Famine again! Not ruin alone, but the downright extinction of the Russian peasantry has been proceeding with astonishing rapidity during the last decade, and probably no war, however prolonged and stubborn, has ever carried off such a mass of victims. All the most powerful forces of the present epoch have combined against the muzhik: ever more rapidly developing world capitalism, which has created transoceanic competition and supplied the small minority of rural proprietors capable of surviving in the desperate struggle for existence with the most perfected means and instruments of production; and the military state, which carries on a policy of adventure in its colonial possessions, in the Far East and Central Asia, and throws all the exorbitant burdens of this madly costly policy upon the working masses, while, at the people’s expense, it sets up ever new batteries of police “suppression” and “curbing” against the growing discontent and indignation of these masses.

Now that famine has become a regular occurrence among us, it was natural to expect that the government would try to shape and consolidate its own regular policy in the food supply question. If in 1891–92 the government was caught unawares and was fairly at a loss at first, now it is rich in experience and knows quite firmly where (and how) to go. “At this moment,” wrote *Iskra* in July (No. 6), “a black cloud of national calamity is gathering over the country, and the government is preparing once again to play its vile role of a soulless force that withholds a crust of bread from the famished population and punishes any ‘demonstration’ of concern for the starving people that does not fall in with the views of the authorities.”

The government’s preparations were very swift and very resolute. The Elisavetgrad affair sufficiently revealed the spirit in which these preparations were conducted. Prince Obolensky, Governor of Kherson Gubernia, at once declared war against all who had the audacity to write and speak about the famine in Elisavetgrad, to call upon society to help the starving, to form private circles and invite private persons to organise such help. The zemstvo doctors wrote in the newspapers that there was famine in the uyezd, that the people were falling ill and dying, that the “bread” they used for food was something incredible, not at all deserving the name of bread. The Governor enters into a polemic with the zemstvo doctors, and prints official refutations. Anyone who knows at all the general conditions of our press, anyone who takes the trouble to recall the redoubled persecution to which very moderate organs and still incomparably more moderate writers have recently been subjected, will understand what this “polemic” by the governor of a gubernia with some zemstvo doctors, who were not even in the state service, signified! It was simply a gagging of the mouth; it was the most patent and unceremonious declaration that the government would not tolerate the truth about the famine. As if a declaration were enough! The Russian government, at any rate, can hardly be reproached for restricting itself to declarations when there is a possibility of “using power.” And Prince Obolensky did not delay in using power, by appearing in person at the theatre of war—the war against the starving and against those who, though on no government department’s list, wanted to render real assistance to the starving—and by forbidding several private persons who had already come to the famine area (among them Mrs. Uspenskaya) to organise soup kitchens. Like Julius Caesar, Prince Obolensky came, saw, conquered—and telegrams immediately informed the whole of reading Russia of this victory. One thing is surprising: that this victory, this insolent challenge to all Russian people in whom at least a drop of decency, at least a little civic courage remained, met with no rebuff from the milieu of the most interested, so to speak, persons. In Kherson Gubernia, very many people undoubtedly knew and know the whole inside story of this hushing up of the famine and the struggle against assistance to the starving, but nobody has published either an account of this instructive affair, or the documents relating to it, or even a simple appeal to protest against the monstrous prohibition against organising soup kitchens. The workers go on strike when the government puts its threat into execution: to dismiss those who “took the day off” on May Day; intellectual society remains silent when its representatives are forbidden… to render assistance to the starving.

As if encouraged by the success of this first skirmish with the “disturbers” who dare to help the starving, the government soon passed over to an attack all along the line. Prince Obolensky’s doughty feat is elevated into a guiding principle, into a law henceforth regulating the relations of all administrators to all persons in any way connected (*prikosnovenny*) with food supply work. (The word *prikosnovenny* is, actually, a criminal law term belonging specifically to our Code of Punishments, but we have already seen and shall see further below that at the present time unauthorised assistance to the starving falls wholly within the concept of a criminal offence.) Such a law was not slow to follow—this time in the simplified form of a “circular from the Minister of the Interior to the governors of gubernias that suffered from the harvest failure of 1901” (August 17, 1901, No. 20).

