The Treasury Did Not Help Our Grandfathers
The treasury did not help our grandfathers. An official brought them to the place. They began to ask him: where are we to live? – he pointed to the mountains... They began to press him: what are we to live on? The official said: “Why, when you start felling timber, the chips and splinters will fly, and you can eat those!” They thanked him and began to fell timber. The following year, little by little, they began to take up this and that, each beside the other, and to lay in what was needed. One horse fell to every eight households. They settled. The land proved bountiful. They revived and grew cheerful. The official they knew came again and threw up his hands: “What, you haven't died yet? A pity, a great pity, for look you, that is just why you were sent here: so that you should all perish.”
From the recollections of the Old Believers of Transbaikalia, recorded by the ethnographer Sergei Vasilyevich Maksimov.
The photograph, from the stereoscopic publisher “Svet”, 1909-1911, shows types of the “Semeyskiye”, that is, Old Believers in Transbaikalia.
The Semeyskiye were Old Believers exiled by the government of the Russian Empire to Transbaikalia in the 18th century, at the time of the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. They received their name, “Semeyskiye” (“family people”), from the local inhabitants, in view of their arrival in large families with their property, in contrast to the solitary convicts.
