ABSTRACT

In the second week of May old Frau Walter died. The sinister companion of the Muscovites—starvation—had at last claimed her as its victim. The decline of her fortune set in, swift and irresistible, immediately after the outbreak of the war. The Soviet campaign against religion which had been begun some months before was now—at the beginning of May—entering a new phase. In the course of the following days the Reds arrested nearly all the clergy of Riga who were still at liberty—mostly evangelical pastors, in all about thirty—and threw them into the notorious Central Prison, where they were confined not only with other "bourgeois" prisoners, but also with a large number of common criminals. On Easter Sunday, instead of the usual crowds of churchgoers, an endless string of people could be seen making their way towards the prisons—relations and friends of the prisoners, bringing them gifts.