This circular will long remain, one must think, a monument showing to what Pillars of Hercules{103} police fear in the face of a terrible national calamity, fear of the contact of the starving with the “intellectuals” helping them, leads, together with the firm intention to crush all “noise” about the famine and to limit assistance to the most negligible proportions. One can only regret that the immoderate length of this circular and the ponderousness of the official style in which it is written will perhaps prevent the broadest public from making its acquaintance.

It is known that the law of June 12, 1900, removed food supply work from the jurisdiction of the zemstvo and transferred it to the hands of the zemskiye nachalniki (land captains) and uyezd congresses. It would seem that nothing could be more trustworthy: the elective element is eliminated, and people who are to any extent independent of the authorities will not now run the work and, consequently, will not make a noise. But, after Prince Obolensky’s campaign, all this proved insufficient: the whole work must be more strictly subordinated to the Ministry and the officials who directly carry out its prescriptions; the possibility of any exaggerations must be definitively eliminated. Hence the question as to which uyezds are “unprosporous as regards the harvest” will henceforth be decided exclusively by the Ministry itself,[139] in which there will evidently be set up the General Staff of the military operations against the starving. And through the medium of the Messrs. Governors this staff will direct the activities of those persons (mainly, the uyezd marshals of the nobility) in whose hands the “uyezd central administration for food supply work” is concentrated. The initiator of the military operations against the starving, Prince Obolensky, had to travel to the spot himself in order to suppress, curb, and cut down. Now this is “regularised,” and a simple exchange of telegrams (all the better since a nice little thousand roubles per uyezd has already been appropriated for office expenses) between the “uyezd central” and the Petersburg central administrations will suffice to “make the arrangements.” Turgenev’s civilised landowner not only did not go to the stables himself, but confined himself to a remark made in an undertone through a lackey in a frock coat and white gloves: “About Fyodor... make the arrangements!”{104} So in our country, too, the arrangements will now be made just as “noiselessly,” in the same quiet and gentlemanly manner, to curb the immoderate appetites of the starving population.

And that Mr. Sipyagin is convinced of the immoderateness of the hungry muzhik’s appetites is evident from the insistence with which the circular not only warns against “exaggerations,” but directly creates ever new rules eliminating the very possibility of exaggerations. Regarding the compilation of lists of the needy—do not hurry: this arouses “exaggerated hopes” among the population—says the Minister plainly, and he prescribes that the lists be compiled only immediately before the distribution of bread. Furthermore, as to when an uyezd should be considered unprosporous in respect of the harvest—the circular considers it superfluous to speak, but it determines with precision when an uyezd should *not* be recognised as unprosporous (for example, when no more than one-third of the volosts have suffered, when there are ordinary earnings, etc.). Finally, as regards the norms for aid to the starving, the Minister lays down such rules as show more clearly than clear that the government wants, at any cost, to cut down this aid to impossibility and to get off with alms that by no means protect the population from dying out. Indeed: the norm is 48 poods of grain per family (reckoning according to the size of the average harvest in a given village); anyone who has no less than that is not in need. By what method this figure was arrived at is unknown. It is only known that in a non-famine year even the poorest peasants consume twice as much grain (see Zemstvo statistical investigation of peasant budgets). Undereating is therefore considered a normal phenomenon, on the basis of the Minister’s prescription. But even this norm is reduced, firstly, by half, so that the worker element, which constitutes about half the population, cannot get a loan; and secondly, by another 1/3, 1/5, or 1/10 “in consideration of the approximate number of well-to-do householders who have stocks from the previous year or some sort (*just that: “or some sort”!!*) of material sufficiency.” One can judge from this what a negligible fraction the share of the grain actually lacking to the population that the government intends to loan them must amount to! And, as if admiring his own insolence, Mr. Sipyagin, having expounded this incredible system of cutting down aid, declares that such an approximate calculation “rarely proves to be in any way significantly exaggerated.” Commentaries are hardly superfluous.

