CHAPTER III
A PEASANT INTERLUDE
Go out among the forests and the people," said Bakunin.
"In the capitals the orators thunder and rage
But in the village is the silence of centuries."
We craved a taste of this silence. Three months we had heard the roar of Revolution. I was saturated with it: Yanishev was exhausted by it. His voice had failed thru incessant speaking and he had been ordered by the Bolshevik Party to take a ten days' respite. So we started out for the Volga basin bound for the little village of Spasskoye (Salvation), from which Yanishev had been driven out in 1907.
It was high noon one August day when we left the Moscow train and set out on the road leading across the fields. Sun-drenched in these last weeks of summer, the fields had turned into wide rolling seas of yellow grain, dotted here and there with islands of green. These were the tree-shaded peasant villages of the province of Vladimir. From a rise in the road we could count sixteen of them, each with its great white church capped with glistening domes. It was a holiday and the distant belfries were
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