Siberia (Price)/Chapter 2

by Morgan Philips Price

CHAPTER II

A SIBERIAN COMMERCIAL TOWN
(KRASNOYARSK)

KRASNOYARSK, where the railway crosses the Yenisei River, is the chief town of the Yenisei Government or Province, and the economic and administrative focus of Central Siberia. It is a town of some 52,000 inhabitants, increasing rapidly, but, being in the heart of the continent, its development has up to now been somewhat eclipsed by the western provinces. It is not a place that would have at first any attraction for the sightseer, until, on closer investigation, here, as elsewhere, the cruder and intermediate stages of social organization in which it abounds are found to be quite as interesting as any other. From the railway station, which in Russia is always a mile or more away on the outskirts of the town, the tarantass, or four-wheeled cart, bumps along a wide cart-track, which reminds one of an unmetalled rural lane in England during a wet December. Soon I became aware that this was the principal street of Krasnoyarsk, where the Governor of the Yenisei Government resided, and by the dim light of a few tumbledown lamp-posts I saw the typical Russian houses, separated by wooden palings and courtyards. Many of them were built of new logs, while some were plastered over in a hasty fashion, as if pretending to be up to

THE MARKET SQUARE, KRASNOYARSK

A STREET VIEW IN KRASNOYARSK

date. In general appearance it was not unlike the outskirts of a mining town in North-East Canada that I remembered visiting some years before.

The hotels are like great two-storeyed barns, one of which we selected after a verbal conflict with the owner about the value of his rooms. One can generally obtain a room for a couple of roubles a night in a tolerable state of cleanliness, even in these wilder parts of Russia, but in this case we soon discovered that as far as back premises and so-called lavatories were concerned, the less we saw of them the better. For my part I decided, on inspection, to perform my morning and evening toilets in the Yenisei River, about half-a-mile away on the outskirts of the town.

One can generally get a fair idea of certain aspects of human life in a town like Krasnoyarsk by spending a few hours a day in one of the most frequented restaurants. As a boy I had always thought of Siberia as a country inhabited by fur-clad hunters, dwelling for months in snowed-up log-houses, or by exiles chained to barrows in the galleries of the gold mines till they fell dead of cold and exhaustion. These impressions received a rude shock when I beheld the type of humanity in the restaurant under our hotel, which styled itself "The Pride of Old Russia." Here were commercial travellers from old Russia, selling anything from peppermint lozenges to pianos, sitting chattering in groups over glasses of cognac and vodka; mining prospectors who had returned from up country, and gold washers fresh from the lower reaches of the Yenisei, Jewish fur traders and salt-fish dealers. Those who had been making money at gold dredging or such occupations were testifying to their success by the size of the dinners they were eating, and the volume of the alcohol they were consuming, while sallow-faced students from the middle schools were already in the singing stage, prior to their final resting-places beneath the table. There was, moreover, a considerable contingent of persons of doubtful virtue.

The decorations in the restaurants and other public places of recreation and pastime were of a most primitive character. Walls covered with loud yellow paint, vermilion curtains, sky-blue sofas, seemed to be the highest efforts of local art, and to contribute no little to the enjoyment of the visitors. Some of the restaurants had stages for impromptu theatricals, but, judging from the quality of the audience, I fear that the art would not have proved inspiring or entertaining if I had witnessed it. Under such circumstances as the above I heard a gramophone bawl forth a Russian comic song, followed immediately by the strains of the "Songe d'Automne" and other beautiful waltz airs from Western Europe. What irony! The air which I had last heard in an English ballroom I now heard in a low coffee-house of a Siberian mining town.

Next day I strolled down to the quay on the banks of the Yenisei and found a rough wooden platform laid on piles against which some grimy paddle-steamers were moored. On the banks lay stacks of merchandise waiting to go up country by the first steamer as soon as the ice broke. There were sacks of flour from Tomsk, reaping machines from America, ploughs from European Russia, cream separators from Sweden and Germany, and bales of cotton manufactures from Moscow. Incidentally I may note that I saw nothing from England, whose business men at present have been too timid in this land, where no one speaks English, to cultivate a trade which Germans, Americans and Swedes are capturing wholesale. On the banks stood groups of fur-clad men discussing the prospects of the breaking of the ice. Some of them were fur traders bound for Turukhansk and the far northern territories bordering the Arctic Sea; some were gold washers and prospectors for the Yenisei district; some were wool and live-stock traders bound for Mongolia or the Upper Yenisei basin. Among them was a yellow-skinned, slit-eyed man, dressed in Russian furs and top boots. He was a Russified Tartar, and his presence there gave the group an Asiatic character.

