few attractions to detain the
traveller who may choose to enter Siberia by this route.
Society is in an inchoate state. The face of the country
is only beginning to assume a civilized look, as the
shaggy growth of forest is pruned away and the marshes
are rudely drained. The population is composed to a
large extent of the same rough and strangely assorted
materials that one may find in a newly-settled western
state of America—miners and forgemen, trappers and
hunters, raftsmen and woodcutters, fishermen and pio-
neers, dwelling in rude wooden shanties, and clearing
the virgin forest in order to lay down their crops of
rye and barley. You may meet here Leatherstocking,
clad in Russian national garb of sheepskin coat and
heavy boots; or witness at some "mining camp" in the
spurs of the Urals the grim humour and still grimmer
tragedy of Poker Flat, or Red Dog, repeated with appro-
priate local colouring.

Still more wild and chaotic is the world of thought

252

A CAVE OF ADULLAM.

and passion seething beneath the surface, invisible to
the official eye. The government of Perm has been a
place of banishment for political offenders, and men and
women who have come under the ban of the ecclesiastical
law. It has been a Cave of Adullam for the oppressed,
the discontented, the restless, and the fanatical. There
are communities of Poles, banished thither for taking
part in the risings of 1832, 1848, and 1864; and
not far off hamlets of raskolniks (champions of the
Old Ritual), the solitary cabins of Priestless People,
or colonies of schismatics and heretics of still more
extreme types, with incarnate "Messiahs" and "Virgins"
among them to whom they pay a blind devotion;
while beneath, spreading their secret mines far and wide
under all sections of society, are Socialist and Nihilist
associations, uniting men who perhaps have little else in
common than the universal feeling of discontent and
unrest.

CHAPTER XII.

NORTHERN RUSSIA.

“HE Province of Russia,” says the worthy Marco Polo in his Travels, “is an exceedingly cold region, of vast extent; and I have been assured that it extendeth even unto the Northern Ocean, and bordereth upon the Region of Darkness, because during most part of the winter months the sun is invisible, and the atmosphere is obscured to the same degree as that in which we find it just about the dawn of day, when we may be said to see and not to see.”

Over this darkling hyperborean land, whose features even in the brief summer are half hidden by dense woods and Arctic fogs, we have now to cast our eyes. The quaint words of the Venetian traveller indicate the vague and misty notions that prevailed regarding the northern parts of Europe in his day—the close of the thirteenth century. It cannot be said that our knowledge of the region has even yet wholly left the twilight stage. The contour of the coasts, the courses of the streams, the positions of the villages and little towns thinly sprinkled over a vast territory, and the names of most of the lakes and fens, have long been known. It

254

WINTER LIFE IN THE NORTH.

is seldom, however, that either business or pleasure
brings a stranger into the forest-wildernesses of Vologda
or Olonetz, except while traversing the well-beaten routes
leading from Archangel to St. Petersburg and to Moscow.
Still fewer are the visits paid to the bleak, treeless wastes
extending along the shore of the Arctic Ocean from the
Asiatic frontier across the mouths of the Petchora and
Mezen to the White Sea, or to the lichen-covered hills
and dark mossy tarns of Lapland that stretch westward
of that gulf to the neighbourhood of the North Cape.

And if these gloomy forests and solitary coasts have
few attractions even in the brief but fierce summer, how
forlorn and forbidding must they be during the long, dark
Arctic night, when the woodman or the fisherman is cut
off from his fellows not only by wide distances and deep
thickets and marshes, but by the masses of snow, yards in
depth, that encumber the rough footpath or waggon-tracks;
when the bare tundra-lands are swept by the Polar
tempests, bombarded by hail-storms, and besieged by the
heavy pack-ice, and Lapp and Samoyede cower in under-
ground burrows, and pray to their divinities for the
speedy return of spring!

But even the most remote and desolate tracts are
not without traces of the presence of man—for a por-
tion of the year at least. How thin the population is in
some parts, however, may be judged from the fact that
in the three northern governments of Archangel, Olonetz,
and Vologda—a territory with an area exceeding that
of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined
—there are only about a million and a half of inhabi-
tants, or less than three to the square mile. You will
find on this northern slope, as in the Uralian provinces

HYPERBOREAN CONTRASTS.

255

we have just quitted, examples of all the stages of civ-\ ilization. A fine, sturdy Slav peasantry—a population
as vigorous and well grown as any in Europe—is in con-
tact and in contrast with the diminutive, half-nomad
peoples that dwell within the Arctic Circle. At Mezen,
one of the most northerly inhabited spots in Europe, are
political exiles, some of them men of birth and education,
living in the midst of a semi-barbarous race that range
from place to place in search of food for their flocks of
reindeer, or pick up a precarious livelihood by fishing in
the streams, hunting the white bear, walrus, and seal on
the ice, or searching along the shore for the remains of
a stranded whale. Races addicted to the grossest pagan
practices are in contact with the fiercest zealots for
Orthodoxy and the strict letter of traditional faith that
are to be found in Christendom. Religious fanes, blessed
not only with the possession of miracle-working bones
and images, and the undecayed bodies of sainted thau-
maturgists, but with official and autocratic favour—it
might almost be called patronage—may be discovered
in lonely islands of the White Sea. But to reach them,
forests have to be traversed that have for centuries been
the retreat of uncompromising schismatics, who look on
monkish piety as an abomination and monkish learning
as blasphemy.

Archangel was the first Russian port; and it is still
in some sense the only place of large maritime trade
where the soil, the language, and the customs are
thoroughly Russian. The commercial community at
the mouth of the Northern Dwina has been for a longer
period than any other in contact with European, and
particularly with English, influences, commercial and

256

A FOREST LAND.

social. But in the country immediately behind it, the primitive Russian life has continued down to our day little changed by inward movement, and almost un-contaminated by innovation from without. The boyards were never able to exercise an oppressive authority over the farmers, wood-cutters, and fishermen thinly sprinkled throughout this vast and almost inaccessible region of forests and lakes. The institution of serfage never took root here; and when the day of emancipation came, it was found that there were only five bondsmen in this northern area to set free.

