Everyday Life Underground

Thirty years have passed since those historic days of 1940, when the insurgent working people of Latvia overthrew the hated fascist regime and put an end forever to political oppression and exploitation, to the nightmares of agonizing unemployment and poverty. In our republic a new generation of free Soviet people has already grown up, people who feel in everything the warm care of the new socialist state. Yet the glorious deeds of those who, for two decades, selflessly fought in the ranks of the Communist Party of Latvia for the victory of the working class will remain in the people's memory for a long time. Armed with the most powerful weapon, the teachings of the great Lenin, they did not lose heart in times of temporary setbacks and never overestimated the successes they had achieved. In a difficult and prolonged struggle, day after day, they prepared the masses for the decisive clash with the class enemy.

The desire to convey to the reader at least a small part of this great and inspiring epic of revolutionary struggle, in which I too had occasion to take part, and to acquaint the reader with an entire detachment of modest and heroic workers of the underground, who gave their lives for our happy communist present, prompted me to undertake the preparation of this book.

The book "Everyday Life Underground" reflects different periods of the revolutionary movement in bourgeois Latvia.

The twenties were a period when various bourgeois parties noisily busied themselves on the political stage, beginning with all sorts of pseudo-democratic and pseudo-socialist parties, all the way to

the ruling Ulmanis kulak union and the neo-fascist party of Arveds Bergs, the most reactionary party of the urban bourgeoisie.

Only one party in this period of vaunted bourgeois democracy was under the strictest political ban: the party of revolutionary workers and peasants, the Communist Party of Latvia. Members of this party were shot after trial and without any trial, sentenced to hard labor and many years of imprisonment, and subjected to torture and abuse.

Despite the brutal terror, the Communist Party of Latvia, driven underground, used every possible means for legal and illegal work among the masses.

The most important area for the legal activity of communists at that time was political work in the trade unions, which until 1922 united workers of different tendencies. After the split in the trade-union movement in Latvia, caused by the provocative actions of Social Democratic leaders, the left revolutionary trade unions continued consistently to defend the interests of the entire Latvian proletariat. Combining the everyday struggle to improve workers' labor conditions with the struggle for their political rights, the left trade unions, led by the illegal Communist Party of Latvia, raised the workers of individual enterprises and whole branches of industry in strikes. Responding quickly to all the urgent demands of the working people and to the most important political events in the country, the left trade unions conducted broad campaigns against high prices and unemployment, for the release of political prisoners, and against the threat of fascist danger. Through these trade unions, the Communist Party carried out extensive work explaining the treacherous activity of the Social Democratic leaders, who helped the bourgeoisie disrupt economic and political strikes and stubbornly opposed the creation of a united front of working people.

This period is described in the first part of the book, "In the Red Forstadt," which shows the activity of the Russian Cultural and Educational Section of the Central Bureau of Riga Trade Unions. It also tells of the preparation and conduct of a public trial of Latvian Menshevik leaders, in whose defense the entire bourgeois press later raised such a loud uproar. This part concludes with the destruction of the Russian Cultural and Educational Section and the trial of its activists.

The second part of the book, "On the Front Line," describes revolutionary work in 1933 and the beginning of 1934. This was the period immediately preceding the fascist coup in Latvia. By that time, when all legal left-wing workers' organizations had already been liquidated, apart from the Social Democratic ones, the forms and methods of the Communist Party's political activity had also changed. Its main attention was now shifted to illegal work in factories and enterprises, among railway workers, and in the army.

The Riga party organization then consisted of four districts. The first district included the Moscow Forstadt and the city center. All of Zadvinye was considered the second district, and Krasnodvinye the third. Grizinkalns and all the enterprises beyond the Air Bridge belonged to the fourth district. The district organizations of the illegal Komsomol and "Red Aid" were divided in the same way.

This part tells of the activity of the party committee of the first district and of the Riga city committee, in which I then had occasion to work. It shows the illegal meeting places of communists, party conferences, surveillance, the difficult and painstaking work of preparing and publishing underground editions, the tense pre-May Day period of 1933 and 1934, the hot summer of the revolutionary workers' struggle against the shackling prison law, and the hard daily life of political prisoners in Riga Central Prison.

Now at last everything has been arranged: you are being sent to the Russian Cultural and Educational Section attached to the Central Bureau of Riga Trade Unions. Organizational and propaganda work in this section will be your main party assignment.

That was how, in December 1925, S. Matison, the head of the illegal communist faction in the trade union of commercial and industrial workers, assigned me to new party work. Constantly occupied with resolving many practical questions, he was almost always on the move. He could rarely be seen sitting calmly at a desk in the premises of the left trade unions at 10 Akas Street. In many ways Matison resembled his deceased brother, who in 1921, while being expelled to Soviet Russia, was secretly killed by a counterintelligence officer not far from the Latvian-Soviet border.

After the political police arrested a group of underground communists who had been carrying out mass work in the Moscow Forstadt, the party tried to strengthen the section's illegal core with new comrades. An activist from the woodworkers' union, the communist N. Halperin, was also sent into the section.

As Matison instructed, at the section's club I was to approach the chair of the presidium, Anna

Marx's phrase "religion is the opium of the people," the so-called "Living Church" in the Soviet Union, and other topics.

That was how I became acquainted with the members of the Russian Cultural and Educational Section.

In February, the club held its annual reporting meeting. After Larina's report, many of those who spoke talked about how to get mass work going again. There was a stormy discussion of the question of expelling the railway worker Veis from the section: there were facts that clearly pointed to his connection with the political police.

Together with other workers' organizations, the section prepared for the demonstration on February 21. The Riga trade unions called on all working people to come out that day for a protest demonstration against the new customs tariff being discussed in the Saeima, which provided for an increase of more than half in import duties on all consumer goods. For the sake of enriching domestic entrepreneurs, workers' and employees' real wages were again being reduced, and their living conditions were sharply worsening.

In the club, people hurriedly set about preparing slogans and drawing satirical placards on square sheets of plywood and cardboard.

About twenty thousand working people took part in the demonstration, and twice as many attended the rally on the Esplanade. The police tried to disperse the demonstrators and beat them. A group of workers arrested on February 21, trade-union activists, were brought to trial.

After the destruction of the underground organization attached to the section, political work in the club became considerably more complicated. At first, therefore, the section's activity was limited to cultural and educational questions. On Sundays there were literary evenings and public lectures on the structure of the universe and on Darwin's teaching, with slides shown. Lecturers came from the left association, the Congress of Extracurricular Education: Fricis Galenieks, Andrejs Kurcijs, and the most progressive educators.

Workers who did not belong to trade unions also came to the club for these readings. Understandably, they were interested in more than questions of general science.

Young people came there more and more often. A choral circle and a string orchestra were organized. On rehearsal days, the melodies of folk and Soviet songs sounded in the club until late at night. The drama circle rehearsed, learning new agitprop plays by Linards Laicens. In them, responding to recent events, the author showed the powerless position of workers in capitalist countries, the oppression of colonial peoples, and the growing revolutionary struggle of all the exploited.

Every Wednesday there were question-and-answer evenings. From a wooden box hanging in the club, notes that had accumulated over the week were taken out, containing questions on various topics. The better-prepared comrades explained everything to those assembled. Additional questions could also be asked orally on the spot.

Of course, not everything could always be said directly and openly. On some questions, such as the theory of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, the Comintern, and the communist

party, one had to speak in a very veiled form, remembering that "even walls have ears."

A social-scientific study circle was also organized, in which questions of political economy and historical materialism were studied.

Gradually the section established ties with the workers of the Brothers Kuznetsov faience factory, the Kvadrats rubber-goods factory, the bone-processing plant, and other enterprises in the district. One after another, branches of the left trade unions were organized there: builders, leather workers, and chemical-industry workers.

Revolutionary proletarian ideas found a broad response among the working people of the Forstadt. At open evenings devoted to International Women's Day, the memory of the Paris Commune, May Day, and at other mass meetings held in the large hall of the volunteer fire society on Lubanas Street, the hall was always full.

Under the procedure established by the police, the passport details of a speaker appearing at a meeting or rally had to be registered in advance with the city prefecture. We used this loophole to deceive the police. The officially registered comrade limited himself to a brief, harmless introduction to the question under discussion and then invited those who wished to take part in the debate. Only then would the real speaker appear with developed theses. When the police tried to arrest this unexpectedly appearing speaker, he would usually, with the help of comrades, manage to slip away in time through the spare door behind the stage...

The preparation and conduct of all the section's mass activities, and the work of the newly organized party cells in the Moscow Forstadt, were directed by a co-opted subdistrict committee. It included the worker M. Chivkul, N. Halperin, a representative of the party's First District Committee, the teacher R. Evelson, and me. For a time the workers A. Aleksandrovich and S. Kachanov also served on the subdistrict committee.

In winter we faced great difficulties, because it was not always possible to find reliable apartments for meetings of the cell members and of the subdistrict committee.

But in spring and summer, when meetings were often held in the woods, it was much easier. More than once, meetings of the subdistrict committee were arranged on Zvīrgzdu Island or in a boat, under the guise of an ordinary evening outing on the calm Daugava. The security police, of course, did not even suspect these meetings in the middle of the river...

Encouraged by the authorities, gangs of hooligans from the fascist organization "National Club" attacked workers' meetings and demonstrations more and more often. Equally unseemly was the role of members of the Social Democratic sports organization, led by the seasoned political-police agent Bruno Kalniņš. They diligently helped plainclothes agents and policemen beat and arrest workers who spoke out against the Social Democratic leaders.

It became necessary to organize workers' self-defense.

A meeting of representatives of the legal communist fractions within the left trade unions was convened on this question. The meeting was held late in the evening outside the city, in the Biķernieki Forest. There were seven or eight of us in all. Just as we had all gathered and sat down on the ground, a rifle shot rang out nearby. We waited several minutes. But no one fired again. Evidently it had been a forest ranger making his rounds. It was risky to remain where we were. With us was a short comrade in a dark cloak and a cap with a short vis-

or. I was seeing this comrade for the first time. In a calm voice he suggested that we follow him. The night was moonless. In single file, one by one, brushing away branches that struck us in the face, we ran without stopping, off any road, several kilometers deep into the forest. The comrade running ahead oriented himself in the forest remarkably well. It was clear that he had long since studied this area far and wide.

At last, coming out onto a clearing, we sat down and continued the meeting.

The comrade in the dark cloak and cap, who turned out to be Martyn-Ozol, a representative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Latvia, gave a review of the political situation, paying particular attention to the strengthening of reaction in Latvia. Then he informed us in detail of the party's position on organizing workers' self-defense. The fractions were urged to speed up the creation, within the trade unions, of large groups to guard meetings and the premises of workers' organizations. Organized into units, after the necessary training under comrades from among the former Red Riflemen, they were to become a strong anti-fascist fist.

Soon a mass physical-culture organization began its work under the Central Bureau of the Riga trade unions. Defense groups were created in all the trade unions, and for their members a breast badge was introduced: dark-blue letters "FK" on a red background.

Practical training began. On the outskirts of the city, on a large vacant lot at the end of Pernavas Street, young and older trade unionists gathered after work. At the command of their instructors,

they formed ranks and then learned to move quickly: drill training was under way.

The year 1927 was especially full of events. At the beginning of the year Latvia and the USSR were conducting negotiations on the conclusion of a trade agreement. Despite the large orders for Latvian industry and major transit shipments through Latvian ports proposed by the USSR, the negotiations dragged on. Reactionary circles tried in every way to disrupt the conclusion of the agreement.

To explain this to the working people, the left trade unions held mass rallies. At them, in order to reduce unemployment in the country, workers demanded the speediest possible conclusion of a trade agreement with the Soviet Union.

One of these rallies, at the proposal of the Riga Party Committee, was organized by our subdistrict. The rally, arranged by the Russian cultural-educational section under the Central Bureau of the Riga trade unions, was also attended by the Social Democratic Party leaders Dzevers and Samoilov, and by Bumeister, a member of the Central Committee. In the debate they hoped, with their anti-Soviet harangues, to confuse those present. But the indignant workers would not let them speak. The "socialist" who cynically declared that "we are not averse to importing Soviet grain, but we do not need communist ideas..." was loudly whistled down.

In the summer of 1927, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Latvia, a campaign was conducted against the worsening of the regime for political prisoners. The Menshevik government then in power intended to introduce a new prison regime in Latvian prisons: the so-called progressive system. Under this system, the conditions of confinement for convicts, who at the beginning of their sentence were brought to extreme physical exhaustion under complete moral isolation, with permission to read only the Bible and other religious literature, would later change depending on the degree of "correction." But since political prisoners in no way yielded to such "correction," they were thereby condemned to perma-

nent starvation ration and the cruelest treatment by the prison guards.

Linards Laicens wrote in great detail in our press about the essence of this system, citing extensive material from the practice of its use by French colonizers in the African lands they had enslaved.

Numerous rallies were held in support of the political prisoners who had declared a protest hunger strike in August 1927. Riga also saw a citywide demonstration demanding amnesty for political prisoners. The demonstration, in which several hundred people took part, ended with a rally in the square by the Vidzeme Market. Among the speakers was Reichenbach, chairman of the Central Bureau of the Riga trade unions.

The party's Moscow subdistrict also organized a protest meeting in the premises on Lubanas Street, where the Udarnik cinema is now located. I remember well how all the section activists, inspired by a feeling of deep solidarity with the political prisoners, hurried to distribute hundreds of small colored appeals with a striking image of prison bars and a call to take part in the protest meeting. In the very last hours they managed to have them printed at the Dzintars printing house. Nikolai Morozov, a member of the section, showed great initiative in distributing them among the workers of the Forstadt. He was a chauffeur and drove a passenger car. In it he quickly reached enterprises located on the very outskirts.

But even before the meeting began, we were not sure that everything had been done to secure such an important mass event at that moment. All the

more so because we were forced to hold it on a working day.

One of the first to arrive at the meeting was the chief of the police precinct, accompanied by several policemen. This unusual appearance by the highest and most fearsome authority in the whole Forstadt immediately put us on guard: had they decided to disrupt the protest meeting?

Even the always calm, elderly transport worker Yefim Ivanov, who had been registered with the prefecture as responsible for this meeting, was slightly nervous. He often twisted the ends of his long blond mustache; a couple of times he went over to his wife, who was sitting in the hall. An Estonian and a participant in the revolutionary movement, she had barely escaped General Laidoner's bloody terror after the suppression of the workers' uprising in Estonia in 1924.

Soon people began to gather. The Forstadt residents came here in whole groups straight after work. We had not expected such a large number of people. The hall was overflowing; many crowded in the aisle and the foyer.

The green stage curtain opened. Ivanov walked to the lectern with measured steps. His underground comrades knew him as a modest man, exceptionally devoted to the Communist Party in any work assigned to him. Visibly anxious, Ivanov announced the opening of the meeting. After a brief introduction to the question under discussion, he gave the floor to the speaker. The speaker's passionate address in defense of the revolutionary fighters who had declared a hunger strike against the introduction of the new regime in Latvian prisons met with a lively response from the workers, men and women, who were present.

After the report, the section's drama circle performed the play The Wall, about the life of political prisoners in tsarist Russia.

At that time, any production in a workers' club required permission from the police prefecture, and it was often necessary to submit the text for censorship as well. But this time it helped that the title of the play and the name of its little-known author did not attract special attention from the police censors. Its concluding part was later "reworked" in the drama circle: in the finale, the insurgent workers were shown approaching the prison and freeing the political prisoners. Unshackled iron chains fall, and one of the former prisoners addresses those present from the stage with a sharp, stirring speech against the bourgeois regime... The hall literally thundered with applause and approving cries. Demands rang out for amnesty for all political prisoners. It is no surprise that the policemen in the hall, and the plainclothes agents who were quickly recognized, hastened to move from the front rows closer to the exit...

This protest meeting vividly expressed the mood of the workers.

In November the third anniversary of the founding of the Russian cultural-educational section was marked. Despite the fact that most of its former activists had been arrested, the section was expanding Marxist propaganda ever more broadly in this district. The anniversary evening in the large premises on Lubanas Street turned into an impressive revolutionary demon-

stration.

On the festively decorated stage, at a table covered with red cloth, sat the entire presidium of the section and the chairmen of the trade-union branches that had been organized under it. There were more than four hundred people in the hall.

Representatives of the Central Bureau of the Riga trade unions warmly greeted the workers of the Forstadt. The presidium of the section was presented with a red silk banner. On it gleamed the words embroidered in gold: "In unity is strength!"

A rank of physical-culture members carried the banner slowly around the hall. Everyone greeted it

standing, while the orchestra played the Internationale. In that solemn moment, everyone present felt great joy.

But in bourgeois Latvia the workers never once managed to march through the city's streets under this banner. After the soon-following rout and closure of the left trade unions, the section's banner, saved by activists, lay buried in the ground for many years.

For the anniversary evening, the drama circle prepared Linards Laicens's revolutionary play Alpha and Auto in five acts. I hurriedly translated the play into Russian for our drama circle. After reading the translation, the author approved it.

In November the first issue of a four-page legal newspaper in Russian was released: Voice of Labor, a weekly publication of the Central Bureau of the Riga trade unions. The members of the section quickly distributed most of its print run among the working people of the Forstadt. M. Yakovlev, who had also been elected chairman of the section presidium in place of A. Larina after her departure for the Soviet Union, was registered as the newspaper's responsible editor.

The plan for each issue of this newspaper and all the materials for it were prepared by an illegal editorial board of five people appointed by the Riga Committee. The editorial board included a member of the Riga Committee and representatives of the party's district and subdistrict committees. The newspaper covered the most important political questions, and printed many correspondences about the condition of workers at enterprises.

Like all publications issued by the left trade unions, the newspaper Voice of Labor was confiscated by the censor on its third issue, and an investigation began against its editor. Such was freedom of the press in bourgeois Latvia.

At that time I often visited the bookstore of the Daile un Darbs publishing house, Art and Labor. The founders of this publishing house were a group of progressive cultural figures, among them the poet Rainis. Leon Paegle, Linards Laicens, Andrejs Kurcijs, and others worked there as editors. Unlike many private publishing houses, which as a rule issued no Marxist literature, Daile un Darbs mainly published and distributed works by Marx and Engels in Latvian, popular-science literature, essays on the history of the workers' movement, and works by progressive Latvian writers.

The publishing house's bookstore on Brivibas Street also sold Soviet publications of a social-scientific character. There I bought new books and scores of new Soviet songs for the section choir.

Once, along with other books, I obtained in this store a collection of articles on forms of club work. In it, alongside other activities, the holding of literary and public trials was recommended.

When I later became thoroughly acquainted with the contents of the collection, the thought occurred to me that it would be good to stage in the section a public trial of the Latvian Social Democratic leaders. The possibility seemed tempting: to show the workers, clearly and concretely, through dramatic roles, the leaders' treacherous role.

At a meeting of the subdistrict committee this proposal was supported, and soon it was also approved by the city committee of the party. Extensive and serious preparatory work began.

The list of characters was determined and performers were selected. The accused were to include representatives both of the right, openly reformist wing, Cielens, and of the "left" wing, Menders, who in fact concealed the opportunist essence of Menshevism behind revolutionary phraseology. The notorious Bruno Kalniņš was also to appear before the public trial for his activity in Ulmanis's counterintelligence service in 1919. In 1926 he had betrayed to the security police a group of Social Democratic youth from Kuldiga who had joined the left trade unions.

The roles were distributed, of course, with each person's wishes in mind. It was decided that the presiding judge of the public trial would be Makar Yakovlev, head of the leather-workers' union branch and a worker-shoemaker; the members of the court would be the women workers Maria Kostyukova and Yevdokiya Yakovleva. The hardest task was finding people to play the accused: Cielens, Menders, and Bruno Kalniņš. Comrades agreed to these unpleasant roles reluctantly... The public defender was appoin-

ted: Ivan Terentyev, a worker from "Kuznetsovka"; I took on the duties of public prosecutor.

I drew up an indictment of about twenty points, in which the actions of the Menshevik leaders aimed at splitting the workers' movement were listed in detail, beginning with their active participation in the camp of the bourgeois nationalists in the armed struggle against Soviet power in Latvia in 1919. They were accused of repeatedly disrupting workers' strikes, of cooperating with the chiefs of the bourgeois parties, and of joint activity with them in the Saeima aimed at maintaining the power of the capitalists. The indictment also noted their stubborn refusal to organize a united proletarian fighting front. This clearly testified to their unwillingness to defend even bourgeois democracy from the ever-growing threat of fascism.

I gave each participant in the public trial a typewritten copy of the indictment. So that not a single copy would fall into the hands of the security police, I arranged for them to be returned to me afterward.

As before every club production in the section, rehearsals were held in advance. We learned the roles and refined the questions of the judges, prosecutor, and defender, and the answers of the accused and witnesses. In everything it was necessary to achieve political sharpness and clarity, to reveal comprehensibly the differences on fundamental questions between the representatives of the growing revolutionary movement, led by the Marxist-Leninist party, and the renegades from the Second International, who were dragging the workers into the rotten swamp of bourgeois liberalism and chauvinism.

At last the painstaking preparatory work was finished. On Friday the final general rehearsal took place, dragging on until late at night. Now each of us waited anxiously for Sunday, when we would have to appear at the open public trial. After all, we were holding such an event for the first time.

In the small club room, chairs and benches were set out in tight rows to fit more people. Despite the hot sunny weather, which on that summer day tempted people to rest in the nearby woods or by the river, people began gathering by the announced hour. They even came as whole families.

Here came women workers from the Kvadrats factory, where English and German shareholders were introducing the newest methods of ruthless exploitation of women's labor. Young people came from the Brothers Kuznetsov faience factory, whose longtime owners spared no expense to keep whole generations of Russian workers obedient. The factory had a church, a school, and a library. All this, of course, was used by the owners in their attempts to shield the workers in every way from revolutionary influence. Members of the builders' union branch also came; they always actively attended the evenings and concert-rallies organized by the section.

Soon all the seats were taken. The younger people stood by the wall.

At the front, behind the table, the chairman and two members of the public trial took their places. To their left, the public defender approached an improvised lectern covered with light-yellow paper. On the opposite side stood a red lectern; beside it stood the public prosecu-

tor. The performers of the other roles also seated themselves.

There was noticeable animation in the audience. Some, especially among the youth, looked curiously into the faces of the anxious "judges" and the "accused," who could barely hide their smiles.

Ringing a small bell, Makar Yakovlev rose from his place. He announced the opening of the public trial of the Latvian Social Democratic leaders: Cielens, Menders, and Bruno Kalniņš.

The indictment was read aloud.

Then came questioning of the accused, testimony of witnesses, and their answers to the questions of the judges, prosecutor, defender, and additional questions from the audience.

In their speeches, the accused explained in very accessible terms their reformist-conciliationist tactics, which, as they asserted, alone could lead to socialism. They justified their divisive actions, proved the advantages of "pure" bourgeois democracy and the unfitness of the proletarian dictatorship for the working class. They defended in every way the opportunist tactics of the Second International and expressed solidarity with its leaders in Germany, England, France, and Belgium. The speeches of the accused were constructed so as to give those present the maximum opportunity to understand the principles and treacherous practice of the Social Democratic leaders.

With particular skill and thoughtfulness, the role of Cielens, the most dyed-in-the-wool ideologue of Menshevism, was played by the transport worker Semyon Samoilov, who a couple of years later would die tragically in the Central Prison.

Naum Halperin showed very clearly all the subtleties of the political line of the "left" Social Democratic leader Menders. This was very important, because the Social Democratic bosses often misled the workers by covering the opportunist essence of their actions with revolutionary phrases.

After the public defender, I was given the floor as public prosecutor.

Following the indictment and the exhaustive speeches of the accused, I exposed point by point the anti-worker tactics of the Latvian Social Democratic leaders. I emphasized that, while presenting themselves as certified defenders of bourgeois democracy, in reality they often indulged reactionary circles in curtailing the democratic rights of the working people and helped them in reprisals against revolutionary workers. While fighting only in words against the activity of fascist organizations in the country, the Social Democratic leaders had assisted in the introduction of military field courts whose entire edge was directed against active fighters of the working class.

The repeated cries of approval from the audience showed that the purpose of the public trial was well understood. Under the conditions of the time, this form of propaganda proved very convenient and effective.

During the break the audience heatedly discussed the course of the public trial, and the accused were very glad finally to be freed from these compulsory roles.

Soon everyone took their places again. The bell rang again, and Yakovlev announced the decision of the public trial:

"The accused Social Democratic leaders are hereby subjected to public censure."

Among those present, a few dissatisfied voices were heard. It had to be explained that the purpose of the public trial was to give a public assessment of the actions of the Social Democratic leaders under the conditions of revolutionary struggle in bourgeois Latvia. And the decision of the public trial fully corresponded to that purpose.

The public trial was over.

And a few months later all its participants themselves had to appear before a bourgeois court...

Although the cultural-educational section was legal, under bourgeois democracy work even in such an organization was bound up with many difficulties. This was felt especially strongly in the Moscow Forstadt.

The Russian workers who lived in this district regarded the Soviet Union with warm sympathy. Along with economic oppression, in bourgeois Latvia they also suffered national humiliations. For this reason the security police struck here with particular fury, arresting class-conscious workers by the dozens. The section of the Social Democratic Party operating in this district indirectly helped the security police. It tried in every way to divert the workers from active revolutionary struggle. Things reached the point where special youth groups systematically tore down all announcements and posters in which our section announced meetings, lectures, and concert-

rallies. Various religious societies also tried to preserve their influence among the workers. There were many churches and prayer houses in the Forstadt. Here, too, a large Baptist church had been built with American money. The Baptists were especially zealous in recruiting people driven into extreme need by constant unemployment. A night shelter for the unemployed had even been arranged at the church.

And despite all this, many workers found the correct path of struggle, went into the left trade-union organizations, and sought and found a connection with the revolutionary movement.