A little lower down the bank was a timber-yard, where rough boards had been hand-sawn out of great logs. Inquiries which I made from a hairy old Siberian, who turned out to be the "Hosyain," or the "boss," elicited the fact that these great planks, two foot wide and four inches thick, were being sold at what would correspond to the ridiculous price of one penny per cubic foot. I then realized how true it is that the value of an article depends not so much upon what it is, as upon where it is. The same articles in England would be twelve times that value.

That afternoon, in one of the restaurants, I met one person who indicated to my mind that, primitive though it seemed, Krasnoyarsk was not without a progressive element. He was a Russian gentleman, with whom I came in contact quite accidentally. He was managing a gold-dredging enterprise somewhere in the north, and his knowledge of all that was going on in the commercial circles of Central Siberia showed me a Russian in a character quite different from that in which one generally sees him. He was full of enthusiasm for the future of Western and Central Siberia. "We have a land of magnificent prospects," he said. "We are in the condition that your Canada was before British colonization in the north-west, with the additional advantage of being even a richer country. The natural resources are in the land: furs, minerals, forest wealth, and a fertile soil for dairy and cereal produce; but the human machinery at present is not here in sufficient quantity, and that is what we want. We Siberians have been impressing this on the St Petersburg authorities. For years past we protested against criminal exiles being sent here to poison our social life. Now we have got our way in that respect, and the Government is alive to the necessity of encouraging the best class of peasant from old Russia to come and settle here, but what we still want is a better development of our natural resources, by means of branch railways from the trunk line, Government subsidies for public works in our chief centres, encouragement of Siberian industry, and, above all, a more forward education policy to suit the practical life of a Siberian trader and settler. We do not want to see our money spent on unnecessary military railways in the Far East, such as the Amoor railway, or on naval armaments on the Baltic. We want Siberia developed for the Siberians."

It sounded so much like the talk of a Canadian to an Englishman from the "old country." Western enterprise has laid its seed even here, accompanied by the material ideas of wealth and of general dissatisfaction with existing conditions.

"The worst problem," he continued, "are the Jews. I disagree with the Cadet Party and approve of the Nationalist Policy of political disability for the Jews. No one can exist along with them, for their standard of life is so different, and in time they will draw all the country into economic bondage under them. Besides, their dishonesty in the remoter parts of the Empire is often flagrant. I approve of a policy which restricts them to certain areas and denies them the right to hold land. In this part of Siberia, Jews of old standing only—namely, those who came here in the earlier days—are allowed to live."

He said he hoped Siberia would receive more consideration from Englishmen than it had received in the past. "Your countrymen are far too careless in these matters. You do not study local conditions or learn our language, nor do you try to cater for our markets. You expect everyone to speak English and to pay cash for goods, but the Russian peasants are without capital and require long terms of credit. Your agricultural implement firms must have representatives living out here on the spot who can speak Russian, understand local conditions and go about among the peasants; and you must be prepared to give long credit. I hope that in future Englishmen will become more interested in Siberia. Nothing tends more to create mutual understanding and foster goodwill than commercial relations. If English people had been more interested in Siberia and Eastern Russia they would never have backed Japan in her war with us, as they did. Now you see the fruits, for Japan is going to shut us all out of Manchuria, if she can succeed in doing so."

These interesting remarks gave me much food for reflection, representing, as they did, the views of an educated Siberian commercial man.

During the daytime while I was in Krasnoyarsk, I was able to get a glimpse of the municipal life of a growing Siberian commercial town. Primitive conditions and superficial imitation of Western culture were evident on every side. The streets were simply wide cart-tracks full of ruts, without any attempt at paving except for a few boards put down in the dirtiest places for the benefit of the foot-passengers, while modern conveniences which one finds in European Russia, such as drainage, paving, lighting and water supply, from public resources did not exist.

