Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/83

 Rh number left to rot in the open country. This was the plague, a scourge as periodic in its visitations as fire. In the spring of 1565 it was raging at Louki, at Toropiéts, and at Smolensk; in the autumn it was at Polotsk. The following year it was to ravage Novgorod, Staraïa-Roussa, Pskov again, Mojaïsk, and even Moscow itself. Before the plague, or behind it, or with it, as in 1570, came famine. And the means devised to stamp out the disease were as fierce as the pest itself. In 1551 the Pskov merchants suspected of being infected were driven out of Novgorod, and those who resisted were burnt alive. So were any priests who dared to visit the sick.

As a matter of fact, famine was endemic, the normal condition of the country. The Englishman Jenkinson, a clever business man and a sagacious observer, mentions eighty-four persons as having perished under his eyes, within a very short period of time, for lack of sustenance—of a little straw, in other words, for dried and pounded straw was the ordinary winter food of many of the natives, who lived in summer on grass, roots, and the bark of trees (Hakluyt, i, p. 323). The foreign observer complains, in this connection, of the inhumanity of the inhabitants of the country, who were unmoved by the sight of their fellow-creatures falling down and dying of hunger in the streets. This trait occurs whenever the general poverty induces a general hardening of the human heart. In sixteenth-century Russia, wealth, even ease, was an exceptional phenomenon.

Apart from the monasteries, hardly any family, except the Stroganovs, owned any considerable fortune. Fletcher reckons that this house, besides its landed properties, which were huge, its farming establishments, which ran from the banks of the Vytchegda to the Siberian frontier, and its industrial establishments, in which it employed 10,000 free labourers and 5,000 serfs, owned 300,000 roubles in hard cash. It paid 23,000 roubles of taxes to the State, but the State was ruining it by its perpetually increasing demands, and to the State system must be ascribed the fact that the Stroganovs were such an exception to the general rule.

The State and the Church, a Baal with two faces, devoured everything, sucked the national riches, and dried up their fount—the State by its exactions, the Church by the usurious interest on her loans. Everybody was in debt, and the poorest paid the interest on what they owed in labour, thus rendered valueless to the general economy, and contributing nothing towards the building up of the public wealth. The formula whereby the man, the woman, and sometimes the whole family, children included, undertook to labour 'for the interest' (za rost sloujiti ve dvoïé po vsiadni) occurred more and