The official statements of the Russian government, when, over and above the bare prescriptions, they contain any sort of attempts to explain these prescriptions, almost always contain—this is a kind of law, far more stable than the majority of our laws—two basic motifs, or two basic types of motifs. On the one hand, you will invariably come across a few general phrases declaring in a bombastic form the solicitude of the authorities, their desire to reckon with the requirements of the time and the wishes of public opinion. For example, they speak of the “important matter of preventing want of food among the rural population,” of the “moral responsibility for the well-being of the local population,” etc. It goes without saying that these commonplaces essentially mean nothing and commit nobody to anything positive; on the other hand, they are as like as two peas to the immortal speeches of the immortal Iudushka Golovlyov, who used to read moral lectures to the peasants he fleeced. Parenthetically, these commonplaces are always exploited (partly out of naivety, partly out of the “duty of service”) by the liberal, censored press to construct a solidarity of principle between the government and its own point of view.

But if you look more attentively at the other, less general and less obviously empty-ringing motifs of the government’s commands, you will always find concrete explanations which wholly repeat the established arguments of the most reactionary organs of our press (e. g., *Moskovskiye Vedomosti*). To trace and note in each separate case this solidarity of the government with the *Moskovskiye Vedomosti* would, in our opinion, be a not altogether useless (and not altogether inaccessible even to legal workers) piece of work. In the circular under examination, for example, we meet with a repetition of the most vile accusations that emanated from the most “wild landowners”—that the premature compilation of lists of the needy arouses “a striving on the part of some well-to-do householders to give their husbandry the appearance of impoverishment by selling stocks, surpluses, and implements.” The Minister says that this has been “proved by the experience of preceding food campaigns.” Consequently? Consequently, the Minister draws his political experience from the admonitions of the most inveterate upholders of serfdom, who made so much noise during previous famine years and are now making a noise about the deceptions of the peasants, and who are so indignant at the “noise” about the epidemics of famine typhus.

From these same serf-owners Mr. Sipyagin learned to speak of demoralisation: “it is highly important,” he writes, “that... local institutions... assist in the economising of the appropriated resources, and, chiefly (*sic!!*[140]) prevent cases, which exert a harmful and demoralising influence, of unfounded distribution of government aid to persons who are provided for.” And this shameless prescription to assist in economising resources is reinforced by the following exhortation of principle: “... the broad distribution of food aid to families which can get along without it” (can get along with 24 poods of grain a year per family?) “independently of the unproductiveness (!) of treasury expenditure in these cases, is, as regards the pernicious consequences of such a system in the future, no less harmful from the standpoint of state advantage and needs than leaving those who are truly in need without due help.” In the olden days monarchs in a sentimental mood used to say: “It is better to acquit ten guilty persons than to condemn one innocent person.” And now the monarch’s closest assistant declares: it is no less harmful to give aid to a family which can get along on 24 poods of grain a year than to leave those who are “truly” in need without aid. What a pity that this “point of view” on “state advantage and needs,” magnificent in its frankness, is concealed from the broad public by an exceedingly long and tedious circular! One hope remains: perhaps the Social-Democratic press and Social-Democratic oral agitation will acquaint the people more closely with the content of the ministerial circular.

But with special resolution the circular “attacks” private philanthropists: it is evident from everything that the administrators waging war on the starving consider the most important position of the “enemy” to be the private relief circles, private soup kitchens, etc. Mr. Sipyagin, with a straightforwardness that deserves full appreciation, explains why this private philanthropy has long allowed the Ministry of the Interior no sleep. “Beginning with the harvest failure of 1891 and 1892, and in all subsequent similar calamities,” states the circular, “it has not infrequently revealed itself that certain philanthropists, alongside the rendering of material aid to the inhabitants of unprosporous localities, try to arouse among them discontent with the existing order and a totally unjustified exactingness towards the government. In so doing, need that is not fully satisfied, and the inevitable sickness and dislocation of husbandry that accompany it, create a very favourable soil for anti-government agitation, and such soil is willingly used by persons who are politically unreliable for their criminal purposes, under the guise of helping their neighbour. Usually, at the very first news of a significant harvest failure, persons with a not irreproachable political past flock to the afflicted locality from all sides, seek to enter into contact with the commissioners of charitable societies and institutions arriving from the capitals, and, through ignorance, are taken on by the latter as local collaborators, thereby creating no small difficulties for the interests of order and administration.”