On crossing the water-shed from the Kama to the Dwina—the great drainer of the lands inclining towards the Northern Sea—one sees, at least at first, little change in the scenery or in the occupations of the inhabitants. The forests, lakes, and morasses are, perhaps, on a larger scale; and so, too, are the trees, some of them monster larches, firs, and spruces of two hundred and three hundred years' growth. The first beginnings of the Dwina and its tributaries are buried under the dense shades of these ancient woods. The resinous odour of the pines fills the air; the surface may here and there be diversified by knolls and glens, but everywhere the sombre plumes of the coniferous trees assert themselves as the prevailing features of the landscape with implacable monotony. The clearings are smaller and more widely separated. In the more remote localities, towards the base of the Urals, the inhabitants—Zyranians mostly—are peltry hunters, who follow their furry prey in moccasins of half-dressed deerskin, like Hiawatha—

“Over river, hill, and hollow,
Through interminable forests,
Through uninterrupted silence,”

AN "ARCTIC PARADISE."

257

and of whose simple scheme of existence the hewing of
the forest or the tilling of the land forms no part.

Nearer the sea, in the central districts of Vologda,
wood-cutting and rafting, the distilling of turpentine and
tar, fishing and fish-curing, the raising of cattle and expor-
tation of hides and tallow, form the occupations of the in-
habitants. Villages, and even considerable towns—such,
for instance, as Veliki Oustioug, an old Novgorodian post,
now a town of eight thousand inhabitants—are met with
on the banks of the streams, which are the main and often
the only means of communication. These sequestered
communities often enjoy not a little comfort and com-
mercial prosperity, and have their full share of public
“institutions,” including churches. Thus Vologda, the
capital of the province of that name, is provided with
some sixty churches; and, in spite of its high latitude
and rigorous climate, it is possessed of so many amenities
that it has been termed an “Arctic paradise.” In Kar-
gopol, a town of two thousand souls, in Olonetz, Mr.
Hepworth Dixon says he counted twenty spires.

In some spots specially favoured by southern exposure
and fertile soil a little barley, rye, oats, and buckwheat are
grown, but not nearly enough for the needs of the popu-
lation. As in the times of Master Richard Chancelor of
the ship *Edward Bonaventura*—the first from our own
shores to visit these quarters!—the people still draw their
supplies of corn from the more fertile countries to the
south. The English mariner, in the year after the taking
of Kazan, journeyed by land and water from the mouth
of the Dwina to Moscow, which he found to be a city
“greater than London with the suburbs, but very rude,
and standeth without order;” and he would meet in a

(718)

17

258

SUMMER ON THE NORTHERN DWINA.

morning many hundred sledges, some carrying corn and some fish, going to and from "the north part of the Duke's dominions, where the cold is so extreme that it will suffer no corn to grow."

In the lower course of the Dwina, within the government of Archangel, and near the shores of the White Sea, even such partial attempts at cultivation are abandoned, and the population are traders, fishermen, lumbermen, and sailors. Spring and autumn are brief intervals of deluging sleet and rain and thick fogs interposed between nine months of grim winter, when land, river, and sea are bound together under a thick covering of ice and snow, and three months of scorchingly hot summer.

With the coming of the genial warmth man seems to imitate nature, and to strive by energetic and ceaseless activity to make up for the long period of enforced inaction. As soon as the streams are clear of ice, rafts of timber begin to descend the Dwina and its tributaries; and the river and its banks present a scene in strange contrast to the white and silent desolation that had reigned a few weeks before. The banks and islands are moist, and green with grass and rushes; the pines, that had during the winter looked like a forest of crystal, have shaken the snow from their branches, and the lighter tints of the new shoots show in beautiful contrast to the sombre shade of the older foliage; and the young leaves begin to sprout on the birch and willow. The stream itself, instead of a silent white avenue of ice, is a fine broad rushing current, down which lines of rafts and *praams* bear the lumbermen with goods and a few ragged pilgrim passengers to the sea. The praam is a rudely constructed craft, hurriedly

KHOLMOGORY.

259

put together for the single voyage down the Dwina to Archangel with its cargo of oats and rye, where it is generally sold and broken up, the strength of the current preventing these clumsy vessels from ascending the stream.

The mouths of large tributaries, such as the Vichegda, the Vaga, and the Pinega, each leading to extensive but little known districts, are passed in the downward course, and some thirty or forty miles above Archangel the village of Kholmogory is reached. It is now a small place, but is convenient for taking a survey of the past history and settlement of this northern region.

In later times Kholmogory has derived notoriety from being the place of banishment and death of the Empress Anne Leopoldovna, on the accession of her cousin Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great. But it has an earlier title to fame. Some writers conjecture that it was the site of the capital of Biarma-land, and of the far-renowned temple of the god Yumala. The Northmen came hither to trade and to fight before the days of Ruric; and Holmgaard, the "Great City," as they called it—which has been corrupted by Russ tongues to Kholmogory—makes a great figure in Norse and Icelandic sagas.

It is in the narrative of the voyage of Other, written by King Alfred about the year 890—about the time when the Varangian princes were transferring the seat of their authority from Novgorod to Kiev—that we have the first sober and authentic record of the navigation of the White Sea, and, perhaps, of the discovery of the mouth of the Dwina. The description of this Ancient Mariner agrees with remarkable accuracy with the condition of

260

OTHER OF HALGOLAND'S YOYAGE.

the northern coasts and their inhabitants down to the
present hour.

Other or Ochter of Halgoland, in Norway, as appears
from the quaint old narrative, was "once upon a time"
seized with the desire "to find out how far the country
extended due north, and whether any one lived to the
north of the wastes occupied by the Northmen." He
proceeded on his adventurous voyage—the first expedi-
tion of Polar discovery in modern times—at first north,
then due east, along a waste shore, until he found the
coast bowing directly towards the south, and the sea
opening into the land, he could not tell how far; and up
this gulf he sailed with a northerly wind for five days.
"A great river lies up this land, and when they had
gone some way up this river, they returned, because they
could not proceed far on account of the inhabitants being
hostile,"—the "Biarmas" having well peopled the country
on one side of the stream. On the right of the navi-
gator during his voyage, up till this point, "the land
was a desert, and without inhabitants, except fishermen,
fowlers, and hunters, all of whom were Finnas; and he
had a wide sea on his left."

