Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/45

Rh nevertheless mutually interdependent. The dwellers of the forest need the produce of the black soil—the granary of Russia. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the agricultural plain need the fuel and the building materials of the forest. Coal and stone are generally wanting. All Russian houses in the country are built in wood, and it has been calculated that all the Russian villages are destroyed by fire every twenty years.

And still more does the plain need the moisture of the forest, without which the droughts and famines which at present are only a periodical scourge of Russia would be her permanent curse. And, finally, the grassy steppe or prairie is the "hinterland" of the black soil. Not only does the arable land encroach every year on the steppe, but without the possession of that "hinterland" the inhabitants of the plain, as in the legendary days of the Cossacks, would have been always at the mercy of incursions and invasions.

Owing to those three zones Russia is a huge agricultural community, distinct from industrial and commercial Europe; it is an Eastern Europe of wheat and wood distinct from the Western Europe of iron and stone. The