The activists of the left trade unions' cultural-educational section in the Forstadt were Makar Yakovlev, Semyon Samoilov, Naum Halperin, Anna Kokina, Spiridon Kachanov, Yefim Ivanov, Maria Kostyukova, Khaya Fridland, Iosif Yankovsky, Faddei Torkach, Nikolai Lushchenok, Nyura Maksimova, Kiryan Isaev, Zina Puntsulis, Zakhar Galileev, and other comrades. Most of them were members of the Communist Party of Latvia.

On December 31, 1927, a large crowd gathered in the big Uley hall, now the building of the Russian Drama Theater. An evening to welcome the New Year was being held, organized by the Central Bureau of the Riga trade unions. Activists from all the left trade unions came to see off the old year and welcome the new one, and there were many young people.

The report spoke about milestones of the workers' movement and the growing unity of the masses in the country, about the prospects for 1928, which, as is known, became the year of the strug-

Choir of the Russian cultural-educational section of the Central Bureau of the Riga trade unions at the Festival of Labor in 1927 in Solnechny Garden.

—gle, a general political strike of the workers of Latvia, and a fundamental turning point in their revolutionary movement.

After the report, with its extensive and interesting program, the trade union amateur performance circles took the stage.

By midnight Russian folk and revolutionary songs were ringing out from the stage in the Uley hall, performed by the choir of the Russian cultural-educational section, led by the young, gifted conductor Zegor (shot by the German fascist occupiers). To thunderous applause, the choir gave an encore of the song popular at the time, "We, the Young Smiths," and the beautiful antifascist "Song of the Italian Workers," with its ringing modulations of women's and men's voices. The evening passed with great enthusiasm.

And on the night of January 1 to 2, the security police carried out mass searches and arrests among the members of the section.

That night I came home late from a meeting of the underground propaganda collegium. I had not yet fallen asleep when there came a loud knock at the door. Clearly the security police had descended on us.

My mother, who had woken up, ran into my room and asked anxiously whether I had anything that needed to be hidden. I reassured her and said the door could be opened in a few minutes.

Without turning on the light, I quickly groped my way through the darkness and found the latest issue of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Latvia's theoretical publication, "Tovarishch" ("Comrade"), which I had received earlier that day, and I hid it among the other books on the bookshelf.

This was the first visit by the security police and my first search. I thought the appearance of the political police was tied to the anniversary of the liberation of Riga by the Red Latvian Riflemen on January 3, 1919. The underground communist party usually marked that date. The day before, leaflets devoted to it would be distributed, and at night red flags with revolutionary slogans would be hung up in various districts.

But when they brought me to the security police headquarters, I realized that the matter was far more serious. In the corridor I heard, coming from the last cell, the loud cough of Kachanov. He too was at that time a member of the sub-district committee.

I was put in the large cell No. 1. Until the very morning I could hear new groups of arrested people being brought into the cells. It seemed there had been a major failure in the organization. As I later found out,

—searches had been carried out at the apartments of many members of the section, and about thirty people had been arrested.

The interrogations began during the day.

I was led into a small room through whose window only the tile roofs of the neighboring houses were visible.

At the desk sat the investigator Petrin. His round, well-fed face wore an expression of dull self-satisfaction. On the right side of the desk, evidently meant to intimidate, lay a revolver. Petrin, as though not noticing me, kept shuffling some folders, making notes on them, laying out pinkish sheets of paper for the interrogation, and then suddenly fixed his wide, bulging eyes on me.

"Well, then? Have you decided to confess, or do you mean to lie?" he said gloatingly, and immediately began the interrogation. "From what year have you been a member of the illegal Communist Party? What party assignments did you carry out?"

As underground discipline required, I gave negative answers. Growing bolder, I even expressed surprise at such questions:

"What party are you asking me about? I haven't read in the newspapers that there is such a party in Latvia," I said, plainly hinting at the fact that with every arrest of underground workers the bourgeois press would authoritatively declare the liquidation of the last communist cell...

Petrin flared up and began making threats. But soon, convinced of the futility of his method, he set about recording my testimony.

During the interrogation, small square notes were brought in to him several times. Reading them,

he would ask me additional questions. From the nature of these questions it was clear that they came from Stieglitz, the head of the secret agents. And however cautious Petrin was, from the substance of one of them it became clear to me that our arrest was the result of a betrayal.

The first interrogation ended.

But back in the cell, the thought of the traitor would not leave me for a moment. I was convinced that the security police was well informed about such details of the sub-district organization's work as were known only to a few of its members. I went over every possible variant in my mind. But the circle of my thoughts kept closing on one or two provocateurs.

A couple of days later I was taken to interrogation again.

This time everything in the investigator's office looked different. Along the wall, piled on the floor, was all the paperwork of the cultural-educational section, including the book of minutes of the weekly presidium meetings, of which I had been secretary. There too were the latest issue of the wall newspaper, a portrait of Karl Marx set in a red five-pointed star, some books from the club library, and other materials.

Petrin, sitting at his desk, glanced at me from under his brows to see how I was reacting to these additional "material proofs," and, his pen scratching, in his sweeping handwriting he began to write up the record of the new interrogation.

After a series of ordinary questions and answers that did not satisfy him, he gestured with his hand toward the five-pointed star and asked snidely:

"And what, then, is this?"

"It's a five-pointed frame; after all, there are all kinds — quadrangular, pentagonal, and polygonal," I answered.

"And who is that in the portrait?" he asked, evidently thinking that this time too I would try to avoid a direct answer.

"It's a photograph of Karl Marx," I answered calmly.

"That's your god," Petrin said with hatred, and he began to swear coarsely, trying in every possible way to insult me.

I kept silent.

And Petrin deliberately repeated his crude remarks.

Hard as I tried to restrain myself, given where I was, I could not overcome the desire to throw it back at the boor. And I answered him just as rudely, and on top of that sent him to the devil...

Petrin jumped up from his chair as if stung. His large, glassy, fixed eyes filled with blood like those of an enraged predator, and he quickly pressed a button on the desk. Two young men rushed into the office and immediately set on me with their fists. After a brief but rather tangible working-over, I was taken back to the cell.

A full week of my solitary stay in cell No. 1 went by. Every day one could hear people being led down the corridor to interrogation from the other cells. The arrests were still going on.

One night, when I was already asleep on the floor,

—covered with my winter coat, I was unexpectedly woken up and led out of the cell.

Although I had just been sound asleep, the thought of a night interrogation immediately put me on edge. After all, at night, when the whole city sank into sleep, the masters of the security police felt even freer and often resorted to torture.

From the corridor I was led down a narrow stone staircase to the lower floor, then through some dark corridors to the far end of another building, and back up a staircase to a different floor. While they were leading me through these labyrinths of the security police building, which also housed the military court, I had time to prepare myself inwardly for the worst.

I was led into a spacious, brightly lit drawing room, furnished with mahogany furniture. The floor was covered with a large rug; rugs and pictures also hung on the walls. Everything here resembled living quarters.

In the middle of the room, at an elegant carved table, sat a thin man in a dress shirt with the collar unbuttoned. He had a long, pale face, a hawkish nose, and a short-clipped reddish moustache.

This was the senior investigator of the security police, Krauze.

Smiling deliberately, he studied me with his slightly narrowed green eyes and very politely invited me to sit down opposite him in a soft armchair upholstered in dark plush.

After a brief pause, he began, in a soft, ingratiating voice, half-jokingly as it were, to question me about a comradely court that had been held in the section, at which, as he knew, I had acted as the public prosecutor. Krauze was especially interested in

who had organized the comradely court, who had played which roles in it, and who had written the indictment. He showed me a photographic copy, made by the security police, of the first page of that indictment.

I grew wary. It was clear that this was a continuation of the interrogation... But why this sudden interest in an event that the section had held openly? "Evidently the security police is cooking something up around this comradely court," I thought. So I said I didn't remember any of the details. I remembered only that I myself had been the public prosecutor. To deny that would have been pointless.

Krauze, evidently realizing the futility of pressing me further on this point, switched to another subject. He began stirring up a new case. I was charged with having been the organizer, during the joint May Day procession with the social-democratic organizations in 1927, of a separate communist demonstration in front of the Sroch Prison. When the column was passing the prison, the section's group, by singing revolutionary songs, was said to have greeted the political prisoners held there.

"This is confirmed by intelligence from our agents," Krauze said.

And since this accusation against me rested only on agent reports, and none of us had been arrested on the spot at the time, it was very easy for me to deny it all.

Only after this did Krauze drop his seemingly noncommittal talk and pick up pen and paper to draw up the record.

Thus ended this unexpected night interrogation.

But a MOPR collection sheet for raising money to aid political prisoners, found on Kachanov when he was arrested, and a single copy of an illegal pamphlet seized from me during my arrest, were plainly not enough to mount a major political trial.

So the political police fabricated a "sensational" case around the comradely court that the section had held openly and lawfully.

The entire bourgeois press obligingly spread the version concocted by the directors at the security police. Beneath huge, screaming headlines, whole pages were given over to lengthy reports about the liquidation of a communist organization and the unmasking in Riga of a secret revolutionary tribunal...

In this whole campaign the multi-page newspaper "Jaunakas Zinjas" was especially zealous; it tried to please liberal and reactionary bourgeois circles alike. The paper's huge print runs brought its shrewd publisher enormous wealth, and his name had already become a byword in Latvia — much like the name of Hearst, owner of what was then the most powerful newspaper trust in the United States.

On February 3, "Jaunakas Zinjas," under the huge headline "Social-Democratic Leaders, Saeima Deputies F. Menders, F. Cielens and Br. Kalnins Sentenced to Death by Communist Tribunal," ran photographs of these leaders and an article inspired by the security police, which reported: "...In connection with recent arrests of commu-

—nists in Riga, important information has been obtained about the activities of communists in Latvia and their schemes. At secret meetings of the communist organizations, not only was the communists' work discussed, but secret sessions of a tribunal were also held, at which political cases were tried, verdicts and even death sentences pronounced against opponents of the communists... Such tribunal sessions took place at the communist club at 135 Maskavas Street. These premises belong to the Central Bureau of the Riga trade unions. The court chamber was closed off; only trusted communists were admitted."

Other newspapers added to this further inventions about a large quantity of weapons supposedly found at the section...

Such was the "truth" of the bourgeois press, and such was the way it worked on public opinion.

The central organ of the social-democratic party howled in unison with the rest of the bourgeois press. Without even attempting the slightest serious examination of the political police's provocation, "Sociāldemokrāts" came out with the lead editorial "Off with the Masks!" — the usual slander against the revolutionary workers. Only the politically blind and outright bourgeois lackeys could act this way.

SOLITARY CELL NO. 57

After two weeks at the security police building, we were taken to the prison in separate groups. In the first group were S. Kachanov, S. Samoilov, I. Yankovsky, and myself.

Surrounded by policemen, we walked down the middle of the street. They were taking us to the Central Prison. Samoilov, who was walking next to me, used every opportunity to talk, to toss off a sarcastic remark about "democratic freedoms."

In the corridor of the main prison block we had to wait for some time. On a black wooden board hanging in the corner of the right-hand wall, numbers had been written in chalk — they indicated that on that day there were already more than fifteen hundred prisoners in the Central Prison. A guard standing in the passageway kept unlocking and re-locking the iron door to the corridor through which prison employees in black uniforms came and went. We were led up to the office window, where the prisoners' documents, watches, and money were taken from them. Each man was given a receipt marked with the personal number under which he was then registered in the prison until his release. Samoilov, who knew the local routine, whispered various practical pieces of advice to me.

"If only we could end up in the same cell — then we'd study together," he said with a broad smile.

Soon after each new arrival had been weighed and measured for height in the basement, we were taken to the second block. I was struck by the unusual silence inside. Not a sound came from any of the fifty-eight solitary cells.

"It won't be easy, it seems, to spend years within these walls," I thought to myself.

As we went up the steps of the iron staircase, Samoilov and I only had time to give each other's hands a firm shake. We were separated immediately.

—placed in different cells on opposite sides of the third floor.

By those days we had grown used to a great deal, and each of us was inwardly preparing for long years of imprisonment. But at that moment I did not yet imagine that this was the last handshake, that I would never see Samoilov again.

The guard led me to the next-to-last cell, No. 57, let me in, and immediately shut the iron door behind me, the lock clicking loudly on the outside. And then I felt with particular sharpness that the doors had slammed shut behind me for a long, long time...

\*

It was an ordinary solitary cell in the second block, on the shaded, sunless side. In the middle, against the right-hand wall, stood a gray four-cornered little table and a small bench. Set into the lower part of the wall was an iron ring. In tsarist times, the chain of the leg-irons in which political convicts were shackled had been fastened to it. On the opposite wall, hanging from a large hook, was a narrow iron cot.

At first it seemed to me that I was in a sealed stone sack. But within a few days I made out a steady tapping, now on one wall, now on another. It was the comrades in the cells beneath mine on the second floor, and the neighbor on the third floor, asking me something. But I did not yet understand this language of captivity.

During one of the exercise periods, a comrade from a neighboring cell managed to pass me a small note with the tapping alphabet. The alphabet consisted of twenty-five letters, arranged in five rows.

The mechanics of tapping with it were very simple — you first tapped the number of the row in which the given letter stood, and then its position within that row. This prison alphabet had been invented back by the Decembrist brothers Bestuzhev during their confinement in the solitary casemates of the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Having learned the layout of all the letters by heart, I set about one day tapping out a conversation with a comrade in the cell below. And just then, when I had concentrated all my attention on this first "stone conversation," a guard crept silently up to the peephole. The door opened at once and a tall, mustached guard entered the cell. Of course, I explained that I wasn't communicating with anyone, but was just tapping a pencil against the wall out of boredom... But the guard sternly warned me that if he caught me again I would not escape the punishment cell.

We learned from our mistakes in prison too! Soon I had become so skilled at speaking this prison language that I was no longer caught.

Everything in the cell around me was a reminder of its many former inmates. The stone walls, the iron door, the underside of the table and bench — all were covered with inscriptions, names, and revolutionary slogans. Two decades of repeated special repaintings of the walls and doors had nevertheless been unable to cover up forever the many marks of people and eras carved into the iron and the stone.

Here were fervent calls to overthrow the tsarist autocracy, the parting words of those sentenced to death in 1905-1907, the many inscriptions of communists tried in bourgeois Latvia, and

lines they had left behind from Rainis's revolutionary poems. High above the door, running across the whole wall, the slogan "Long live the Third International!" had been carved with something sharp in large letters. Beneath it stood the date — June 1921. This was the last cry of one of the communists shot in those days together with the secretaries of the Central Committee, J. Shilf and A. Berce-Arajs.

Such was the classic revolutionary legacy in every solitary cell of bourgeois Latvia, where it seemed that the stone of the walls had absorbed the wisdom and courage of whole generations of heroic fighters for the people's happiness.

Semyon Samoilov, a Forstadt worker, was a striking and original figure in the revolutionary movement of the 1920s.

In 1917, as a young man, he went off as a volunteer into the army and was wounded on the Riga front. Then, during the years of the civil war, serving in the ranks of the Red Army, he took part in battles against the counter-revolutionary bands of Kolchak, Denikin, and Wrangel, and was wounded again. The pull of the home places where his childhood and early youth had passed brought him, after the war, to Riga. Here he trained in a carpenter's workshop, then worked as a hauler at the "Emolip" sawmill on Zaichiy Island [? factory name uncertain], and as a stevedore at the Export Harbor.

It did not take this thoughtful working man long to discern, behind the false tinsel of bourgeois democracy,

its true face, and to come to hate it with his whole heart. In the ranks of the left trade unions he took an active part in the workers' economic and political struggle. When the publication of a left-wing Russian-language paper — the weekly "Kolokol" ("The Bell") — was organized, Samoilov agreed to act as the publisher of record before the censors. Sharp satirical feuilletons mocking the bourgeois rulers quickly made the paper popular among Russian workers. After several issues had appeared, "Kolokol" was confiscated by the authorities. Samoilov, charged with anti-state activity, was thrown into the Central Prison.

In prison, Samoilov studied and read a great deal.

When he was released eight months later, he at first held back from open public activity. He had to reckon with the threat of a fresh arrest under the so-called "Kerensky Law," which was widely applied in bourgeois Latvia. This law had been introduced by Kerensky's government after the July demonstration in Petrograd. Under it, anyone suspected of Bolshevik activity could be thrown into prison without trial or investigation. No legal or factual evidence was required.

But, of course, caution could not keep Samoilov long on the sidelines of the workers' struggle. He was soon drawn back into public work; he was elected to the presidium of the cultural-educational section. I was very glad to see how the club's activity was getting on its feet, how new and new groups of builders, of leather workers, chemical-industry workers, and workers in other branches

Semyon Samoilov

were coming into their trade-union branches in the Forstadt, how the circle of activists was growing and broadening.

Under conditions of constant political terror, the section also had its especially difficult moments; not everything went as one would have wished. Samoilov took this very much to heart and would then become uncommunicative. The nerve disorder he suffered — the result of his shell shock — would make itself felt. But such moods usually passed quickly. The man who had just been gloomy would once again grow cheerful when in the crowded club there came to a boil

—the work of the amateur circles, or a public lecture or concert-rally went off successfully.

Samoilov lived close to the section's club. Often, not waiting his turn, he would be the first to come to the club in the evening after work and would sit down at the duty officer's little table.

He never forgot about the comrades languishing in prison, and on paydays he himself often organized collections of funds to help the political prisoners. He spoke openly about them, as fighters for a just cause, in his speeches to the workers. He was also among the initiators of pooling money together when there was no cash in the section's till and the landlord was demanding rent and threatening to hand the section's premises over to a tavern.

The year 1928 was marked by a growth of the strike movement in the footwear and textile industries. The successful conclusion of a series of strikes led by the revolutionary trade unions further strengthened their authority and influence. This greatly troubled the bourgeoisie.

An economic crisis began in Latvia, the whole burden of which the bourgeoisie meant to shift onto the shoulders of the working people. Plans for an outright dictatorship were already being hatched in the circles of the ruling bourgeoisie. Clearing the way for it, the Juraševskis government took a decision to suspend the activities of all the left trade unions.

On August 22, the Riga District Court was scheduled to hear the case for the liquidation of all the organizations united in the Central Bureau of the Riga trade unions. At the call of the underground communist party and the Komsomol, tens of thousands

Protest demonstration against the closing of the left trade unions on the day of the political strike, August 22, 1928 (on Gertrudes Street).

—of workers were preparing to carry out a protest strike on that day.

Already from the morning of August 22, work had been stopped at many Riga enterprises, and street demonstrations of workers took place. In various parts of the city there were clashes with the police. Workers in Ventspils, Liepāja, and Daugavpils also went on strike.

Samoilov, recently released from prison on bail pending trial, took an active part in this struggle. On that day he marched at the head of a large column of striking workers heading from the Forstadt down Gertrudes Street. Through the police

cordons they pressed toward the center of the city, where they were to join up with workers from other districts for a common protest demonstration in front of the district court building.

Together with many other revolutionary workers, Samoilov was arrested and once again thrown into prison. He now appeared as a defendant in two political cases — in the case against the activists of the Russian cultural-educational section at the Central Bureau of the Riga trade unions, and in the "twenty-second of August" case, for taking part in an unauthorized demonstration.

On Thursday, December 29, at night, in the corridor of the fourth wing of the Central Prison, a muffled noise was heard — the hurried steps of alarmed guards and some unusual commotion at solitary cell No. 24, where Samoilov was being held. But soon everything in the corridor fell quiet again.

Many times that night the comrades in the neighboring solitary cells tapped on the walls of cell No. 24. They tried long and stubbornly to get an answer from Samoilov. But the walls of solitary cell No. 24 remained silent.

The next day, on Friday — visiting day — when his relatives came to the prison to see Samoilov, it turned out that he was no longer alive. The administration told them that the night before, late in the evening, he had been found hanged in his solitary cell.

Thus the life of the twenty-eight-year-old worker-revolutionary Semyon Sa-

moilov ended unexpectedly. Naturally, his comrades, and all the more those who knew him personally, were deeply troubled by the question: what reasons could have driven him to suicide?

Despite his active participation in the workers' movement, Samoilov was not in fact a member of the Communist Party. Someone who knew him only slightly might have thought he was staying out of the underground party simply out of fear of repression. In reality it was nothing of the kind. As a non-party Bolshevik he often took no less risk than a regular underground worker. He kept and read communist literature and made wide use of it in his talks. Not infrequently Samoilov himself secretly distributed illegal leaflets among the workers of the Forstadt. And whenever he spoke at a legal mass meeting or rally, he always had to reckon with the fact that he might be arrested the next day.

In private conversations Samoilov spoke to me of his still inadequate theoretical preparation, of his doubts about his ability to submit always and in everything to iron party discipline. But he was very close to the party, and his joining its ranks was only a matter of time.

During his solitary confinement Samoilov's illness grew still worse. In those days the political prisoners' hunger strike demanding amnesty had just ended. Samoilov's heart had also begun to give him trouble. After his death it came to light that the secret police had used every method to drive its victim to the last degree of despair, not shrinking from any provocation, even forged letters from "comrades on the outside."

It was a peculiar form of unpunished

murder. Without trial or investigation a worker-revolutionary had been brutally tortured to death.

The authorities dragged out the release of Samoilov's body to his relatives for a long time. With the help of the prison administration they intended to bury him secretly at the Matveyev Cemetery. But they did not succeed.

Samoilov's funeral was organized by the Worker-Peasant Faction of the Saeima and by the newly created Transport Workers' Trade Union.

It was a cold, frosty New Year's day. The entire front page of the newspaper "Darbs un maize" — the organ of the Worker-Peasant Faction of the Saeima — was that day devoted to the fallen revolutionary Samoilov. In the bourgeois papers, on the other hand, a notice from the city prefect was published, stating that "the police have taken the necessary measures against any possible action by the communists and to prevent any breach of order..." With such police threats they tried to frighten workers away from taking part in the funeral.

The funeral was set for one in the afternoon. But already from the morning the working people of Riga were hurrying in groups and singly to the city morgue on Moskovskaya Street. Recently released on bail after ten months of pre-trial confinement, I too was going to escort our fallen comrade on his final journey.

To the sounds of a funeral march, beneath the lowered red banner of the Transport Workers' Union, the coffin with the body of the deceased was carried out from the gates of the morgue into a street packed with people. Those gathered formed up in ranks, and a column of seven thousand set off for the Forest Cemetery. At the front were borne dozens of wreaths of fresh flowers — red roses, orchids, and tulips — from workers' collectives. On the broad

The funeral of Semyon Samoilov

scarlet ribbons of the wreaths were inscribed revolutionary appeals to the working people. The procession stretched through the entire Forstadt — along Vitebskaya, Daugavpilsskaya, and Gertrudes streets. When the head of the column was already turning into Marijas Street, the last ranks back at the morgue were only just starting to move. The whole long way — more than five kilometers — the coffin was borne in the hands of trade union activists, deputies of the Worker-Peasant Faction of the Saeima, friends and comrades. The faces of those accompanying him were stern and silent; the mournful melodies of the brass bands that succeeded one another did not falter.

When the funeral procession was passing the Remand Prison, the banners were lowered, and toward its walls

rang out the loud strains of the "Internationale" — a fighting greeting to the political prisoners.

Dusk had already fallen when, at the freshly filled grave of Semyon Samoilov, representatives of the workers of Riga, Valmiera, Tukums, and Kuldiga delivered their words of farewell. The grave was surrounded by thousands of people outraged by the terror against the revolutionary workers. The laying of numerous wreaths began.

"Our life is struggle!" — these words, inscribed on the broad red ribbon of a large wreath of red tulips that I laid on behalf of a group of fellow prisoners, sounded like a farewell salute to the fallen fighter. They were Samoilov's own favorite words, which he had carved into the corner of the stone wall of one of the cells in the second wing of the Central Prison. From one part of the cemetery, then from another, came loud cries: "Down with the murderers and executioners of workers!", "We demand amnesty for all political prisoners!"

But already at the gates of the cemetery, the police were furiously attacking the workers heading home, scattering them through the streets and beating them with rubber truncheons. They arrested anyone who was pointed out by the agents of the political police darting about everywhere.

The investigation of our case dragged on for a whole year.

Three months before the trial, I was released from prison on bail. Taking advantage of this, I set about organizing the defense.

The first thing was to expose the secret police's fabrication about a "secret revolutionary tribunal." For this it was necessary that some authoritative figure appear in court as an expert witness and explain what a public court of opinion was — though the bourgeois judges themselves could hardly have been unaware of this.

At a meeting with a representative of the party leadership I reported on the state of our case and on the betrayal; I consulted him about whom to ask to appear as an expert or defense counsel at the trial. He inquired whether the traitor still posed a danger to the underground organization and whether appropriate measures should be taken against him. He also asked about my chances at the trial, where I figured as the main defendant, and whether, if hard labor was threatened, the question should be put to the leadership of my leaving Latvia.

Not yet personally familiar with all the workings of the "independent" bourgeois court, I believed that I could not be convicted simply for organizing a public court of opinion. I also said that it would be wrong for me to leave and evade trial while the other comrades accused in this case remained in prison.

As for a defense counsel, he advised me to approach the barrister Bushevits, who was also a member of the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party.

I was aware of Bushevits's particular position within the Social Democratic Party on the question of developing economic ties between Latvia and the USSR. He had also recently published

a pamphlet in which, on the basis of factual material, he argued for the urgent need to restore large-scale Latvian industry, whose products had a natural and historically established outlet in the vast market of the Soviet Union. The ruling bourgeois-kulak clique, however, fearing the growth of a revolutionary proletariat, did everything to slow the restoration and development of large industry and pushed the country toward agrarianization.

Incidentally, a copy of this pamphlet of Bushevits's, with some of my pencil notes in the margins, had been taken from me at my arrest and likewise added to the case file.

On my way to Bushevits's law office I felt a certain ambivalence. Of course, the appearance at this trial of an old leading member of the Social Democratic Party would carry great weight. But on the other hand, he and I did not know each other personally. "And besides, how will he take such a proposal?" I thought as I walked.