Scavengers call round periodically and carry away refuse, which they pitch into the Yenisei River, and water-carts, which consist of tubs on four wheels, are to be seen plying about the streets bringing water from the river. It is perhaps a good thing on the whole that there is no drainage system, for an inferior system is often more perilous than no system at all. A "Goratskoye-upravlenye," or town council, exists, and, if you take the trouble to hunt up the Local Government Statistical reports, you can find a publication which is supposed to record its activity, along with general statistical information about local Government institutions. Some of it is very interesting, although it always relates to conditions about five years old. It apparently takes in Russia at least so long to compile an issue for publication, probably at considerable expense, by which time the information is obsolete. That is very typical of bureaucratic Russia.

But whatever public conveniences are lacking here, there is always the comfort that a bureaucratic Government has created the machinery on paper for providing and carrying them out should the public ever need them. Indeed, according to the statistical publications, there is no lack of committees in charge of public works and charities of all kinds. There is, for instance, an Urban Sanitary Committee with a long list of titled officials, whose activities apparently exist on paper only, a Hospital Committee, a Highways Committee, and a Committee for regulating the construction of houses—in fact, a sort of Town Planning Committee. But for the present it seems that the Siberian Urban public are quite happy without these European conveniences; the householder, providing for his own comforts and interests, gets along very well in a primitive state and is as contented as if he were living in the wilds. In justice, however, it should be noted that the hospitals in Krasnoyarsk, of which there were three, are well organized. In fact nearly every town in the government has one or more, maintained at public expense. According to statistical information, in the Yenisei Government, with a population of just under one million, over £20,000 a year is spent on hospitals, surgeries, rural doctors and public dispensaries.

One does not expect to find in a Central Siberian town many signs of Western culture, or of any development of public institutes for the educational or scientific training of the minds of the people. But although they certainly do not obtrude themselves before one's eyes, nevertheless, like the public works committees, they exist on paper, and to a limited extent in practice. In Krasnoyarsk, for instance, there are two public middle schools or gymnasia, for boys and girls, where the classical curriculum of the Government is taught, including Latin, German, French, history, geography, and a certain smattering of theoretical science, which is taught only from books. Then there are a large seminary, or priests' training college, seventeen urban elementary schools kept up by the urban authority, where the rudiments of reading and writing are learned by the citizens, and one small technical institute for teaching mechanical work among the railway employees. Education, therefore, is not utterly neglected.

There is also a public library, which consists of a low dingy shed with dusty second-hand novels. These seemed to have been cleared out of some library in Moscow to make room for something better. A sluggish youth in uniform, acting as the librarian in charge, did not look as if he could even read.

At the north end of the town, facing an open space, there is a great barn-like building made of plastered wood, which is called the museum. The idea of a museum in Siberia struck one as ridiculous at first. Inside I saw a remarkable collection of articles, some of which were very interesting, but all of which were without much order or arrangement. Stuffed birds, in various stages of moth decomposition, were pushed up against a very good collection of local minerals, geological specimens, and some interesting maps. The curator, who, I afterwards gathered, was a political exile from Poland, showed a superficial knowledge of everything, but very little real knowledge of anything. It gave one the impression that the authorities, feeling bound to be up to date, had copied the Western European models and grafted them on to a crude Siberian framework, whether it fitted or not. Assisted by a handful of enterprising private citizens who had made collections at their own expense, the bureaucratic machine did the rest. To satisfy bureaucratic minds an elaborate account was kept of how many people entered the museum in one year, and yet not a penny was spent to preserve the specimens in that museum from dust and decay. On the surface it looked as if the higher Government officials in Russia are in advance of the people in their ideas of progress, but their enthusiasm seems to be more for programmes than for performances. Thus all the material for a scheme is found and great labour is expended, but one thing is lacking—namely, the men to work the machine. The majority of those we saw all round us preferred to spend a large part of every day leisurely sitting on the doorstep, cracking nuts or getting drunk on Sundays and holidays. And yet the people complain that the Government is not enlightened and progressive, and does not study local needs.

