“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.