Soon I entered a building on Elizabetes Street, went up the stairs, and rang the bell at a door bearing the nameplate of barrister A. Bushevits.

He showed me into his small office. I gave my name, stated my purpose in coming to him as a lawyer, and described the case in detail.

Bushevits listened, scrutinizing me with a probing look.

"Yes, but you handed down a death sentence there," he remarked with a sly smile. And, no longer concerned about the outcome of our conversation, I said:

"I understand very well why the secret police

invented this version, but it surprises me very much that you of all people should believe such a crude provocation."

The smile vanished from his face — he was silent.

I also explained that I already had an arrangement with my own defense counsel, and that one group of the accused already had a defender. It would be desirable for him to defend the other group and at the same time to explain in court what a public court of opinion was.

Bushevits did not answer at once. For several minutes he sat deep in thought, propping his head on his hands. He had plenty to think about. In this political case he would have to act not only as an ordinary defense lawyer but also as a member of the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party — whose opinion by no means always coincided with the opinions of the other members of that committee.

To Bushevits's credit, he was not afraid of this.

Lifting his head, he said calmly:

"Yes, I will take on the defense of this group."

I handed him a copy of the indictment and asked about the amount of his fee.

"If I am taking on the defense of these workers, I am not doing it for money," he answered firmly.

"I will pass this on to the comrades in prison," I said, and we took our leave.

Bushevits was one of the few former Social Democratic leaders admitted into the ranks of the Communist Party in 1940, and in February 1941 he was elected a member of the Supreme Court of the Latvian SSR.

On January 17, 1929, the trial began of the nineteen defendants in the case of the Russian cultural-educational section attached to the Central Bureau of the Riga

trade unions. We were all charged under Article 102 of the criminal code — for participation in the underground Communist Party of Latvia.

The trial was under way.

Along the right-hand wall, on two long benches placed one behind the other, sat the defendants. On these benches we were arranged in the same order in which we were listed in the indictment.

At the front of the hall, on a raised platform behind a large, massive oak table, sat three judges in dark-red robes. Small velvet caps seemed barely to hold on the tops of their heads. On the breast of each, a gilt chain with the judicial emblem glinted dully.

The malevolent, scowling faces of the judges bore the stamp of cold cruelty. In their whole appearance they reminded me of pictures I had seen long ago — of medieval inquisitors standing beside great burning pyres on which "heretics" they had condemned were burned alive. On the faces of these modern-day inquisitors there was, if anything, no less arrogance and false solemnity than in their medieval forebears.

In the tall presiding judge's chair sat the offspring of major Courland landowners, the Baltic German Hermann Mintal. During the Civil War, in the service of the American-Japanese interventionists, he had tried Russian workers and peasants in Vladivostok. Now he was an influential landlord in Riga and continued his black and bloody work in the post of deputy chairman of the Riga district court. Generously paid by the bourgeois

state, the German Hermann Mintal now passed judgment and meted out punishment on the revolutionary Latvian workers and peasants. He announced harsh sentences against them "in the name of the sovereign Latvian people." With this mendacious phrase began the sentences pronounced by the courts of bourgeois Latvia.

To the right of the presiding judge sat a stooped man with a small, shaven head and a pale, well-groomed face. A small gold pince-nez was firmly perched on the steep saddle of his aquiline nose. This was Judge Erdmann — a former officer in the White Guard detachment of the Livland Baron Liven.

He yawned often during the proceedings and occasionally cast a glance toward the women defendants, peering searchingly into their calm, concentrated faces. In those moments he was apparently recalling the "glorious deeds" of the Landeswehr men in the May days of 1919. Having intercepted, near Ropaži station, the last train out of Riga with women evacuee militia, they had subjected them to torturous abuse in the Ropaži forest. His thugs hanged many of the women upside down from pine trees, tying live hand grenades to their bodies... And then Judge Erdmann would shift his gaze again to where, at a round table, sat the prosecutor Rasmus, robed in black, working out the plan of his bombastic speech for the prosecution.

To the left of the presiding judge sat Judge Maurer. He already counted as a "Philister" — an honorary member of the student corporation "Concordia." Former members of this reactionary-nationalist corporation, like the local Germans, were especially successful in the upper ranks of the Ministry of Justice.

In his student years Maurer lived in Riga on a grand scale. His father — a co-owner of two distilleries in Zemgale — denied his only son nothing. As a student, Maurer showed very mediocre academic ability, but he distinguished himself by noisy "patriotic" activity. He was the ringleader at all the corporation's traditional drinking-bouts, the organizer of all sorts of hooligan stunts to break up meetings of workers and progressive youth. He was also directly involved in the murder on Martas Street of the young worker-activist Alexander Masak.

Skimming the faces in the hall with an arrogant glance, Maurer would gaze for long stretches upward — at the ceiling. There, on the oval vault, was painted in oils the goddess of justice, Themis, with a white blindfold over her eyes and scales in her hands...

On a separate table lay a heap of physical evidence. Not a single item of it had been found on the accused at the time of arrest. There were various illegal leaflets in Latvian and Russian, and dozens of red banners that had been hung up in the city on the eve of various revolutionary anniversaries.

The presiding judge, Hermann Mintal, monotonously and with a noticeable accent, read out the long, twenty-five-page indictment. Then there appeared a whole procession of "witnesses" — spies and old gendarme informers. Whenever some of them got plainly tangled up in their memorized testimony, Mintal hurried to extricate them from their awkward position and rudely overruled any questions from the accused or their counsel.

Then there appeared before the court the head of the Riga secret police, Friedrichson.

Last in the long line of spies came the head of the entire agent network of the Latvian secret police. Broad-shouldered, in a light grey suit, with a dull, cold gaze and slicked-back yellowish-red hair, he reported to the court in a quiet, insinuating voice. This was the all-too-well-known Stieglitz. One could not look without revulsion at the repulsive face of this chief of the whole network of spies, informers, and provocateurs, the organizer of the most refined tortures inflicted on arrested communists. Citing secret intelligence sources, he spoke of the guilt of each of the accused. As proof of my membership in the underground Communist Party, he also relied on the fact that in the past year I had worked as a bookkeeper at the Riga branch of Sovtorgflot...

During the testimony of this chief "witness" for the prosecution, a sharp verbal incident broke out in the courtroom between Bushevits and Mintal.

Coming to the rescue of Stieglitz, who was talking outrageous nonsense about paid agents of the Comintern, the presiding judge allowed him not to answer a tricky question from Bushevits which in fact refuted Stieglitz's claims. At this Mintal, in a tone insulting to Bushevits, threw out for everyone to hear the remark, "Anyone can be bought for money!"

Bushevits quickly rose from his place and, also for everyone to hear, asked:

"Mr. Presiding Judge, you of course answer for your words. You assert that anyone can be bought for money. Does that mean that you too can be bought for money?.."

Mintal, flaring up in anger, immediately denied Bushevits the floor.

There were also small joys during the days of the trial, which added new impressions to the monotony of prison life. In those years the defendants were still walked to the district court on foot. Along the way through the city we would meet relatives and acquaintances. They had been waiting in advance for this chance — to exchange a silent glance with those under arrest, to smile a friendly smile at them.

The trial lasted three days. None of us, the accused, had any doubt about its outcome. It was clear that this trial, like hundreds of previous political trials in bourgeois Latvia, would end with a sentence of many years' imprisonment.

The defense lawyers argued that one could not condemn people for their political views. They also said that the court must reckon with the will of those seventy-five thousand working people who no longer trusted the Social Democratic leaders and had cast their votes in the most recent Saeima elections for the candidates of the left-wing workers and peasants.

During one of the recesses, in the corridor, a correspondent from "Pēdējā Brīdī" — a bourgeois tabloid — came up to me. He invited me to give a comment on the trial in progress.

I knew very well that the editors of this paper would never print what I really had to say.

"You are yourself present throughout the court sessions — so just give an objective report, without any distortions, of everything you hear here. That will be best."

Of course I did not expect anything of the sort.

Still, it must be said that the report about our trial that appeared in that newspaper was not as

malicious and provocative as the one in the newspaper "Sociāldemokrāts."

"It's turning out rather curiously," I said to Bushevits during the long recess before the verdict was handed down. I showed him the materials on our trial that had appeared in the latest issue of "Sociāldemokrāts," with which this "socialist" paper was clearly aiding the secret police.

Bushevits's face visibly changed — my words were evidently not entirely to his liking.

"Yes, but that is only the opinion of the paper, not of our entire party," he said.

"But this is the central organ of your party," I said.

Bushevits gave a meaningful smile and avoided a direct answer...

The verdict in our case was announced late in the evening of January nineteenth. Beforehand, in addition to the extra prison guards, police armed with rifles were brought into the courtroom. Two policemen took up position next to me. And it was already clear to me that under the court's sentence I would be arrested on the spot and led back to the Central Prison.

The large crystal chandeliers blazed with dazzling light, and the judges came out from the conference room. Presiding judge Mintal was not for the first time reading out the standard sentence handed down to communists in such cases. Someone in the hall fell, having lost consciousness, and cries of protest against the verdict came from the public. The judges hurriedly withdrew through a side door, while the police, working hard with their black truncheons, restored "order" among the public...

Almost all of the accused were sentenced to confine-

ment in a fortress. I was sentenced to four and a half years in the fortress, Kh. Fridland to four years, M. Yakovlev, S. Kachanov, and M. Kostyukova to three and a half years each, Ye. Yakovlev to three years, and the rest to terms of from three down to two years' imprisonment.

The reader will probably wonder — and what about the traitors?

There were two of them. They did not appear at the trial. One of them turned out to be a member of an underground sub-district organization, who at the public court of opinion had played the role of the former officer of the bourgeois counterintelligence Bruno Kalniņš. A very curious coincidence, of course...

This is now also confirmed by his own handwritten reports to the secret police, which have since come to light.

"We, all political prisoners, must firmly grasp and accept that prison is not an accidental and far from a useless stage in our revolutionary development. Prison, together with everything that inevitably precedes it — the secret police, torture, the 'court' — should revolutionarily harden every political prisoner who falls into it. In prison each of us must master everything that is necessary in order to become a propagandist, an agitator among the masses — to turn prison into a political school."

So it was put in the lead article "Our Tasks" of one of the issues of the underground journal "Caur tumsu" ("Through the Darkness"), which was published

the Central Prison by the political prisoners. These words very well expressed their passionate desire to make the most of every day of their imprisonment for study. After all, on the outside, after a working day and then practical legal and illegal work until late in the evening, it was not always possible to sit down to read the book one needed.

With such a mood and an unshakable faith in the imminent victory of the revolution, the years of imprisonment ahead did not seem so very hard.

By chance or by design, I was placed in the very same cell No. 24 in which Samoilov had recently hanged himself.

Only after my repeated demands was I transferred to another solitary cell. There, among many marks on the wall, I found several inscriptions made by the revolutionary fighter and poet Leon Paegle. On the stone window-sill he had carved fiery lines from his poem "What I Saw."

Prison does not help! Down with your order! Give back justice, Freedom for all, and beauty, and labor!\*

After the verdict was confirmed by the judicial chamber, we were transferred to the group of convicted prisoners. The serving of the sentence began. As every political prisoner usually did, I drew up for myself a detailed study plan for the remaining four years. And there was much I wanted to manage to do in that time. First of all, I considered it necessary to thoroughly work through all three volumes twice of

\* The translation of this poem was made by L. Paegle himself.

"Capital," which had been sent to me in prison. For two years I devoted three or four pre-dinner hours to "Capital." Alongside this I took up reading materials on the history of the international workers' movement and on philosophy, and studied German and English.

The first period of imprisonment was very fruitful. At that time I was in a solitary cell together with the young writer Y. Kauzhen, who was distinguished by his great capacity for work even in prison. From early morning until lights-out he was reading or writing. He had managed to obtain a couple of dozen of the latest Soviet books in prison. During short breaks, having learned to "take a walk" in the little cell, we would quickly go back and forth across a space two and a half meters long and a meter and a half wide, sharing our opinions on what we had read.

But in the years of bourgeois "democracy" study did not come easily in prison. The administration tolerated it only as a necessary evil. The prison censors and the prosecutor's office, as a rule, confiscated all Soviet political books legally sent from outside. Nor was every literary work permitted by censorship in ordinary libraries allowed into the prison. Here exceptional laws were in force, with special lists of forbidden literature.

Political prisoners had to wage a constant, intense struggle against the arbitrariness of the administration. But even under conditions of the strictest isolation, despite enormous difficulties and disciplinary punishments, communication was always maintained between cells, floors, and different blocks. Using this communication, we learned of everything that was happening

in the prison, and we received information from outside about the most important domestic and international events.

So life went on in the solitary and common cells of the Central Prison. The last pages of a thick personal notebook, laced and sealed with wax, I had turned into calendar-tables. With a feeling of relief I always crossed off the days, weeks, and months that had already passed and, as we used to say then, "broke off" the time being served.

"An opening in the wall of a building for air and light" — so the word "window" is briefly and accurately explained in the dictionary. But this important function of a window was felt with particular sharpness by every political prisoner in a solitary cell of the Central Prison.

The light filtering through the small window up near the ceiling seemed to bring to life the gray walls of the half-dark cell.

By day, a free, fresh wind burst in through the flung-open window. With strong, life-giving streams it cut through the stifling, stale prison air, which people had been breathing day and night for years on end, often falling ill here with consumption.

But here windows were not merely openings for air and light. They connected the imprisoned revolutionaries with the outside world. And free thought could not be fettered even by the thick, impenetrable walls of the cramped solitary cell.

Through the window the voices of the outside life reached the cell, with all its contrasts and contradictions.

The cheerful twittering of birds, the distant echo of women's voices, familiar tunes of popular songs, and the mournful funeral music with the tolling of bells from the neighboring Matveevskoye cemetery reached us. There were intermittent locomotive whistles, the steady clanging of wheels of a train passing by, and the creak of wooden peasant carts dragging slowly along the country road nearby. All this broke the grave-like silence that the guardians of prison order so zealously demanded of the prisoners. We were strictly forbidden not only to look out the window, but even to come near it.

But no threats or punishments could kill in people who so loved life the urge to glimpse, even now and then by stealth, a piece of "freedom" — to look at the green expanses stretching to the horizon, to catch the moment of sunrise or sunset, or to look at the naked little children carelessly playing in the sand. Nor could anything keep the prisoner from trying to exchange a friendly glance with comrades walking in a circle in the prison yard during the short exercise periods. Under conditions of solitary confinement, even these small successes became a source of joyful experiences for many days afterward.

But to look out the window even for a brief moment was not so simple. One had to do it skillfully, so as to remain unnoticed both by the warder darting about the cells inside the block and by the soldier-sentries standing on the watchtowers. They could shoot without warning at a prisoner's head appearing in the window.

During my time in solitary I learned to look out the window with the least risk. Carefully

listening for whether the warder on duty was creeping up to the door, I would quickly step up onto the bench very far from the window — into the left-hand corner of the cell, next to the door. This spot was almost not visible through the peep-hole from the corridor and remained out of the line of sight of the sentries on the tower.

\*

It was a warm May day in 1929. Weak rays of reflected sunlight, penetrating the cell through the open window, fell on the perfectly smooth surface of the cement floor. For more than two decades many political prisoners had polished this floor day by day with their wooden clogs. After washing and tidying the cell I again sat down at the little table over the opened thick English self-instruction book. In a half-whisper I tried to repeat words whose pronunciation was particularly difficult. But my gaze kept drifting from the book — I was looking at the patch of azure sky visible at the top of the window.

A strange animation could be felt on the railway track near the prison. Usually along this line only freight trains went by infrequently, and empty cars were shunted from Shkirotava station to the Export harbor. But on that day, since early morning, there had been a great deal of noise. Locomotive whistles sounded almost without interruption, and there was the rumble of loaded trains rapidly rolling along the rails. I managed to take in a small piece of the track with my gaze. I saw that on the flatcars there was military equipment and supplies, and I was surprised at such a transfer of troops in an eastward direction. But

remembering that at the end of May the Riga garrison units begin to move out to summer camp, I immediately guessed: for it was precisely along this branch that the Fifth Cesis Infantry Regiment, in which I had served as a private six years before, traveled to the Stopini military camp.

The regiment was quartered in the former hussar barracks at Grizinkalns and, when leaving for camp, loaded up at the small station near Vozdushny Bridge. I also remembered well that after the trains carrying the regiment's military equipment, a train with the regiment's personnel was soon to follow. And I resolved not to miss that moment.

Having pushed the bulky textbook a little to one side, I sat at the table listening intently to what was happening beyond the prison's stone wall. Musing on the past, I recalled my comrades from military service and many episodes of that time.

Over those years the composition of the regiment had changed more than once. In it, as in the other Riga infantry units, there were rather few rich men's sons — for the most part they were directed to special technical units. Evidently, as before, it was workers and peasants who served their compulsory military duty in this regiment — young men who had already had a taste of the hardships of unemployment, of the shattering of bright hopes ground cruelly under the heavy millstones of capitalist reality.

While serving in the army of a bourgeois state, the discontent of the working lads with their position grew and ripened all the faster. The commanders of divisions, regiments, and battalions were officers of the tsarist army who, during the years of the civil war, had actively helped the interventionists strangle Soviet Latvia.

The other officers too, mostly from kulak families, were marked by their reactionary spirit and hatred of the popular masses.

In the army every means was used to turn soldiers into obedient executors of the orders of a bourgeois power alien to them. They were subjected to all kinds of abuse, especially in the first months of service. A turn in formation made not crisply enough by a recruit, a conversation in Russian, a hint in a letter home about the difficulties of service — all this served as a pretext for punishment and humiliation. Young soldiers were made to leap like a "goat" around the barracks and to shout at the top of their lungs into the open flue of the cast-iron stove: "I am a fool." Every evening after drill, whole ranks of "offenders" stood for hours under arms with a two-pood load of stones or sand on their backs. The petty tyrants would watch keenly to see that those standing under arms not only did not stir, did not shift from foot to foot, but did not even dare to blink. Often the soldiers could not endure such tortures and fell unconscious.

In the army, as everywhere, an unrestrained chauvinist persecution of "non-natives" was being carried out. Particularly encouraged was a contemptuous attitude toward the Latgalians — the sons of poor and small-holding peasants who had labored as farmhands for Zemgale and Kurzeme kulaks. Mocking them was considered a mark of good tone in the circles of the rapidly enriching Latvian bourgeoisie. Following in the footsteps of its foreign masters and patrons, the Latvian bourgeoisie used their colonialist methods for the economic enslavement of Latgale and the national oppression of the Russian population of that region.

Once at evening roll call the company's senior sergeant Berzin, along with reprimands to soldiers and warnings to the orderlies for bedding insufficiently neatly arranged on the bunks, was giving an admonition about reading the bourgeois newspapers. In the tone of an Unter-Prishibeev, this sergeant-major spoke of the command's displeasure that no one was reading the newspapers received by the company. The majority of soldiers were Latgalians, who knew only Russian and Latgalian. They scarcely touched the issues of the reactionary newspapers "Latvis" and "Briva Zeme" lying on the table.

"From tomorrow," the senior sergeant declared sternly, "all soldiers are required to attend the readings-aloud of the newspapers, which will be held in the company quarters."

And, swiftly scanning the ranks, he called out my surname and added:

"And you I order to read the newspapers aloud to the whole company."

This order was carried out punctually. Every day, an hour before dinner, the company duty officer would gather the entire rank and file to listen to the reading of the newspapers.

Each time I prepared in advance, selected materials in the papers about international events and, observing the necessary caution, tried to explain them. The soldiers afterwards often came to me with various questions. They were especially interested in life in the Soviet Union, wanted to know how the land question had been settled in the USSR, what the essence of the New Economic Policy was, and what the structure and condition of the Red Army were. About all this, of course, we spoke only within a narrow circle.

However, the readings-aloud of newspapers did not please Berzin and were soon stopped by him...

On one of the autumn evenings, his nitpicking and abuse of the soldiers nearly cost him his life.

Late in the day, after a long and difficult march and exhausting drill, Berzin led the company out into the street and ordered them to strike up a song. But no song came. Repeatedly giving the order and trembling with rage, he commanded the company: "At the double!" The soldiers, gasping for breath, ran for a long time through dark, narrow streets paved with uneven cobblestones. Suddenly, two or three paces in front of Berzin, who was running along the sidewalk, a large stone fell. Thrown by someone in the darkness from the column, it nearly hit him in the head. Thoroughly frightened, Berzin quickly led the company back to the barracks...

Other episodes were also recalled.

Once, while standing sentry in the regimental headquarters building, I heard a loud conversation in one of the staff rooms, where the regiment duty officer, the commander of the first machine-gun company Captain Praulin, was on duty. He was rarely in a sober state. The company duty officers, having reported to him after the evening roll call, took turns reporting on the situation in the companies and the incidents of the day. Praulin hurled thunder and lightning when he heard that during his shift a Communist proclamation had been found posted in broad daylight in the corridor of the first battalion. Frightened and bewildered before such dangerous sedition, the "warrior" cursed, threatened, and at once ordered a temporary ban on soldiers' leave to the town, and the cutting off of contact with the civilian population...

The command was thrown into no small alarm on the day of the regimental holiday, on learning of the appearance of illegal leaflets in the barracks. These leaflets, printed in typographic type, had been scattered during the night on the drill field and in the area adjoining it. The soldiers, marched out in platoons for the morning walk, eagerly snatched them up. Unnoticed by the officers, many quickly bent down, picked up a leaflet and hid it on their persons.

Then, slipping off into a secluded spot, the soldiers, alone or in pairs, would read and reread the leaflet, fold it carefully, and again carefully hide it in order to pass it on to a fellow countryman or a close comrade.

In the leaflet, the military center of the illegal Communist Party of Latvia addressed the soldiers of the Fifth Infantry Regiment. It told of the anti-popular policies of the ruling bourgeoisie and of the need to overthrow this regime and establish a workers' and peasants' power. The Communist Party called on the soldiers always to remember their class interests, to try to learn well how to handle all kinds of weapons, so as to be ready at the necessary moment to turn them against the oppressors of the working people.

The commander of our company stood for a long time before the formation urging the soldiers to hand in the illegal leaflets they had found. But his efforts were in vain. No one, except one man who was angling to become company clerk, turned in any leaflets...

And once again I lived through the day of parting with fellow soldiers. Peasant sons and young workers who had not known one another before, who had been driven into the same regiment from different ends of the country, were parting as friends-

and comrades. Many were brought close together by the hardships of military service, by common interests and secret conversations about the Soviet Union. In vain did commanders of all ranks try so persistently to make the soldiers enemies of the revolution, to instill hatred of the Communists and of the first socialist country.

On leaving the regiment, the sons of Latgalian peasants, who had been suffocating from landlessness, unbearable exactions, and political disenfranchisement, carried away in their hearts sparks of the truth about life. After their contacts with young workers, who knew slavish labor and the torments of unemployment, they carried those sparks of truth to their land of blue lakes, to the leaning and half-tumbledown huts of Latgalian villages, to the laborers' shacks and tiny rooms of Kurzeme, Vidzeme, and Zemgale farmsteads...

Thus many episodes of military service came alive again in memory.

\*

A fair amount of time had already passed since the third train with regimental equipment had rumbled along the rails. At any moment one could expect a train carrying the personnel to rush by.

I quickly got up from the table and stepped over to the small wall shelf. In one of my books, between a specially made outer wrapping and the cover of the binding, a sheet of red glossy paper was hidden. It was the inner wrapping insert from a quarter-pound packet of smoking tobacco. Such paper was always taken away from prisoners. But one time, when from the prison shop they

brought me tobacco, I managed to keep this little paper in my cell.

In my excitement, I cautiously looked out the window. Already the approaching rumble of the wheels of a new train clearly reached my ears, and soon its head drew level with the prison block. My heart began to beat even faster.

Indeed, a train was approaching with the personnel of the Fifth Infantry Regiment.

Forgetting for the moment all precautions, I went right up to the open window and, at the very bars, began to wave the sheet of red paper which I held high in my raised right hand.

Several dozen seconds went by, during which I, holding my breath, intently watched the movement of the train. It seemed that my greeting had gone unnoticed. The soldiers in the train continued to sing folk songs. But suddenly the melodies of the songs that had been carrying to me broke off all at once. From the train rang out a loud, undulating "Hurrah!" Soldiers crowded by the wide-open doors of the freight cars waved back in greeting with hundreds of hands. This was an open demonstration of solidarity with the imprisoned Communists, an open protest against bourgeois terror. Workers and peasants in soldiers' greatcoats vehemently expressed their sympathy and fellow feeling for us.

At that very moment, from the windows of the neighboring solitary cells, comrades also waved a greeting to the soldiers. Already the last cars of the long train were running past, yet still the receding cries of the soldiers' greeting rang out. A passenger carriage of the better class, traveling at the very end of the tra-

in. In this carriage rode the officers of the regiment. In its open windows and doors the faces of furious officers could be seen. They shook their fists and revolvers in the direction of the prison, and their angry shouts came across. But the shouts of a handful of enemies were drowned out in the general overwhelming chorus of friendly soldiers' voices.

On the iron galleries of all three floors of the solitary block the duty warders began to scurry about. They darted from one peephole to another, trying to catch those who were secretly looking out the window. Especially zealous on the second floor was the warder nicknamed Bull's-Eye — so called for his large and very stupid eyes.

When Bull's-Eye opened the peephole in the door of my cell almost soundlessly, I was sitting calmly at the table. Nothing, it seemed, could distract me from my absorbed reading of a book...

But in my chest everything was boiling over with irrepressible joy. In this message from outside, in the comradely soldiers' greeting, I sensed all the more deeply that profound and unbreakable bond with life. In that bond — not always outwardly visible, but always inwardly alive, which could not be broken either by years in solitary cells or by the highest stone walls — lay hidden the unconquerable strength of the imprisoned Communists, who did not cease their struggle even in prison.

The year was 1930. The destructive effect of the severe economic crisis that had engulfed the capitalist world was already making itself felt in the Baltic coun-

tries, where in fact German, American, and British capitalists were the masters.

