Famine and Politics

AS THE GERMAN FARMERS strove to make ends meet with ever-shrinking areas of arable land, they sought different means of finding income. They, as an ethnic group, had become the focus of hateful political entities. This situation was exacerbated when Germany allied itself by treaty with Austria.

Russia, France, England, and other countries had always liked the two countries to be divided and in competition. United, the two empires presented a powerful front, a fact promptly noted by anti-German factions in Russia.

A people, barely able to survive at times, enmeshed in problems with climate and soil, could scarcely imagine that they should be hated for nothing but political expediencies.

The villagers of Norka had barely recovered from the crop failures during the 1860s, when severe draught and scorching temperatures once more covered the region in the last three years of the 1870s.

Adam, re-elected to the Zemstvo, became familiar with the worst of the famine. However, conditions were so horrific that nothing could be done to alleviate the suffering. While large parts of Russia’s population starved, grain trains rolled unabated through Ukraine to Poland, to be dispersed into Europe; they rolled to St. Petersburg, where the grain was loaded onto ships destined for Sweden and Norway.

At the Volga people ate their seed grain as their last resort, thereby assuring that there would be less grain to harvest the next year. The Lutheran church in Saratov opened a soup kitchen for the poorest of the settlers. People survived, but only barely. Adam was helpless to prevent his people from seeking loans at usurious rates, rates so exorbitant that they amounted to financial serfdom for the farmers.

“Wait a little, I might be able to get you better rates. Trust me, if we stick together you can get better rates.” All his pleas were to no avail. Desperate people seldom reason. Alexander’s losses during the famine in the late 1870s had been profound. The draught had killed the tobacco plants with the same ease it decimated everything else, wheat, barley, rye, grass, vegetables, and fruit. However, having been wealthy, his family had weathered the horrid years without too much pain.

At the end of the famine years Alexander had taken his boys, Peter, fourteen, and twelve-year-old Paul, to Germany, where, with Adela’s blessing, he boarded them at the Lutheran high school in Leipzig.

He was determined that the family should eventually resettle in Germany or in America. At forty, and a man of steady nerves, he was nevertheless concerned by Russia’s uncertainties – an insecure future. As he traveled in Europe and all over Russia, selling his tobaccos, he was able to compare the European advances and Russia’s stagnation, especially the backwardness of the Vlady Vostok region, the Far East.

It seemed to him, that the prevailing problems were caused by never-ending Islamic intervention and Russian Orthodox mysticism. The culture and religion of the seventh century pervaded the thinking of peoples; they were the reasons that held back the reformers trying to break into modern society.

Not only did Islam scream with insane furor against any rejuvenation of society, but Russian Orthodoxy was closely allied with Islam’s antiquated ideas, both carrying the torch of human enslavement, dual enslavement of spirit and mind.

Every day of his life presented Alexander with pictures of miserable Orthodox and Islamic women, dominated and bound like chattel to their overlords. Women of the lower classes moved through Russian life as almost invisible shadows, puppets coming only alive at the hands of a master. A woman was a covered figure on the edge of action, never clearly perceived, unless pursued by a drunken man, knout in hand, ready to beat, damage or kill her. Tartar men whipped their women, sometimes while the object of their anger sat on horseback, holding a child. Alexander did not fall into the trap of the biased observer, excusing the faults of his own people, making them better just because they were his own clan. He knew that there were German farmers who were violent with their wives; however, on the whole, Lutheran and Catholic women were treated according to the dictates of the Bible. Being married to Adela had opened his eyes to women’s capabilities and their achievements.

For Victoria, the apple of his eye, now eleven, he foresaw a magnificent future. He envisioned her to become the adored, pampered wife of a German industrialist, a doctor, a famous politician or even as the wife of a grain merchant, cultured and fabulously rich like her great-grandfather.

But as Katharina had often said, “The heavens laugh and shout with joy the moment an earthling presents such plans to the world, plans to arrange a life, plans that will change the miserable course of human existence. Oh, such pronouncements amuse the heavens. For humans have never been able to change the course of anything successfully, making it last. In the historical perspective they have mostly failed, repeating the same mistakes over and over again, despite being in possession of a clear record, displaying ancient pitfalls and mistakes. Their record of predicting an individual’s actions was even worse. Ever since God endowed humans with free will they have used this will to defy others, whether the others represented parents, governments, groups or organizations – defying even God.”