Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/122

 CHAPTER XV

PIRITUAL illiteracy and the home policy of the Government were the causes of endemic famine in Russia. During periods of greatest prosperity one-fifth of the village population was in the clutches of hunger, dying of starvation, of hunger-typhus. Primitive methods of agriculture in districts in which there were no estates belonging to the more cultured gentry, the obstinacy and fear of the peasants of any modern improvements of farming, diminished the crops from year to year and exhausted the soil. No wonder that whole families of peasants were leaving the land and moved into industrial towns to earn their living in factories.

Here, very soon these families were dissolved and scattered over the whole of Russia, losing all contact with each other, never to meet again. Bereft of all moral support, with only a faint stock of religious principles, these people developed into pronounced demoralised representatives of the lowest type of the ragged proletariat, heroes in the Maxim Gorky style. The women particularly sunk to the lowest depths, perished in tap-houses or hospitals from loathsome