sea fishing, in which case they
usually start out on foot for Kem on the shores of the White Sea or for
the far away Kola on the Murmansk Coast. Here they must charter a boat
and often times after a month or two of this fishing they will be in
debt to the boat owner and are forced to return with an empty pocket.
While we were there we gave them all plenty to do--village after village
being occupied in the grim task of making barb wire entanglements, etc.,
building block houses, hauling logs, and driving convoys. This was of
course quite outside their usual occupation and I am of the impression
that they were none to favorably impressed--perhaps some of them are
explaining to the Bolo Commissars just how they happened to be engaged in
these particular pursuits.

For the female part of the population, however, the winter is a very
busy and well occupied time. For it is during these long months that the
spinning and weaving is done and cloth manufactured for clothing and
other purposes. Many of them are otherwise engaged in plaiting a kind of
rude shoe--called lapty, which is worn throughout the summer by a great
number of the peasants--and I have seen some of them worn in extremely
cold weather with heavy stockings and rags wrapped around the feet. This
was probably due to the fact, however, that leather shoes and boots were
almost a thing of the past at that time, for it must be remembered that
Russia had been practically shut off from the rest of the world for
almost four years during the period of the war. The evenings are often
devoted to besedys--a kind of ladies' guild meeting, where all assemble
and engage in talking over village gossip, playing games and other
innocent amusements, or spinning thread from flax.

Before closing this chapter, I wish to comment upon an article that I
read some months ago regarding what the writer thought to be a
surprising abundance of evidence disproving the common idea of
illiteracy among the Russian peasants. It is admitted that the peasants
of this region are above the average in the way of education and
ability, but as I have later learned they are not an average type of the
millions of peasants located in the interior and the south of Russia,
whose fathers and forefathers and many of themselves spent the greater
part of their lives as serfs. While the peasants of this region
nominally may have come under the heading of serfs, yet when they were
first driven into this country fo