ABSTRACT

All the Riga newspapers, on account of their "bourgeois" opinions, had been ordered by the Muscovites to cease publication from the day of their entry. In their place there appeared three new Communist newspapers which, though published in three different languages—Lettish, Russian and German—were all edited in the same central office and displayed exactly the same contents. The Red Flag was a tiny sheet, usually of only four pages. It was wretchedly printed on ordinary packing-paper, and made a positively unappetising impression. There was practically no foreign news at all. Thus, in the very first number of the Red Flag which people ever saw, they were confronted with Heine's famous Song of Freedom, which had been given the place of honour and was printed in such prominent type that one could only suppose that the paper intended it as a kind of motto of the "glorious new era".