It was not long before the merchant adventurers of
Novgorod made their presence felt in this region; and
they settled themselves at Kholmogory and other con-
venient points near the mouth of the Dwina, and had
even a post at Mezen, on the Arctic Circle. Thriving
trading-stations began to be established on the banks of
the great lakes and rivers of this northern land, and
commerce to pulse through the arteries of the Volkhov,
the Svir, the Onega, and the Dwina, and Lakes Ladoga
and Onega, between Great Novgorod and the White Sea.

WHITE LAKE AND WHITE SEA SHRINES.

261

Anchorites wandered into these countries in search of "deserts" and waste places where they could build their little cells and chapels and live entirely secluded from the world. Missionaries went forth under the protection of the republic to preach the gospel to Finn and Samoyede; and the bands of Good Companions zealously strove, as was their wont, to drive home Christianity at the pike's point.

Sometimes the authority of Bielozersk, on the banks of the White Lake, nearly equidistant from Novgorod and Archangel, extended over a great part of the region. This remote principality had been a seat of warlike and monkish renown since the days when Sineous and Truvor, the brothers of Ruric, established themselves there; and in later times its possession was often contested between Novgorod and the Grand Princes of Suzdal, Vladimir, and Moscow, before it finally fell into the power of the latter. The neighbourhood is still thickly sprinkled with monasteries, churches, and shrines; and the sandy shores of the White Lake are annually the resort of pilgrims on their way northward to the still more sacred soil of Solovetsk, on an island in the White Sea.

The invasions and civil commotions in the south, and the religious persecutions of Nikon, helped to people the territory. During the Interregnum, in 1613—the year that young Michael Romanoff was chosen Czar—the Poles penetrated to Vologda, which they pillaged and burned; and at a still later date Bielozersk was destroyed by a band of Lithuanians and Cossacks of the Ukraine. But as a rule there was profound stillness and peace in the recesses of these northern forests, as there is in the

262

SIR HUGH WILLOUGHBY.

depths of the ocean when storms are chafing its surface; and within them a free and hardy race grew up, intensely Russian in their instincts and prejudices.

It was the English that first taught Russia the uses of her northern sea-board, and opened up the country to international commerce. In the reign of Edward VI. the "Mystery and Company of Merchant Adventurers," the nucleus of the Muscovy Company, was formed in London, with the great navigator Sebastian Cabot, then in extreme old age, at its head, the original purpose being to explore the northern parts of Europe and "Great Tartary," and to discover "regions, kingdoms, islands, and places unknown and unvisited by the highway of the sea."

Three ships were fitted out, and sailed from the Thames in May 1553, under Sir Hugh Willoughby, Richard Chancelor, and Cornelius Durforth, and were charged with letters from the king addressed to "all the princes and lords, to all the judges of the earth, to whoever possesses any high authority in all the regions under the vast sky." It was hoped that they would be able, by following this northern track, to round the Promontorium Tabin of Pliny—the "uttermost part of the earth"—and thence make easy sailing to China and the Indies, towards which all the Western nations were then running a breathless race. Tempests overtook the vessels in the wild seas beyond the North Cape and drove them far from their course. Willoughby and Durforth rejoined each other, took shelter with their disabled ships in a haven on the coast of Lapland, whence they sent out parties to the east, west, and south without discovering a trace of inhabitants. "Vpon the maine," says

CHANCELOR'S VOYAGES.

263

Sir Hugh's journal, as quoted by Hakluyt, "wee saw beares, great deere, foxes, and diuvers strange beasts, as ellons (elks) and such other; which were to us unknown and also wonderfull. Seeing the yeare farre spent, and also very euille wether, as frost, snow, and haile, as though it had been the deepe of winter, wee thought best to winter there."

Here, alongside the remains of the goodly vessels, the frozen bodies of the brave seamen were discovered next spring by Russian fishermen, all having died miserably of cold and hunger. Chancelor held on his way in the *Edward Bonaventura*, entered the White Sea, discovered, or rediscovered, a great river, the Dwina, on the banks of which were already two monasteries—those of St. Nicolas and St. Michael the Archangel, near which the new port of the north was afterwards to rise—and found, to his astonishment, that all this country was under the Grand Duke of Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible.

The enterprising sea-captain ascended the Dwina to Vologda, and thence made his way to Moscow—a journey about as long and arduous as a trip across Siberia would be to-day—and successfully carried out his mission, obtaining leave for English ships to trade with the Dwina. On a second voyage, agents of the Company were established at Kholmogory and Vologda, and Chancelor returned home with the governor of the latter town as the first Russian ambassador to England. He perished, however, with his ship in a storm on the Scottish coast, though the envoy was saved, and was received with high honours in London.

A crisis in the history of Archangel—whose painted

264

ARCHANGEL.

spires and wooden shanties soon began to rise on the swampy river bank—arrived a century and a half later, when Peter the Great was founding his new capital on the Neva. He wished to close the port of Archangel in order to encourage the trade of St. Petersburg. This blow was averted, and Peter instead took the town under his especial care. “He fetched,” says Mr. Hepworth Dixon, “masons from Holland to erect lines of bastions, magazines, and quays. A castle rose from the ground on the river bank; an island was reclaimed from the river and trimmed with trees; a summer palace was built for the Czar; and a fleet of ships was sent to command the Dwina mouth.”

Though Riga and St. Petersburg have carried away the bulk of the commerce from the centre of the empire—which in the early times, when Russia was shut out from the Baltic, found its way to the White Sea—Archangel has maintained, and is likely to maintain, a respectable position as the outlet for the wealth and trade of Northern Russia.

The modern aspect of Archangel has been picturesquely sketched by Mr. Hepworth Dixon, and its social life and manners humorously and pithily described by Mr. Edward Rae. The former speaks of it as “a camp of shanties, heaped around groups of belfries, cupolas, and domes. Imagine a vast green marsh along the bank of a broad brown river, with mounds of clay cropping here and there out of the peat and bog; put buildings on these mounds of clay; adorn the buildings with frescoes, crown them with crosses and cupolas; fill in the space between church and convent, convent and church, with piles and planks so as to make ground for gardens,

ON ENGLISH SOIL.