But if the educational institutions of a young Siberian town are certainly not up to European standards yet, there are others which more nearly attain this end, and to some extent act as their substitute. In most towns throughout the Eastern Empire the military authorities are always in evidence, and along with the vodka factory generally possess the finest buildings in the towns. There is always a great "kazyerm" or barracks in every important place, as if Siberia were under an army of occupation. And indeed Siberia is a useful training-ground, especially as it is near the Far East, where political conditions are always apt to be volcanic. When one sees the great barracks for six or seven thousand troops, generally consisting of large log-houses (very like ordinary dwellings, only a little bigger, and surrounded by wooden palings), scattered in various parts of nearly every town, one realizes what an incubus of uneconomic expenditure militarism must be to the community. Youths at the best age of their lives are taken from home and put where they learn to use a rifle and to drill, but during a large part of the day they are to be seen idling about the barracks squares, eating nuts in company with their fellows. I used to talk to some of them while I was in Krasnoyarsk. They seemed to have no other idea in life except to get back to their villages. The discipline is no doubt good, and the fact that they see some of the other parts of the Empire has beneficial results, but the disadvantages would be less and the advantages more if these raw peasant youths were taught reading and writing, first of all, before they learnt the gentle art of murdering their fellow-men. If they then had facilities to learn useful trades they would be more fitted for work in the newer parts of the Empire, and thus they would become useful members of society, instead of remaining an incubus upon the Russian taxpayers at the best time of their lives. However, political conditions seem to demand that states should keep a large percentage of their youths in uneconomic employment for the best time of their early lives. This is especially so in the East. Here racial differences among nations are more clearly marked than in Western Europe, where such differences are, or ought to be, less.

The policy of the Government has always been to

THE YENISEI AT KARNOYARSK

MILITARY BARRACKS AT KRASNOYARSK, HEADQUARTERS OF THE
SIBERIAN INFANTRY

mix the component races of the Empire as far as possible, and thus they send Poles to serve in Siberia, Finns and Letts to Turkestan, and Siberians to the Polish frontier. For instance I talked to several youths outside the barracks of the Siberian regiment in Krasnoyarsk who had come from districts as widely apart as Bessarabia, the Caucasus, and Archangel. The same principle underlies the policy of political exile. This mixing of races from all parts of the Empire has the effect of breaking down racial and religious barriers, and in this respect is undoubtedly progressive, although it is a somewhat crude method of bringing about this ideal. In other respects, however, it defeats the Government's own object, for it enables progressive ideas to be propagated more widely, and the reactionary element in the Government seems to be foolishly afraid of progress. Military service also helps in the levelling of social classes, and this is perhaps more the case in Russia than in most countries. It is true that the officers are seen driving about the streets of the town in "drofskies " with an air of social exclusiveness, but this in Russia is more apparent than real, and on the other hand you often see them talking and smoking with private soldiers. There is really no very great social barrier between officer and private, and the Russian officer, although often inefficient at his duties, is generally popular with his men.

In the big square opposite the cathedral is the bazaar. Formerly the greatest commercial media of exchange, the bazaars or public fairs are now gradually losing their importance in Siberia. In the old days the only means of exchange for the isolated inhabitants of the district was to meet once or twice a year at a big autumn fair in some central spot, where a fur trader could exchange his furs for corn, or a peasant his local produce for boots or clothes. But this old system is fast breaking down, and the advent of the railway was the first step towards bringing Siberia into closer contact with Europe. Wholesale commercial firms in Moscow are now establishing branches in such places as Krasnoyarsk and sell their goods wholesale to the smaller retail firms scattered about the country. Quicker transit, bringing buyer and seller closer together and facilitating a greater volume of trade, is now the order of the day. And so the trade of the annual fairs has fallen steadily year by year, and the warehouses and wholesale depots for the import of Moscow manufactures and the export of local produce have steadily grown. The annual fair still takes place every autumn, chiefly for live stock and grain, but the volume of its business declines year by year. During spring and summer the bazaar square is deserted, except once a week, when a few peasants from the immediate neighbourhood have stalls where they retail local produce for the consumption of the town. The prices current at the fairs are interesting and show how economic laws of supply and demand operate in these distant parts. The long distance by rail to the European markets precludes the profitable export of much local produce, and since the richness of the land floods the market in ordinary years with superabundance, the price of food and local produce is phenomenally cheap. I found the following prices current at Krasnoyarsk in the spring of 1910.