The First of May was approaching.

On that day, together with the workers of Warsaw, Berlin, London, and New York, the workers of Riga too were preparing for a demonstration of international proletarian solidarity, for a protest against the steadily worsening condition of the toilers and the growing unemployment.

In their own way, the political prisoners in all the prisons of bourgeois Latvia were also preparing to mark that day.

Throughout April, in our fourth block, as in the other blocks of the Central Prison, an intensive secret correspondence on this matter was carried on among prisoners at hard labor, those sentenced to fortress confinement, and those under investigation. Cell tapped to cell, floor to floor through the wall — all the details of the May Day celebration in the prison were being clarified and agreed upon. Our block was to be the first to begin this active demonstration by the political prisoners.

On the thirtieth of April, after a twenty-minute exercise period, our group of convicted prisoners was being led back into the block. At the entrance, by the doors and in the corridor, we tried furtively, unnoticed by the warders, to shake one another's hands or at least to say farewell with a glance. For after the collective celebration tomorrow all kinds of changes were possible in the block: we could be isolated still more, transferred elsewhere. Inwardly calm, ready for any surprise, we walked into our solitary cells.

On the morning of the First of May, as soon as the order to get up rang out, the dull walls of our block came to life all at once. From below, from above, and from the sides, from one cell to another, a loud knocking was passed along all the inner walls. With threefold blows of our fists we congratulated one another on the arrival of the day of international proletarian solidarity. This was done with lightning speed, simultaneously on all three floors.

The duty warder had scarcely managed to figure out what was happening when the noise had already died away. The block resounded with the usual clatter of wooden clogs. Roused, as always, early in the morning, the prisoners walked back and forth in their cramped solitary cells.

Morning roll call passed as on any other day. Then the distribution of bread began. The warder came up to each cell, opened the small window in the door, and a corridor orderly from among the criminal prisoners pushed through it a hunk of half-baked bread and half a liter of dark slop called coffee. On that day the senior warder of the block also stood outside the doors. He at once noted down in his notebook the surname of everyone who did not take the bread and coffee. The little windows in the doors quickly slammed shut one after another — on that day all the political prisoners were refusing to accept the prison food.

"They've conspired again," the senior warder muttered angrily, nervously running his pencil over a page of his notebook.

All day it was completely quiet in the block. We also did not go out for our walk, did not take dinner or supper. In the silence the steps of the duty

guards, who were constantly rushing from the door of one cell to another. On that day they kept an especially close watch through the peepholes.

*

The evening cleaning was finishing up. By special order, the corridor crew did not linger long this time — they went over the floor with a wet rag and hastily wiped the iron staircase.

The metallic drumming of a steel bar tapping against the window grilles sounded more and more frequently and loudly. Having checked, as on every other day, whether the bars had been filed through, the guards were closing the windows for the night. Soon a guard came into my solitary cell as well, with practiced skill tapped the grille and locked the window with his key.

At last the final preparations for the evening roll call were completed: the guards hastily slid back the outer bolts on the door hatches. At the moment of the roll call the guards would briefly open and then slam shut the hatches.

Absolute silence fell. All the political prisoners listened tensely for every rustle in the block. The roll call was expected any minute. To catch the moment when it began was extremely important that evening. On this depended the precision and coordination of the demonstration the prisoners were about to stage, taking the administration by surprise.

Now the sharp banging of the block doors could be heard: the duty assistant warden and his entourage were walking down the corridor. Rattling his bunch of keys, a guard opened the door into the solitary-confinement section and bellowed in a booming voice:

"At-ten-tion!"

This very command, by direction of the underground bureau of the political prisoners' collective, was to serve as the signal for the start of an active May Day demonstration in the block.

With an iron clatter, the hatches in the doors of all the cells flew open at once. And at that same instant, from the first floor, the strong voice of the worker R. Peterson, sentenced in the August twenty-second case, rang out:

"Long live the First of May!"

"Long live the Communist Party!" — I shouted loudly through the open hatch of the door from my cell on the second floor.

The cry "Long live the Communist International!" coming from the third floor had not yet died away when, in all the cells, voices rose loudly singing:

Arise, ye branded with the curse, The whole world of the starving and the slaves...

The jailers, taken aback at first, halted, then hurried to the telephone to call up the guard reserve on duty in the main block. On the major-alarm signal, the Fourth Valmiera Regiment was summoned to the prison from the nearest barracks.

Meanwhile in the block the singing of "The Internationale" went on.

When more than twenty guards burst into the corridor, we were already finishing "The Internationale." But the voices of the singers did not fall silent — in all the cells revolutionary songs were taken up. This was no ordinary singing, but a powerful protest against the prison and against terror,

a fighting May Day roll call of the political prisoners with the revolutionary working people struggling on the outside.

The reprisal began.

Enraged guards burst into the cells. They beat the prisoners with their fists and dragged them by force out into the corridor.

But the singing in the other cells did not stop at this time.

While the guards were dragging me down the iron staircase and the senior guard Kolberg was pummeling me with his fists on the back and head, the block was filled with a roar. The boisterous singing no longer had its earlier unison. Some were still finishing "With a battle cry on our lips," others were beginning "Boldly, comrades, in step," and yet others were singing "Hostile whirlwinds blow above us"...

Along the narrow corridor of the basement, where the punishment cells were located, the guards stood in a line. Here, as the political prisoners passed through this gauntlet of guards, they were savagely beaten again. Warden Pommer, who was directing things here, lent a hand himself: he struck many of the politicals on the head with the butt of his revolver.

While the beaten prisoners were being led one by one from their cells to the punishment block, upstairs in the cellblock the assistant warden Azis was at work. This executioner with the haughty manners of an aristocrat, his hands always drawn into black silk gloves, could not look at the political prisoners without hatred. On his orders the guards ferociously beat the political hard-labor convicts and trampled them underfoot. In a fit of fury he demanded that they shoot the political prisoners, but the soldiers did not carry out his orders.

Soon the punishment cells were overflowing. Into each of them, designed for only one person, eight to ten men were driven. In the same cells were thrown together prisoners sentenced to the fortress and to hard labor, people from different floors and cells who had been kept for years in strict isolation.

Already in the punishment cells, we banged with our fists on the locked doors, demanding that the beating of our comrades be stopped, demanding that the prosecutor be summoned to the prison. But the executioners went on with the bloody beating.

It took about an hour to drive all the prisoners into the punishment cells. After that everything fell quiet. The guard reserve and the soldiers were thrown into the other blocks of the prison for the reprisal against the politicals. The prisoners in the second block were beaten especially brutally that evening.

In the punishment cell into which I was shoved it was so crowded that there was nowhere even to step. On the cold cement floor lay the Liepāja communist Gebels, sentenced to six years of hard labor. He had been beaten especially badly. To help him, we placed our outer clothing under him. Also there were the convict Miezis, the students J. Putniņš sentenced to the fortress, and the young Ventspils worker A. Ankups. Finding ourselves neighbors in the dark punishment cell and still stirred by what had just happened, we talked about the workers' demonstrations expected that day in Riga, Berlin, Paris, and New York.

But the conversation that had begun was soon interrupted by new bustle in the corridor. The outer iron bolt of the door was shoved back with a clatter, and Azis suddenly appeared before us again with a group of guards

. Pointing the beam of his pocket electric flashlight at us, he was looking for someone.

"Come out," he ordered me, and went on sweeping the beam of the flashlight over the faces of the other prisoners.

Something stirred inside me. The thought flashed through my mind that the administration intended to shoot individual politicals as the ringleaders of the "mutiny" in the prison. But, quickly mastering myself, I walked out of the punishment cell with a firm step, escorted by three guards. Behind me they led Ankups. We walked along a narrow corridor where, against the stone wall, soldiers stood with rifles at the ready.

The two of us were led one at a time up to a wide iron door; it was unlocked, each of us was let inside, and then it was locked again. It turned out that, having darkened the windows and hastily adapted all the basement premises for use as punishment cells, the administration was relieving the extreme overcrowding. In the process, different groups of political prisoners were being separated — those under investigation, those sentenced to the fortress, and those sentenced to hard labor.

In the new punishment cell were the convicted men Vesmanis, Skuiņš, Kalvari, and others. It became at once more cheerful. The whole first night passed in lively conversation — none of us even thought of sleep. We talked about how the May Day celebration had been carried out in the block, joked about who had gotten more and who had gotten less from the rampaging jailers. Armin Ankups vividly recounted how, in single combat with a soldier who had swung his rifle butt at him, he had managed to wrench the rifle away from him. But, finding himself with the rifle in his hands, Ankups had also been at a loss. After all, he could easily have been charged with an armed

assault, and he decided to return the rifle to the frightened soldier as quickly as possible.

Forced to keep silent for years in our solitary cells, we now talked in a hurried whisper. And what didn't we talk about that night! — about the tactics of the political prisoners in the prison and the most important domestic and international events, about books that we had managed only with such difficulty to obtain from outside, about a great many other things.

That night a conversation got going between us and the sentries — cadets from the instructor company of the Valmiera Regiment — who often came up to the big barred doors. Although these were future instructors, not all of them were hostile to the communists. The sentries disagreed with us on many points, and maintained that socialist ideas could be put into practice only in the far future, in a hundred years or so...

The next day Ankups did not fail to take advantage of the sentries' "loyalty." During the morning cleaning he made contact with the neighboring punishment cells in order to agree on expressing a joint protest against the beating of the political prisoners and on the demand that the prosecutor be summoned to the prison.

*

The excitement of the first days gave way to the quiet of punishment-cell routine. Long, hungry days. The large basement was damp and cold. Lying down to sleep late in the evening on the cement floor, we all pressed close together to keep warm. But by the middle of the night the basement grew still colder, and there was no way to keep lying

on the bare floor. We decided to sleep in shifts. While some slept fully clothed, others, half-undressed, paced briskly back and forth across the cold cell. With their clothes they covered the sleeping comrades. Every two hours, at the changing of the sentries, some got up and others lay down to sleep.

By day, gathered in the corner farthest from the doors and sitting on the floor, we again carried on our conversations: about the prospects of the proletarian revolution in Germany and the peculiarities of the revolutionary workers' movement in the Baltic countries; we argued about questions of philosophy, literature, and art. Each of us tried to clarify what was difficult to work out on one's own in solitary.

So the days and nights passed in the remote and dark basement.

*

The seventh day of confinement in the punishment cell was already drawing to an end.

On the seventh of May, shortly before the evening roll call, footsteps and the clinking of keys were heard in the corridors of the basement. The prisoners began to be led out of the punishment cells one by one and back to their cells. After the dark and cold punishment cell, each of us was eager to find himself as soon as possible in his own already familiar cell.

But in the cellblock everything now turned out to be different. A full reshuffle had been carried out there. The administration had done everything to strengthen the isolation, to disrupt the secret connections that had been established among the solitary cells. None of us ended up in his former cell. As for those

who were regarded as the initiators of the active celebration, they were transferred to the lowest cells, on the shaded side. In addition, all the politicals were deprived of visits, correspondence, and parcels for two months.

In retaliation for the May Day celebration, our whole group was moved to the very lowest floor, to the northern, shaded side. The rays of the sun never penetrated into these solitary cells; it was damp and cold here even on the hottest summer days. Transferred here from the second floor, I found myself in a cell with Ankups. I had met him before during the twenty-minute exercise periods in the prison yard. Now, however, we were to be together in one cell all the time, to live each day with the same thoughts, the same anxieties and hopes.

We introduced each other to our personal books. We were both pleased that not all our books turned out to be the same — that meant each of us now had more textbooks and reading material. Ankups was especially delighted by the large world atlas sent to me by comrades from Leningrad. The atlas contained a wealth of economic, historical, political, and all sorts of other interesting information. Then we looked through the photo postcards we had received over the years of our imprisonment from family and friends; together we read letters in which there sometimes appeared interesting and stirring details of life on the outside. Ankups' mother worked as a stewardess on a Lat-

vian merchant steamer. She wrote about how warmly and cordially the Latvian sailors had been received by Soviet sailors in the clubs of Leningrad and Arkhangelsk, and about her impressions of the Soviet Union.

Resting after the ordeals of the punishment cells, we told each other about Riga and Ventspils, about our lives and the crossroads we had come to.

Having begun working at the age of fourteen, Ankups had served for a time as a cabin boy and then as a sailor on a merchant steamer; he had been in the port cities of England, France, and Spain; he had seen how hard life was for the working people in those countries. Ankups also told about conditions in the Jelgava prison, where, together with other Ventspils comrades, he had been held until trial.

So passed the first weeks, full of new impressions.

Then we set ourselves a firm daily routine. We were both full of the desire to learn as much as possible, to study many things during our years in prison. And, like all our fellow prisoners, we stubbornly and persistently "gnawed at the granite of science."

Soon all the politicals who had been moved to other cells settled into their new places, and life in the cellblock again flowed on as before. The mute stones of the walls began once more to speak, on which, in prison code, with the tip of a pencil or a pin, letters, words, and whole sentences were tapped out almost inaudibly. By paths imperceptible to the administration, the secret mail was once again in operation.

The administration tried to prevent the establishment of any kind of communication between the cells whatsoever. Bursting in unexpectedly with a search, the guards literally

turned everything in the cell upside down, even shaking out the straw from the mattress sacks in search of secret correspondence. Sometimes they did manage to intercept the mail, to uncover the hiding places where it was kept in common areas. But the correspondence among the political prisoners was never broken off. And in the following years too, even in the period of open fascist dictatorship, when the prison executioners savagely tormented the political prisoners, terrorized them in every way, and tried to deny them any possibility of individual study or communication within the prison, — they still could not fully achieve this. In the common cells, in the cellblocks, at the peat works in the Sigulda marshes, in the Kalnciems quarries, the communists went on publishing their bulletins and journals, thereby contributing to the cohesion of the collective of political prisoners scattered across separate cells, prisons, and labor camps. To maintain communication, new places and new possibilities were always being sought out — ones the administration could not even guess at.

The central communication hub was the prison bathhouse. There everything was used as a mailbox: cracks on the underside of benches, barely noticeable holes in the walls, various joints on the numerous pipes, drainage points in the floor, and so on. Tiny notes, written in indelible pencil or India ink and wrapped in well-oiled paper, could lie for weeks in water and hot steam awaiting a previously agreed-upon recipient. For a long time specially constructed hiding places existed for correspondence between the leaderships of the collectives of the second and fourth cellblocks. They had been made by master

prisoner-craftsmen during the renovation of the steam room of the bathhouse. The thick iron bolts that fastened the upper benches had been made hollow inside. By unscrewing the nut of the bolt, one could insert into its middle a tightly rolled-up little packet the size of a finger.

Finding ourselves in prison after intense practical work in the underground, each of us tried to use every smallest opportunity to study, in order to better arm ourselves theoretically for the further revolutionary struggle on the outside.

However, obtaining the necessary literature was extremely difficult, since with each passing year and each passing month, the endless list of publications not allowed into the prison kept growing. To say nothing of the classics of Marxist literature — the works of Marx and Engels, while the works of Lenin were strictly forbidden even on the outside — the administration with particular zeal confiscated and withdrew from circulation all Soviet publications of a social-scientific character, and later all imaginative literature as well.

Taking advantage of the ignorance of the inspectors, comrades on the outside, who took constant care of us, sometimes managed to smuggle into the prison some of the literature we needed. To this end various methods of deceiving the censors were devised. One of them consisted in the following: the block of the relevant book, without title page and table of contents, was inserted into a common binding together with another, "loyal" edition similar in format and typeface.

Such tricks still worked at the end of the twenties, when the lazy prison censors usually did not

acquaint themselves fully with the contents of an entire book. By this method one political prisoner was sent Lenin's work "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. By the same route, taking advantage of the prison administration's trust in reactionary authors and renegades of every kind, in 1929 we received Lenin's book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. It had been skillfully bound into the middle of a book by the bourgeois economist and philosopher and white-emigrant Struve.

With what joy and impatience, when my turn finally came, I took up the reading of this work of Lenin's, in which the theory and practice of imperialism were set out so simply and clearly. I read it through twice, trying to make as many notes as possible. This work of Lenin's, which laid bare the entire inner mechanism of the driving forces of imperialism, after Marx's Capital aroused in me, as in other comrades, a special craving to study the economic problems of the world economy and questions of international politics. And it was precisely this that helped us, even during long years of imprisonment, to orient ourselves correctly in all the news that reached us about events going on outside.

The bureau of the cellblock collective also tried to give practical help with study to newly arrived political prisoners. In addition to the irregularly issued underground prison-wide journal Caur tumsu ("Through the Darkness"), it was decided to set up a cellblock journal as well. An editorial board of three was appointed.

And soon, unseen by the administration, in the solitary cells of the cellblock, the editorial and non-editorial contributors to the new social-

political journal Aiz restēm ("Behind the Bars") began their work. Its first issue came out in July 1930, when the "black months" of additional punishment for celebrating the First of May ended. We called them "black" because during that time we were deprived of correspondence, visits, and parcels from home, and were left only on the starvation prison ration.

Along with surveys of the most important events and articles containing a deep analysis of the current moment, the journal carried short essays, poems, and often satirical sketches and caricatures of overreaching jailers. In several issues a serious theoretical question was discussed in its pages: was it possible, in the epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism, for there to be a war among the imperialist powers themselves, or only a war of the imperialists against the Soviet state? On this question the article authors and their critics debated a great deal at the time, breaking lances with great heat.

It was a substantial journal, consisting of 120 to 140 small pages of thin cigarette-tube paper, 12.5 centimeters long and 6.5 centimeters wide. All the material was written in block letters, so that in case of discovery it would be hard to identify the authors by their handwriting.

Work on each of its pages required great painstaking labor and exceptional self-restraint. After all, articles had to be written and "printed" under the unrelenting surveillance of a guard who at any moment might burst unexpectedly into the cell. One therefore had to listen attentively for the barely audible footsteps of the approaching guard,

Cover of the prison journal "Behind Bars"

quietly lifting the cover of the peephole to check what the political prisoner was doing.

There were also such warders — "spirits," in prison slang — who, in their soft slippers, would creep up to the peephole completely silently. When they were on duty, any possibility of writing for the journal was ruled out.

At the beginning of 1941 I had to prepare an article on the communist press for the all-union publication "Bolshevik Press" — "In the Prison Underground." Before me at that time was one of the few issues, so familiar to me, of the journal "Aiz restem" (Behind Bars), which for ten years had been kept in one of our prison "archives," walled up in a mixture

of sand and bread in the recess of a ventilation duct in one of the solitary cells.

This issue, for November–December 1930, had five sections.

The first — the social-political section — opened with a leading article devoted to the thirteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Then came the articles: "On Opportunism," "What the Parliamentary Elections Prove," and "The Socio-Economic Foundations of the Communist Movement in Latvia."

In the literary section — "From Memoirs" — a sketch on the life and work of the worker-revolutionary Semyon Samoilov, marking the second anniversary of his death in this very prison block; "At the Demonstration" — an account by a participant in the general strike and demonstration on the day the left trade unions were closed, August 22, 1928, and the sketch "The Career of the Kulak Sons Ruksha and Duksha." Here too were the verses "Remember Yourself," full of cheer and resolve, "Prison Bells," and the elegiac lines "What Do You Long For, What, Dear Comrade."

The criticism section analyzed works by young poets and prose writers, imprisoned and published in earlier issues, pointing out shortcomings of content and form and noting their creative successes.

In the section "Prison Life" was an article by Senior on a very topical question of the time: "On Methods of Struggle in Prison."

In the section "Satire and Humor" — "The Debate," a pantomime in three acts about how the imperialist powers "disarm," with a fitting illustration; satirical verses and apt cartoons on prison themes.

On the last, 133rd, page was an appeal from the editorial board to the prisoners to take an even more active part in their own publication. The authors of all the materials signed with pseudonyms.

The journal "Aiz restem" seemed to push apart the walls of the solitary cells and brought much that was new into the gray, monotonous life of the political prisoners, who at that time were deprived of the chance to receive newspapers and magazines. Thanks to the participation of well-prepared comrades, it helped to deepen our political knowledge and sharpened our thinking. An unclear framing of an issue, careless wording, would receive substantive criticism in the following numbers.

Alongside the younger comrades, the old Bolshevik Berzin-Anderson (under the pseudonym Senior), who in 1919 had been Deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture in Soviet Latvia, also worked on the journal. In the 1920s he had returned illegally to Latvia for underground Party work and, after his arrest, was sentenced to eight years of hard labor. Among the activists who created the journal was also Ankup. He took part in the editorial work, and in his small but clear printed handwriting copied out many of the articles. Both the authors and the members of the editorial board were on different floors and in different ends of the cellblock. And every article, every poem and cartoon was passed, with unimaginable difficulty and risk, through many links of a long chain, until at last it reached its destination.

The journal was passed from cell to cell in the rag of a bucket for washing the floor, through various "malinas" — specially made hiding places in the toilet, during the exercise period, and so on. From floor to floor it was passed "by elevator" — a string lowered from

an outer window. For this we had to catch brief moments of early morning, when the warder inside the cellblock was busy handing out bread to the other cells and the sentry in the watchtower was dozing or looking the other way.

During the day, during the usual searches in the prison, the journal was hidden in the straw mattress, under the tin shield on the outer part of the window, inside bread, and in other suitable places.

Interesting and varied in its topics, "Aiz restem" became indispensable in the life of the cellblock collective, and every political prisoner waited impatiently for his turn at the only copy of each new issue. It reached every one of the thirty-nine cells, and was read so much that after a month and a half or two months of secretly passing from hand to hand, the brittle cigarette-paper pages barely held together. And by then the next issue — tightly rolled into a tube and wrapped in waterproof paper — was already beginning its complicated route through the cellblock.

The journal "Aiz restem" existed for about a year. This was a great achievement, given the extremely difficult conditions in which one had to write for it, keep it, and read it. After the sixth issue of our journal was uncovered, further publication was temporarily halted for reasons of secrecy.

When the last issue of the journal fell into the hands of the administration — an issue containing not only articles on international and domestic political subjects, but also detailed statistics on the makeup of the political prisoners in the cellblock and material about embezzlers in the prison department — they were thrown into no small panic. Having failed to prevent the appearance of

an underground publication inside a prison so heavily guarded both within and without, the administration handed the matter over to the secret police.

The fingerprints of the right hand were taken from every political prisoner in the cellblock, handwriting was compared with their letters; there was an attempt to use a provocateur, who was later exposed. The whole effort came to nothing. The secret police had no time for those who were already in prison. They were too busy with those who were still at large…

\*

The prisons of bourgeois Latvia were filling more and more with politicals. The old places of confinement in the provinces were being expanded; new prisons were being built in Valmiera and Cēsis. There were no longer enough solitary cells even at the Central Prison in Riga. Room was being prepared in it for new arrivals. Some of the sentenced politicals were transferred from solitary cells into the common ones.

Day after day, ordinary life among the political prisoners went on in our common cell. From morning till evening, during the "quiet hours" set by the collective itself, with brief breaks for rest, we studied.

Elected to the bureau of the cell collective, Ankup continued here too the painstaking and complicated work of maintaining contact with all the cellblocks. By his self-control and his straightforwardness, by his fairness in handling matters great and small, he always helped to bind together the militant, monolithic collective of the cell.

Ankup was already serving his last year of fortress imprisonment. But with the energy and persistence so characteristic of him, he kept on studying, taking notes, never parting with a book even in the breaks between "quiet hours." His term was nearly up. And he was in a hurry to use every day and every hour of his imprisonment. "In spite of everything — turn the prison into a school of struggle and political study!" — Ankup steadily and consistently tried to carry out this directive of the Party to all political prisoners.

\*

On a day in November 1932, after the dinner break, the "quiet hours" continued in our common cell. At five long tables placed in a single row sat thirty communists sentenced to various terms of imprisonment in the fortress. Most of the comrades were preparing for the upcoming seminar on political economy, others were working on dialectical and historical materialism or studying Russian. The rest were reading Fadeyev's "The Rout," Sholokhov's "And Quiet Flows the Don," and a collection of Gorky's articles on literature. They were hurrying. Another fifteen or twenty in the cell were waiting impatiently for their turn — according to a pre-arranged list — to read the works that had been so hard to obtain.

That day I was the one responsible for keeping order in the cell during the study hours. Such a duty-keeper each day, by turn, was one of the three members of the elected bureau of the cell collective. But the established internal routine was so strictly observed

by everyone that even those who liked to whisper with a neighbor patiently waited for the next break.

This time, however, the quiet of the cell was being broken by an unceasing noise in the corridor, where for the first time some warder from the reserve was on duty. Comparatively young, short, very lively, he kept pacing back and forth past our cell and loudly jangling his bunch of keys. This made us all nervous and kept us from concentrating.

I quietly got up from the table, went to the grated door, and asked the warder not to make noise in the corridor, since it was very irritating to people.

The warder smiled slightly but said nothing. There were none of the usual oaths against the "incorrigible" communists. The noise in the corridor stopped, and we went on with our studies.

After supper, when we were let out into the corridor for the evening cleanup, we noticed that for some reason the warder was looking very closely at each of us and listening in on our conversations.

I was the last to come back into the cell from the cleanup. As he locked the door behind me, the unfamiliar warder addressed me in a half-whisper:

"A warm greeting for you from Zina Puntsulis."

It was so unexpected that for a moment I was at a loss. Besides, one had to remember that the secret police did not stop their provocations even inside the prison. They tried in every way to identify the people on the outside through whom the political prisoners kept up their connection with the Party and with the "Red Aid."

"Who is she, then?" I asked him in a restrained tone, as though out of mere curiosity.

"She worked together with you at the cul-

tural-educational section of the left trade unions. Recently she became my wife.

"And to whom is she sending the greeting?" I pressed him in surprise.

"To you — Kolya," the warder answered briefly and firmly. "I need to talk with you about a lot of things, but it's awkward now; better after the count," he added, and quickly stepped away from the door of our cell.

Down the corridor the criminals were already scurrying, let out from the neighboring common cell for the evening cleanup.

