The Great Siberian Railway by Francis E. Clark

The distance from Vladivostock to Khabaroffsk is a little less than five hundred miles, and it requires fully twenty-nine hours to cover it, so it will be seen that the trains are not run on the "Empire express" plan. However, before we had been many days in Siberia such a rate of progress had come to seem speed itself. The stations on the eastern end of the Siberian railway are not many, for the villages are few and far between, but we make up for the fewness of the stops by spending a long time at each station. Still we can occupy the waiting time very pleasantly by getting many, though fleeting, glimpses of Siberian life. The stations themselves are usually wooden buildings, neat and attractive and prettily painted. A picturesque water-tower is always a feature of the grounds, and usually an underground store-house, sodded over, that looks like an Oklahoma cyclone cellar. In this, doubtless, provisions are kept from freezing during the long Siberian winter. All the principal stations have buffets, where thirsty Russians refresh themselves with vodka, kvass, and other national drinks.

The villages usually consist of a few log-houses, with an occasional more pretentious frame house, but they are neat and attractive, and compare very favorably with the villages on our own Western frontier. The most interesting object at all these stations was the line of country men, women, and children who had brought the products of their farms to sell to the hungry travellers. Every station had its hucksters, not noisy or obtrusive, but waiting patiently in an orderly line for customers. Bottles of milk for ten kopeks, hard-boiled eggs for ten kopeks a dozen, huge loaves of black, sour bread in which the Siberian rejoices, chunks of fried meat and fried fish, huge pickled cucumbers, bottles of home-brewed kvass, a kind of innocent pop beer, were among the comestibles offered for sale. The hucksters were all hearty, healthy specimens of humanity, not refined or elegant in feature or dress -- this could scarcely be expected in this new land -- but wholesome, honest-faced settlers, capable, evidently, of laying deep and strong the foundations of an empire. I am told that many of them are dissenters from the Greek Church, and that they live godly and simple lives, and are much respected by their neighbors, and in this part of the country at least are unmolested by the government, unless they try to proselyte among adherents of the national faith. Most of them, too, are vegetarians. Every village has its church, often embowered in a little park of green, and the towers of blue and green, colors which the Siberians greatly affect for their churches, and bright copper domes, shining in the brilliant sun, always gave a touch of pleasing color to the scene, and showed that the people were not wholly given to buying and selling and getting gain in these little raw railway settlements.