265

streets, and yards; cut two wide lanes from the church
called Smith's Wife to the monastery of St. Michael,
three or four miles in length; connect these lanes and
the stream with a dozen clearings; paint the walls of
church and convent white, the domes green and blue;
surround the log-houses with open gardens; stick a
geranium, a fuchsia, an oleander, into every window;
leave the grass growing everywhere in street and clear-
ing,—and you have Archangel."

The English traveller who lands here may feel that in
one sense at least he is on his native soil. The strand
all along the river bank is formed of the ballast that has
been discharged from the hundreds of vessels, chiefly
British, that every year come to Archangel to load
cargoes of grain and flax, tar and turpentine, tallow,
hides, oil, whalebone, fish, wax, timber, and spirits, furs
and reindeer-tongues—everything, in fact, which the
thrifty Russian has to sell; while he purchases the
minimum of foreign luxuries in exchange. The twenty
thousand inhabitants of the place are wholly devoted to
trade or to religion. Archangel long held a high repu-
tation for honesty in business transactions, and perhaps
it still compares favourably with other Russian trading
communities. But the traveller, and still more the
merchant or shipmaster, will have frequent occasion for
observing here, as elsewhere in the empire, that the
standard of commercial morality is not superfluously
high. In spite of the abundance of public buildings and
educational institutions—"cathedral, fire-tower, town-
hall, court of justice, governor's house, and museum," with
numerous seminaries—municipal enterprise and literary
life do not seem to thrive; and Mr. Rae remarks that

266

ORIENTAL CURIOSITIES.

the only branch of science to which he found the inhabitants attached was "the collection of coins—modern coins."

Still more curious to those who forget that the Dwina is to the eastward of the Euphrates, and that they must consequently look for Oriental as well as Arctic conditions, is the fact that in a port which is so much frequented by strangers there does not exist anything that in a Western city would be called a hotel. Other evidences of Eastern taste, and perhaps of ancient intercourse with the civilization of the Arabs, are to be seen in the design and workmanship of the silver crosses and other ornaments worn by the peasantry of these northern districts. Many of these are figured in Mr. Seebohm's book; and Mr. Rae, who was also an industrious collector of them, declares that so closely do the Northern and Eastern types harmonize, that it is impossible to tell, in certain classes of work, whether the ornaments come from Russia, Iceland, or Barbary. Mr. Howorth, in his "History of the Mongols," accounts for the Eastern character of the northern silver art by the intercourse of Arab traders with the Khazars, Bulgars, and Biarmas of the Volga countries, and the incursions of the Norsemen in the Levant; and the Byzantine origin of the Russian Church has also had its influence.

One reminiscence the summer sojourner at Archangel or in any of the countries around the White Sea is sure to bear away with him—the bite of the mosquitoes. Myriads of these insects awake to life in the short hot season of almost perpetual daylight; and they make up for the briefness of their opportunities by ubiquitous activity. The natives seem to have become partially used to them;

MOSQUITOES.

267

but they "smell the blood of an Englishman" or other
foreigner with unfailing acuteness, and are unremitting
in their attentions to the stranger. Mr. Cornelius Stone
mentions in his account of his travels in New Guinea
that neither there nor in Persia, India, Burma, Java,
America, or any other country he had visited, had the
number of mosquitoes "exceeded *one-tenth* of what they
did in travelling through Lapland, from the Arctic Circle
to the Gulf of Bothnia, during the summer months." On
this journey, he says, "I once counted on my right arm
alone one hundred and thirty; two pairs of trousers were
scarcely sufficient protection; and I was always compelled
to wear a couple of veils round my head, made into a sort
of bag. I never wish to visit that part of Lapland again
in summer."

Mr. Rae's account of his sufferings is even more
pathetic; in short, such is the universal testimony of
travellers by land and sea in these regions regarding the
remorseless and intolerable assaults of these pests, that
to give a description of the White Sea shores and omit
all mention of them would be like presenting a melo-
drama with the part of the "villain" left out.

Dropping down the Dwina, threading the way between
the marshy flats, shifting mud-banks, and low green
islands, partly covered by scrub, that divide the streams
forming the delta of the river, catching a glimpse now
and then of the walls of a church or convent, a custom-
house or a ferryman's cottage, or a humble cross set up
by some pious sailor in token of his deliverance from
peril by sea or his safe return from a whaling cruise
among the Polar ice, having always in sight on the right
and on the left the dark wall of pines bounding the

268

WINTER AND SUMMER ASPECTS.

course of the river and stretching back interminably into
the interior, we reach the buoys marking the entrance to
the navigable channel, and are afloat in the waters of
the White Sea.

The materials are few for supplying a picture of the
aspect of this inlet of the Northern Ocean during two-
thirds of the year, when it is bound from shore to
shore with frost and invaded by heavy drift-ice; when
swamp and forest and heath are alike buried under
heavy snow, and the sparse population hibernate like the
bears, cowering over the fires in their log-cabins or in their
sod-built *gammer*. Not many travellers have been found
devoted enough to brave the rigours and discomforts of a
winter among the Lapps or the Samoyedes, or even of
testing the amenities of life at that season of the year
in the trading-ports of Archangel, Onega, and Kem.

In summer the shores of the White Sea are in a few
spots picturesque and even pretty. Fogs hang over the
water, and for days shroud the land from sight; sharp
frosts and cutting showers of hail and sleet not only
"chill the lap of May," but intrude in the hot sum-
mer weather of July, if the wind shift to the north-
east. But in the bright sunshine even the shores of Lap-
land put on a kind of flickering smile.

On the southern shore of the long Gulf of Kandalaks,
a district inhabited by Karelians, a quiet, kindly-man-
nered Finnish race of fishermen, there are some charming
bits of forest and river scenery. "A clearing on the
forest edge, a small box-shaped log-hut, with blue smoke
wreathing from it, a few racks for drying nets, a boat
drawn up on the shingly beach, another afloat, an appa-
ratus for drawing salmon nets, a cross standing on a

THE SOLOVETSK ISLANDS.

