133
in the reports of local zemstvo committees. Among these, there was
the colony of the Kazan zemstvo for fifty disabled men, the com-
bined hospital and home maintained by the Voronezh zemstvo for
130 men, the training schools in the hospitals of Moscow and Voro-
nezh, a workshop for instruction in wood carving attached to a home
at Nizhni-Novgorod, a home maintained by the district zemstvo of
Skopin, a boot shop for the employment of invalids in Kiev, a home
maintained by the zemstvo of Ekaterinoslav, an asylum at Rostov in
the province of Yaroslav, a number of physico-therapeutic insti-
tutes in various provinces excellently equipped for the special use
of invalids, etc.
The Central Committee of the Union, in addition to working out
a general plan for the relief of invalids, invariably subsidized every
practical measure undertaken in this field by the zemstvo and its
own subcommittees. In view of persistent complaints from various
localities of the large number of invalids accumulating in the zem-
stvo hospitals, the Central Committee obtained the consent of the
military authorities to the temporary transfer of the disabled to
the so-called “patronage” beds, that is, the boarding of patients
with local residents. In its efforts to find a practical way of training
the invalids in codperative bookkeeping, it organized in October,
1916, special demonstration courses in cooperative bookkeeping for
a hundred invalids at the Shanyavsky People’s University.
All these, however, were only isolated measures absolutely inade-
quate in relation to the vast extent of the actual needs. The problem
of relief for disabled soldiers was destined to remain an “unpaid
debt” of the unions, as the High Commissioner of the Zemstvo Un-
lon bitterly remarked in one of his addresses.
*® The problem of relief for disabled soldiers has been discussed in great
detail in the documents from which the history of the Zemstvo Union is
drawn. In addition to the extensive report mentioned above, articles, notices,
and projects may be found in the following numbers of the Bulletin: 10, 11,
12, 18, 16, 17, 19, 20, 27, 29, 30, 31, 83, 34, 35, 86, 37, 38, 40, 48, 49, 50,
52, 53, 54, 55, and in the supplement to Nos. 45-46 (pp. 1-206).
SICK AND WOUNDED