It is becoming too narrow on the Russian land for the Russian government, however. There was a time when only the student youth was considered a specially protected milieu: a particularly strict surveillance was instituted over it; any contact with it by persons with a not irreproachable political past was imputed as a great offence; all kinds of circles and societies, even if they pursued only aims of material aid, were suspected of anti-government aims, and so forth. In those times—and very recent times—there was no other section, still less class, of the population which in the eyes of the government presented a “very favourable soil for anti-government agitation.” But from the mid-nineties you already find in official government statements indications of another, immeasurably more numerous, class of the population demanding special protection: the factory and mill workers. The growth of the working-class movement compelled the creation of entire systems of institutions for supervising the new, turbulent element; in the list of localities forbidden for residence to persons under political suspicion there began to appear, alongside the capitals and university towns, factory centres, factory settlements, uyezds, and entire gubernias.[141] Two-thirds of European Russia proved to be specially protected from the unreliable, and the remaining third is so overcrowded by the mass of “persons with a not irreproachable political past” that even the remotest provincial backwater is becoming unquiet.[142] Now it turns out that, in the authoritative judgement of so competent a person as the Minister of the Interior, even the remotest countryside represents a “favourable soil” for anti-government agitation, since instances of not fully satisfied need, of diseases, and of dislocation of husbandry occur there. And are there many such Russian villages where “instances” of this kind are not constant? And should not we Russian Social-Democrats immediately take advantage of this instructive indication by Mr. Sipyagin of the “favourable” soil? Precisely now, when, on the one hand, the countryside has been stirred by the rumours that ever and again have reached it somehow about the February and March clashes of the urban proletariat and intellectual youth with the government oprichniki; while on the other hand, does not any such phrase as “totally unjustified exactingness” on the part of the muzhik, etc., provide the richest programme for the most extensive and all-round agitation?

We must make use of Mr. Sipyagin’s useful indication, and we can laugh at his naivety. It is really a comical naivety to imagine that the subordination of private philanthropy to the surveillance and control of the governor will make it difficult for “unreliable” persons to influence the countryside. True philanthropists never set themselves political aims, so that the new measures of suppression and curbing will mostly fall upon those who are least dangerous to the government. But people who want to open the peasants’ eyes to the significance of the new measures and to the government’s attitude towards the famine in general will surely not find it necessary to enter into contact with the commissioners of the Red Cross or to introduce themselves to the Messrs. Governors. Consider, for example: once the factory and mill milieu proved to be a “favourable soil,” those who wanted to come into contact with this milieu did not enter into relations with factory managers in order to learn about factory rules and did not introduce themselves to the Messrs. Factory Inspectors in order to get permission to organise meetings with the workers. We do not for a moment forget, of course, that political agitation among the peasantry presents enormous difficulties, the more so because to divert revolutionary forces to it from the towns is both impossible and irrational; but we must also not lose sight of the fact that such government feats as the restriction of private philanthropy remove a good half of these difficulties and take half the work off our hands.

We shall not dwell on such a “trifle”—as compared with the circular just analysed—as the same minister’s circular on intensifying the surveillance over charitable concerts, performances, etc. (Compare *Iskra* No. 9, “New Hurdles.”)