269

rock, a sea-eagle sailing overhead, a sunny sky and a
sunny sea, a background of spruce and birch, a strip of
fir near the beach—gray and blasted as if by some
poisonous breath,”—such, says Mr. Rae, are the usual
surroundings of the fisherman’s *isba* on the western side
of the White Sea. Every summer these poor people
make a journey of a thousand miles to the fishings on
the desolate Murman coast, in Northern Lapland, or to
Finmark, or hire themselves for the still longer trip to
Novaya Zemlia and Spitzbergen after seal, whale, and
walrus. In the interior they are woodmen or small
farmers, and they compare favourably with the Russians
in honesty and sobriety. “The sociable, tipsy, thriftless
Russian,” says the traveller just quoted, “will not shut
himself up as a squatter in the lonely backwoods. The Finn,
Quain, or Karelian prefers solitude and independence.”

To the voyager sailing from the mouth of the Dwina
to the southern extremity of the White Sea, the Solo-
vetsk Islands on his right arrest the eye by their fresh
verdure and the pleasing diversity of their rocky bights
and wooded slopes, from amid which rise the spires, cupo-
las, and roofs of numerous churches, convents, and her-
mitages. “Each height,” says Hepworth Dixon, who has
given a long account of the place, “is crowned by a
white church, a green cupola, and a golden cross. A line
of wall, with gates and towers, extends along the upper
quay; and high above this line spring convent, palace,
dome, and cross. Within, the convent looks more dur-
able and splendid than without; wall, rampart, guest-
house, prison-tower, and church are all of brick and
stone.” “One of the few tidy spots in Holy Russia,” says
Mr. Rae.

270 THE MONASTERY AND ITS FOUNDERS.

This lonely group of islets in the Northern Sea has been famous for centuries in the ecclesiastical annals of the Russian Church, and is haunted by warlike as well as monkish memories. In its early days, Solovetsk was the secure retreat of pious monks from Novgorod, who fled hither from the pleasures of the world, in search of a desert solitude where they could wholly give themselves up to prayer and penance. Two of these anchorites—St. Savatie, or Sabbatheus, and St. Zozima, the founders of the Solovetsk monastery—peculiarly distinguished themselves by their devotion and the severity of their ascetic regimen. After their death, miracles were performed at the touch of their consecrated dust, and the monastery became the greatest and most celebrated in Northern Russia.

When the English first came to the White Sea, its fame was already bruited abroad, and Ivan IV. paid it especial reverence. That reputation has continued down to the present day, and has even grown with the lapse of time; and every year pilgrims flock hither from all parts of Russia to kneel at the shrines of Zozima and Savatie, and before the wonderful image of the Virgin, who dispenses here the gift of healing, and has in all times taken Solovetsk under her peculiar care. Peter the Great paid more than one visit to the monastery; and his example was followed by the late Emperor.

It has not, however, invariably received favours from the civil and ecclesiastical powers as by law established. At the time of Nikon's reforms, Solovetsk was the stronghold, the citadel of the raskolniks. It sustained a siege of ten years before it was reduced; and the zealous monks who had pointed the cannon and wielded

A MIRACLE.

271

the pike in the defence of the Old Ritual did not miss
the crown of martyrdom.

The last warlike event in the history of the convent was
its bombardment, during the Crimean War, by a British
squadron, under Admiral Ommanney, in retaliation for
the guns of the monastery having been fired at an Eng-
lish vessel. Shells were dropped through the roof of the
principal church, and the buildings set on fire at different
places, while the archimandrite and monks sang mass in
front of the sacred tombs and the miraculous picture of
the Virgin. Not a soul within the walls was injured;
and on the strength of this, to the Russian mind, most
indubitable proof of divine favour, the fame of Solovetsk
rose higher than ever in the estimation of the faithful.
In another sense, the existence of a rich, powerful, and
prosperous community on this unkindly soil, and amid
surroundings so desolate and forbidding, seems little short
of miraculous. In spite of their inclement skies, the
monks assiduously till the ground, and gather from it
not only the grain and herbs, but even the fruits of
warmer climes; and notwithstanding their isolation from
the world, there are found among them men who cultivate
also art and literature with a success that has made their
lonely convent a "lamp of learning" in the northern
darkness.

Leaving behind us Solovetsk, with its soil so strangely
dinted by pilgrims' knees and cannon-balls, we resume
our voyage along the shores of the White Sea. We
coast, on the left, a low peninsula, with sandy shores and
marshy inlets—a barren and solitary foreground backed
by pine woods. Where the large rivers discharge them-
selves into the Bay of Onega, and for some distance up the

272

THE LIMIT OF TREES.

western coast, the forests are of larger growth and more
widely spread. Farther inland, the country is blotched
by shallow ponds and marshes, large and small, which
are drained by sluggish streams, or joined to each other
after heavy rains, but are stagnant and isolated during
the rest of the year. Fish of many varieties ascend
these rivers and swarm in the lakes, and they form the
staple article of diet. Small patches of barley, oats, and
rye are grown, and potatoes and other garden vegetables
are sometimes raised.

Before the Arctic Circle is reached, timber begins to
fail. The spruce-fir will not grow beyond the sixty-
seventh parallel of latitude, and the extreme limit of
the Scotch fir is found about 69° north. The birch and
alder, however, are found growing to respectable dimen-
sions in the extreme north-western nook of Russia—at
the mouth of the Pasvig in 70° north latitude.

The birch forest fills the glens that run between the
gray rocks in Lapland and the Samoyede country, and
its bright green foliage and ghostly white stem and
branches cover the southern slopes of the hill-sides. Low
ranges of hills traverse the country, offshoots apparently
of the Ural chain, seeking to establish communication
with the great mountains of the Scandinavian peninsula.
They feebly mark the water-shed between the Dwina
and the Petchora and Mezen rivers, that flow directly
into the Arctic Ocean, and they divide the north-
flowing and south-flowing rivers of Lapland.

On either side of Lake Imandra, in the "neck" of
the great White Sea peninsula, these hills rise to a height
of three thousand feet, and are always clad with snow.
Under their shelter fine forests rise, and a profusion of

THE SAMOYEDES.

