Founded in 2017, Strange Times is a twice-monthly newsletter that explores the weirdest news of 1921, one day at a time. To get free games and the original PDFs of every article that runs in Strange Times—plus stories that didn’t make the cut—back me on Patreon.

This is the 250th issue of Strange Times, a project I started in 2017 to promote my debut novel. Nearly a decade later, we’ve made it all the way to September. What’ve we learned? Eh, I don’t know. You tell me.

But today we’ve got a short item about amnesia and a long one about famine. Indulge in caviar while the poor starve on…

Bimbo Bronson! It’s so fun to say. Try it yourself, as loud as you can, as publicly as you can.

LONDON, Sept. 6.—Much mystery surrounded the finding of a wondering, memoryless woman at Deal last May, who was fashionably dressed, complained that she had been robbed and gave her nickname as “Bimbo Bronson,” but was unable to remember her real name. She told hospital authorities that she went to Dover to bid farewell to her husband, who was leaving for the Continent or America. She thought he was an American.

For four months all efforts to trace her friends and relatives have failed, but there are signs that her memory is returning. She now describes herself as Diana Hamilton Morgan, and believes she belongs in Virginia, in the United States.

She is about 50 years old and about 5 1/2 feet tall, and has brown eyes and dark hair, turning gray.

The Russian famine is, along with the Troubles and the Mingo County labor unrest, one of the threads that I’ve long followed in this newsletter without featuring it often in the newsletter. Partly that’s because the articles about it rarely stand alone, partly it’s because famine is extremely depressing. This is a rare (bylined!) piece about the famine that stands on its own, and while it’s extremely depressing I thought it an appropriate one to feature in the 250th issue. Because what is history if not full of death and caviar?

By FLOYD GIBBONS.

SAMARA, Aug. 27 (by Courier to Riga, Sept. 6).—Vladimir Sokolsky, the son of a village priest and now the communist Governor of the State of Samara, is 33 years old. He is of medium height, sparsely built, and has a complexion approaching yellow.

He wears his hair uncombed to such an extent that it sometimes gets in front of his sharp gray eyes. Between his reddish-brown mustache and his chin whiskers one may notice the absence of one or two upper front teeth. His face is pock marked. He wears no tie, and he does not button his shirt collar. He speaks slowly, between deep puffs of a cigarette.

“You ask why this tragedy is on our people,” he began through an interpreter. “I will tell you. The great war and the civil war exhausted Russia. The intervention of the Allies prevented Russia from including Samara in its reconstruction program. Samara, the richest State in Southern Russia, has had to give up its surplus to feed the Red Army, which has been fighting our enemies on all sides, and now nature has gone against us and we are suffering the natural consequences.

“Samara has always been rich. It has always been able to take care of climatic deficiencies by surpluses which we have kept over from year to year in granaries all over the State. Normally we used to seed about 10,800,000 acres of land every year, but under the intensive modern methods we could till about 40,500,000 acres. Last year we were able to till only 3,050,000 acres. We have been able, in good and bad y ears, to ship 3,600,000,000 pounds of grain a year to other parts of Russia and the world. We did it last in 1913.

Famine Due to Weather.
“During the civil war the Volga region fed Russia. The Ukraine was occupied, the Crimea was occupied and Admiral Kolchak and bandits were in Siberia. Even with these great drains on our resources we could have come through the year all right if it had not been for the weather. For the last seventeen years, previous to last year, our rainfall for the months of April, May and June has averaged about four and a half inches. This year during the same months we had only about three-tenths of an inch.

“This is our catastrophe: There are 600,000 starving peasants in our State, which is three times as large as Switzerland, and of the 3,000,000 population only 500,000 live in towns. The rest are all agrarian. By starving peasants I mean those actually possessing nothing to eat. The live stock for shipping has long since been slaughtered and the breedings tock also. There have been many reports of cats and dogs being eaten in the towns and field rats in the rural districts. The peasants are also eating a kind of swamp root called “susak,” which is like peat and which chemists say is not poisonous, but is not nourishing. Clay eating has caused hundreds of deaths, particularly among the children.

“The peasants are great bread eaters and they have never bothered with gardens which some people in the towns and cities have maintained by sprinkling. The city dwellers have the advantage of a few vegetables and also some food shipped in by railroads. But the peasant who is left inland is now situated the same as if he were in the middle of a desert. He must either stay where he is and die or he must move down to the river or a railroad on the possible chance of food reaching him. But then he encounters additional risks of cholera and typhus, which are now epidemic due to the enormous emigrations to such centres.

Local Efforts to Meet Crisis.
“For our own part we are working along three lines. First, the central Government and all the State Governments have voted a special tax on those sections which have produced small surpluses by reason of regional rains. Second, we are trying to manufacture small articles of handicraft to exchange for food. Third, peasants’ committees have been organized in all localities to distribute what relief is available and to invent means to cope with the situation. All that we can hope to raise by these methods is 576,000,000 pounds, while our minimum consumption until next harvest is estimated at 1,404,000,000 pounds. Our deficit is 820,000,000 pounds.

“The Russian people will not be able to raise a fund to help such a seemingly hopeless situation. You know they cannot do the impossible. American help is needed, and we ask for it. Officially we have heard that help was coming, but we do not like to announce it too much until we are sure—we do not want to make people passive or to diminish their efforts to save themselves. It is my hope that not only the poor people of America, but the upper classes, too, will help us.”

