Many families had guests almost daily, the
company sitting around a samovar, discussing and conversing until one or
two in the morning, while the sleepy domestics were stealing a nap in the
anteroom, ready to appear at the call of the mistress. The table had to
be cleared after the guests and the family retired for the night and the
breakfast had to be prepared, boots polished, stoves heated, rooms cleaned
in the early morning. For the master might rest until ten or eleven, but
the children have to be at school by eight and the servants must be ready
to serve them. And though many families kept professional servants, the
country homes depended almost entirely in winter as well as in summer on
local help.
Attempts to improve the condition of peasants were numerous and in some
respects successful, but found an obstacle on the one hand in the attitude
of the Government and on the other in the conservatism and suspicion of the
peasants themselves. Fire insurance and cooperative enterprises helped to a
certain degree, but an almost complete absence of expert agriculturists in
the ranks of the landowners prevented them from demonstrating on their
own estates the value of applied knowledge as well as from teaching the
peasants how to increase the productivity of the land through intensive
farming. Thus it came to pass that the vast majority of landowners, both
conservative and liberal, remained strangers to the people among whom
they lived, whose labor they employed, and for whose welfare many were in
earnest concerned.
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