exeouted by shooting in Uriev*). Such facts of radiant martyrdom are 
numerous. 
Tt is difficult to fix the general number of priests and monks executed 
in the first years of Bolshevism. Here are some approximate figures: 
2,691 persons 
1,962 
3.447 
8.100 persons 
(The figures were given in 1924, by the Bishop of the “New Church’’, 
Nicholas Solovei.) 
At present executions of members of the Church have certainly become 
rarer. But how many of them languish in prisons or in banishment. 
It is reckoned that 117 bishops were in prisons in the Summer of 1927, 
but it is an incomplete list. The general number of bishops imprisoned 
and banished to the extreme North of Russia amounted in that summer to 
140 to 150. During one year (1927) from Moscow alone, 35 bishops (kept 
at first in Moscow prisons) were sent to their place of banishment; 14 
bishops were banished from Kiev. 
Letters coming from there are eagerly read by religious people. Here 
are two letters (sent from Soviet Russia via Finland), one of which refers 
to recent years; the other one is of still more recent date. 
“On Tuesday, Easter week, these bishops were expelled from our town; 
one of them was an invalid. They were expelled surreptiously, and were 
not even allowed to take leave of their relatives and the parish. Notwith- 
standing the mystery surrounding their departure, a good number of people 
gathered at the station to see them off; a Red Guard detachment was sent 
for. One was forbidden to approach the carriage, the windows of which 
were purposely dimmed with soot. When the train started, the bishops 
blessed their flock by the help of a candle, — otherwise nothing could be 
seen through the sooty panes. These letters tell us that they were jeered 
at during the journey. On their arrival at N., they were led to the governor 
of the town, who said in their presence that the prison was full-up, and that 
he would not allow “these quacks to loaf about the town’’. He ordered them 
to be sent further on, to Irkutsk. The bishops were brought back 
to the same carriage, which was now crammed with convicts. The latter 
attacked the priests, the guards being unable to stop the criminals. Bishop 
J., suffers from blows. God knows what new hardships are in store for 
them.” Here is a letter of a bishop from his place of banishment in the 
North of Russia: 
— 
84 
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*) BR