Hunger forced many Russ­ian peas­ants, includ­ing chil­dren and old peo­ple, to beg from their neigh­bors. They felt ashamed. But there was no help for it. There was noth­ing, lit­er­al­ly noth­ing, to eat in their izba. And so they went to oth­er izbas, beg­ging for just a sin­gle morsel of bread. Relief work­er Jon­ah Stradling described what he saw.

On enter­ing the izba the [beg­ging] peas­ant makes the sign of the cross and stops on the thresh­old in silence, or mut­ters in a low voice, “Give in Christ’s name.” Nobody pays any atten­tion to him; all go on with their busi­ness… as if nobody was there. Only the house­wife approach­es the table, picks up a piece of bread three square inch­es in size, and gives it to her vis­i­tor. He makes the sign of the cross and goes. All the pieces giv­en are the same size – three inch­es square. If two peo­ple come togeth­er, the house­wife puts the ques­tion, “Are you col­lect­ing togeth­er?” If the answer is “Yes,” she gives them a piece six square inch­es. The [beg­gar] who tramps the neigh­bor­hood owns a horse and some land… only for the moment he has no bread. When in ten months time he car­ries his crops, he will not mere­ly cease beg­ging, but will him­self be the giv­er of bread to oth­ers. If because of the aid he receives from his neigh­bors now, he weath­ers the storm and suc­ceeds in find­ing work, he will with the mon­ey he earns at once buy bread, and him­self help those who have none…

In 1894, the same year Nicholas became tsar, a Swedish relief workder named Jon­ah Stadling arrived ina peas­ant vil­lage locat­ed just ouside of Moscow. He’d come with a car­go of flour to aid the starv­ing peo­ple. But when he inspect­ed the com­mu­ni­ty, he real­ized mere flour would nev­er be enough. He wrote:

• In izba No. 1 I found one cow, three elder­ly peo­ple, one of whom was lying on top of the stove with typhus by the side of two chil­dren in the last stages of small pox.
• In No. 2 was a child with small pox, an old man with typhus and two women whose bod­ies were all swollen. No cat­tle – all starved: no fuel, no food.
• In No. 3 a curi­ous sight met my eyes. A pair of feet wrapped in rags pro­trud­ed from the oven and in a moment a big peas­ant crept out of the open­ing, fol­lowed by a sick­ly-look­ing woman. Burst­ing into tears, she point­ed to what looked like two bun­dles of rags on top of the oven. It [was] two starv­ing chil­dren close to death. No cat­tle, no food, but just what was giv­en from outside.
• No. 4: Two grown peo­ple and two chil­dren, both ill.
• No. 5 con­tained a woman and two sick­ly and for­lorn children. 
• No. 6 shel­tered three fam­i­lies, one cows, one horse and two sheep all hud­dled togeth­er to pro­tect them­selves from the intense cold. It was a strange sight to see the dyadush­ka, or grand­fa­ther, climb out of a child’s crib to which the horse was tied, come up to me on his aged limbs and salute with a deep bow. I told him that friends in for­eign lands had sent me with help to their suf­fer­ing broth­ers in Rus­sia. In a fee­ble and trem­bling voice, he said, “What Good Peo­ple! May God bless you!” 
• I had not the heart to enter No. 7 that day.