273

wild flowers carpet the sod. On the northern slopes,
exposed to the full onslaught of the Polar storms, even
the birch finds it hard to gain foothold and sustenance.
Grass gives place to a scanty growth of moss and dwarf-
willow. In some places the hills are clad with a snow-
like covering of the white reindeer moss, and in search
of these pastures the Mountain Lapp moves from place
to place with his herd.

Of the two desert tracts into which the northern part
of the government of Archangel is divided by the White
Sea, the country of the Samoyedes, stretching from Cape
Kanin to the confines of Asia, is the more extensive and
the more desolate. The Samoyede people only number
a few thousand souls, and the interest attaching to them
is very far from arising from any attractiveness in their
persons or their manners. They claim notice simply on
account of the enormous range of country over which
they are scattered, and the fact that, living within the
bounds of Europe, they are yet essentially idolaters and
savages.

They are a stunted, ill-favoured race, with dull, flat
faces, small eyes, high cheek-bones, scanty beards, and
depressed foreheads; and their low physical type does not
believe their intellectual deficiency. The Orthodox Church
claims most of them as her children; but it has not won
them from their heathenish practices, and has conspic-
uously failed to teach them the virtue of cleanliness.

One of the most recent observers of Samoyede life—
Professor Nordenskiöld—found a tribe professing Christ-
ianity, whom he visited near Vaygatz Strait in 1878, still
worshipping their idols. Nothing can better illustrate
the poverty and degradation of these people than the

(718)

18

274

SAMOYEDE SUPERSTITIONS.

primitive appearance of their "gods." "One consisted of
a stone which, by the help of brightly-coloured patches,
had been made into a sort of doll; another was a similar
doll, with a piece of copper-plate for a face; and a third
was a little skin doll ornamented with ear-rings and
pearls. In general they resembled the rag dolls which
peasant children make for themselves without the help
of the toy-shops of towns." Of their mode of life and
their burial customs Nordenskiöld says:—"The Samoyede
tent is formed of deer-skins, and is of quite the same
form as the Lapp kota. There is always to be found
in the neighbourhood of the tent a large number of
dogs, which are employed in winter for general
purposes, and in summer for tracking boats against
the current. At a simovie (fishing-place) where we
landed, we found, as usual, a burying-place. The bodies
were placed in large coffins above ground, with a cross
nearly always erected beside them. At one of the graves
a sacred picture was affixed to the cross, which must be
regarded as a further proof that a Christian reposed in the
coffin. Notwithstanding this, some clothes which had
belonged to the deceased were found hanging on a bush
at the grave, together with a bundle containing food,
principally dried fish. At the graves of well-to-do natives,
we learned that the survivor even places some rouble
notes beside the food, that the departed may not be
altogether devoid of ready money on his entrance into
the other world."

On the breaking up of the winter ice the whole
of this "Siberia in Europe," from the Mezen to the
Ural range, is entirely cut off from communication
with the rest of the world. The land is a vast half-

SPRING TRAVELLING.

275

thawed, wholly impassable swamp. The rivers are impetuous torrents full of floating ice. Two British naturalists, Messrs. Seebohm and Harvie Brown, travelled eight hundred miles in sledges over the Government post road from Archangel to Ust Zylma, on the Petchora, in April 1875, and found the track through the forest a "diabolical" series of ups and downs. "Sometimes the sledge would be on the top of a steep hill, the first horse in the valley and the third horse on the top of the next hill. The motion was like that of a boat in a chopping sea, and the sledge banged about from pillar to post to such an extent that we scarcely felt the want of exercise."

Suddenly this snowy covering begins to melt, and then for weeks it is almost impossible to move about out of doors. The Petchora, in its lower course, is a magnificent stream—"fifteen times as broad as the Thames at Hammersmith;" the dark forests of pine are impressive in their stately solemnity, the bare level tundra lands spread away to the horizon without break or bound. Wherever the eyes are turned the landscape is vast and mournful and silent; and we look away from scenes so sublime and so solitary with a feeling of relief.

Russian Lapland, the country between the White Sea and Varanger Fiord, where the Norwegian coast begins, is a little less rigorous in climate, and somewhat more green and habitable, than the Samoyede wastes. The Lapps, too, are neither so low in stature nor so poverty-stricken, neglected, and isolated as their neighbours to the east of the White Sea. The seasons are a trifle less unkindly to them, and they have the good fortune to be placed many hundred miles nearer to the influences of civilization. All this is reflected in the

276

THE LAPLANDERS.

comparatively high social and intellectual condition which
the Lapp occupies. The race have partially given up
their nomad habits.

In the interior the reindeer is still their mainstay
and their comfort; their beast of burden and their
dairy animal; the source on which they depend for
food and shelter, clothes and companionship. But
many Laplanders devote themselves exclusively and
successfully to fishing; they make long voyages as
sailors and hunters with the whaling and sealing ships,
and bring home roubles in their pockets and new no-
tions in their heads. Their communities have a fixed
range, with some nucleus of huts on a sheltered river
bank or by the side of a lake, where, in the interior, they
make diligent attempts to cultivate patches of grain and
potatoes, and they are gradually accustoming themselves
to agriculture and settled habits of life.

Education has made some progress among them, and
they have been found not unapt to learn. If the visitor
can conquer his prejudices to dirt, grease, and smoke, he
will have no difficulty in discovering attractive traits in
the Laplanders. Mr. Du Chaillu and Mr. Rae have
lately made great friends with them, and are warm in
praise of their honesty, gentleness, and intelligence.

The Russian Lapp is officially classed as a Russian
Churchman. Soon after Martha, the *possadna* of Nov-
gorod, founded Kem, Novgorodian bands expelled the
Norsemen from what is now Russian Lapland, and ere
long began, by their own forcible weapons of argument,
to recommend their religion to the heathen natives. A
small monastery—that of Boris-gleb—was planted on
the west bank of the Pasvig, where it still exists, a

LAPP “MAGIC.”

