At Simbirsk I entered the heart of the famine district, and from this point on my attention was almost entirely claimed by the misery of the starving people, whose pitiable suffering I had to witness in utter helplessness--appalled by the magnitude of the crime. I call it “crime” because famine, in Russia, is preventable. The régime that persists in maintaining the present archaic, economic system is responsible for all the pain, the epidemics of disease, and the deaths which follow in the wake of the calamity we call famine. CHAPTER XVI THROUGH THE “HUNGRY COUNTRY” Heart of the famine region--Terrible pictures of starvation--Peasants feeding the thatch from the roofs of their houses to cattle--Auctioning cattle and horses for a song--How the workers and breadwinners suffer first--Inability of the government to cope with situation--Peasants pledge their labor for years to come to secure food for their families for the present time--Another arrest--Expulsion from the province. Samara province marks the heart of the “hungry country,” which includes all of the Volga provinces and most of the provinces of Great Russia. Samara is the most important of these provinces, owing to its situation. Samara city, the capital of the province, is the chief point on the railroad between Moscow and Siberia, and being also on the Volga, it has developed into a large shipping port. In good years when harvests are plentiful, Samara throbs with life and activity. The volume of trade which it handles is enormous; its connections extend to all parts of the world. But when famine smites the land, Samara seems to cower into unwonted insignificance. The busy air of prosperity grows clouded and dull and the shadow that envelops the city is but a somber reflection of the awful reality--the blight of famine and starvation--that has descended upon the country. There are big landlords in Samara province, as in neighboring Volga provinces, who work land for profit. Ordinarily they ship immense quantities of grain to Europe. The raising of these crops gives employment to several hundred thousand peasants who come from other provinces for the sowing and the reaping, and who rely upon these earnings to help them through the winter. This summer the peasants came into the agricultural district, as usual, but they wandered weary miles east, and north, and south, only to be turned away from each place in disappointment and despair. Work there was none. The crop failure was almost absolute. The scanty returns yielded by the sun-baked earth could easily be gathered by local laborers whose own harvests were mere mockeries. And so these thousands of peasants who journeyed eastward in search of work were finally turned back toward their own provinces, empty-handed and hungry. They wandered back as tramps, penniless, broken, to face the winter under circumstances hardly better than that of those who stayed at home.