The Governor admitted that statistics on the cholera and typhus epidemics have not been kept. Deaths have come so fast that there has been no time, nor doctors enough, to ascertain the causes. There has been no record kept of the burials. Staff men have been kept in the cemetery digging graves all the time, but they had to depend upon the town folk or the relatives of the dead to carry the bodies away and to bury them.

He said that as near as he could figure between 140 and 200 persons have been dying in the city of Samara every day since Spring. Maybe the cold weather, he thought, might stop the cholera, but the cold weather was sure to increase the typhus, which was even worse.

Leaving the white building which serves as the Governor’s mansion above the park on the banks of the Volga, we entered the city streets again, passing twelve funerals in a fifteen minutes’ walk. Plain wooden boxes were carried on a wagon drawn by dejected horses. The coffins were all open, with some one walking ahead of the horses, carrying a coffin lid on his head. When no wagons were available the boxes were carried on the shoulders of four men. Small boxes containing the bodies of babies and children were simply carried under the arms of bareheaded peasants who walked slowly down the main street to the city toward the cemetery. People on the sidewalks and in groups in front of the stores were constantly making signs of the cross as the processions of the body bearers passed. The few shopkeepers who have reopened their business are attempting to make their pitiful supplies look as attractive as possible. One man I saw arranging some secondhand brass objects, a pair of white canvas shoes that had been used and were soiled, a pair of roller skates, a set of draftman’s instruments, a bouquet of faded artificial flowers, some old flymarked postal cards and other miscellaneous junk that has long been hidden in cellars since the time when the communists confiscated all private goods for common ownership. Now with the decree lifted and the new economic policy established, these penny catching, or rather thousand ruble note catching, nicknacks are reappearing.

Change to Old Policy at Wrong Time.
The changing back gradually to the old policy of private ownership and the operation of the small private stores now makes the past failures of the Government all the more apparent, particularly in view of the fact that the change comes today at a time when any other State in the world faced with the same crisis would change from private ownership to the immediate Government confiscation of food supplies for feeding its starving millions.

It is a strange commentary on the present state of so-called communism here in Samara that hundreds are lying in the streets slowly dying of starvation while it is possible for me to walk into the principal restaurant and order a 70,000-ruble meal, consisting of cabbage soup, beef, potatoes, bread and butter, tea and white cakes with stewed fruit, or walk out with two pounds of the finest Russian caviar under my arm for the modest cost of 50,000 rubles, or around $1.50, which is much cheaper than it could have been obtained for before the war.

And this is in days of great hunger. But one learns Russia by its contradictions. For instance, after dinner tonight I went to the public park on the banks of the Volga at the end of the town. Sleeping on the ground or on the benches at night is prohibited, as in America, only here in Samara the weary, hungry and sleepless ones stay outside of the park peering through the railings—at the more or less happy scene under the garlands of electric lights strung among the lower branches of the trees.

Under a big collection of arc lights a five-piece orchestra was playing selections from “The Dollar Princess.” The violinist and his leader wore a straw hat, because the night was chilly. The man at the piano was in his shirtsleeves. The clarinet player wore a rough, much-patched corduroy suit with a visored white hat of German band style. A woman in a red waist and blue skirt played a ‘cello.

Soldiers and officers with their girls were sauntering through the paths, taking pains, proudly, not to salute or to recognize one another, because that would be like the bourgeois armies. Waiters were serving tea, cigarettes, soda, but no liquor, at tables near the orchestra, and my communist guide proudly explained that the park was not being exploited by private interests who rent the place from the Government.

Waiting at a corner for a drosky, my guide found a news poster pasted on a telegraph pole. It was a Tribune dispatch which I had telegraphed on Aug. 11 from Danzig to Berlin for relay by wireless to America. It told of the departure from Danzig of a steamer carrying the first American relief for Russia. My guide proudly explained that the Government wireless is listening in at all times and learns all the news of the world that is sent through the air.

On the corner a new café had been opened. Barefooted girls waited on the six tables there, one of them attending to a squeaky phonograph which was playing “Hiawatha.” My guide bargained with the isvostchik, the driver of the drosky, for return to our station, and after our departure up the unlighted cobblestone street the driver continually turned around toward us to drive home his arguments for more money.

“The feed for my horse costs 70,000 rubles daily,” he explained, “and I need at least 30,000 rubles a day to keep myself and my family of four, so that I must make at least 100,000 rubles daily to meet expenses. It is a hell of a life, driving a drosky in Samara these days. Droskies are getting fewer and fewer every day. Fares are scarce and the money is worthless. There is less and less to feed horses. As soon as a horse dies, the driver and his family eat the horse and then join the starving crowd at the station.”

Misery Herded at Station.
Back at the station it was cold. Thousands were prostrating on the ground, shivering, scratching and grunting under their lousy rags and animal hides. Most of the station electric lights were gone. There was plenty of electricity, but the bulbs were broken or had disappeared.

The interior of the waiting room was stifling from the stench of 806 unclean humans were lying on the floor. Occasionally a baby cried—but only occasionally. They were too weak. All of them are starving. They have only one hope, that a train may take them away to some land of food and peace.