Meat (beef)	4d. per lb. in towns; 2½d. per lb. in villages.
Bacon (cured in Siberia)	5d. to 8d. per lb.
Wheat flour	1½d. per lb. (retail price).
Wheat grain	30 kopuks per pd=¼d. per lb. = 1d 6d. per bushel, autumn price.
Butter	1s. per lb. (the only article exported).
Eggs	¼d. each; ⅛d. in the villages.
Rice	6d. per lb.
Beet sugar	5½d. per lb.
Siberian brick tea	10d. per lb.
China tea	6s. 6d. per lb. (2s. Government duty).
Timber	Redwood deals 3 × 11, 1¾d. per ft. cube.[1]

I believe that a man can live on the local produce of the country at a very cheap rate, and indeed subsequent experience in the surrounding villages proved that a diet of eggs, bread and tea does not cost more than one shilling per day per person. Nor is the cost of living in a Siberian town much higher than in the villages. On the other hand, everything except pure necessaries is inordinately expensive and very inferior in quality. Siberians are chafing under the monopoly of the Moscow manufacturers who, sheltered by a high protective tariff, sell inferior articles at high prices. Moreover, in the remoter districts clothing, other than the rough Siberian homespun clothes and sheepskin coats, is nearly fifty per cent, in advance of Moscow prices.

But this excessive cheapness of Siberian natural produce will not always continue; when the economic demands of the seething populations of Western Europe with their industrial proletariat grow greater, Siberian natural produce, now only a drug on the local markets, will command a real value. At present only such articles as have a sufficiently high value in Europe to bear the cost of a long rail journey will find their way from such far-off places as Central Siberia. Such articles are furs, minerals, dairy produce, and certain valuable kinds of Siberian pine timber. Meanwhile, thanks to the railway and cheaper transport, the present tendency is for prices of Moscow manufactures to sink below the high level of former days, while prices of local agricultural produce, although at present very low, are showing an inclination to rise, and this will probably continue, especially as more and more is exported to Europe.

The economic life of Central Siberia, therefore, is changing slowly from the primitive condition of the past, where each economic unit of the community provided most of its few requirements and disposed of the surplus to its neighbours in the annual fairs at very low prices. With the growing division of labour, the facilities for exchange are increasing; and the whole country is now placed in closer communication with Europe than before. The effect of this is here reflected in the social condition of the people, for under these new conditions the standard of living is becoming higher. Siberians living in those parts where communication by rail or river is fairly easy are now no longer content with homespun hemp clothes, raw-hide boots and wooden spades, but buy, if they can, Moscow calicos, and cheap iron implements to help them in their field work. The rise in the standard of living, largely assisted by the building of the railway, helped to bring about these economic changes. Foreign traders in Siberia cannot pay too much attention to the social conditions of the country, and they must always bear in mind that the class of goods sent to Siberia must suit an as yet primitive, although developing, civilization.

One of the most important factors in effecting these changes is, as I have indicated, the development of communications: cheap transport here, as elsewhere, is naturally the principal agent in breaking down the old condition of economic isolation. The great railway which crosses the continent from east to west is now fed by the river traffic, running north and south, and in time branch lines will be constructed to run parallel with the rivers to certain localities which are known to be peculiarly rich and favourable to colonization.

As I describe in Chapter IX., the proposed new route by sea from Europe to Siberia via the Arctic, and Yenisei estuary, which has been established by Captains Wiggin and Webster, may have great effect in cheapening the cost of transport to Central Siberia, and seems, moreover, within reach of achievement. The hope, however, of subsidizing this route by rebates of the customs dues on goods imported thereby must not be too much relied upon. The influence of the manufacturing interests in old Russia, I who have a great power over the Government, is more than likely to be exerted against all attempts to lower the import tariffs in any parts of the Empire. Having regard to the economic relationships between Russia and Siberia, only those articles will be allowed rebates on importation by sea to Siberia which do not compete with any interest in old Russia.

The strata of society in Krasnoyarsk differ little from one another. Nowhere in Eastern Russia are social distinctions much emphasized, or the grades of society very sharply divided, and the general impression left on my mind was that society there was not unlike that of other young countries that I had seen, especially on the American continent. The officials of the bureaucracy are, of course, surrounded by a halo of exclusiveness in their offices in St Petersburg and the chief provincial towns of the Empire, which they rarely seem to leave, but, these excepted, the society in any town along the Siberian Railway is very like what one sees in a mining town in Northern Canada. Generally speaking, there are no real social barriers in Central Siberia between the rural agriculturists, the urban citizens, and the merchants. There are no divisions separating rural from urban society. The poorer citizens, the tradesmen, and even the lower grades of officials live in the same kind of houses and treat one another, when not at their duties, as equals. Yet although there are few social barriers which prevent intercourse in Siberian society, nevertheless social castes do exist, as in old Russia; but they seem to have been created chiefly for administrative purposes.

Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace, in his great work on Russia, at the end of the first volume refers to these social castes. His theory is that social groups such as peasants, urban citizens, civil and military officials, etc., have become formed as the natural result of Government administration, but that the autocratic power has hitherto been strong enough to prevent these castes from ever acquiring political power and formulating policies for their own objects. It is indeed probable that as Russia emerged from a feudal state of society, and as social castes gradually came to be formed, the powers of these castes became clearly defined by laws and regulations of the autocracy. Hence economic and political antagonisms between the social castes have been far less developed than in other countries of Western Europe. What struck me most in Krasnoyarsk and other towns of Central Siberia was that, although socially the castes seemed to mix in everyday life, nevertheless for official and administrative purposes they remained very clearly defined. Thus I used to find that so-and-so called himself a peasant ("krestyan") from a certain district, and so-and-so an urban citizen ("meshchaneen") without land; one man was registered with a guild licence to trade up to a certain annual value, another was an urban merchant of the second guild, while another had been born a Cossack and was liable to Cossack military service. In addition to these, I often came upon the case of a peasant who, although living in a town, retained his land under his village commune. As a member of that social caste he was still liable for his taxes on that land to his commune, although he was no longer living the life of a peasant. Everyone, in fact, has to be registered in some social caste. Again, the trades are classed in guilds according to the volume of their business, and pay guild taxes to the Government; the peasants who are settled on the land are registered in another class, and so on. But all this does not prevent the castes from mixing in everyday life, and in many ways the class distinctions are even less in Siberia than in old Russia. Thus there are very few nobles and no landlords, for the State owns all the land. Indeed, society in Siberia compares with that of European Russia in much the same way as society in England compares with that in Canada. Those social castes that do exist are useful for taxation and administrative purposes, but up till now the autocracy has prevented them from obtaining political power, and so from becoming socially divided.

Racial castes also, based on religion, theoretically exist, but are not recognized for purposes of administration, except in the case of the Jews. Poles, Finns, Letts, Armenians, Georgians and Tartars are classified in Siberia, for administrative purposes, along with Russians, according to their social castes and not according to their race and religion. A separate list of Tartars and Armenians in some districts of Siberia is often published by the Statistical Department of the Government, but they are not treated as a political entity.

Modern European economic influences are also making themselves felt in Siberia, and in the growth of the industrial proletariat, which, in company with higher commercial organization, is having the effect of so submerging the old social castes, such as peasants, burghers and traders, that it will soon become impossible to separate them out even for administrative purposes. It is not improbable that in time everyone will come to be registered according to income, and be assessed for taxation on the same principle as in Western Europe, and that the old system of Trade Guilds and Guild Taxes will disappear. Indeed, one would also be tempted to assume from the analogy of Western Europe that the growth of the industrial proletariat, which seems to be spreading throughout Russia, will not only break down these old social castes, but create new ones under the headings of Capital, Middle Class and Labour. This movement will be intensified if autocratic and bureaucratic power weakens and constitutionalism gradually strengthens. Then will follow a landless, wage-earning proletariat, and the inevitable contest between Capital and Labour, as we have it to-day in Western Europe, the tendency to which is so deeply deplored in Russia by the Slavophil patriots of the old school. As far as Siberia is concerned, my impressions are that this is the direction in which society is moving, and I doubt if the old Slavonic social conditions will survive in Siberia as long as the same conditions have done in European Russia, where sentimental traditions are naturally stronger than in the new country.

On the other hand these new conditions will not grow in a day, for at present in Siberia the wage-earning proletariat are an almost negligible percentage of the population and are only confined to some of the smaller trades in the towns, the railway employés, and the wharf and steamship labour on the rivers. For the rest, taking the population of the Yenisei Government as an example, out of a total population of 787,778 in 1908, the principal social castes existed in the following proportions:—

Peasants, 584,000—five-eighths of the whole population.