I, of course, remembered Zina well — she had worked in the galosh shop at the "Kvadrats" factory. She was a member of the branch of the left trade union of chemical-industry workers in the Moscow Forstadt and took an active part in all the section's undertakings. As a former typographic folder, she had more than once helped to fold our publications faster — they were printed in legal print shops — so as to carry the finished print run away in time before the censor's inevitable confiscation of these editions.

After the liquidation of all the organizations of the left trade unions, Zina had no doubt thrown herself into illegal revolutionary work as well. And if this warder was close to her in his political views, what tempting prospects this opened up for improving our connection with the outside, I thought to myself at once.

Soon after the count we both, as if by chance, met at the grated door of the cell. It turned out that the warder, who had given his name as Shvyakin, had already been serving in the prison for several years.

He spoke of the growing dissatisfaction outside

Vladimir Shvyakin

among the working people, about the unemployed who only the other day had smashed up the labor exchange in Riga, about the new newspaper "Sarkanā Zeme" ("Red Land") published by the worker-peasant faction of the Saeima, and other news. Then he spoke heatedly about shortcomings in the leadership of the Party cells over the illegal anti-fascist workers' groups. Evidently he too was a member of one of those groups.

In a couple of days Shvyakin was due to be on duty in the solitary section of this same cellblock. He offered, if need be, to pass through him to that section anything that was needed. Just at that time, because of

the failure of the "post" in the bathhouse, our connection with that section had been broken.

I informed the other members of the cell collective's bureau about the content of my conversation with Shvyakin. And we decided to take up his offer in order to restore the connection as quickly as possible.

The next day, unnoticed by my other cellmates, I handed Shvyakin a coded note and asked him to deliver it to a particular politkatorzhanin in solitary, who was especially skilled at observing secrecy. It was necessary that as small a number of comrades as possible should know of the existence of such a warder.

Shvyakin carried out the task and brought back a coded reply from the bureau of the solitary section's collective.

Some time later Shvyakin was again on duty on our floor, this time at night. Everyone in the cell was sound asleep. But he waited until one of us woke up and went over to the shelf for a drink of water, and asked him to wake me.

That night the two of us talked for a long time and reached agreement on many things. First, Shvyakin promised to bring us the latest issues of the information bulletin published by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Latvia, and other illegal publications. We also spoke about the possibilities of individual educational work among certain of the prison warders. Shvyakin knew some progressively-minded warders who were very interested in the achievements of the Soviet Union. It was important to bring them together into a separate group and to set up political work with it on the outside. I suggested to Shvyakin that he draw into this group also the warder Vy-

sotsky, who sympathized with the political prisoners and was morally weighed down by his position. A skilled metalworker, he had been forced to go into the warders' service since he could find no other work.

\*

Several weeks of waiting for the promised illegal literature passed. But Shvyakin no longer showed up in the cellblock.

One early morning, as he was letting the prisoners of our cell out for the cleanup, a visibly worried Vysotsky drew me aside. He reported that Shvyakin had been arrested and was in the hands of the secret police. The authorities had officially announced this "disgraceful" affair before the formation of warders and had demanded that they immediately report on any progressively-minded colleague.

Under what circumstances Shvyakin had been arrested was not known. Still, one had to reckon with the fact that he would be beaten badly to wring from him the information the secret police needed. Vysotsky was extremely shaken and feared arrest himself. It turned out that Shvyakin had recently managed to pass him several illegal pamphlets. I advised him not to keep these books at home, but to hide them somewhere else. Just in case, I warned him how to bear up if taken to the secret police.

But all turned out well. For lack of compromising material, Shvyakin was released from the secret police. Even so, he was dismissed from his post. In a verbal greeting passed through Vysotsky, he insisted that he had been betrayed by the warder Tikhomi-

rov, who later openly showed himself as a tormentor of political prisoners.

And half a year later Vladimir Shvyakin was already to be seen among the political prisoners in the second cellblock. For taking part in the work of an underground Party print shop, he was later sentenced to six years of hard labor. Throughout that whole time he was kept in a solitary cell, and the administration mocked in every possible way the former prison warder who had become a steadfast revolutionary fighter.

On the morning of January 2, 1933, I was walking out of the yard of the Central Prison.

After presenting to the sentry the documents I had received at the prison office, I passed through the main gate. Down a narrow lane that ran along the dilapidated fence of the Matveyevsky cemetery, I hurried into the city. Behind me lay the gloomy, elongated blocks of the prison. From a distance they looked like enormous coffins.

And there, in the big prison cell, my comrades were now once again observing "quiet hours."

In my ears still rang the words spoken the day before yesterday after the evening roll call, when our whole collective in the cell was marking the final hours of the departing year 1932. The comrades quietly voiced their cherished hopes for the future. One after another, in half-whispers, they pronounced toasts to the further successes of the party in the revolutionary struggle, and to the coming New Year. Everyone also raised their mugs to the fact that, beginning tomorrow, each man's term of imprisonment was reduced by one year.

It was no misfortune that the toasting cups held not strong sparkling wine but simple cranberry kvass, and that the snacks were small slices of half-stale white bread! All warmly praised our "quartermaster" Karl Sprogis, who showed so much care and practical inventiveness in running our collective household. He always

was very far-sighted and skillfully distributed the food received from outside. For this solemn occasion, too, he had managed to set aside modest treats from everything we had received on the last visiting day...

It was a cold, windless day. On the dry, frozen ground no snow was anywhere to be seen. In a light autumn coat, with a small bundle of belongings, I walked along Matisa Street. It was pleasant to breathe the fresh air with full lungs. No guards watching over you, you walk along the street on your own, without an escort. There is, it would seem, no sharper joy in life. So it seemed to me in those minutes, on that first day. For thoughts of this day had grown more and more troubling to me over the last six months. They had not left me even when I sat over a book, nor at night when I woke in the overcrowded, stifling cell.

I looked at everything with excitement. How does this outskirt of the city live? What has changed here over the past five years? The wooden houses had visibly grown shabby, the facades of buildings had faded. The faces of many people seemed dejected to me. Among them, of course, were a great many unemployed. Some elderly man silently begged for alms.

Such were my first impressions of "liberty."

Before my arrest I had lived on Stabu Street. And when I approached the house in which my mother had been waiting tirelessly for me all these years, a strong pounding of the heart constricted my chest...

In prison, and only after a long struggle by the political prisoners, from 1931 onward we had been permitted to subscribe to one and only one newspaper -- "Latvijas Kareivis"

("Latvian Warrior"). It was a poor little army newspaper -- a publication of the Ministry of War -- which civilians normally did not even pick up. Rarely, and this was considered a great event, we managed by illegal means to obtain a copy of some other newspaper. At the risk of being thrown into a punishment cell, we passed it secretly from cell to cell.

That is why, in the first days after my release from prison, I greedily read the fresh issues of various newspapers, in order to find out about everything as quickly as possible. But from the content of all these newspapers one could only guess at the true features of reality, as if seeing them in a distorting mirror.

The newspapers were full of screaming headlines, printed in green, red, and blue ink. In the most prominent places were placed the well-known "Riga canards" about the Soviet Union -- the output of White-emigre fake news agencies in Paris, Riga, and Warsaw.

All the newspapers, from the fascist "Latvis" to the liberal and venal "Jaunakas Zinas," wrote with ever greater malice all sorts of fables about the communists, lied about the failure of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan, about economic ruin and famine in the USSR. Right alongside they placed reassuring reports from the New York and London exchanges, news of some supposedly impending easing of the economic crisis, in whose grip the whole capitalist world had already been for the fourth year. Native kulak political wheeler-dealers and certified charlatans of science argued in tedious articles that the root of all human misfortunes lay in the rapid development of technology and industry, that only the antediluvian peasant

labor would save humanity... With all this newspaper filth they tried to poison the minds of the working people, to breed in them disbelief in their own strength, to weaken their will to revolutionary struggle.

Then came reports of the successful activity of the Latvian secret police. Thus, under the headline "Communists Are Trying to Draw Soldiers into Their Organizations," on January 4 "Jaunakas Zinas" wrote: "...The Communists are trying to influence the unemployed masses and to create committees of the unemployed... Communist agents are especially active in conducting lively anti-state and communist agitation in our army... Yesterday evening agents of the Political Police carried out major arrests and searches in Riga. More than twenty members of the third communist district have been arrested..."

Among those arrested in those days was also the twenty-two-year-old worker Fricis Gailis. Under torture in the secret police he was beaten to death. To cover up this atrocity, his body was thrown from a fourth-floor window of the secret-police building. Officially it was later claimed that Gailis, "while attempting to escape," had jumped from the window of his cell and was killed.

It was also reported in those days that a trial had recently been held in Riga of a group of members of the underground Union of Communist Youth and that all of them had been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

And in a small notice, among brief information about various minor incidents, in a few lines set in fine print, there was mention of suicides in Riga in December. It was dryly enumerated that of the eleven people who had killed themselves that

month -- eight men and three women -- five had hanged themselves, three had poisoned themselves, and two had shot themselves. They were young and elderly people who had seen no way out of the oppressive unemployment.

In another newspaper one could not read without distress about the tragedy of one set of parents. The father of eight children, S. Brantman, who lived on Sadovnikovskaya Street, in house No. 26, had committed suicide by taking some poison. In a letter he left behind he wrote that he was killing himself because he could no longer bear to watch his children's suffering. He had been out of work for a long time. The family was living in terrible conditions, the children went hungry for whole days at a time.

"I made every effort to provide my children with food, but it was all in vain" -- these were the last words of the despairing father, an ordinary member of the social-democratic party...

And the newspaper "Jaunakas Zinas" was meanwhile boasting about the "help" given to a few dozen unemployed members of the intelligentsia by the government of Skujenieks -- a renegade, the vilest representative of the so-called "right-wing Mensheviks."

In the issue of January 7 it was written: "The first feeding station in Riga for unemployed members of the intelligentsia has been opened. It has found its shelter in the premises of the Young Women's Christian Association at 55 Elizabetes Street, and began work on Thursday, January 5. On the first day about fifty meals were issued to unemployed of the first category, that is, to family breadwinners and former soldier-liberators. The famished people eat a tasty soup of fresh cabbage standing up. 'We have now been saved from hunger, but not yet from the frost!' says one as he is leaving. He expressed a common thought. One after another tells of his grief. People show their pawn-

shop receipts: a winter coat, a silver watch, a dress, a suit... Everything, everything has gone to the pawnshop! 'We won't even speak now of the fact that we shall not get our things back. You see, the term for paying the interest has already expired -- we have no means of redeeming them, there is no money... And with every passing day we are sinking deeper into debt...'"

So spoke those fifty out of ten thousand unemployed intelligentsia who had been lucky enough to eat a bowl of hot soup. In an even worse position, of course, were the other fifty thousand unemployed workers, who had always lived in want and had nothing to pawn.

The overall picture was completed by the advertisements placed daily in this newspaper:

Honored citizens!

Help an educated young man of the intelligentsia, in an utterly hopeless situation, with any work whatsoever or in any other way. Offers: Krisjana Barona Street, 37, apt. 10. ("Jaunakas Zinas" No. 5, January 7, 1933.)

A young man,

finding himself in utter destitution, asks for some kind of work; otherwise he will be forced to put a noose around his neck or take up the work of a burglar. Kind offers to the 1st dept. of the newspaper office under No. A. S 6716. ("Jaunakas Zinas" No. 6, January 9, 1933.)

Kind, sympathetic people!

I sincerely ask people with a soul to respond, who could give work to an honest, good-looking

girl with secondary education, who knows needlework and housekeeping. She is also willing to keep house for a single person. ("Jaunakas Zinas" No. 7, January 10, 1933.)

A living participant in the battles of the Latvian Riflemen's regiments for the liberation of Latvia asks for work or to be provided for, so that he and his family will not have to go hungry in a free Latvia. Offers to the office of this newspaper under No. OA 6852. ("Jaunakas Zinas" No. 9, January 12, 1933.)

Women with higher education applied to be maids; highly qualified workers and engineers were willing to hire on as watchmen and yard-sweepers.

In its political orientation, as before, the Menshevik newspaper "Socialdemokrats" differed little from all the bourgeois publications. Only its outward appearance had changed slightly. Earlier its title had been printed in black ink -- now it was in bright red. But in spirit and content the paper remained as yellow as ever. Issue after issue, the Menshevik bosses, with mounting fury, lashed out against the left-wing workers and, to please the secret police, provocatively called them "Muscovites." Masters of slanderous fabrications, they tried by every means to deceive the toiling masses.

On January 3, 1933, the newspaper "Socialdemokrats" carried on its front page false information about a meeting that had taken place of the delegates of the Central General Health Insurance Fund, at which the question of improving the insurance of workers and salaried employees was discussed. Under a large three-column

headline "The Left in a United Front with the Factory Owners!", the paper screamed: "In the struggle against the socialists, the 'left' defile all the basic principles of the workers' movement and ideologically go hand in hand with the factory owners."

And this was written by Menshevik leaders who, contrary to the actual principles and ideas of the workers' movement, at every step openly betrayed the workers, and in October 1929 did everything they could to wreck the general strike of workers in defense of the health insurance funds, organized by the Communist Party. Thus the Menshevik leaders lied about and slandered those who consistently fought for the interests of the working people, and whom the bourgeoisie, with these same leaders' help, systematically terrorized and rotted in prisons. The remaining pages of "Socialdemokrats" likewise abounded in such fabrications against the "left."

And this was happening in those ominous January days, when in the streets of Berlin, Leipzig, Hanover, and Stuttgart fierce battles were already being waged between communists and bands of fascist storm troopers, and Hitler, the protege of the German imperialists, was coming to power.

Knowing full well that within the circles of the big Latvian bourgeoisie too, intensive preparations had long been under way for the establishment of just such a bloody dictatorship as in Lithuania, "Socialdemokrats" boastfully wrote on January 3: "...'Latvia is not Lithuania'... This is not the first time for our party, which cannot be taken with bare hands. We have known how to work in all sorts of circumstances, and we shall know how to wage struggle against those who, with their armored boot, would encroach on the political rights of the working people..."

But this was a blatant deception, calculated to lull the masses precisely at the moment when the communists were trying to mobilize them against the looming fascist threat.

In actual fact the Menshevik leaders had no intention of fighting against fascism. As every working person was later to be convinced, they did not lift a finger to prevent the Ulmanis putsch. Forewarned from various quarters, they concealed from the people the fascist coup that was being prepared for May 15, 1934.

Even before my release from prison I had heard much that was new and joyful from political prisoners who had ended up there later than I. They told of the rapid growth of the ranks of the party and the Komsomol, of new illegal publications, of many interesting episodes from the underground party life. About all of this I now wanted to learn more, to meet my comrades as soon as possible.

Soon, on instructions from the city committee of the "Red Aid," a middle-aged woman came to see me. She asked about the situation in the prison, asked which of the comrades needed to be sent warm underwear, who was not receiving parcels, whom visitors rarely came to see, and who was not receiving letters from outside. About all of this the members of the illegal "Red Aid" organization tirelessly took care.

And a few days later, in the evening -- in the dark it was easier to avoid being followed by informers -- Robert came to see me, a comrade from my earlier work in the underground party district. He had come out of prison a year before me. There we had been in different

blocks and had not even seen each other once. And we had plenty to talk about.

Seated at a small table in the corner of the room, farther from the window that opened onto the courtyard and was covered by a dark curtain, we talked, hurrying to tell each other much.

That evening we talked about everything new that had happened in those years in the life of the underground district organization, about comrades who had been hardened in the difficult struggle; we recalled the hard daily routine of prison and mutual acquaintances whose terms of imprisonment would soon be ending.

Robert told me that opposition workers' groups were forming within the social-democratic party. Fearing the rapid strengthening of the opposition, the leaders were turning to the help of the secret police to "remove" such revolutionary-minded workers. They did not stop even at dissolving entire organizations in many places. That had been done in Riga, too, with the entire Krasnodvinsk district organization of the social-democratic party.

Unnoticed, the hours of our conversation flew by. It was already long past midnight when Robert stood up to leave. He had to make his way with caution to his semi-legal apartment. As we said goodbye, I asked him to convey through party channels my wish to be drawn back into party life as soon as possible.

I now had to set about looking for work. That was no easy matter in those days. It was all the more difficult for those who had a criminal record for participation in the revolutionary movement. Since one could sometimes manage to

obtain work in textile enterprises, I decided to retrain and become a weaver or a spinner. A comrade from the illegal "Red Aid" introduced me to an elderly weaver of the "Kurshansky and Co." factory, who agreed to teach me the weaver's trade. He hoped that the foreman of the shop would help me get hired. Everything seemed to be settled. But ten days of waiting passed, and nothing came of it. Despite the "protection," I was not taken on at the factory.

Learning soon that hiring was being done at the textile factory "Lenta" in Zadvinye, I hurried there. At the office I was given a detailed questionnaire which had to be filled out. When I came back the next day for an answer, I had to wait half a day at the office door.

At last the office window opened, and a bald man curtly announced to me:

"We have no work for you!"

Equally unsuccessful proved my searches in other places. Only several weeks later, with the help of comrades, did I manage to take on work as a day-laborer at a sawmill.

In January arrests continued in Riga. Party and Komsomol activists from various districts were arrested.

The news of the brutal murder in the secret police of Fricis Gailis aroused the deep indignation of the working people. His funeral turned into a mass-protest demonstration. Large forces of mounted and foot poli-

cemen surrounded the Forest Cemetery and fell upon the thousands of people taking part in Gailis's funeral. Many of them were badly beaten by the police.

Every day I awaited the receipt of party contact. I could not calmly enjoy the month of rest that the party usually granted to comrades after a long term of imprisonment.

Exactly at the morning hour appointed for me, walking quickly over the snow that crunched underfoot, I was making my way along the Lubana highway in the direction of Dreilini. Here my first rendezvous after coming out of prison had been set.

Outside the city, at the fourth kilometer, I saw approaching me the underground worker Mihail Shvarts, with whom I had recently been introduced. Beside him walked a middle-aged man in glasses, dressed in a then very common ash-colored half-length sheepskin coat and a fur ushanka pulled low over the forehead. Shvarts introduced me to the comrade, who called himself Artis. For a time the three of us walked along the road and spoke about the latest political events. Soon Shvarts said goodbye to us and went off in the direction of the city. And I, with Artis -- the organizer (secretary) of the Riga Committee of the Party, who had summoned me to this meeting -- continued to walk in the direction of Dreilini.

Artis began at once with questions about the situation in the Central Prison. He was interested in the state of the illegal connection between the prison and the outside, in the preparation of a protest by the political prisoners against the new criminal code being introduced and the introduction of shack-

Ernest Amerik (Artis) — organizer of the Riga City Committee of the Party

aid for the convicted. He inquired about the state of health of his acquaintances among the political hard-labor convicts. It was evident that he was thoroughly informed about all prison matters.

Then Artis spoke of the recent collapse in the First District of the Party, of the arrest of some members of the district committee together with its organizer, and of the situation that had arisen there. And again, without any preliminaries, he conveyed the decision of the Party leadership to assign me as organizer in that district.

On my way to the rendezvous, I had no idea that I was being summoned about such an unexpected matter. A doubt at once arose: was it advisable to return-

to this district after prison from the standpoint of conspiratorial work. The Okhranka knew about my work in the First District before my arrest, and that would make it easier to keep me under surveillance. But after some thought, I agreed with Artis, who spoke of a number of favorable conditions for my underground work specifically in this district. Here I was personally acquainted with many communists, I knew the practice of mass work at the enterprises and the strongholds of the various nationalist and social-democratic organizations. All this, of course, argued in favor of the quickest possible setting up of the party organization's work — and that was the main thing.

As we walked along the suburban highway, Artis was explaining what would need to be tackled first, how to reorganize the district committee for the time being, and which key political slogans should now serve as the starting point for the deployment of all organizational and mass work. Certain circumstances of the recent collapse gave cause for alarm. For that reason Artis twice reminded me of the need to be very careful in restoring connections in all links of the district organization.

We made arrangements for our further meetings. We also agreed on a backup rendezvous once a month, in case for some reason the regular ones fell through. Having said goodbye after a long conversation, we parted. I was returning to the city along the Lubana highway. Artis went off in the opposite direction.

Artis was in Latvia in an illegal status and was therefore in particular danger here. He was one of those professional revolutionaries of whom Lenin once said

Abram Burnstein

that without such people — tested and tempered in battles with the gendarmes and trained by the long school of political experience — the revolutionary struggle of the working class is impossible. The political police set every means in motion to expose and arrest such people as quickly as possible with the help of informers and provocateurs.

Deliberately and cautiously, step by step, I began to restore the organizer's connection with the cells. I made contact with the district propaganda board (the "propka"), which had been least affected by the recent arrests. Coming to each of its meetings, I

informed the propagandists about the current tasks of the district organization and learned from them about the state of the cells. In the guise of a propagandist I visited several cells, getting to know the people and their practical work. Restoring the work of the underground district printing shop was more difficult. For this it was necessary above all to select skilled comrades and to find a new place for an absolutely conspiratorial apartment.

One Sunday, on the small Krasotaju Street, in the apartment of party member E. Kondrat, the newly co-opted district party committee gathered for its first meeting. Its members were: the shoemaker K. Shits, the railwayman "Peterit," the office worker A. Burnstein, the worker Osokin, and myself.

We discussed in detail the situation in each cell and made arrangements for communications. In order better to unite and direct illegal work on the ground, each member of the district committee was assigned a group of cells at enterprises in one and the same branch of industry. The party leadership over the district organizations of the Communist Youth Union and the "Red Aid" had to be improved. Representatives were elected to the district committees of these organizations. It was decided to strengthen the propaganda board, so as to involve the propagandists more broadly in explaining to the workers the most important task: the creation of a united front of struggle against the fascist danger in Latvia.

It was planned to make the district printing shop and the technical communications even more strictly conspiratorial; these communications fanned out to the cells and rose in a thin chain to the printing shops of the city and the central-

committees. The new technical worker, contrary to established practice, was relieved of attending general rendezvous and of taking part in any meetings. From then on he was to maintain direct contact only with the district organizer and to receive the committee's assignments through him.

It was already dark when, at its very prolonged first meeting, the district committee took up the last item on the agenda. The city party committee had informed the district committee about the murder by informers in Zadvinye of Eduard Smiltens, secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol. It also became known that the body of the slain man had recently been secretly transported to the city morgue, which was located on the territory of the First District of the party. Right then it was decided to entrust the "Mayak" cell with a difficult and honorable mission: to convey on behalf of the district organization a last farewell to the comrade who had given his life in the struggle for the cause of the working class.

The Okhranka raved and raged greatly when it became aware of this new bold and daring deed of the communists. Despite a police post stationed nearby, a trio of members of the "Mayak" cell climbed at night over the high fence of the morgue, removed a window of the stone building, and made their way inside. At the risk of being sent to hard labor, they took leave of the slain comrade and laid upon his body a fully unfurled red banner bearing the inscription "Glory to the fighters — death to the executioners!" Along the lower part of the banner, running its full length, the signature of the committee of the underground party organization of the First District was clearly displayed — the very committee the Okhranka already considered crushed... The leader of this daring trio was a worker who went by the nickname Diky (the Wild One).

The district committee also issued a leaflet announcing this new outrage of the Okhranka.

Since not everything had yet been set up in the new district "technique" — the printing shop — the urgent production of this leaflet had to be carried out in conditions somewhat unusual for strict conspiratorial work. Having met with Burnstein on Dzirnavu Street, in the apartment of a female student, we quickly drafted the text of the leaflet. Burnstein worked in a shop selling various devices and typewriters. And right there, on the portable typewriter he had brought with him, he typed the text on a wax stencil for duplication on a rotator.

At first, the leaflets we issued bore the signature of the First District. Later on, in order to mislead the Okhranka and to make it harder for them to track down the illegal printing shop, all of our district's publications were signed: "Xth district of the CPL."

The winter of 1933 was especially hard for the working people of Riga. Many enterprises were completely shut down; others worked only one or two days a week.

Every day, from early morning, huge crowds of the unemployed gathered on Torna Street by the city labor exchange. But here the registration of new thousands of unemployed had long since been halted. Nor did the government intend to render the necessary aid to those previously registered.

Policemen, in a new uniform borrowed from the old Prussian Schutzmänner, mounted on large,

well-fed horses, plowed into the crowd of women and men emaciated by hunger, beating them with rubber truncheons and rifle butts. But these people could not be dispersed or pushed back. They blockaded the building of the labor exchange, insistently demanding work and bread!

Under this slogan the Communist Party organized the unemployed in defense of their rights. In thousands of its appeals and addresses it called them to struggle, pointing out to them the path of deliverance from poverty and hunger.

Under the slogan "Work and Bread!" the unemployed were preparing for a hunger march through the central streets of Riga, announced for February 16.

The authorities did everything to disrupt this demonstration. Arrests were made of members of the illegal committees of the unemployed and of all participants in the revolutionary movement already known to the Okhranka.

On the night of February 14 I was awakened by a loud, prolonged knocking at the door of our apartment. I sprang up from the bed and in the darkness, without lighting a lamp, picked up the small sheets of cigarette paper laid out just in case on the chair beside me. This was the manuscript of an illegal leaflet I had prepared that evening. I quickly squeezed the paper into a small ball and swallowed it. The knocking grew louder; it seemed the door was about to be knocked out of its frame.

Now I calmly went up to the door.

"Open up — police!" came a sharp, rude shout.

"All the unemployed to the demonstration on February 16," "Work and Bread!", "Comrades of the unemployed, working people of Riga — all out into the street on March 20!" — poster and leaflets of the Riga Committee and the committee of the I District of the Party (February—March 1933).

The moment I opened the door, two policemen and a man in plain clothes — an agent of the political police — burst into the corridor.

They immediately rushed to the bookshelf. The elderly but very nimble agent carefully went through book after book, leafing through the pages to see whether anything illegal had been tucked inside. He turned the whole bed inside out, examined every scrap of paper lying on the table, studied the ink imprints on the blotting paper. Meanwhile the policemen were busily groping about in the other corners of the room, checking whether there were any concealed openings in the walls, testing the floor.

