RUSSIA: Samara’s Memories

U.S. aid to Russia is nothing new. And Russians know all about U.S. aid that comes too late. They are especially familiar with this phenomenon in old Samara, now called Kuibyshev, new capital of Russia.

Samara was founded at the easternmost bend of the Volga River in the 16th Century, during the reign of the weakling Theodore, son of Ivan the Terrible. It was to be a fortress against the wandering tribes of the steppe. At first its citizens were mostly Cossacks, but in the 19th Century there was a great influx of Poles and Germans—particularly from Danzig.

The German colony of the Volga grew until it numbered over 2,500,000.

Samara was a fine spot for a fort, perching on terraced heights at the juncture of the Volga and Samara Rivers; but it was a terrible place to live. Freezing weather comes by mid-October. The average January temperature is 9° Fahrenheit. Some years the sharp-toothed winds are so persistent that snow will not stay on the ground. Droughts follow, and famines follow the droughts.

There was a terrible famine in 1891, when the rye and wheat crops failed. In a dozen provinces around Samara 30,000,000 peasants shrank on the bone and swelled in the belly. The great U.S. heart was touched. Money was raised, four ships of provisions and clothing sailed for St. Petersburg. But the Volga was far from the Mississippi and the aid came too late: thousands perished.

In 1921 there was another dreadful hunger. This time over 20,000,000 peasants came to the verge of starvation. Again the U.S. was touched and helped hard. Correspondent Walter Duranty wrote: “Imagine yourself standing at the corner of a dusty street. . . . The houses are mostly low wooden structures with dirty windowpanes or gaping holes like bleared and sightless eyes. . . . Opposite there is a handsome dwelling, formerly the home of a rich merchant. A broad garden is dotted with dun-colored bundles, motionless. . . . They are children. . . .”

Between 1921 and last week Samara had been renamed Kuibyshev, after Valerian Vladimirovich Kuibyshev, who was head of the State Planning Commission and prime mover of the First Five-Year Plan when he died in 1935. The city had been refurbished, as the junction of important railroads joining Moscow, the Donets Basin and Siberia, as the location of an armature and carburetor factory famous throughout the U.S.S.R., as a cultural center with seven colleges, 18 technical schools, six scientific research institutes, six repertory theaters.

The Government bureaus and foreign diplomats who had moved to Samara last week settled down to their routine of calls. They waited for the Moscow Ballet, the Bolshoi Theater casts. The U.S. Embassy holed up in a former school. Diplomats gathered at the Grand Hotel for flat beer from the local brewery. With the Germans still 600 miles away in the west, they speculated about the Volga Germans, many of whom had been deported to Siberia. With the Italians still 700 miles away in the southwest, they sat down to huge meals of Samara’s abundant local macaroni.

But these foreign visitors must have felt urgency in the city’s memories. They must have heard echoes of the piteous, patient cry Walter Duranty heard so often in the Samara of two decades ago:

“Help will come too late. We all must die.”