Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Terror in Russia (1909).djvu/81



AST summer there was a famine in several provinces of European Russia; Smolensk, Minsk, Ufa, Saratov, Simbirsk, and Tambov—the last four belonging to the fertile regions of Russia. At the present time the conditions are still worse, the crop of the year 1908 having been 35,000,000 cwts. below the average crop of the four preceding years, 1902–1906. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior has given orders to levy, in the most stringent way, all the arrears which have accumulated for the last few years, both in regard to the payment of the taxes and in the repayment of famine loans.

This order of the Ministry was understood by the Governors of the provinces as a command to take drastic measures in levying the arrears; and in some provinces (Vyatka, Tula, and Smolensk) special punitive expeditions were sent out to collect the arrears—the Governors giving to the commanders of such expeditions full powers to resort to all the measures they might find necessary.