Then all of them rummaged through my mother's room and the kitchen, dug into the embers still warm in the stove, and searched for the remains of any burned paper.

Despite all their efforts, they found no compromising material. This time they did not draw the search out — apparently they were in a hurry to get to others that night. The agent — a long-time gendarme detective named Ops — sat down at the table. He pulled several blank arrest warrants out of his breast pocket, already stamped and signed in advance by the head of the political police. After filling out one of them, he at once presented me with a warrant for my arrest. I tried to protest against such an illegal and entirely unfounded arrest. But the policemen and the agent only smirked and, snapping back angrily, ordered me to follow them at once.

I was led out of the apartment. My elderly mother handed me a small parcel of food she had hastily put together. Holding her bare gray head high and keeping her eyes fixed on us as we walked away, she accompanied me all the way to the gate. In silence, with slow steps,

my mother walked along the narrow, long courtyard. In her parting glance, which I have remembered so well, I saw the silent, deep grief of a mother who had borne everything and had never once reproached me for anything.

The policeman knocked hard on the locked gate. The watchman opened the wicket and we stepped out of the yard.

It was a quiet, starry night. The streets of the sleeping city were completely deserted. Only now and then could one hear the voices of people calling for the watchman. There was the creak of doors and gates being opened.

It struck me as strange that they were taking me not to the political police but in an entirely different direction — along Ģertrūdes Street toward the railway crossing. When I was brought to the Ninth Police Precinct on Daugavpils Street, everything became clear. That night "preventive" mass arrests were being carried out. The political police could hold only some of those arrested. So the ones taken there first were those at whose homes the search had turned up any evidence. The rest were sent for the time being to various police precincts, regardless of where they actually lived.

At the Ninth Precinct people were beaten with particular cruelty, and the Russian population of that district was mocked in every possible way. The lock-up of the precinct was not nicknamed the "bedbug nest" for nothing. They deliberately bred bedbugs there. At night the walls, the floor, and the low, filthy plank bunks literally swarmed with these parasites, which crawled under your clothes and bit every part of your body. Because of the bugs you could neither sit nor lie down on the bunks. To escape them you had to keep walking around the small, dimly lit cell.

I was not alone in the cell. They had put in with me one of the activists of the Komsomol organi-

zation who had recently been released from Termiņcietums. I had not known him personally before, I had only heard of him. This ardent, lively young man asked about all sorts of things, wanted answers on everything at once, and was always ready to argue passionately. Even at night, waking up, he was ready to start the most serious of conversations. He was interested in the situation in various capitalist countries, in the progress of industrialization in the USSR, in questions of friendship and love in a socialist society. It was then that I understood how aptly the underground Komsomol members had nicknamed their comrade — they called him "Alarm Clock"…

On the fifth day of my stay in the bedbug nest I was summoned for interrogation. In the office of the precinct chief, where I was taken, sat a man in plain clothes with disheveled hair. On his bloated face the large, bluish-purple nose and the thick, drooping lips were especially conspicuous. This was Šāberts, the senior interrogator of the political police and a Social Democrat, who after the fascist coup became the prefect of the city of Liepāja.

Without looking at me, Šāberts began asking the usual procedural questions. With his right hand he scratched away rapidly with his pen on the large sheets of pink paper already familiar to me — interrogations at the political police were written up on it. Every few lines he would stop, take from a flat tin box something that looked either like sugar pellets or pills, raise them to his mouth, and resume the questioning. He pressed me about the tactics of the communists among the unemployed and asked what assignments I had been given in prison to carry out once I was free. Pretending not to understand the gist of the question at all, I said in a serious tone that the prison authorities had given me no assignments…

Embittered by such an ironic answer, Šāberts soon ended the interrogation and ordered the policeman to take me back to my cell. From the character of the interrogation, however, I had become convinced that the political police had no factual material on which to build a charge against me.

The next day, the five of us were taken under the escort of seven policemen to the political police. The rest of those arrested had already been released earlier from the precinct.

They led us, as if we were the most dangerous of criminals, along the main streets of the city: down Daugavmalas, Smilšu, Valdemāra, and along the boulevard to Strēlnieku Street. The senior policeman walking in front ordered every cart and cabman we met to halt while the convoy passed. From the sidewalks, ladies out for a stroll, shopkeepers, and the owners of the various offices located there watched us. Their discomfort, brought on by the demonstration of hungry unemployed workers held a few days earlier on these same streets, gave way once again to confidence in the unshakability of their power.

And yet that demonstration had caused them no small amount of anxiety. On February 16, Jaunākās Ziņas wrote: "…This time the communists devoted particular attention to the demonstration of the unemployed. Already yesterday they were distributing leaflets in the streets in which they urge the workers to turn the demonstration of the unemployed into an active mass action.

According to our information, the communists will attempt to carry out their designs by trying to wedge themselves into the demonstration of the unemployed in order to provoke disorder and to take over the leadership of the demonstration. As is anticipated, communist outbursts can already

be expected at the very start of the demonstration and even at the meeting of the unemployed. The political police and the regular police have taken every measure to prevent disorder and they expect that there will be none.

In connection with the demonstration of the unemployed, the Riga police have been put on combat alert today. The mounted police will also take part in maintaining order during the demonstration."

And indeed, on February 16 the Riga Prefecture mobilized all its reserves. The long column of more than four thousand unemployed demonstrators who came out into the street that day was surrounded on all sides by chains of policemen, headed by Prefect Anšmits himself and the senior leadership of the political police. Alongside, "Big Bertha" — the van used to transport prisoners — kept circling.

The demonstrators carried numerous red banners with the words: "Work and bread for all the unemployed!", "Our children are dying of hunger!", "Down with fascism!" Singing revolutionary songs and shouting out their demands in unison, the unemployed marched along Valdemāra Street toward the residence of the cabinet of ministers. Then they moved along Raiņa Boulevard, Brīvības Street, and Krišjāņa Barona Street toward Matvey's Market. The square by the market had already been cordoned off by police, and not far away mounted squadrons stood ready, armed with revolvers and sabers — the "Latvian cossacks," as the people called the mounted police.

When the whole mass of unemployed had reached the square, the deputies of the Workers' and Peasants' Faction of the Saeima — O. Gulbis and F. Bergs — immediately addressed them with speeches.

Demonstration of the unemployed on February 16, 1933, in Riga

They were set upon by the gangs from the Social-Democratic sports organizations who had been mobilized that day to assist the police. Comrades Gulbis and Bergs were severely beaten. The whole mass of unemployed rushed to defend them. In vain did Veckalns, the Social-Democratic "specialist" in deceiving the unemployed, try to make a speech. At that very moment a thousand-voiced singing of the "Internationale" broke out across the entire square…

At the political police they put me in a cell where there were already three men. They had also been arrested on the eve of the hunger march of the unemployed. There were the port workers Neikofer and Šilfs — the brother of the executed J. Šilfs — and a comrade who had been brought here from Smiltene. I knew that Neikofer was a member of the party committee of the Third District.

It was very cold in the cell. So little light penetrated the frozen window that even by day it was dim inside. But my comrades turned out to be cheerful and interesting company. Neikofer and Šilfs joked and made fun of the unlucky spies: how many times had they been arrested, and always without any incriminating evidence. This time too the political police had had to let them go. A couple of days later I was released as well.

A month later, in the middle of March, I was again taken to the political police. This time too it was in connection with preparations for a new demonstration of the unemployed. The plan was, alongside the leaflets, to put up illegal posters calling for the demonstration. I had arranged about the posters with the artist Z. Haskin, who belonged to one of the cells in the First District. Together with the artist K. Bušs he often produced such illegal publications. As it happened, we missed each other on the appointed day, and the posters were urgently needed. There was nothing for it but to go to his apartment. As a last resort, he had given me his address.

I entered the hallway of the building on Skolas Street, went up to the fourth floor, and rang the bell of the apartment I needed. The landlady half-opened the door and said briefly that Haskin was not at home. Without lingering for a moment, I went back down the stairs. And just then a man came up to me and demanded that I show my papers. He was

a plainclothes spy. To his question of which apartment I had visited, I answered that I had not been to any yet, but that I was looking through newspaper ads for a flat to swap for mine…

The spy took my passport and led me to the political police. There they searched me at once and, though they found nothing, drove me into an empty cell; they did not interrogate me until the next day.

Every day, from early morning until late at night, I waited for the door to open and for them either to call me again for interrogation or to announce my release. After all, the search had turned up nothing, so there was no concrete material on which to base a charge.

In those slow-dragging days at the political police, I thought more than once about how laboriously we had only just begun to build up the work of the district party organization, about all the many things still left undone, about the comrades — selfless underground workers. And right then I decided that if I got out this time, I would arrange things so that the political police could no longer arrest me so easily.

So, in tense thoughts about freedom and the possibility of a new imprisonment, I passed one day after another in my cell.

Toward the end of the second week after my arrest, late one evening, when I had already lain down on the narrow wooden bench, footsteps could be heard in the corridor. I grew alert, sat up, and listened anxiously as the cell door was unlocked.

"Get your things, you're going home!" the lock-up duty officer muttered in a sleepy voice, and stood waiting at the open door.

After receiving my papers, my coat, and my pocket watch, I soon went down the wide granite staircase and walked out of the great political-police building onto Strēlnieku Street.

Night had already fallen. A warm westerly wind was blowing in from the sea, and the hard frost of only a short time before had given way to a thaw. My heart felt light and good.

Free again!

But now it had also become clear to me that, the next time I was arrested, there would be no escaping a long stretch in prison — at best under the "Kerensky law."

As I walked home, I was thinking about how to shake off the spies' surveillance, how to restore the contact with the district committee that had been broken during this time, and how to plunge back into the work of the district party organization.

At one of the meetings of members of the district committee, along with various information about the state of the cells, we were told that a few hours earlier Nyura Maksimova, recently released from prison, had died. She had been sentenced to three years in a fortress prison. Having caught a severe cold in the freezing punishment cell, she fell gravely ill and was let out of Termiņcietums already in an utterly hopeless condition.

The brief life of this young woman, a worker at the "Maikaparss" tobacco factory, was closely bound up with the work of the Russian Cultural and Educational Section of the left trade unions in the Moscow Forstadt. There she took an active part in the amateur arts circles, recommended her fellow tobacco workers for membership in the trade union, and herself did not miss a single evening of questions and answers at the section's club. At those evenings all the questions raised by those gathered there were ex-

plained from a revolutionary-Marxist point of view.

Maksimova took part in the illegal collection of funds to provide material help to the families of arrested communists. During the general hunger strike of political prisoners in the summer of 1927 she distributed leaflets and walked in the front ranks of the protest demonstration against bourgeois terror — for amnesty for all political prisoners.

In January 1928 the political police smashed the trade-union branches and the cultural and educational section. Many activists were thrown into prison, and the political police tried every means of intimidating the remaining members of these organizations. But Maksimova was not frightened. In those days she was on duty every evening at the section's premises, organizing the work of the amateur arts circles, and, together with other comrades, fighting for the restoration of all legal mass work. Through relatives of arrested comrades she passed on to those in prison the joyous news that, despite the difficulties, the work of the recently smashed organization was being put back on its feet.

Soon Maksimova, who was no longer satisfied with cultural and educational work alone, entered the ranks of the Communist Party of Latvia and later became a member of the district propaganda collegium.

The glorious life of this class-conscious worker, tortured at the political police and in prison, was recounted in a leaflet issued that very night by the committee of the party organization of the First District, in which she had been an active member.

Nyura Maksimova

Maksimova's parents wanted to bury her at the Grebenshchikov Cemetery — in the forstadt. Everything had already been arranged, the plot for the grave even paid for. But on the eve of the funeral the head of the Old Believer clergy categorically declared that he would not permit a communist to be buried at the Grebenshchikov Cemetery.

The funeral was set for Sunday — at the Forest Cemetery. The workers of all the enterprises of the Moscow Forstadt were notified of this. It was anticipated that the political police would, as usual, try to break up the funeral and would attempt to arrest many of her

past the wooden house in which Maksimova had lived. The windows were closed with shutters from the outside. Having made sure that nothing suspicious was visible anywhere around, I walked to the corner, quickly turned back, entered the courtyard, and knocked at the door. Maksimova's father met me. In a half-whisper he said that during the day spies and police had been there and had arrested several comrades who had come by at that moment.

"Now," he added soothingly, "there is no one in the apartment except our own people," — and he led me into a half-lit room.

In the middle of the room, in an open coffin set on chairs, lay Maksimova.

On her young face, framed by light-brown hair, there was not even a trace of the heavy physical suffering that had overcome her.

I laid the roses I had brought near her heart, which in life had beaten so fervently and so feelingly, and stood for a while in silence by the coffin beside Nyura's father. The young comrade's life had been cut short early and cruelly. Struggling with an effort of will to hold back the lump rising in my throat, I gripped the old father's hand firmly and went out of the house.

On the dark street, lit only by the whiteness of the snow, not a living soul was to be seen. The street that evening seemed full of sadness and despondency. Dimly lit houses, in which lived workers who had known the cheerful Nyura from her earliest years.

Walking along the uneven, rutted sidewalk of this city outskirt, I remembered other communists and Komsomol members who had given their lives in the struggle for

a better future and the people's happiness. And the hatred for the enemy grew stronger still, the will to fight him grew firmer still.

About a thousand working men and women took part in Maksimova's funeral. Despite the arrests being made, the police nonetheless failed to disperse those who had gathered for the funeral.

To keep the funeral procession from entering the city, the spies and police resorted to a cunning trick. Allowing the coffin and a dozen of the front ranks to pass over the railway crossing from Daugavpils Street, they immediately lowered the barrier. In this way the larger part of the column was cut off and barred from going forward. But even this maneuver proved fruitless. People ran by side streets and again fell into the column, which moved slowly along Ģertrūdes, Brīvības, and Miera streets toward the Forest Cemetery.

The coffin, draped in red cloth, was carried by comrades carefully on their shoulders. Behind the coffin, with wreaths and bouquets of living and paper flowers in their hands, walked the women workers of the "Kvadrats," "Kuznetsovka," and "Maikaparss" factories. It was a demonstration of protest against bourgeois terror, a demonstration of sympathy for the underground Communist Party.

In April the underground party and Komsomol organizations were spreading the preparations for May First. At secret gatherings and mass meetings, at flying rallies near the big enterprises, the communists spoke about

the tasks of the workers in the struggle against the fascist threat, and called on them to take part in the revolutionary May Day demonstration. The same was written in the illegal leaflets, which were handed to workers, pasted on the façades of buildings, slipped through doors, and dropped into household mailboxes in the workers' quarters. This illegal agitation grew particularly intense in the last days of April.

After midnight, when the electric lamps in the deserted streets were going out and the footsteps of the rare belated passers-by could be heard distinctly from far off, communists and Komsomol members in every part of the city were carrying out the most dangerous assignments. Trying to seize the right moment, acting quickly at intersections of busy streets that had been picked out by day, they would skillfully throw red banners up onto wires and high fences. On the banners, in glowing bronze, revolutionary slogans were written. Often daring workers also raised them on the tops of factory chimneys.

Let the trembling cloths of those banners flutter in the wind only briefly. Spies and police, together with caretakers and the fire brigades that had been called out, hurried to take them down. But in the early morning hours, when people were going to work, the red banners proudly waving in the air carried to the toilers a fervent May Day greeting from their own Communist Party, kindling joy and bracing hope in their hearts.

Nor did the political police slumber in these days. Mass searches and arrests were carried out among workers and the working intelligentsia. Police posts were stationed at the gates of many enterprises, and spies were on duty. Mounted patrols rode through the streets, and in the barracks

mobile detachments of military units were kept at the ready. Finally, on the very eve of May First, armored cars frequently sped through the city streets to intimidate the working people.

Every member of the district committee, every cell organizer, every communist had to show no small amount of resourcefulness so that, under these conditions, the functioning of the entire system of the underground organization was not disrupted, and so that all its links could be shielded from the direct blows of the political police. Connections that were breaking down were quickly restored on the move, and their most vulnerable junctions were reinforced.

Normally, to maintain steady organizational contact, to receive practical assignments from the district committee, and to coordinate all current questions among the members of each cell in the district, one or two meetings were held per week. In this period, however, meetings took place every day and at different hours — sometimes early in the morning, sometimes in the evening — and always at different locations. In case of a betrayal, deputies had been chosen in advance for all the "technicians" — the comrades who received and distributed the illegal literature among members of their cells. Illegal leaflets and ardent pre–May Day proclamations flowed to the masses in an unbroken stream.

On April 26 I was going to Pārdaugava for my last pre–May Day meeting with Artis. In the two weeks since our last meeting, much had piled up at the district committee that I needed to talk over and consult with him about. We had to work out how contact with the other districts of the city would be maintained on May Day.

Having left the city by Altonavas Street, I walked along the

wide country road. The time within which we were to meet had long passed, and there was no sign of Artis. But I simply could not reconcile myself to the thought that the meeting would not take place. The vacant lots on either side of the road came to an end, the forest — the boundary we had agreed on — was already beginning. But Artis never came. An important meeting, on which I had very much been counting, had fallen through.

On my way back I stopped on the embankment by the bridges, admiring the river. In those days of the spring flood, the Daugava, having burst its banks upstream, was carrying its waters swiftly to the sea. Nothing could halt its rushing current. Just as swift and unstoppable, it seemed to me, was the spreading revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party. Breaking and overturning every obstacle and barrier raised in its path, it was, with its turbulent spring torrent, undermining and shaking loose the decrepit foundations of bourgeois society.

Tired, I came home and unfolded the afternoon paper I had just bought. Unable to believe my eyes, I saw on it a photograph of a face I knew. In a long item, the reporter from the political police, gloating and savoring his words, wrote that the other day one of the leaders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Latvia, who had been living under a forged passport in the name of Yakov Bauman, had been arrested. That was Artis — E. Amerik. Now it became clear to me why the meeting had fallen through.

May Day proclamations of the Central Committee of the CPL and of the committee of the I District of the party →

The political police often timed the arrests of the underground workers it had tracked down to coincide with revolutionary dates, in order to smash the party organization and to sabotage all the preparations it was making for such days.

In this way, at this important moment, the district organization was left without contact with the center. But not for a moment did it break off the pre–May Day campaign it had begun. It went on acting in keeping with the situation as it was developing in the district and with the general political line of the party. Everyone became still more vigilant.

Members of the district committee avoided arranging meetings in nearby and seemingly more convenient places, since spies prowled there more often. We held meetings in distant and sparsely populated locations that could easily be observed from every direction, so as to spot the appearance of any suspicious persons in time. I met with each member of the district committee separately, one after the other, in different blocks of the city; we were never here together as more than two, for fear of drawing the attention of outsiders.

So as not to be "exposed" on the street if I should happen to meet spies who knew me by sight, I tried to alter my appearance: I wore glasses with dark horn-rimmed frames and traded coats for a time with comrades. For the first time in my life I even put on a hat, despite my deep aversion to such a "bourgeois" head covering…

The pre–May Day campaign that year was closely intertwined with the preparation and conduct, in April, of the strike of the shoemakers. The First District party organization had close ties with the workers of this trade — there were two party cells, made up entirely

of shoemakers, as well as eight groups of sympathizing shoemaker-workers. At secret mass meetings and at meetings of the legal leather workers' trade union, in defiance of the disorganizing and splitting activity of its Social-Democratic leadership, strike committees were elected and the demands of the shoe-factory workers were drawn up. The deputy organizer of the district committee, Karl Šics, himself a shoemaker, was tireless in this complex practical work and personally maintained direct contact with the strike committee.

About four thousand shoemakers took part in the strike; they were also joined by the cutters and suppliers. Among workers of other trades, money was collected on behalf of the strikers and their families. As a result of six weeks of united struggle, the Riga shoemakers won a wage increase of thirty-five to forty percent and the conclusion of collective agreements. Even so, wages did not reach the level of 1929, since during the crisis they had been cut by a full sixty percent. On their wages even single workers could not get by.

A great deal of agitational and organizational work among the shoemakers was carried on at that time by the communists V. Vilnītis, M. Kits, V. Udriš, E. Kondrats, M. Aršs, and members of revolutionary groups K. Blekše, K. Elvants. Among the textile workers — the communists N. Baranovsky, G. Maiofis, S. Udriš, F. Kons, a member of the women textile workers' party cell known by the nickname "Negr" ["Negro"], and among the woodworkers, the communists Strazdiņi — father, son, and daughter — V. Katans, who had served six years of hard labor, and others.

On May Day, more than forty thousand of Riga's working

people came out in a protest demonstration against fascism, demanding the improvement of the situation of all workers and the immediate adoption of a law on unemployment insurance. In the columns of demonstrators, despite the wishes of the Social-Democratic bosses, the singing of revolutionary songs rang out loudly and revolutionary slogans were shouted. All along the demonstrators' route to the Park of 1905, hundreds of leaflets of the Communist Party of Latvia flew up into the air, now here, now there.

Dozens of foreign and Latvian ships, loaded with valuable lumber, were sailing out of Riga's port for England, Germany, Belgium, and France.

Selling off Latvia's national wealth wholesale and retail, raking in huge profits on international deals, a handful of capitalists were destroying the country's forests. The workers of the forestry industry, meanwhile, received pennies for their labor. Women's labor was exploited especially cruelly. In the autumn-winter period the majority of those employed in this sector became unemployed and scraped by from hand to mouth on whatever odd jobs they could find.

In the spring, when the season for cutting lumber for export began, the struggle to raise daily and piece-work wages among the workers of the sawmills intensified. The strike of the carriers at the "Baltic Wood" mill ended successfully; the carriers at the "Brothers Hazan" mill, where I was working as a day laborer, began a strike. The carriers were well organ-

ized, and they were actively supported by all the other workers. Within two days they succeeded in winning partial fulfillment of the demands they had put forward. The comrade working there as a sorter was a member of the "Red Aid" organization. He informed us in good time of the owners' intentions and helped to bring the strike to a successful conclusion.

Workers at other sawmills were also on strike: at Sarkandaugava, on Zaķusala, and in Pārdaugava.

Meanwhile the reactionary bourgeoisie, watching with longing as the "new order" was being built in Germany, was busily preparing to express its devotion to the Hitler regime.

Under large headlines, the local pro-fascist newspapers announced the upcoming visit to the port of Riga of a squadron of warships of Nazi Germany.

The working people of Latvia, who knew of the bloody fascist terror in Germany, were outraged by the noisy publicity given to the unwelcome visit. The city party committee instructed us to prepare and print leaflets on the matter. We had to make clear to the population the true meaning of the visit by the German fleet, which was again putting out into the open waters of the Baltic Sea.

A special leaflet in German was issued for the sailors of the German squadron. They had to be distributed in two ways. Early in the morning, before the sailors began to be released from the ships into the city, the leaflets were scattered along the embankment near the squadron's mooring. On the days when the public was allowed onto the ships to view them, members of certain cells

were assigned to leave rolled-up copies of the leaflet there unnoticed.

In this comradely appeal to people who had been deceived by nationalist and misanthropic propaganda, the predatory essence of German fascism was laid bare. The Latvian communists, driven deep underground and subjected to merciless bourgeois terror, fervently and warmly called on the young German sailors to hold sacred the revolutionary traditions of their fathers and elder brothers in the struggle against the worst enemies of the German working people.

In order to escape the constant surveillance to which I was being subjected and a new arrest, I had to go over to a semi-legal way of life. Now I was rarely at home on Stabu Street, where I was still officially registered. Only now and then, trying to avoid running into familiar neighbors in the courtyard, I would slip stealthily into my old home. I would have a brief conversation with my mother, calming her and giving her grounds for hope.

In fact I was already living elsewhere — on the small and very quiet Pērses Street. Here, after a long search through the classified ads, I had finally managed to find a little room which the landlords agreed for the time being to rent out without registering me. I justified my wish to put off the registration on purely personal grounds.

It was, of course, no easy thing to find such accommodating landlords. In many places where rooms were being let, there was no point even hinting at this condition that was so essential for me. Beyond that, it was important to take into account the so-

cial position of the landlords of the flat. Government employees were especially to be avoided.

I settled in with an ordinary lower-middle-class family that was experiencing no small amount of financial difficulty and was very far from any "politics" whatsoever. The welcome opportunity to rent out a room — and on top of that to provide meals to an undemanding tenant — inclined the landlady to disregard, for a while, even the strictest police regulations…

In the cramped little room next to the kitchen I would read illegal literature until late at night, look over the first proofs of freshly printed leaflets, and prepare for meetings. Then, after a short but sound sleep, I would leave early in the morning to work at a sawmill that was far away, on Katrīnes dambis Street. Meanwhile, at the home where I was officially registered, the political police were diligently looking for me.

From this same flat I would set out confidently to my meetings, and would return by the most intricate loops and zigzags through many streets, carefully guarding my convenient illegal hideout. Even here, however, I had to remain on my guard, ready for any contingency.

After two months of quiet living at this flat, I had occasion to live through my first serious scare as well.

One day, having come home from work, I set about reading the illegal publications I had recently received. Suddenly the voices of strange men who had come in could be heard in the front hall. They were demanding that the landlords show them the rooms they occupied, asking whether anyone else was living with them, and then they began to walk through the rooms.

I listened intently to the snatches of words drifting in. Things had taken a very bad turn. It looked as though, having somehow picked up my trail, agents of the political police had come to the apartment. I quickly ran to the door of my room, locked it from the inside, and began thinking how to destroy at once the whole pile of literature I had on hand. "I have to burn it," I thought immediately. But there were no matches at hand, and besides, the stove in the room was fired from the kitchen.

Soundlessly approaching the wide-open summer window, I was ready to throw the bundle out into the courtyard, where children were playing carelessly. But if the political police really had located my apartment, then there would surely be a spy on duty in the courtyard, watching the windows. And maybe these were not the secret police at all and the visitors were only interested in the landlords, I suddenly thought. I decided to wait and not throw the bundle out until the moment when the spies began breaking through the closed door of my room. By then there would be nothing left to lose.