277

minute but precious excrescence of a great empire. The Lapp faith, though purer than that of their Samoyede brethren, is still largely and curiously mixed up with their ancient idolatrous rites. The worship of Yumala is not quite extinct; in the northern lights, often witnessed with great splendour in these latitudes, the waver-ing conflict of the spirits of the air is seen—the portent of dire calamity; the Prince of Evil is still a secret power, though reindeer are no longer sacrificed to him. There is an awful and mystic significance in the enclosures, formed of birch and fir boughs, which the Lapps, like some of the Finn peoples on the Volga, set apart in honour of the old gods.

The Lapps have not quite forgotten the practice of the “black arts” for which they were once famed and feared throughout Europe. Foul weather, instead of having its origin in America or in the Atlantic, according to some modern notions, was then believed to be brewed in Lap-land by the devilish charms of “secret black and mid-night hags,” whose shapes, as they rode through the air maliciously rejoicing in the havoc they had let loose, could often be dimly discerned by the superstitious scudding through the rack of storm-clouds or whirling snowflakes. A great place of gathering of these wizards, or *noaïds*, was the Sviatoi Nos (Holy Cape), near where Willoughby and his men perished. Here, at the turning-point of many a voyage, they practised their incantations, with aid of the magic drum and libations of reindeer blood, and made a good profit by selling a “capful” of fair wind to English sailors bound to the White Sea.

The witches and wizards of Lapland now-a-days are much more humble and restricted in their field of opera-

278

SNOW-SKATES AND SLEIGHS.

tions. Their most potent charms are only employed to spoil
a neighbour's fishing, to lame his pet reindeer, or to cast
upon himself and his family the "evil eye." These sup-
posed powers, however, give to the "magicians" among
the Lapps, as among the Samoyedes, a considerable influ-
ence; and the Russians, Norwegians, Swedes, and Fin-
landers dwelling in their vicinity are by no means free
of the infectious dread that they inspire. If the Lapp no
longer scours through the clouds on a broomstick, he has
other means of progression in the winter-time that are
almost as unfamiliar to the experiences of more southern
climes. On foot, on his skids or snow-skates, six feet in
length, the Laplander skims the snow-covered surface
of the lake, or darts down the frozen slopes, with the
rapidity and agility of a swallow on the wing. Seated
in his light reindeer-sleigh, and muffled up to the eyes
in fur as a defence against the intense cold, he makes
long journeys across the icy waste with speed and safety,
managing his "horned steed" with admirable skill and
address.

Their language and many physical traits and customs
show that the Laplanders are allied to the neighbouring
population of Finland. The two peoples indeed so blend
into each other, through intermarriage and gradual ap-
proximation of pursuits, that it is not easy to draw a line
of demarcation between Finland and Lapland; and the
opinion has been hazarded that the Lopari, as the
Russians style them, are simply the northern section
of the Finnish people who have been squeezed "out into
the cold" by the pressure of stronger races from the
south. Their rigorous climate and their isolation would
explain their diminutive stature and the backwardness

THE FINLANDERS.

279

of their condition. They are Finns in spite of their
stature, just as the dwarf-birch of their heaths is a birch
in spite of its stunted growth and gnarled and twisted
stem.

It is not necessary to enter into a full description
of Finland and the past history and present condition
of its people. Like Poland, though part of the Czar's
European dominions, it is outside of Russia. It has its
peculiar language, religion, and nationality, all presenting
strong marks of contrast to the prevalent Russian type;
and it has a separate organization and special laws.

The Finns of Finland are not like their kin on the Volga,
surrounded on all sides by a Slav population, which is
gradually absorbing and "Russifying" them. Only
within the present century has the country been united
to the empire; and on any disruption of the autocratic
power Finland would be at least as likely to try to join
itself to a neighbouring nation, or form itself into a
separate state, as to willingly take part in a new reor-
ganization of Russia. It has received its Lutheran faith
and its civilization from Sweden. A large infusion of
the population, especially on the sea-coast, are of Scan-
dinavian descent. The language, the customs, the
national character and sympathies, have been essentially
modified by contact and old association with Sweden;
and the aspirations of an intelligent people naturally
turn towards a constitutional monarchy rather than a
despotism, however "benevolent." Education has made
considerable progress; and until within the last two or
three generations Finland and Sweden had a "common
fund" of literary as well as of military glory.

280

YOUNG FINLAND.

Too scattered and weak a nation to be able to maintain
their independence in the gigantic struggles between the
two great northern powers that lay on either side of
them, the Finlanders showed themselves, under the banner
of Charles the Twelfth, and in more recent conflicts as
soldiers of the Czar, possessed of splendid soldierly
qualities. Intellectually, too, they have shown that they
need not be ashamed of a comparison with other northern
peoples; and recently a vigorous "Young Finland" school
has arisen that has assiduously explored the rich stores
of Finnish poetry and folklore, and has raised the
native language to the dignity of being one of the
literary tongues of Europe. In no part of the dominions
of the Czar are the people more fit for self-government,
and nowhere could that experiment, which cannot be
much longer delayed, be tried with better prospects of
success.

The inhabitants, numbering some two million in a
territory of one hundred and forty-four thousand square
miles, are an intelligent, hard-working race of agri-
culturists and fishermen, simple and frugal in their
habits, though rather fond, like other northern peoples,
of strong spirits, and presenting in many features of their
character and daily life marked resemblances to the
Swedes, with whom they were so long politically united.
This resemblance, as might be expected, is most observ-
able in the western districts, especially along the coast
of the Gulf of Bothnia, where the tidy little villages
lining the shores of the fiords, with their quaint wooden
houses, the modest Protestant church, the troops of
school children, the alertness, intelligence, and homely
courtesy of the inhabitants, their costume and often their

THE CONQUEST OF THE GRAND DUCHY.

281

dialect, might make a visitor fancy that he was sojourn-
ing in Scandinavia rather than in Russia.

As the traveller proceeds eastward and approaches St.
Petersburg, a change, not for the better, is perceptible.
The symptoms of taste and contrivance fade from the
exterior of the dwellings, and comfort from their inte-
riers; the tokens of brain and industry having been at
work in the cultivation of the thin sandy soil, the drain-
ing of the marshes, and the clearing away of trees and
boulders, become less evident; dirt accumulates in the
streets; beards, boots, and overcoats grow in dimensions,
and the natives become more fawning and subservient
in manner, while losing the frank, hearty hospitality of
their western kin, until at length we reach the old
familiar dead-level of the Russian village.

