Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/88

66 inclosed, and one may ride for two or three hours at a time through a fertile and highly cultivated region without seeing a single fence, farm-house, or detached building. The absence of fences is due to the Siberian practice of inclosing the cattle in the common pasture which surrounds the village, instead of fencing the fields that lie outside. The absence of farm-houses is to be explained by the fact that the Siberian peasant does not own the land that he cultivates, and therefore has no inducement to build upon it. With a very few exceptions, all of the land in Siberia belongs to the Crown. The village communes enjoy the usufruct of it, but they have no legal title, and cannot dispose of it nor reduce any part of it to individual ownership. All that they have power to do is to divide it up among their members by periodical allotments, and to give to each head of a family a sort of tenancy-at-will. Every time there is a new allotment, the several tracts of arable land held under the Crown by the commune may change tenants; so that if an individual should build a house or a barn upon the tract of which he was the temporary occupant, he might, and probably would, be forced sooner or later to abandon it. The result of this system of land tenure and this organization of society is to segregate the whole population in villages, and to leave all of the intervening land unsettled. In the United States, such a farming region as that between the Uráls and Tiumén would be dotted with houses, granaries, and barns; and it seemed very strange to ride, as we rode, for more than eighty miles, through a country that was everywhere more or less cultivated, without seeing a single building of any kind outside of the villages.

Another peculiarity of Western Siberia which strongly impresses an American is the shabbiness and cheerlessness of most of its settlements. In a country so fertile, highly cultivated, and apparently prosperous as this, one naturally expects to see in the villages some signs of enterprise, comfort, and taste; but one is almost everywhere disappointed.