Trying to master my agitation, I forced myself to figure out what was happening. The strangers were moving from one room to another, lingering in each one, and were particularly interested in who owned which belongings in the apartment. Reaching the kitchen, they turned back along the corridor, then drew up some papers and finally left. A weight rolled off my heart when I heard the door close behind them.

It later turned out that the visitor to the apartment had been a court bailiff with policemen, come to inventory the landlord's property for non-payment of taxes. Since finding anything suitable for the inventory in the little room

in the kitchen was not what they were counting on, they did not look into it. That was what saved me from a wholly accidental exposure, since the police would have immediately discovered that I was living here without registration.

The economic stagnation was still being felt across the country. The influence of the Social Democrats among the working masses was sharply diminishing, and revolutionary sentiment was growing among urban and rural laborers. The politically bankrupt Ulmanis clique sought salvation in an open dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie. The Skujenieks government, supported by these circles, was clearing the way for fascism. Brazenly trampling even on its own bourgeois constitution, it hurriedly passed, without any discussion in the Saeima, a whole series of laws all aimed at the working people. A new criminal code was also prepared, more cruel toward workers than the still-extant tsarist criminal statute. Henceforth all strikes were strictly forbidden and their participants handed over to the courts. Penalties for participation in the revolutionary movement were raised twofold or threefold, and hand and leg shackles were introduced for those sentenced to hard labor.

At the same time as the new criminal code, a new regulation on disciplinary punishments in prisons came into force, in which everything was arranged so as to turn the prison for political prisoners into a permanent solitary cell and an unending abuse.

Clearly aware of the aim and meaning of this latest blow, political prisoners in every prison in Latvia prepared seriously for the sharpest struggle — for a long hunger strike. The start of the strike was timed to coincide with the day on which these new laws would come into force — the first of August.

In July the collective of political prisoners of the Central Prison issued an open letter "To the Comrades and Working People of Latvia!"

The text of the letter, secretly conveyed to the outside world, was illegally reproduced and distributed in thousands of copies. This stirring indictment recounted in detail the terror and all manner of provocative methods used by the prison administration against political prisoners, the constant beatings, the unheard-of abuses inflicted on them, and the dark and damp punishment cells into which people who steadfastly fought for the freedom and happiness of the people were thrown.

"From the depths of the prison cells, through the bars and walls," the political prisoners wrote, "we send you our proletarian greeting! The bourgeoisie wants to break us physically and spiritually, it is trying to break our fighting resolve and organization in our action against the draconian regime, for the improvement of our condition...

But the bloody dogs will not succeed!

They starve us in punishment cells, they beat and torture us, they drive us to madness, but we are organized, in good spirits, and ready to fight... Comrades, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, working people of Latvia! We are beginning a hunger strike — a struggle not for life but to the death against the new criminal

code, and we call on you to support us in this struggle!"

In those days every district organization of the Party, of the Komsomol, and of the "Red Aid" in Riga unfolded a vast amount of work among the masses.

The committee of the first Party district was now three-quarters made up of former political prisoners. And we knew very well what unimaginable hardships, and what danger to the health of our comrades in prison, this collective hunger strike entailed. The entire activity of the district committee, of the agitation collegium, of all the cells and sympathizer groups was now devoted to explaining the reactionary essence of the new criminal code and to organizing support for the political prisoners. Mass meetings of workers were held; at the gates of individual enterprises it was possible to hold flying protest meetings against the inquisitorial laws.

Trying to mislead the public, the bourgeois newspapers lied daily that the political prisoners' hunger strike, supposedly begun "on instructions from Moscow," was tapering off. But they still could not deceive the working people!

Every night new leaflets and posters appeared in the workers' districts. They gave truthful information about the course of the strike, about the solidarity of those fasting, and about the unsuccessful attempts of the administration to break the political prisoners' hunger strike by force.

On the tenth day of the strike — the tenth of August — a demonstration and rally of family members and relatives of the political prisoners took place in Riga. Delegations were sent from them to the prime minister and

to the minister of internal affairs with a demand for the immediate repeal of the shackles law. But the delegations were not admitted to the ministers. The demonstration was dispersed by the police, and more than twenty of its participants were arrested.

The political prisoners' hunger strike lasted twelve days. On the thirteenth day, by a prearranged signal, it was called off. Avenging the political prisoners for the organized protest they had carried out, the prison administration afterward picked on them for every possible reason. A few days after the strike, the punishment cells were overcrowded with political prisoners. In those days the political hard-labor convict Dums lost his mind in the punishment cell, unable to endure the tortures.

Although the hunger strike did not succeed in achieving the repeal of the new law, the application of shackles to political prisoners was nevertheless temporarily postponed. This struggle was not in vain. It showed the firmness and self-control of the imprisoned communists under the most difficult conditions, and the enormous moral support that the working people on the outside gave them.

At the very height of this political campaign I unexpectedly learned that I should leave my illegal apartment as soon as possible. In the corridor of that building I had once run into a young technical worker whom I knew as the technician of the Komsomol's first district. Not long before, I had had a meeting with her to arrange to hand over a typewriter to the Komsomol for cutting wax stencils. Thinking that she had ended up there by chance and was simply using

the corridor to pass literature to some Komsomol technician, I jokingly told her she should drop by here less often, since possible surveillance of her would lead to my exposure as well...

But her reply staggered me. I realized that a Komsomol safe house had just been set up there, and that any surveillance of me would inevitably lead to a much bigger exposure...

There was no time to think it over. Having two underground points in one building ran against the most elementary rules of conspiracy.

A few days later I moved to another room — at the far end of Marijas Street. To at least stay there a little while, I tried under various pretexts to delay registering with the police precinct. A couple of months passed this way, until the landlord categorically demanded that the registration be filed. I had to move again. With the help of acquaintances I finally managed to settle for a longer stretch elsewhere.

The owner of the new apartment was often unemployed. The three-person family lived mainly off what the landlady earned — she was a seamstress. From morning till late at night she sewed at home for the shops. Though they knew I had been in prison, they nevertheless agreed to rent the room without registration. The landlords even considered themselves socialists, and we very often had conversations on political topics.

In the summer of 1933 the Party conferences were held.

The conference of the first Party district was held in a building on Krišjāņa Barona Street, in the apartment of M. Ioffe, a young doctor and "Red Aid" activist. Already on Saturday evening, deputy district organizer Šic, together with several delegates, came into this apartment and stayed the night. Ioffe and his wife had left their home before then, until Monday.

On Sunday from early morning, members of the district committee were meeting in different parts of the city with delegates from the cells. At each rendezvous, every pair of delegates was simultaneously given the address and the agreed password for entering the apartment where the conference was being held. And only the two of them, without parting from one another for a moment, were to head straight there.

The delegates agreed not to use the telephone in the apartment, not to answer calls from the city, and not to react to ordinary doorbells.

Settled in two small adjoining rooms, the delegates listened to a report on the work carried out by the district organization after the January exposure. The delegates then spoke about the mood of the workers at the enterprises, about the shortcomings, difficulties, and immediate prospects in the work of their cells.

Almost all those present at the conference took part in the lively discussion. By secret ballot a district committee was elected.

The conference lasted the whole day. The delegates left the apartment one at a time — every 20 to 30 minutes.

In July a city Party conference was being planned. The day on which it would be held was not announced in advance. But all of us had been warned to be ready for the conference. For this reason, meetings with delegates were held every other day.

At one of these rendezvous the deputy organizer of the city committee, Šalms (Sālna), passed on to me that all three delegates from the first district were to set out that evening for Ogre, in the vicinity of which the Riga conference would be held.

Half an hour later, having met in the opposite end of the city with the other delegates — K. Šic and P. Jankovskis — I informed them of this.

As instructed, we boarded the Daugavpils train, which left Riga at about nine in the evening. As a precaution, we settled in different cars. An hour and a half later we were already in Ogre.

Getting off at the station, the three of us then met up beyond the settlement. The road led into the forest. None of us had ever been in this area before. Walking briskly in the darkness, we caught up with a horse-cart moving slowly ahead and for some time followed directly behind it. We walked for quite a long time, covering at least twelve to fifteen kilometers. The road brought us to some homestead. We turned back in bewilderment, walked around again, waited for the agreed signal from the forest. But there was no signal. Something had clearly gone wrong,

we decided, having lost all hope of making it to the conference.

At dawn we met Šalms on the road with another comrade — they were heading back to the station. Šalms told us that those who had gathered had waited a long time for the first district delegates and had been worried about us. They had considered the possibility of our being arrested on the way, and therefore had decided to postpone the conference.

The cause of the misunderstanding also became clear.

At the very moment when the comrade waiting in the woods by the roadside was supposed to stop us, we were passing right next to a horse-cart. Because this struck him as highly suspicious, he did not give us the needed signal, and we walked an extra ten kilometers ahead. We — the delegates of the first district — were of course annoyed that we had blundered so badly in our conspiratorial work and for some time had walked along the road right next to an unknown cart...

About a month went by. At the end of August, at a regular rendezvous, the organizer of the city committee, F. Jaunpolis, told me that another departure from the city for the conference was coming up shortly. And the very next day, at a meeting by the railway bridge over the Daugava, I was given the exact route to the conference site and the time of departure.

It was a Saturday evening. In those hours, after the end of work and usually on the eve of a day off, the streets of the city were busier than on any other day. Summer weather still held, and a clear, cloudless sky promised no changes for the following day. The warning therefore seemed unnecessary —

to dress more warmly — it would not be all that cold even if we had to spend the night out in the open.

Meeting up afterwards with Šic in the area of the freight station, I told him how to make his way to the site of the conference.

All the delegates and the comrades of the security group had been given trains and buses with different departure times from the Riga and Torņakalns stations, and different end points as well. Some were to get off at Cenas station on the Riga–Jelgava line, others one stop closer or farther than Cenas, and from there to make their way on foot to the conference area. Such a procedure of staggered boarding and arrival, and the utmost caution at every stage of preparing the conference, was necessary to prevent any possibility of betrayal. Cenas was a small station, and the simultaneous appearance there of several outsiders could attract the attention of the local police.

To avoid running into a spy while waiting for the train on the platform, I arrived only a couple of minutes before its departure and went straight into the second-to-last car. When the train had pulled out, I carefully looked over my fellow passengers. They were the usual sort of passengers on a train from Riga to Jelgava. I noticed nothing suspicious — meaning there was no surveillance on me.

Getting off at Cenas station, I continued along the highway. It was completely dark all around. By eleven o'clock I had to pass a trigonometric tower — five or six kilometers from the station, where I was to be met. But the farther I got from the lit station, the less sure I was that I was on the right

path in the dark. Only when I saw the broad base of the tower right in front of me did I calm down and, without stopping, walk on. Soon the agreed password rang out from the woods — three whistles. In reply I struck a match and lit a cigarette.

Faintly rustling the branches of the trees, a man appeared by the road. It was E. Gavars (Meteor) — the organizer of the fourth Party district. In a whisper he asked how the other delegates from the first district were getting there. Then Gavars silently led me onward through the dense forest thicket. We walked a kilometer to a kilometer and a half and came out at the forest edge, beyond which a wide clearing stretched out.

Here, on the ground under the canopy of an old, spreading tree, about twenty delegates from all four districts of the city were already sitting. Some were speaking together in whispers, others rested in silence or thought over their speeches. There were also comrades there who had not known each other before.

Always cheerful and ready to laugh in any situation, Gavars joked under his breath about how he had nearly lost me in the woods...

At twelve o'clock, when all the delegates had finally gathered, the organizer of the city committee, Jaunpolis, opened the conference and gave the floor to the representative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Latvia — Comrade Vilis. This was Zelma Lūtere. She spoke of the great successes of socialist construction in the Soviet Union and of the unshakable might of the true homeland of the working people of the whole world, of the spreading workers' movement in the capitalist countries, and of the revolutionary movement in China. Then, speaking about the serious threat to peace from Germany, where the fascists had come

to power, she also spoke in detail about the fascist danger in Latvia.

Conveying the militant greeting of the Central Committee to the Riga underground organization, the largest in Latvia, Lūtere spoke about the great and difficult tasks now facing the Riga communists.

Night silence reigned all around. That night in the forest, each of us felt with peculiar sharpness our indissoluble bond with the German communists, who were boldly carrying on illegal revolutionary work among the masses under the most terrifying conditions of fascist terror, and with the Chinese communists, who were selflessly fighting for the happiness of their people — with all the fighters against the oppression and exploitation of the working people.

After the city organizer's report on the activity of the city organization, the delegates' speeches began at dawn. Now we saw before us, in the lowland, a young birch grove and dense brush stretching far away. In the event of a raid, one could quickly get out of the forest and flee in different directions.

To guard the conference, lookouts were posted in every direction. These were communists from the third and fourth districts. They were stationed one hundred fifty to two hundred meters from the conference site. For reasons of conspiracy, they were to be able to see the delegates, but the delegates were not to see them. Direct contact with the lookouts was kept up at all times only by Šalms and Gavars.

Early in the morning all the conference participants were alarmed by a warning from the lookouts —

some people were approaching through the woods, their voices growing ever louder. This put us on edge. Possibly the forester had noticed the presence of unknown people in the forest at night. But it could be worse still. It was not impossible that, on the strength of some provocation, the forest was being surrounded by Aizsargi at the orders of the political police, as had happened once several years before with the Komsomol members in the Babīte area. For by arresting the entire active core, the secret police would manage to paralyze the work of the city Party organization for a time.

The speeches were instantly broken off, and a complete silence fell. Everyone froze in tense expectation. Some of the comrades, relying on their keen hearing, pressed their ears to the ground and tried to make out footsteps.

With a feeling of deep anxiety, the delegates thought that this so carefully prepared conference would have to be broken off and — what was worse — that perhaps we had all walked into a trap. The comrades' faces were serious but calm; in them you could feel a readiness for an unequal encounter with the enemy. At any moment Šalms and Gavars were due back from the main lookout post with the latest report on the people they had spotted.

The alarm gave way to joy when Gavars came running up shortly afterward and described the situation in the woods. It turned out that the large group of people approaching on a wide front, among them many women, were simply mushroom-pickers. But they had turned aside and were already far off.

The conference continued its work for a full day and night, with only a brief break for a short rest during the day. During the break, the participants were

set out a travel basket with rolls, sausage, and large juicy tomatoes. The conference organizers had seen to this in advance as well. On the spot, the money spent on these provisions was also collected.

Down below, in the young birch grove, evening twilight was already gathering when the conference was finishing its discussion of all the questions: on strengthening the district organizations, on mobilizing the masses to fight the fascist danger and preparing an active defense of the workers' and peasants' faction in the Saeima, on issuing publications of the underground press at the local level.

Then, by secret ballot, elections to the city committee of the Party were held.

So as not to reveal their own names and assumed nicknames, all the delegates seated themselves in a single semicircular row. The one sitting on the right was considered number one, the others in the order in which they were sitting. On the ballots distributed to them (small squares of paper), the delegates wrote in their candidates — the numbers of five conference participants. The ballots, rolled into little tubes, were placed in a cap that lay on the ground, beside which sat the city organizer and the representative of the Central Committee. The results of the election were later communicated only to the comrades who had been elected to the Riga committee.

The city Party conference ended on Sunday evening, and over several hours its delegates left the forest along many different paths. By various routes they made their way to the nearest railway stations and bus stops, heading back to Riga.

And a few days later, at meetings of the district committees, in the propaganda collegia, and in the cells,

the delegates gave detailed accounts of the city conference and the decisions it had adopted. The communists listened intently to every word and rejoiced as they sensed how the underground Communist Party was growing and getting stronger as an organization. And everyone looked ahead to the future with still greater confidence.

On the fifteenth of September a strike by tailors began. Workers of ninety-three workshops, mostly women, took part in it. They were forced to work fourteen or fifteen hours a day in the worst hygienic conditions, in small, dark little rooms. Adolescents and apprentices were in especially harsh conditions.

During the preparation and conduct of the strike, contact was established and actions coordinated between the committees of the first and fourth districts, in whose territory most of the sewing workshops were located. In our district, direct contact with the strikers was maintained by S. Eidelmane, a member of the district committee, who was also a seamstress by trade. Every day she informed the district committee on the course of the strike.

The Social Democratic leaders of the tailors' trade union sabotaged the strike in every way, deliberately preventing its expansion and refusing to support the strikers materially. At the very height of the struggle they tried to betray it, begging the bosses for raises of even a few santimi, just to have a pretext for breaking the strike. Having no interest in its successful outcome, the trade-

union bureaucrats did not issue any appeal to the workers and made no effort to set up strike pickets at the workshops.

To discuss all the questions tied up with the strike, the district committee held a meeting with a group of communist tailors. This meeting took place in the apartment of party members Emīlija and Pāvels Dzerve, at the far end of Brīvības Street. There were three of us there from the district committee. After brief reports by Eidelmane and Šic on the course of the strike, the comrades decided to push for the workers themselves to take the initiative into their own hands at their workplaces. The communists and the Komsomol members were to expose all the maneuvers of the Social Democratic conciliators. The district committee provided people to help set up strike pickets, and new leaflets were issued to the strikers.

The strike lasted two weeks, and the workers won a wage increase of seven to twenty percent.

Autumn was setting in — meetings of the Party committee could now be held only indoors. And not every urgent meeting could conveniently be moved far out of the city. We always had to keep in reserve a couple of apartments whose owners were considered politically wholly "trustworthy" and who had not been compromised in any way before the political police.

For this reason I turned to the district head of the "Red Aid". This organization was connected with a wide circle of people sympathetic to the revolutionary movement. And soon I was told

that there was a suitable apartment of a dentist on Brīvības Street.

Taking advantage of the fact that after my prison stay I needed dental work, I set off for the address I had been given.

Number forty-two stood at the corner of Brīvības and Stabu Streets, directly opposite the large six-story building that housed the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Not without risk, this was nevertheless very tempting... For the political police usually devoted all their attention to the workers' districts. And of course it could never have entered their heads that right here, in the very center, directly under the nose of the Ministry of Internal Affairs — to which the political police itself was subordinate — the communists would dare to set up a safe house...

I went in through the main entrance of number forty-two. The walls of the foyer were inlaid with mahogany, and large mirrored squares gleamed all around. On the door plate of the first apartment the doctor's office hours were posted. On the second floor, next to the dentist's apartment, lived an attorney. Everyone here was a "respectable" person. As a last resort, my visit could be explained simply: I was a patient...

I rang the bell at the dentist's apartment. A girl in a white coat opened the door and invited me into the waiting room, where two more men were waiting. About an hour later, last in line, I entered the doctor's surgery. A short, elderly woman was setting in order, with quick movements, the instruments laid out. This was Dr. Blūmentāle, the dentist with whom I was to make arrangements about using her apartment.

I said that I had to have several fillings put in and had come on the recommendation of some acquaintances who had already been treated here. Blūmentāle got to work at once and, probably as always with her patients, was very talkative. At first I mostly listened. Only at the very end, when the doctor was setting the day for my next visit, did I say who had actually sent me to her and what the main purpose of my visit was. This woman's face noticeably changed, became serious, and a frank conversation soon began between us. The hostess showed me the layout of the rooms, pointed out the second entrance to the apartment from Stabu Street, and a further additional way out through the courtyard.

It was an unusually convenient apartment, one that could be used for quite a long time. One only had to be very cautious and not use it too often.

Here, in especially urgent cases, I would meet with Šic and Šalms to settle important matters; meetings of the district committee were also held here. For several months we successfully used this reliable apartment right next to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

But in winter the hostess of the apartment took an active part in collecting signatures among cultural figures for an antifascist declaration. Because of this, other comrades also began dropping in. Under such circumstances we had to reckon with the possibility of surveillance of the building, despite the fact that it stood in such close proximity to so influential a state institution...

And we had to look at once for a safer place for our meetings in another district of the city.

A worried technician passed on alarming news to the district committee: near the building that housed the underground print shop, a suspicious figure was often loitering about.

It was very possible that the political police had picked up some trail and, before destroying the print shop, was tracking the whole technical line of contact leading to the cells. In such cases one always had to assume the worst. Therefore the work of the print shop had to be halted immediately, all the more so because it had already been in use for quite a long time. The printing of leaflets was moved to another location.

However, it was equally impossible to simply leave even an idle print shop for the political police. The printing equipment had to be removed from there as quickly as possible.

On Sundays the traffic in the streets usually started later. On an overcast Sunday morning, a hired carriage drove into the courtyard of the building where the underground print shop was located. In it sat a respectable man in glasses and a hat — the typical figure of a doctor making house calls. Next to him sat a young nurse in a snow-white kerchief, with a Red Cross armband on her left sleeve. None of the passers-by could of course have any doubt that this urgent medical assistance was needed by some seriously ill person...

Driving into the courtyard, they asked the cabman to wait while they themselves, suitcases in hand, went up to the apartment. Everything there had been packed in advance and prepared. All that was left was to load it straight into the suitcases.

The visit to the "patient" this time was not a long one. Soon the doctor and the nurse came out of the apartment with their loaded suitcases. Already in the courtyard they got into the carriage, covered the suitcases, and the cabman drove out into the street.

The shutdown of the print shop, which had been under threat, went off successfully.

Now the very complex and painstaking work of setting up a new district print shop, the so-called "heavy equipment" — with type-setting — had been completed. It was very hard to come by type, which was strictly accounted for and issued only to print-shop owners. The one remaining possibility was to arrange a secret supply of type. The underground worker M. Sverdlov, who worked as a typesetter at a print shop on Parku Street, took this on with great enthusiasm. Hundreds of lead letters, ornamental headpieces, and spacing material he carried out of the print shop in his pockets, unnoticed by those around him.

In this way, over the course of the summer, enough type was accumulated for a full four cases. With this it was already possible to begin putting out a four-page newspaper. Yet there was still not enough type to set all four pages at once. So at first one page would be set and printed, the type would be immediately broken up, and then in the same way the remaining pages would be separately set and printed.

Having experience in this work, Sverdlov foresightedly attended to everything. He did not forget to lay in various display capitals, fine rules, asterisks. With Burnstein's help they managed

to have an iron plate and printing rollers cast quickly. Sverdlov also had no end of trouble with the large letters for the newspaper's masthead. He managed to get them from comrades at another print shop. It was unfortunate, of course, that the first letter of the paper's title turned out to be of a smaller point size, but for the following issue they obtained a letter of the proper size as well. With undisguised pride Sverdlov spoke of this seventh underground print shop, whose setting up he was actively taking part in.

Having entered a print shop at thirteen, he had been a messenger boy for two years, getting first two, and then three rubles a month. He was also required to go to the market with the owner's tall, heavy wife and carry on his back the large, heavy baskets with her purchases. And then for a couple of years he got cuffs from an old German master craftsman, to whom he had daily to bring a bottle of beer, on which the greater part of his apprentice's pay went. In return, the master would sometimes show him how to handle the typesetting case. Once, for failing to carry out an order, the master knocked him to the floor, beat him, and trampled him with his feet.

He went through many bitter humiliations and hardships in his youth as a worker, and still more of them came later, in his mature years. With all the fervor of his soul he therefore fought for a better life for himself, for a healthy and happy youth for his only son.

And soon, despite the terror and provocations of the political police, in the enterprises of the district, alongside the underground publications in Latvian, copies of a new district newspaper in Russian, named after the famous

In this building (on Lenina Street) was located the underground print shop of the newspaper "Vperyod"

pre-revolutionary Leninist publication — "Vperyod".

Two pages of the newspaper were given over to the section "From Workers' Lives," in which numerous letters from workers were printed. These reports came in to the editorial board from the enterprises along the underground line of communication. In the section on Party life there were materials about the work of the best cells of the district organization and the most important decisions of the district committee and the city Party committee. The newspaper also gave information on the revolutionary

movement abroad. Beginning with its third issue, "Vperyod" became the organ of the Riga committee.

Every freshly printed issue of the underground newspaper bore witness to the many difficulties that had been overcome, to the truly heroic deeds and devoted labor of the people who set the type and printed it through the nights in a half-dark room that was unheated in winter. Every single copy of the paper helped tear away the web of bourgeois lies, to break a wide breach in the blank wall of the bourgeois order.

Much energy and effort was devoted to this work by the district technician — the working-woman G. Shneyder (Lotta). She herself became a typesetter and literally carried on her own shoulders the greater part of the difficult and dangerous work of setting up and frequently relocating the "Vperyod" print shop.

The International Anti-Fascist Committee brought out "The Brown Book". This was a documentary publication with extensive material on the atrocities of the Hitlerites. It contained the accounts of the victims of fascism and photographic evidence of terrible tortures and abuses. "The Brown Book," issued in many languages, mercilessly exposed the bearers of the "new order" in Germany.

It was very important to acquaint our working people with the contents of this book. It tore the mask from the champions of fascism in Latvia as well. It would of course have been pointless to expect such a book to be issued by local bourgeois publishing houses...

For the organization of the issue of "The Brown Book"

was taken on by M. Leibovich, a communist of the First District. This was no easy matter. The inevitable confiscation had to be reckoned with, and so the book could only be brought out semi-legally.

With the help of a group of antifascist intellectuals, Leibovich arranged a swift translation of this voluminous work from German into Latvian. The greater part of the translation was done by Aleksandrs Sakse, Mirdza Ķempe, Mikhail Ioffe and Boris Tsinis. They worked day and night to ensure the successful release of the edition. The money for paper and printing costs was obtained on a temporary basis — until the print run was sold — from a workers' loan-and-savings society, on whose board our people sat.

Under the censorship rules then in force, the imprint had to give the name of the person responsible for the edition. The Riga Committee proposed that Arnolds Deglavs serve as the person responsible for the release of the "Brown Book." As a Saeima deputy he still enjoyed a certain immunity. Deglavs readily agreed and threw himself actively into preparing this edition.

