io HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
I must therefore ask leave, before entering on my theme
proper, to give a brief account of myself and my activities in
this question.
By good fortune I was able, in my student days, to visit
almost every part of the vast Russian Empire, of which I was
a national until the republic of Estonia was founded. In 1913 a
journey of investigation took me into certain parts of the basins
of the Volga and the Kama, where I had, in connection with a
scientific thesis on which I was working, to study the position
of the peasants as producers in the Russian grain trade. During
this journey I had to cover hundreds of miles by sleigh in
winter and by river in summer—for even to-day there are
hardly any railways east of the Volga. This journey was a
veritable revelation.
The impression which I formed at that time in the villages
of East Russia, in the provincial towns and in the great centres
along the Volga, through immediate contact with the peasants,
the boatmen, and the merchants, who owned dozens of vessels
and an extensive system of branches on the various rivers, may
be summed up thus. At that time two different worlds stood
face to face: a socially and economically privileged class, and a
mass of peasants living in economic distress and in primitive
conditions. Even at that time the Russian export of grain was
in many districts not so much the result of abundance as of the
distress of the producers, who were compelled to sell their
crops—in part even in so far as they needed them for their own
requirements—to cover taxes, debts, and purchases of vodka*
Frequently enough—a fact worth stressing as typical of the
disastrous effects of the State vodka monopoly of that time—
the only sign of tibe State's activity in tie remote Russian
villages consisted in the State drinking shops with the eagle
ovet the entrance and the drunken peasants round it. Despite
ibe appearance of order, the entire country was in the midst
of a severe crisis, which not even Stolypin's reforms could
The revenues of the State consisted almost wholly