99
THE PROBLEM OF RESETTLEMENT
promised land”, the poorest emigrants find no happiness in
Siberia either. Here, for instance, is how Deputy Voilosh-
nikov described their condition in the new places of settle-
ment by quoting from official reports.
One official (a special inspector of the Resettlement
Department) writes: “Most of the lots are scattered among
taiga forests without water, without ploughland, and
without pastures.” Another adds: “The granting of loans
has entirely lost its significance as a means for setting up
homes; the amount of the loans is in itself too small to be
of real help in this respect. The established procedure of
granting loans has turned the latter into a matter of charity
pure and simple, for it is impossible to set up a home and
live for two years on the 150 rubles granted as a loan.”
And here, by way of example, is a description of the sani-
tary conditions of the new settlers, quoted from the same
official reports:
“After the typhus,” writes one official,
*
“scurvy has been raging
here on a no lesser scale; practically in all the settlements and in
every house there are people suffering from this disease or liable to
contract it. In many homes there are cases of both diseases. In the
Okur-Shask settlement I came across the following picture: the master
of the house was ill with typhus in the period of peeling; his preg-
nant wife was extremely exhausted from undernourishment; their
son, a boy of twelve, had swollen glands and scurvy, the wife’s sister
was sick with scurvy and could not walk; she had a breast-fed baby;
her ten-year-old boy was sick with scurvy, was bleeding through
the nose and could hardly move; her husband alone, of the whole
family, was well.
“Scurvy and typhus are followed by night blindness. There are
settlements in which literally all the settlers, without exception,
suffer from this blindness. The groups of lots along the Yemna River
are covered almost entirely with taiga forests, have no pastures or
meadowland, and in the course of two or three years the new settlers
barely managed to clear the ground to build wretched huts. There
could be no question of the settlers having their own grain; they had
to live entirely on the loans, and when these gave out there was a
terrible scarcity of bread; many literally starved. The scarcity of
bread was aggravated by the scarcity of drinking water.”
Such reports are plentiful. Appalling as these official ac-
counts are, they apparently do not tell the whole truth, and
*
Memorandum, p. 8.
V. I. L E N I N
100
thus give too favourable a picture of the actual state of
affairs. Here is, for instance, how Prince Lvov, a man, as
we know, of moderate views, who visited the Far East as a
representative of the Zemstvo organisation, describes reset-
tlement in Amur Territory:
“Cut off from the world as if they were on an uninhabited island,
amid marshy hummocks in the primeval taiga, amid swampy val-
leys and swampy hills, and forced to put up with barbaric conditions
of life, labour and subsistence, the dispirited and indigent settler
naturally feels crushed. He lapses into a state of apathy, having
exhausted his small store of energy at the very beginning of his strug-
gle against harsh natural conditions in setting up his wretched dwel-
ling. Scurvy and typhus attack the wasted organism and carry it off
to the grave. In many of the settlements founded in 1907, the death
rate is simply incredible—25 to 30 per cent. There are as many crosses
as there are households, and many settlements are doomed to be
removed completely to new sites or to the grave-yard. Instead of
resettlement, what rivers of bitter tears shed by unhappy families
and what costly funerals at state expense in the remote borderland!
It will be long before those who survived last year’s great wave of
resettlement will stand on their feet again after their defeat in the
taiga. Many will die, and many others will flee back to Russia, where
they will defame the territory by stories about their misfortunes,
scaring off new settlers and holding up further resettlement. It is
not accidental that this year we witness an unprecedented reverse
movement from the Maritime Region, and an influx of new settlers
that is one-fifth of the former proportion.”
Prince Lvov is justly appalled by the isolation of the set-
tler from the world and his desolation in the boundless Sibe-
rian taiga, particularly in view of the lack of roads in Sibe-
ria. We can imagine with what brilliant success the policy
of setting up separate homestead farms and the apportion-
ment of otrubs is now being put into effect there, for the
very same men who direct the agrarian policy have proc-
laimed “the necessity for a decisive turn [ ! ] in the land
policy in Siberia”, the necessity of “establishing and pro-
moting private property”, of “ensuring that individual
peasants have their plots in accordance with the decree
of November 9, 1906”, “assigning lots for resettle-
ment, with the land divided, as far as possible, into otrub
holdings”,
*
etc.
The conditions of resettlement being what they are, it is
quite natural that, according to the Resettlement Depart-
*
Memorandum, pp. 60, 61, 62.