Merchants associated to Guilds, 983.

Burghers or urban citizens with small occupations, 52,118.

Of the latter class of burghers only five per cent, can be classed as wage-earners, and even they are not wholly dependent upon their labour for their livelihood. For a period of the year they work for hire, but at other times they supplement their earnings by carrying on small trades at home.

Domestic industry is still much in vogue in Central Siberia. The weaving of flax for rough clothes, the making of felt boots and sheepskin coats and caps, wheelwright and blacksmith work are all carried on in the home on a small scale, generally without hired labour. The chief wage-earning industries on anything like an extensive scale at Krasnoyarsk are the Government vodka factory and spirit distillery, a small skin-curing factory, glass-making, and brick and timber yards, while a considerable number of hands are employed on the railway and on the wharfs.

As one would expect under conditions where labour and wage-earning are only just developed, unskilled labour is cheap, but skilled labour is very dear. Thus in the spring of 1910 in Krasnoyarsk I found that unskilled labour on the railway and wharfs was paid from 1s. 9d. to 2s. per day, whilst shop-assistants with small clerical knowledge, mechanics and carpenters were much in demand and could get from £4, 10s. per month with food and lodging all found.

Krasnoyarsk reflects the economic and social life of the Yenisei Government of Central Siberia. This vast territory, of which Krasnoyarsk is the centre, is populated at the average density of eight per square mile. Five-eighths of this population are peasants, one per cent, are wage-earners and only two per cent, can read and write. Under these circumstances one does not expect to see a social and economic system like that of Western Europe springing up in a day. Great as are the economic possibilities of Siberia, no one can blind himself to the fact that its future economic development must not only go hand in hand with, but be directly dependent on, the social and political evolution which is now in progress in the Russian Empire.

In Krasnoyarsk no less than in other commercial and administrative centres of Siberia one can see this gradual change in progress. Not much is to be seen of the old Siberia of our youthful imaginations, where convicts work in gold mines and fur traders dwell isolated for months in snow-clad forests. The former have been replaced by political exiles who go about as ordinary citizens and speculate in gold concessions or work on the land, and the latter one only sees if one goes far enough into the remoter districts. What we see to-day in the more populous parts of Western and Central Siberia is the development of the natural resources of the country—its minerals, furs, live stock and agricultural produce—the growth of wholesale commerce with European Russia, the indications of the decline of domestic industry, the beginnings of workshop and small factory industry, and the gradual rise of a wage-earning proletariat. We also see a Slavonic civilization, pure and simple, planted on the land direct from old Russia. There is no large native Siberian population or a native element racially and religiously differing from the Russians, and no native question to distract its administrators as in Turkestan and the Caucasus. The little Finnish tribes in the northern forests are inferior in numbers to the Russians, and, thanks to the adaptability of the Russian colonists, it is not unlikely that many of them will become socially absorbed and mingle completely with the Russians. The Mussulman Tartars of Kazan and Tobolsk, the relics of the old Siberian Khanate, have long ago been politically absorbed and only remain distinct in religion; and here the utmost tolerance is shown. The whole field of Western and Central Siberia has been laid open to colonization by Slavonic civilization with all its peculiar semi-European characteristics, as they have grown there in the course of five centuries. Siberia only differs from old Russia as any young and new country would differ from an older and more established one, or just as society in England differs from that in Canada or Western America.

A tourist then in a Western or Central Siberian town finds much material for meditation on the earlier stages of the evolution and the development of society. He may be adversely struck with the crudity of the human kind in a Siberian commercial town, and with the scum which tends to collect there. But one does not look for beauty or romance or anything which appeals to the higher nature of mankind in such places as these. One finds, however, a society in one of its most interesting stages of development and one which will thoroughly repay study and sympathy. After all, we know that in Western Europe we must have passed through a similar phase ourselves, and that even the outlying parts of the British self-governing colonies are passing through such a phase to-day. But whether the evolution will be exactly on Western European lines, or whether the Slavs in their Eastern Empire will develop a social condition distinct from that of Western Europe, a civilization peculiar to themselves and tainted with the atmosphere of the East, the future alone will disclose.

1. Compare these figures for the average wages in Krasnoyarsk given on p. 36.