Let us try to see in what relation the government aid to the population, allocated and distributed according to the new rules, now stands to the actual extent of the need. True, the data on this are scarce to the last degree. The press is now gagged to the utmost; the voices of private organisers of soup kitchens have fallen silent together with the “prohibition” of their activity; and for the information of the Russian public, stupefied by the new rigours, there remain only the official police notes on the prosperous course of the food campaign, and the little articles in the same spirit in *Moskovskiye Vedomosti*, and the ever-so-often reported conversations of an idle reporter with some Pompadour or other{105} who very importantly expounds “ideas about municipal-gubernatorial unanimity, and also about municipal-gubernatorial autocracy, and so forth.”{106} For example, *Novoye Vremya*, in No. 9195, reports that the Saratov (formerly Arkhangelsk) Governor, A. P. Engelhardt, received a contributor to a local newspaper and told him, among other things, that he, the Governor, had personally arranged on the spot a conference of marshals of the nobility, representatives of the zemstvo boards, zemskiye nachalniki, and representatives of the Red Cross and “distributed the tasks.”

“Scurvy,” said A. P. Engelhardt, “in the form in which I observed it in Archangel Gubernia, does not exist here: there you cannot approach the patient within five paces; there the disease is indeed ‘putrid,’ while here there are mostly the consequences of severe anaemia, which develops thanks to the terrible conditions of domestic life. Almost the only signs of scurvy here are white lips and white gums.... Such a patient recovers within a week given proper nourishment. And so this feeding-up is now proceeding. On the whole, 1,000 portions a day are given out, though not more than 400 persons have been registered as extremely needy.

“Apart from scurvy diseases, only three cases of typhus have been noted throughout the whole locality. Further than this, it must be hoped, matters will not go, since public works have already been opened everywhere and the population is provided with earnings.”

There’s prosperity for you: in the whole of Khvalynsk Uyezd (of which Mr. Pompadour speaks) only 400 extremely needy (the rest, probably, “can get along,” in the opinion of Messrs. Sipyagin and Engelhardt, on 24 poods of grain a year per family!), and the population is already provided for, and the sick get well within a week. How, after this, can one not believe *Moskovskiye Vedomosti*, which in a special leading article (No. 258) impresses upon us that “according to the latest information from the twelve gubernias that have suffered from the harvest failure, the administration is in full swing with the organisation of aid. Many uyezds have already been surveyed with the aim of recognising them as unprosporous in respect of food supply; uyezd heads of the food supply department are being appointed, etc. It would seem that the government officials are doing everything possible in order to render timely and sufficient aid.”

“The administration in full swing,” and... “not more than 400 have been registered as extremely needy”.... In Khvalynsk Uyezd there are 165,000 of rural population, and the number of portions issued is one thousand. The shortfall of rye this year amounts, in the whole south-eastern region (including Saratov Gubernia), to 34%. In Saratov Gubernia, out of the total sown area on peasant lands (1,500,000 dessiatins), 15% is affected by complete harvest failure (according to data of the Gubernia Zemstvo Board{107}) and 75% by poor harvest; and Khvalynsk Uyezd, together with Kamyshin, belongs to those uyezds of Saratov Gubernia that have suffered most. Consequently, the general shortfall of grain among the peasants of Khvalynsk Uyezd amounts to at least 30%. Let us assume that half this shortfall falls upon the well-to-do peasantry, which has still not been reduced to starvation by it (though this assumption is more than risky, since the well-to-do peasantry has better land and cultivates it better, so that it always suffers less from harvest failure than the poor). Even with such an assumption, it will turn out that the starving should number 15%, i. e., up to 25,000. And we are asked to be comforted by the fact that Khvalynsk scurvy is still a long way from the Archangel variety, that there were supposedly only three cases of typhus (they might at least lie more artfully!), and that a thousand portions are given out (apportioned and measured, probably, according to the Sipyagin system of struggle... against exaggerations).

