Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/29

 Rh conitions of the Russian peasant commune, once so powerful among the peasants of European Russia, developed to its fullest in these parts, and is now beginning gradually to die out, before the steady growth of peasant proprietorship. All over this land a peaceful social revolution is going on, and from it the Slavs will doubtless emerge as triumphantly as they did from the Tartar yoke.

Now the Volga is crossed, and after Samara a gradual change comes over the face of the country. The land is more steppe-like; although it is spring it is quite dry, and layers of slimy black mud no longer cover the ground where the wheels of peasant carts have plied. The atmosphere also is clear and dry, and there is an Asiatic colour in the view from the railway carriage. Undulating hills and little sharp escarpments of red sandstone break the almost level plain, and under the lea of these hills the Russian villages are settled, collections of four or five hundred houses together. The land, however, seems less cultivated than farther west, and large areas are under steppe grass. The villages here retain large common grazing areas for their flocks, and the land allotted to the plough is more and more restricted. Soon we see an Eastern figure. A Tartar on horseback is trotting by the railway-side and whips up his horse to race the train. A little farther and we see a village with straw-thatched houses of mud and wattle, but rising above are no longer the cupolas of the Greek church, but a little pointed pinnacle on which rests the star and crescent—a Tartar village—the relics of that power that once ruled Russia. But for the sign of their religion who would know that they were not Russians? Thus