While the commoner, who lived in almost the same conditions as the Cossack, but free from the duties of military service, grew rich, the Cossack, burdened with unbearable demands, became poorer and poorer. His debts and arrears in public sums and military capital grew every year, and by the end of the 80s, the majority already felt like almost unpaid debtors and saw no way out of this situation.
At this time, a time of great economic and moral decline of the Orenburg Cossacks, they were visited by a terrible disaster - the hunger strike of 1989. T
From the previous one we have already seen how unprepared the Cossacks were to face this terrible enemy, and therefore we can judge what economic devastation he caused in the general population. Where before this the usual price for grain did not exceed 30-40 kopecks. per pound, it rose to 2-2 rubles. 50 kopecks, and this central bank often could not get it; where the tsfna fna did not exceed 5 kopecks. for a pound, but the straw did not amount to anything (it was often burned on the threshing floor, like a worthless thing), it rose to gr., gr. 20 kopecks per pood.
Due to lack of food, poultry and small livestock were wiped out in some villages without exception. There are very few cattle left. Horses were priced only for the value of their skins. There were absolutely no earnings. By the spring of 1892, the Cossacks, accustomed to eating Kubanka, had to sit on gold pounds of corn, which, not having seen it before, they did not know what to do with. What could be sold was sold. The roofs of houses and barns were opened and fed to livestock. The fences were burned with a hundred firewood, because there was no one behind them. The dress was worn out, and there was nothing to buy a new one. It goes without saying that uniform items were not spared at this time. There were cases when the Cossacks, suffering from hunger and having lost all hope of feeding their combat horse, sold it for one pound of grain, and the Cossacks from the Tatars sold it.
Cossack settlements by the spring of T8 from the year went quickly to cemeteries, and to populated areas. The usual movement was not visible in them, the pfy pfsen was not heard, not even the pfing of the roosters. Only occasionally, like ghosts, half-starved residents and emaciated cattle wandered through the deserted streets. The population seriously began to say that this was sent by God for their peasants and disorderly life. Without any exaggeration, we can say that if the government had not come to the aid of the Cossack population at that time, in the form of a loan to the Cossacks and issued a new regulation on public administration! and villages, then the army would have half died of hunger and would have ceased to exist in the form in which it is in present time. The hunger strike, with very minor exceptions, brought the Cossacks' agriculture to one general level, i.e. She made them almost beggars, and, moreover, imposed on their necks millions of debts for the loan.
This is what kind of inheritance the military authorities received with the publication of a new regulation on the public administration of villages in 189.
But no matter how terrible the famine was in its consequences, it also had its good side. He showed the Cossacks in the most tangible way how right their elders were in stealing public reserves of grain and hay, and to what extent they could be driven by their carelessness towards public interests.
The regulation on the public administration of the villages of 189t, placing the Cossack entirely under the control of the best people of the village societies—representatives and military commanders—gave a completely different direction to the entire structure of his internal life.
neither. It affected every aspect of his life so completely that it constituted a new era for him.
Under his influence, a relatively rapid growth of the public and private economy of the Cossacks and their readiness for a military campaign began.
Having received power into their own hands at the very height of the hunger strike, the representatives and military commanders of the atamans of the divisions, first of all, took the most energetic measures to possibly weaken it, and then to ensure that every grain released for the famine was harvested in the spring of 1892. Due to the lack of draft animals, artels of a few householders were formed for the production of grain. There were also cases where the Cossacks, lacking plows and labor, dug up the ground with shovels, and did the harrowing for themselves, harnessing themselves to the harrows of the VMFSTB with their wives and daughters. God blessed the work of the managers and executors: the harvest in 1892 was good. In subsequent years, the harvests were also satisfactory, and the Cossacks gradually began to recover.