As for those “earnings” which Mr. Sipyagin in his circular tried three times to take into account in order to avoid exaggerations (once—by prescribing that uyezds with normally developed earnings should not be considered unprosporous; a second time—by prescribing that the 48-pood norm be reduced by half, since 50% of the working population “must” earn money; and a third time—by prescribing that this last figure be further reduced by one-third to one-tenth, according to local conditions): as for earnings, in Saratov Gubernia not only agricultural but also non-agricultural earnings have fallen. “The consequences of the harvest failure,” the above-mentioned report of the Board informs us, “have also been reflected on the handicraftsmen, thanks to the reduction in the sale of their products. By force of these circumstances, crises are observed in the uyezds with the most developed handicraft industries.” And to the number of these uyezds belongs also Kamyshin Uyezd, which has suffered most, and in which, incidentally, many and many thousands of poor folk are engaged in the famous sarpinka (coarse calico) industry. Even in ordinary years the conditions in this industry, buried in a rural backwater, were most monstrous: children of six and seven, for example, worked, getting seven or eight kopeks a day. One can imagine what is happening there in a year of huge harvest failure and a special handicraft crisis.

In Saratov Gubernia (as in all the famine-stricken gubernias, needless to say) the grain failure is accompanied by a shortage of fodder. Over the recent months (i. e., already in the second half of summer!) there has been noted an extraordinary spread of various epizootics, increasing the mortality of cattle. “According to a communication from the veterinary surgeon of Khvalynsk Uyezd (we borrow this information from the same newspaper that gave the substance of the above-mentioned report of the Gubernia Zemstvo Board), on the dissection of animals that had died, nothing except earth was found in their stomachs.”

In the “communication of the Zemstvo Department of the Ministry of the Interior” on the continuation of the food campaign there was made, among other things, the statement that, among the uyezds declared unprosporous, “only in Khvalynsk did a number of epidemic cases of scurvy manifest themselves from the month of July, in two villages, to the stopping of which the efforts of the local medical staff have been directed; and two detachments of the Red Cross Society, which, according to the Governor’s report (the same A. P. Engelhardt with whom we have already become acquainted), are acting with great success, have been seconded to the assistance of the local forces. In all the other uyezds, however, that have been declared unprosporous in respect of food supply, according to the information available in the Ministry as of the 12th of this September, there have been no instances of unsatisfied acute food need, and no development of diseases on the basis of inadequate nutrition is observed.”

To show what trust this assertion can deserve—that there have been no instances of unsatisfied acute need (and was there chronic need?) and that no development of diseases is observed—we will confine ourselves to a comparison of data on two more gubernias.

In Ufa Gubernia, Menzelinsk and Belebey uyezds have been declared unprosporous, and the Zemstvo Department of the Ministry of the Interior communicates that a government loan “for food supply proper” will be required, “according to the Governor’s declaration,” to the amount of 800,000 poods. Meanwhile, the Extraordinary Ufa Gubernia Zemstvo Assembly, summoned for August 27 to discuss the question of aid to those who have suffered from the harvest failure, determined the need of these uyezds for food supplies at 2,200,000 poods of grain, plus 1,000,000 for the remaining uyezds, irrespective of a loan for seed (3,200,000 poods for the gubernia) and for the feeding of cattle (600,000 poods). The food loan is, consequently, fixed by the Ministry at one-fourth of what the zemstvo fixed.

Another example. In Vyatka Gubernia, there were no uyezds declared unprosporous at the time when the Zemstvo Department published its communication, and it itself fixed the amount of the loan for food at 782,000 poods. This is the very sum which, according to newspaper reports, the Vyatka Gubernia Board for Food Supply Work calculated at its meeting of August 28 (it calculated in accordance with the resolutions of the uyezd congresses of August 18 to 25). These same congresses had, around August 12, determined the amount of the loan differently, namely: 1,100,000 poods for food, and 1,400,000 poods for seed. Whence this difference? What happened between August 12 and 28? What happened was that Mr. Sipyagin’s circular of August 17 on the struggle against the starving appeared. The circular, therefore, had an instantaneous effect, and the tidy little sum of 230,000 poods of grain was struck out of the calculation drawn up—mind you—by the uyezd congresses, i. e., by the institutions which (under the law of June 12, 1900) replaced the unreliable zemstvo, institutions consisting of bureaucrats in general and zemskiye nachalniki in particular.... Shall we really live to see even zemskiye nachalniki accused of liberalism? Like enough. At any rate, in *Moskovskiye Vedomosti* we read recently such a reprimand to a certain Mr. O—m., who had ventured to suggest, in *Priazovsky Kray*,{108} that the protocols of the meetings of the gubernia boards for urban affairs be printed in the newspapers (if it was still impossible to admit representatives of the press to these meetings):

