“On my arrival at K., on awful life began. We were drilled like
soldiers, and made to salute and shout at the top of our voices for hours
at a time; our instructors were two wild young communists. They could
not say a word, without following it up by the worst and most blasphemous
oaths. I was placed into a wooden hut crammed with prisoners. So narrow
was the space allotted to me that I could only lie on my side. My companions
were very miserable and very filthy thieves and murderers. We lacked
water, as it had to be brought by train from the nearest town. For whole
weeks we were refused boiling water for making tea. The worst prison
would seem a palace in comparison to our dwelling place. Vermin attacked
me in swarms, and never gave me a minute of peace. About three times
a day I had to shake the lice out of my shirt. My whole body bleeds from
scratching. Once we were led to a bath-house, but we were given there a
small pail of bitter sea-water, owing to which, my hair got all glued up.
At six o'clock in the morning work begins, — and what work! — the
hardest and dirtiest imaginable. My companion was Bishop Raphael from
S., a middle-aged man in the second stage of phtisis; there was no room
for him in the hospital, — so he had to suffer and die in these appalling
surroundings.” Let us also mention another letter which has already become
known to Russian Christendom. It depicts the conditions of life, which
fell to the lot of a bishop, banished to the remote North of Siberia
(3° to the North of the Polar Circle). He was given a half-ruined hut.
. There were already two other fishermen’s huts in the neighbourhood, were
the rest of the prisoners lodged). He was obliged to make repairs himself,
but without special tools, without warm clothes; and he had to work breast
deep in snow, in icy weather.
But, although the Church is being violently broken up, it remains orga-
nically whole. Priests are torn away from their flocks, but the religious
anity is far from dying out, it becomes still deeper and triumphs over space
and the walls of prisons (as it triumphs also in linking those in Heaven with
those on earth). A bishop writes from his place of exile in the far North.
“I derive great consolation from the fact of my being able to perform
the sacred service in my hut, together with S. I am praying for all the
people, for all the world. And when I make the sign of the cross in four
directions, I have before my spiritual eyes all my flock, all my dear ones,
all the world.”
The state of the “flock” may be shown by the following remarkable
letter, received at the beginning of 1927 from South Russia, and published
by Father Theodorovitch in the Warsaw periodical “Sunday Reading”
{Voskresnoe Chtenie) No. rr, March 13th, 1927.