Not only are these eastern districts of Finland, com-
prehended in the province of Viborg, and partly incor-
porated in the governments of St. Petersburg and Olonetz,
more exposed to Russian influences by reason of their
situation, but they have been much longer under the rule
of Russia than the other portions of the Grand Duchy.
They formed part of the extensive dominions on the
eastern and southern side of the Baltic conquered by the
great heroes of Swedish history, from Torquil Knutson
in the thirteenth century down to Charles the Twelfth.
These embraced not merely what is now known as
Finland, but Ingermanland—the isthmus between Lake
Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland, on which the Russian
capital now stands—the “Baltic provinces” of Estonia
and Livonia, and Pomerania; in fact, the Baltic was a
Swedish lake.

Many were the battles, the sieges, the doughty deeds

282

FINLAND LANDSCAPES

by sea and land, that were accomplished before these spoils were won for Sweden; and then the most martial and intrepid of her sons, grasping at still wider conquests, lost the choicest of those that had already been secured. In the course of less than a century Sweden was deprived of all her hard-won possessions to the east of her present boundary, the river Tornea. The Peace of Nystadt in 1721 secured for Russia the province of Viborg and her conquests in Ingria and Estonia; the Peace of Abo, twenty-two years later, gave her another slice of Finland; while by the Peace of Fredrikshamm, in 1809, the rest of the Grand Duchy, with the Aland Islands, was absorbed by the Empire.

While the jagged and broken coast of Finland, with its deep firths, still reaches of enclosed water, storm-chafed capes, and innumerable outlying islands and rocks—what in Scotland are called skerries—resemble on a diminished scale the Atlantic coast-line of Norway, the interior of the country has nothing corresponding to the great mountain backbone of the Scandinavian peninsula. There are some ranges of low hills in the centre of the country which form the nucleus of its drainage system, but the general character of the surface is flat or gently undulating. Forests of fir and larch, far-stretching fens, heaths, and sandy barrens, huge lichen-covered boulders that have floated thither in the Ice Age, at long intervals a patch of cultivation and a human habitation, and in the less sparsely inhabited parts traces here and there of what may by courtesy be called a road, make up the characteristic scenery of Finland. But if, even in the cheerful spring season, there are suggestions of loneliness and sadness in the aspect of their native land,

A WATERY LABYRINTH.

283

this only endears it the more to the hearts of its loyal
children.

Chief, however, among the natural features of Finland
are its lakes. Indeed, no country in the Old World is
so abundantly, so superfluously supplied with fresh-water
reservoirs. Any one who glances at a map of the
Grand Duchy cannot help being struck by the bewilder-
ing distribution of earth and water, the lace-like pattern
of the multitudinous peninsulas, isthmuses, and islands
that represent the solid land, and the fantastic filigree
work of lakes, rivers, and fens covering thousands of
square miles of surface. This part of Finland looks
more like a great lake that has got entangled, as in a
net, among an infinite number of fine threads of land,
than an ordinary piece of terra firma. If it is puzzling
on the map, what must it be in actual travelling experi-
ence! How is one to make a cross-country march over
this "crude consistence" of moist and dry, unless he is
provided with the travelling apparatus of Milton's fiend,
who

"O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,
And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies"?

Fortunately the dwellers in those parts have long ago
discovered the shortest and easiest cuts through this
labyrinth of lake and land; and in former times these
morasses and islands protected Finland's independence,
as the fens of Ely preserved the last liberties of the
Saxons. Strong places were established at the fords,
at the narrows between lake and lake, and on islands
that had easy communication between either shore.
Roads have been constructed, and causeways and bridges
built, so that with water on either side of him for a

284

THE ROUTE TO ST. PETERSBURG.

great part of the route, the traveller can traverse the
country from north to south or from east to west with
little interruption.

Apart, however, from the railway line that now crosses
Finland, almost the only route familiar to tourists is
that which follows the coast, past the chief towns of
historical and commercial note—Nystadt; Abo, the old
capital; Helsingfors, the new seat of administration and
learning, defended by the strong fortress of Sveaborg,
bombarded by the Allies in 1855; Lovisa; Fredrik-
shamm; and Viborg—to St. Petersburg. On this
journey we cross the Saima Canal, which connects the
lake of that name with the Gulf of Finland, while the
river Saima unites the lake with the greater reservoir of
Lake Ladoga.

Lake Saima presents all the features of the Finland
meres on an exaggerated scale. Low islands are scat-
tered over every part of its surface; long tongues
of land pierce it to the centre from every side; still
longer and curiously intricate branches and channels
join it to other great ponds of exactly similar design—
Orevesi, Kuopio, Pielisjarvi, and others—and altogether
this Briareus of lakes might perhaps compete with any
other body of fresh water in length of coast-line. By
canal and river Lake Saima is connected with the two
“keys” of Finland—Viborg, by the salt waters of the
Gulf of Finland, and Kexholm, on an island of Lake
Ladoga—of which Peter the Great possessed himself in
1710, when, having planted his feet firmly on the
isthmus of Ingria, and laid the foundations of the future
capital, he began his conquests on the Grand Duchy.

CHAPTER XIII.

ST. PETERSBURG.

THE shores of Lake Ladoga are still, for the most part, girt with swamp and forest. The clearings are partial and widely scattered, the population is sparse, and the woods are dense and tall. Much commerce, it is true, passes through the lake, and there are thriving communities of fishermen, lumbermen, pitch-distillers, and agriculturists. But it is of vast extent—indeed, the largest collection of fresh water in Europe; and its fleets of barges, rafts, and sailing craft make but a small figure in the wide vista of waters enclosed in the dark frame of pine-forest.

The climate is rude and boreal, and the soil generally sandy or marshy. There are few sites suitable for civilian towers or the villa residences of rich city merchants. It is a semi-arctic lake and a semi-arctic landscape, and few would suspect that not many miles from these sombre shores stands one of the richest, gayest, and most magnificent of European capitals, the metropolis of the most extensive of modern empires.

Yet little more than a century and a half ago the banks of the Neva were as lonely and desolate as the most sequestered nooks of Ladoga are to-day. The dismantled