“The aim is too transparent: the Russian official often suffers from a fear of seeming illiberal, and publicity may compel him, sometimes even against his conscience, to support some liberal-fantastical project of the town or zemstvo. The calculation is not quite mistaken.”

Should not a special surveillance be instituted over the Vyatka zemskiye nachalniki, who—evidently from a fear of seeming illiberal—displayed unpardonable light-mindedness in “exaggerating” the food need?[143]

However, the “liberal-fantastical project” of the Vyatka Zemstvo (if the wise Russian government had not removed it from the conduct of food supply work) went as far as fixing the need at still much larger dimensions. At any rate, the Extraordinary Gubernia Assembly, which sat from August 30 to September 2, determined the shortfall of grain from the required quantity at 17%, and of fodder at 15%. And the size of this quantity is 105,000,000 poods (the usual harvest—134,000,000 poods; in the current year—84,000,000 poods). The shortfall, consequently, amounts to 21,000,000 poods. “The total number of volosts in the gubernia not provided for by the current year’s harvest is 158 out of 310. Their population amounts to 1,566,000 souls of both sexes.” Yes, undoubtedly, the “administration is in full swing”—in reducing the actual dimensions of the need and in reducing the whole business of helping the starving to a sort of acrobatics of kopeck philanthropy.

However, “acrobats of philanthropy” would still be too flattering a name for the administrators closely united under the banner of the Sipyagin circular. What they have in common with the acrobats of philanthropy is the paltriness of their aid and the striving to puff up its dimensions. But the acrobats of philanthropy look upon the people they benefit, in the worst case, as upon toys that agreeably tickle their vanity; whereas the Sipyagin administration looks upon them as upon enemies, as upon people who are somehow unlawfully encroaching (“totally unjustified exactingness towards the government”) and therefore subject to curbing. This view was expressed with full distinctness in the remarkable “Provisional Rules” confirmed by the Highest Authority on September 15, 1901.

This is a whole law, consisting of 20 articles, and there is so much that is remarkable in it that we would not hesitate to place it among the most important legislative acts of the beginning of the twentieth century. To begin with the title: “Provisional Rules on the Participation of the Population of Localities that Have Suffered from Harvest Failure in Works Carried Out at the Disposal of the Departments of Ways and Communications, and of Agriculture and State Properties.” Probably these works represent something so crammed with privileges that “participation” in them is a special boon? Probably, otherwise the first article of the new law would not have repeated: “rural inhabitants of the localities that have suffered from harvest failure are granted participation in the carrying out of works,” etc.?

But the law speaks of these “privileges” only in its latter half; first it establishes the organisation of the whole business. The respective administrations “pre-assign the most appropriate works” (Art. 2), in so doing “conforming to the procedure established in the law” (Art. 3, which, in conformity with the titles of the chapters in certain novels of Dickens, could be called: “the article of the new law in which it is stated that it is necessary to conform to the old laws”). The works are opened either with estimate resources or with special credits; the general charge of the organisation of the works belongs to the Minister of the Interior, who may appoint special plenipotentiaries, and under whom, with his Deputy as chairman, a special “Council on Food Supply Work” is formed, consisting of representatives of different ministries. The duties of this Council include: (a) the authorisation of departures from the established procedure; (b) the discussion of proposals concerning the assignment of resources; (c) “the establishment of the maximum rates of workers’ remuneration, as also the determination of other conditions for granting the population participation in the aforesaid works; (d) the distribution of workers’ parties among the districts of the works