Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/62

 32 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