Warsaw, the capital of Poland, and Lodz near it, are cotton- and wool-manufacturing centers, near the Polish coal fields. Riga and Reval are ports with less manufacturing than the Polish cities. Moscow, the old capital of Russia, is near the central coal field and manufactures much iron and leather. In the south, near the Sea of Azof, is a large coal field yielding most of Russia's coal.
During the Russian civil wars many of these factories stopped running. That was one of the reasons why Russians suffered so much.
476. Polish and Russian agriculture.— Most of the people of the whole great region between Germany and Asia, and between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, are farmers. Among these hun dreds of Millions of people few can read or write, and they have suffered long from cruel and thieving government, and from war.
Where these things happen, the people are ignorant and have poor tools, poor crops, and the people them selves are poor. Such people always have need less sickness and suffering. Here one might ride, day after day, past gray villages from which the peasants go out on the level plain near by to work in their fields of rye, potatoes, barley, oats, wheat, or sugar beets. At noontime they eat a simple meal of black rye bread, cabbage, potatoes, and perhaps drink a little tea, but rarely have a bit of meat or eggs—these being the things they must sell to get money to pay taxes and to buy the few things they cannot do without.
477. The Russian wheat region.—The southern part of the plain, from Rumania eastward, is one of the two greatest inland wheat regions of the world. (Fig. 321.) Where is the other? (Fig. 88.) This great stretch of flat, treeless land has a very rich black soil and is• known as the " Black Earth " country. It has a climate much like that in the central part of North America. Near the Black Sea it joins the European Corn Belt, and here the wheat is sown in the fall, as in Kansas and Nebraska, where wheat and corn are grown near each other. Farther east, the winters are colder, and scanty rain falls in the summer season as it does in our own Northern Wheat Region. As the climate is like that of North Dakota, we find the same method of growing wheat (Sec. 89), namely, sowing in the spring and harvesting in the autumn. Everywhere in the southern part of the great plain there is wheat, wheat, wheat, almost nothing but wheat, for fully a thousand miles. The soil is rich, but the rainfall is uncertain, and the ignorant Russian farmers, or moujiks, as they are called, cultivate the crop so poorly that the yield is only a third of that on German fields.
In this treeless region the moujik's house has a dirt floor, and walls made of sods piled one on the other, plastered with mud, and whitewashed. The roof is of sod or straw thatch held up on poles. Straw is burned in the stove. Near the rivers some of the richer people have wooden houses that have been floated down on rafts from the forests to the northward.
478. Migrating laborers.—Because of their poverty, many Poles used to go away each year to work in the harvest-fields of Ger many, and even of Switzerland and Sweden.
Before the World War as many as five million harvesters sometimes made a summer jour ney from Central Russia southward to the Wheat Belt (Fig. 321), and then worked their way northward with the advancing harvests.
479. The trade of Russia and Poland.— In times of peace, this great agricultural re gion of the eastern plain sends its surplus crops to the cities of western Europe. At the south, wheat goes from the port of Odessa, and from Rostof at the mouth of the Don. In the north, rye, oats, butter, eggs, and meat animals are shipped eastward from Petrograd, Riga, Koenigsberg, and Danzig. Much trade in times of peace goes overland by railroad into Germany.
The people of Russia still carry on much of their trade by fairs, as the people of England and of all Europe did before the coming of the steamship and the train.
Indeed, many of the cities of Europe were started by the fact that people met at certain places once a year to trade. Such an occasion they called a fair. It was really a market. In Russia to this day many such fairs are still held. After working all winter at their crafts, the shoemaker, the saddler, the basket maker, and the weaver go off to the nearest fair and sell their year's produce to traveling merchants, or to people who are buying a year's supply.
The most famous of these fairs is at Nizhni Novgorod. The more regular transport of the railroad and the steamship are causing the fairs to decline.
Just as the farms of our own Wheat Belt receive manufactures from our own factory region, so the peasants of eastern Europe buy clothes, shoes, nails, machinery, and tools from the factory region of central Germany, from Norway and Sweden, and from the other factory regions on both sides of the English Channel. Before the World War the peasants had begun to use American plows and reapers, which sometimes went by shiploads from America to Odessa.
480. Future of the great plain of central and eastern Europe.—In the western part of this region,—Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and central Germany,—there cannot be very much increase in food production because the land is already tilled so thoroughly and so well; but there might be many more com fortable manufacturing towns, if markets and supplies can be found in foreign countries.
Poland and Russia can double their food supply if the people can have peace, a chance to own land, and good schools where the children can learn better ways of doing things.
Such a great region should also have many small manufacturing cities, busy supplying local needs. The Russian coal fields will give the power, but the location of the towns for foreign trade is not so good as in the countries near the English channel. Then, too, the winter is so long and so very cold that people do not feel as much like working as people do in a climate that is less severe.
The Ural Mountain district has ores of iron and platinum which have been worked in the past and should be worked still more in the future.
Much, very much, depends upon the kind of government a country has. No one knows what the government of Russia will be, or what Russia's future will be.