The translation manuscript was handed over to the printer in small portions for typesetting, and each printed sheet was immediately taken away to another place. The owner of the printshop, meanwhile, was misled about the actual size of the edition. Unaware that the last sheets had already been printed, he raged and demanded that the rest of the material be turned in for typesetting as soon as possible. In this way it was possible to delay for a time the dispatch from the printshop to the censorship office of the first mandatory copies of a book that had already been fully printed.

Meanwhile several thousand copies of the "Brown Book," hastily folded and stitched in another bindery, were already on sale at the news kiosks of the Invalids' Union. An accelerated sale of the book had been arranged in advance with the union's board.

In the Saeima the reactionary bourgeois deputies came forward with a special interpellation to the government and demanded that every measure be taken to ban so undesirable a book. And it was deemed confiscated.

The ambassador of Nazi Germany in Latvia also burst out with an official protest against the publication of the "Brown Book" in Latvian. The Hitlerite diplomat even tried to withdraw it from sale. On his orders the embassy officials rushed to buy up the print run of the book at every kiosk in Riga. But it was already too late. They managed to gather and destroy only a few isolated copies of the "Brown Book." The rest had quickly sold out. The people learned the truth about the horrors of the fascist regime.

The attempt by the Latvian bourgeoisie to load all the burdens of the economic crisis onto the shoulders of the working people met with stubborn resistance from the working class. In response to systematic cuts in wages, the worsening of social legislation, the introduction of new taxes and the exploitation of unemployed labour at so-called "public works," a strike

movement broke out on a wide scale. In recent years it had reached unprecedented dimensions, both in the number of striking workers and in the duration of the strikes.

The growing revolutionary activity of the proletarian masses posed a serious threat to the class domination of the bourgeoisie. To break the resistance of the working class, the ruling clique was openly preparing to establish a dictatorship. A new criminal code was introduced, workers' organizations were closed, the police terror was stepped up still further, and the liquidation of the worker-peasant faction in the Saeima was being prepared. All the Latvian bourgeois parties — from the Bergists, the "Peasants' Union," the "Democratic Centre," the "New Settlers," through to Skujenieks's "Progressive Group" — were as if vying with one another in the speed of their march towards complete fascist degeneration.

Representing various strata of the urban and rural bourgeoisie and of the reactionary higher officialdom, these parties hastily threw off the last remnants of "democratic" trappings. With generous financial backing from bankers and big industrialists, and under the fatherly patronage of the authorities, the Pērkonkrusts, the Stelmachers, the Karlsons groups and other fascist organizations were developing their activity.

The "Peasants' Union" project for amending the constitution and Ulmanis's hymns of praise to Hitlerism showed that the kulaks — the "grey barons" — were claiming the right to be the first in the struggle against the working class and for the establishment of a fascist regime.

Returning from a long "medical" trip through Nazi Germany, the leader of the ruling

kulak party, Ulmanis, published article after article in his party's newspaper "Brīvā Zeme." A seasoned political wheeler-dealer and embezzler, a participant in a number of major banking frauds, he was now loudly proclaiming the necessary "political rebirth" of Latvia. With whatever strength and ability they had, the wheeler-dealers and political jugglers of the other bourgeois parties — of entrepreneurs, big landlords, and merchants — chimed in.

But behind the newspaper howls about a "new order" the principal villainy lay concealed: this gang was secretly preparing a coup in the country. The remnants of progressive elements were being driven out of state institutions and local self-government bodies. Everywhere the most outright obscurantists were being pushed into leading posts.

In its anti-popular plans, the reaction nevertheless did not rely on the army. Despite the carefully chosen officer cadres, the mass of soldiers, consisting in the main of village and town toilers, did not inspire any particular confidence. For that reason, around Riga and other industrial cities, the manoeuvres of the militarized kulak organization — the Aizsargi — became more frequent. This armed force, comprising nineteen regiments, cavalry units and an aviation regiment, was the bulwark of the reaction.

The Social Democratic leaders rendered the bourgeoisie no small service. They lulled the workers with revolutionary phrases, while in fact they were not only failing to organize resistance to fascism but were sabotaging every economic and political struggle of the proletariat. They also took an active part in the persecution of the worker-peasant deputies and were negotiating with the bourgeois coalition of the Saeima for the liquidation of the worker-

peasant faction, without which the "struggle" against fascism would be more successful...

Social Democratic windbags of the Menders type were still trying, even at their latest congress, to provide a theoretical justification for the absence of any political and economic preconditions for fascism in Latvia...

The Communist Party explained to the people the true meaning of Ulmanis's "political rebirth" and the treacherous role of the Mensheviks, who had rejected the proposal of the Communist Party of Latvia for the creation of a united proletarian front against fascism.

The party pointed to an extremely grave political situation and spoke clearly of the looming threat. It demanded of the communists constant mobilizational readiness and a strengthening of their ties with the masses.

In order to avoid possible mass arrests, many Riga communists were advised not to spend the night at home.

On a November night, at a late evening session of the Saeima, the bourgeois majority got its way. The people's elected representatives, who had stubbornly defended the interests of the working people both in the Saeima and outside of it, were that night stripped of their parliamentary immunity and handed over to the courts. As they came out of the Saeima building — within whose walls the bourgeoisie had spoken so ostentatiously and hypocritically of the principles of democracy — the worker-peasant deputies were set upon by the okhranka agents and police who had been lying in wait. All the deputies of the faction — O. Gulbis, F. Berg, R. Lapiņš, P. Rutiņš, A. Matison and M. Bite — were right there at the doors

of the Saeima, severely beaten and carried off in handcuffs to the Central Prison.

This open, fascist-style brazen reprisal against the worker-peasant faction deeply outraged the working people of the city. At a number of enterprises the workers declared a one-day protest strike; illegal meetings were held.

In those days the First District Party Committee also organized a flying protest demonstration. For the demonstration, scheduled for an evening hour, the intersection of Maskavas and Lāčplēša Streets had been chosen in advance — at that time of day it was usually the busiest crossroads. Right at the appointed hour, members of several cells, revolutionary groups and Komsomol members of the First District began to converge on the spot. At the moment when the place was most crowded, all the comrades who had arrived, together with the district committee members Shits and Blazhevich, stepped out into the middle of the street and quickly closed up into ranks. They lifted the propagandist high in their arms; he at once began his address to the workers passing by. From the sidewalks many joined this flying demonstration, which was making its way along Maskavas Street. When mounted policemen were spotted racing towards them from the centre of the city, the demonstrators turned onto Lāčplēša Street and near Kuršanovs's factory swiftly dispersed...

It was the beginning of March. In Pārdaugava, in a small and very tidy worker's flat, a meeting of the Riga Committee of the party was being held.

Present at the meeting were the deputy organizer of the city committee Shalm, Gavar, the representative of the central propaganda collegium Druva, a representative of the Komsomol city committee, and myself. Absent was the city committee organizer Jaunpolis, who had already been in the okhranka for a week. Under circumstances unknown, the city committee courier had also been arrested shortly before this; he had maintained the technical liaison with all the districts and systematically supplied them with all the illegal literature being put out. Since Shalm and I had not been found at home during searches, summonses had been left for us demanding our immediate appearance at the okhranka. Other party activists were being sought as well.

By some thread, the okhranka was clearly closing in on the city committee. The fact of the failure was beyond dispute. But what were the reasons that had led to it? News was reaching us of a severe beating of the city committee courier at the okhranka. It looked as though, unable to endure the torture, he had told them something.

The situation gave cause for alarm. But the meeting decided that, under no circumstances, was anyone to present himself at the okhranka of his own accord, even if there should follow repeated summonses. Despite the arrests, it was necessary, without any panic, to continue and to expand still further the work of the whole city organization.

The Riga City Committee of the party took up the question of preparations for the First of May.

The May Day campaign, under the conditions of intensified terror and the growing threat of fascism, was acquiring particular significance. It had to be used to the utmost for uniting and rallying all antifascist forces.

It was decided to begin at once printing the bulk of the pre-May literature. Experience had shown that at such important moments it was inadvisable to rely on delivery of literature from the central underground printshop alone. The slightest hitch, an unforeseen obstacle, was enough to derail the timely arrival of the necessary literature. For that reason the pre-May appeals of the Central and Riga Committees of the party had to be printed simultaneously in large runs at the district printshops as well. This year it was also necessary to hold the illegal pre-May rallies, gatherings and flying meetings far earlier than usual, to gain time and manage to get a great deal done before all the forces of the okhranka and police were thrown into mass "preventive" arrests of workers on the eve of May Day.

At the meeting it became clear that Jaunpolis, summoned to the okhranka by a notice, had appeared there of his own accord. He hoped that he would not be detained, since during the search of the home where he did not in fact live, nothing had been found. In doing so he had failed to take into account the new wave of arrests and had acted contrary to the party's instruction to hide from the okhranka. The Riga Committee severely condemned Jaunpolis's action and referred the matter for consideration to the Central Committee of the party.

After the meeting Shalm made arrangements with each member of the city committee about future meeting points and worked out questions of liaison with the districts.

When we had already begun to disperse one by one, Druva (Vadzis) came up to me and arranged for

a meeting with him in the Imanta woods the next day. When we met, Druva expressed great concern over the arrests that were taking place.

Immediately after the end of my shift, after ten in the evening, I set out for the emergency rendezvous that had been set for me.

Stepping out of the gates of the rope factory, which stood by the Air Bridge near the VEF works, I passed through the 1905 Park and then, along the almost deserted Purvciems Street, made my way far out of the city.

Early spring was felt everywhere. In the city there was no longer any snow, and the dry, clean streets gave no further reminder of the winter just past. In the Biķernieki forest, on both sides of the winding road, tufts of last year's grass showed reddish on the patches of bare earth. Here and there small mounds of blackened snow could still be seen.

Unhurriedly I walked in the stillness of the forest. The appointed time was approaching; from minute to minute I expected the meeting.

Now ahead, from around a bend in the road, a short, broad-shouldered man came into view — it was Mārtiņš Ozols, secretary of the Central Committee.

Soon we met. We walked side by side and discussed the situation in the city committee that had arisen in connection with the failure of its organizer and courier.

He spoke of the obvious connection between the arrests now going on in Riga and the recent collapse in the Zemgale party organization. In its regional committee a traitor had appeared who was well

acquainted also with the courier of the Riga City Committee. Evidently it was from this direction that the okhranka was closing in on the city committee. A rapid reshuffle was needed within the city committee itself, taking into account that Shalm, who had often met with the courier, had no doubt already been given up by him at the okhranka. For this reason, the exposed links of the technical line of communication also had to be renewed at once, in order to prevent further collapse in the city organization. Informing me that the carrying-out of this task was being entrusted to me — that the Central Committee had appointed me as organizer of the Riga City Committee — Mārtiņš-Ozols explained in detail how best to put it all into practice. At the same time he warned me of the need, within the next few days, to leave the factory in connection with my transition to the status of a professional revolutionary, in order to give myself entirely to underground organizational work.

Despite all the difficulty and complexity of the situation, Mārtiņš-Ozols spoke of everything calmly, with an encouraging confidence. All of his instructions had been thought through down to the smallest detail. Whether he was speaking of how, under these conditions, to preserve the working underground printshop of the city committee; or of the people to whom one could entrust this or that assignment; or of the solution of any organizational question — in everything one sensed not only his good theoretical preparation but also his knowledge of every practical side of the matter.

It was already quite dark when we agreed on our next meeting.

Returning by the same road to the city, I tried to test myself: had I remembered everything that had to be undertaken so urgently? Much still

needed to be thought through and clarified. The thought of my new situation troubled me. Only recently, after a string of temporary jobs, I had managed to find a place at a mechanized rope factory, where I had learned to operate a complicated twisting machine. And would I have strength enough for underground work on so unusual a scale? But the question had been settled. This was apparently required by the situation that had taken shape.

A complete transition to underground status demanded still greater conspiratorial discipline. Questions of housing had to be solved differently, the whole system of meeting points changed, and meetings held only outside the city.

Absorbed in thoughts of all this, I did not notice that I had come out of the forest. From afar there already glimmered the rare, dim lights of the city sunk in sleep. Cutting through the darkness and slowly drawing closer, these lights shone brighter and brighter, and one could already make out the familiar outlines of individual city buildings. I quickened my pace, not taking my eyes from the nightly panorama of the city.

At the next meeting of the city committee the decision of the Central Committee on my appointment as organizer of the Riga Committee was announced. After all current matters had been discussed, arrangements were made for liaison with all four party districts of the city. The most difficult task was establishing liaison with the Second District — the Pārdaugava party organization.

At one of the preceding meetings the city committee had become

had become acquainted with a letter from a group of political prisoners in the Central Prison, in which they expressed their suspicion that the organizer of the Second District, Pacevich, was a provocateur. They based this on the fact that comrades who met with Pacevich in everyday underground work usually fell into the okhranka's hands soon afterwards. But those members of the city committee who knew Pacevich personally were convinced that he was an honest man. Moreover, there was no concrete proof of provocation. So the city committee resolved to carry out a thorough investigation. However, arrests began at once because of Zalum's betrayal.

It was decided meanwhile to remove Pacevich from district leadership without waiting for the results of the investigation. But this had to be done very carefully, after first establishing all the necessary contacts with the Second District.

There was no time to waste. Setting about my new party assignment, I made contact with the district committees with Shalm's help, learned of the situation in each district, and informed the organizers of the plan for preparing the May Day campaign. First of all I worked for the fastest possible replacement of those district couriers whom the arrested city committee courier had known by sight.

Over the course of a whole week, at frequent meeting points and conferences, contacts along the organizational, propaganda and technical lines were consolidated. As usual, in case of my own arrest, I did not write down the coordinates of these many meetings, but tried to keep them precisely in memory in a definite sequence.

MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE OF THE FIRST RIGA DISTRICT OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF LATVIA (late 1933 — early 1934)

Kārlis Šits (Terauds). Deputy organizer, and later organizer, of the district committee.

Sara Eidelman-Rapoport (Roza).

In this period, full of all sorts of alarms, I was once awakened early in the morning by a very loud and agitated conversation in the next room. With hysterical cries, weeping, the landlady was telling her husband how the yardman had been insistently demanding of her what man was living unregistered in their flat, and was speaking of the police and a search that had been carried out. Half-asleep, I listened to this strange conversation and could not at all make out how I had been spared and how the po-

Pavel Yankovsky (Andrei).

Boleslav Blazhevich (General).

lice had not even awakened me. And only at the end of the landlady's account did I realize that she was telling her husband about a frightful dream she had had in the night...

That morning I laughed inwardly at this dream, which could come true at any moment. Practical conclusions had to be drawn from it in waking life as well. The landlady's nerves were badly shaken. Nothing good promised to come of such a situation. I had to look for a more reliable place...

It was a Sunday in spring. A broad stream of sunlight burst through the windows into the room. At the flat of a sympathizer the members of the First District committee had gathered for a meeting: the energetic and exceptionally devoted-to-the-revolutionary-cause Kārlis Šits (Terauds), who had now become the district organizer; the unbending communist Boleslav Blazhevich, a worker at a match factory, who still bore the prison nickname "General" — given him by his cellmates, who remembered his namesake, the general from Furmanov's novel "Mutiny"; Sara Eidelman (Roza), whose revolutionary firmness could not be broken either by the savage beatings in the Daugavpils prison or by the agonizing sadistic regime for political prisoners in the Cēsis prison; and the head of the district propaganda collegium Pavel Yankovsky (Andrei), who in prison had been so absorbed in the study of questions of literature and art.

At that time the district organization numbered some fifteen party cells. The Stučka cell, which carried on work at the "Kuznetsov Brothers" factory; a railwaymen's cell; the "Rekord" and "Boston" cells at the textile factories of the same names; two cells of leather workers; a furriers' cell — "Kuņica," "Daugava" — at the "Emolip" sawmill, "Mayak," a Dimitrov cell, and others. Attached to each of them were several groups of sympathizing workers and members of the illegal revolutionary trade unions.

At that meeting I told them of the latest decisions of the city committee and of my departure for new underground work. I confessed to the comrades sincerely that I was leaving the First District with regret, where we had all worked together so well and come to know one another so closely.

Jēkabs Šalms (Salna) — deputy city organizer and member of the Riga Committee of the party.

We talked about the arrests that were continuing in the city, about what fate awaited each of us, and then moved on to the items on the agenda.

On the seventh of April I had to leave my job at the factory. On that day, on the pretext of a serious illness, I was to draw my final pay at the office.

On the way to the factory, in the area of the Freight Station, I had a last meeting scheduled with Shalm, who afterwards needed to disappear from the city for a while. At this rendezvous, the courier of the Central Committee was to be introduced to the new courier of

the city committee. But the comrade designated as city courier had left Riga for several days. So as not to hold up Shalm, it was agreed that I would go to this meeting, and that I would then myself put the courier of the Central Committee in touch with our city courier. In the long chain of meetings of that week I had deliberately set this meeting as the last.

Exactly at one o'clock in the afternoon, on the wide Hanzas Street, I met with Shalm. Unhurriedly, as if out for a stroll, we walked along this street from the direction of Ganību Dambis. Suddenly a young man in a dashing sports outfit overtook us. He glanced back at us. This caught our attention. But the passer-by outwardly did not differ in any way from the usual football and volleyball fans of this neighbourhood — the stadium was right there.

Soon we met a young woman dressed already in spring clothes. I remembered her blue eyes — small, with a very sharp gaze. This was Marta Kramiņa, courier of the Central Committee. Shalm introduced me to her, and a few minutes later he set off in the direction of Valdemāra Street.

Together with Kramiņa I came out onto Sporta Street. On the way she spoke of her not entirely reliable position in connection with the arrest of the city committee's courier. We agreed on the next meeting, at which Kramiņa was to be introduced to the new city committee courier, and we parted.

Trying, as always in such cases, not to look back, I walked quickly on.

So as not to be late for work, I was hurrying very much, and twenty minutes later I was already entering the gates of the rope factory.

Eduards Gavars (Meteor) — organizer of the IV District and member of the Riga Committee of the party.

In those days — a month before the fascist coup — the okhranka was working especially intensively. By some means it had tracked our meeting on Hanzas Street. In addition to the "sportsman" loitering by the stadium, a whole group of spies had concealed themselves on the premises of the automobile garage at the start of Hanzas Street.

A few minutes after Shalm parted from me, he was seized at the corner of Valdemāra Street by two agents who had run up at him from behind. Giving him no chance to utter a single word, they hastily shoved him into a passing cabman's droshky and carried him off to the okhranka.

Kramiņa, straight from the meeting, set off for the Central Market to buy herself groceries. Behind her

surveillance had been set up along her whole route. Fearing nevertheless to lose sight of Kramiņa later in the crowded market, the agents detained her right at the entrance.

The spies who had begun to follow me, however — acting, evidently, on the instructions of the chief of the agentura — were in no hurry to make the arrest. Having learned from a hardened, still-unexposed provocateur about the underground work I was carrying on at the time, the okhranka was counting on my proceeding from here to other meetings, so that it could continue with the arrests now so important to it. And finally, after ten months of fruitless searching at my home, the okhranka hoped then to catch me at my underground flat.

For this reason I was followed in secret right up to the entrance of the factory yard.

I had worked here only two months. In order to avoid an unexpected arrest, I had told no one of my new place of work. It was still unknown to the okhranka as well. For several hours, in the hush of the offices of the building on Alberta Street, experienced agent-investigators, skilled in mounting the most subtle provocations, tried to unravel the tangle that had now suddenly snarled at the gates of the mechanized rope factory. They were in a hurry not to miss, but to strike with certainty at the new, quickly slipping links of the underground party organization that were eluding them.

The roar of the motors, the sharp noise of the big bobbin machine, the rumbling and clatter of the old sizing and twisting machines made the tall wooden walls of the factory building shake. All around — under

dust and waste from the hemp being processed rose. Dust packed into the nose; the throat went dry. Tiny sharp bits of waste, finding their way into the airways, set off a violent cough. In the unbearable noise it was hard to make out a worker speaking loudly right beside you.

In the middle of the working day a winder, M. Lotsova, who belonged to one of the party cells of the First District, came up to me. Seizing a suitable moment, unnoticed by those around, as if shaking hands in greeting, she handed me a half-folded sealed envelope. Inside was the manuscript of the May Day appeal in Russian, which one comrade had at my request translated from Latvian.

But the translator had clearly been in a hurry, since we had agreed that I would receive these materials at our meeting the following day. And tomorrow, at a meeting with the technician of the underground printshop, I had intended to hand over the manuscript for typesetting. What was more, the translation turned out to have been written on two large sheets of ruled paper, so that the packet was too bulky and awkward under conditions of conspiracy. But there was nothing to be done — I could hardly hand it back — and I quickly put the manuscript into the pocket of my work overalls.

It was a Saturday. The machines and benches did not stop for a moment, and everything was endlessly clattering and turning around.

I glanced at the clock — it was already past six. The working day was drawing to a close.

Watching attentively as thick threads were wound evenly onto the rapidly spinning rows of bobbins, I began, on the move, to clean and oil many of the parts of the running machine. Today I had decided not to

stay on after work for an extra fifteen or twenty minutes for this purpose.

With satisfaction, standing at the machine, I recalled many episodes of the successfully completed week. The last meeting too, it seemed, had ended well — the one which up to that day had troubled me most, since the okhranka had been hunting Shalm intensively.

Now, I thought triumphantly, it would be much harder for the spies to pick up my trail. In this last hour of my work at the machine I was already taken up with thoughts of tomorrow, when I was to go still deeper into the underground.

But these thoughts of tomorrow were suddenly cut off by a strange circumstance: through a half-open door at the far end of the factory hall, some people were coming in one by one from the yard.

It looked like a new visitation by officials of the factory inspectorate to check on labour conditions at the enterprises. Usually such inspectors, often with a Social Democratic party card in their pocket, would dash hurriedly through the workshops. And despite the most wretched state of sanitary and hygienic conditions, having received the next bribe, they would discern the most exemplary order in everything...

But when I also saw the policemen entering, and recognized in one of the men in plain clothes the coarse square face of the senior agent Aprans, it became clear to me that the okhranka had descended on the factory.

Inquisitively looking from side to side, suspiciously eyeing the workers, but asking none of them anything, they began to make their way between the rows of machines.

There was no doubt, they had come to arrest me. But how had the okhranka suddenly learned that I was here? And how could it be that they had come for me precisely in the last hour of my work? But might it still turn out that they had not come for me and that the spies would not recognize me?..

Remaining at the machine, I tried outwardly to give nothing away. I understood the full extent of the danger now threatening me. Instinctively I thrust my right hand into the pocket of my trousers, intending to take out the envelope of manuscripts I had received just earlier, so as to stuff it quickly somewhere into the machine or fling it aside from me.

But that very minute a gang of spies and policemen surrounded me.

"Hands out of your pockets! Hands up!" Aprans shouted frenziedly, training the muzzle of his revolver at my head.

A feeling of sharp bitterness and pain at this important party assignment so unexpectedly broken off gripped my heart. As though paralyzed by the great strain on my nerves, I went on holding in my pocket the hand with the paper packet. Trying not to lose my composure, I made a great effort to recover that sense of inner calm which had so helped me in the most difficult moments of struggle, both at liberty and in prison.

At that moment three spies fell upon me and, twisting my arms back, led me into the shift foreman's room. There they set about searching me thoroughly. The spies smirked complacently when one of them handed Aprans the manuscript of the May Day appeal of the Central

...of the Central and Riga Committees of the Communist Party of Latvia.

Aprāns began crudely trying to intimidate me, hoping to wring the information he needed out of me at the very first interrogation. He jabbed his fist into my face, grabbed my throat with his thick fingers, and savagely cursed the communists, who, he said, would soon be finished off on the other side of the Zilupe as well... The other agents tried to keep up with him. A burly policeman zealously helped them along with shouts and fists.

I understood at once that the slightest weakness on my part would only embolden the enemy. So I resolved to stand up to their violence. With sharp movements of my arms I pushed off one snoop after another as they came at me with their fists, and I refused to answer any questions about the manuscript found on me or the keys to the illegal apartment.

Having finished drawing up the brief report listing the materials found on me, Aprāns gave the order to take me to the okhranka.

Two snoops twisted my arms behind my back and led me across the courtyard out into the street.

Right at the gates I managed to glance back, and I saw a kind of demonstration. In the courtyard, along the wall of the factory building, the entire shift of workers — men and women — stood. Silently they saw me off with comradely glances full of sympathy.

Shoved from behind, I climbed into a closed okhranka car waiting in the street. Soon it was racing through the city, which was wrapped in thick evening twilight. The main thoroughfare — Brīvības Street — was flooded with electric light. On both sides of it the gaudy advertisements

of American, German, and English firms blazed, along with the come-hither colored lights of the bars and cabarets.

The agents in the car began arguing aloud among themselves: which of them would be the first to beat me at the okhranka. Each one was claiming the privilege for himself...

I spent that whole first night without sleep. Cell number seven — a dark closet two by two-and-a-half meters in which they had placed me — actually served as a punishment cell. There were no windows and no ventilation. The heavy stale air, overheated by a cast-iron stove deliberately stoked to a glow, brought on an unbearable headache. So that the prisoner would not suffocate, the duty officer would open the cell door for the night. Then, through the narrow, slightly-cracked door, normal room air filtered in from the corridor and breathing became easier.

Through that night, which dragged on so long for me, I never stopped thinking about the circumstances of the arrest and persistently tried to uncover the cause of my unexpected exposure. I had to identify as quickly as possible the provocateur lurking somewhere and warn the comrades still at large. Yet much was still unclear even to me. I knew nothing of the fate of the illegal apartment. So I had to reckon with all sorts of possible surprises at the next interrogation and was preparing for the worst.

In the morning they led me down to the lower floor for interrogation.

I answered the investigator unhurriedly, trying — from the nature of his questions — to determine exactly what and how much the okhranka knew about the city party organi-

...of early spring and the aching bitterness brought on by the arrest.

Usually in the morning, right after reveille, the duty officer would open the barred window of the cell to air it out and let me go to do the cleanup. Sometimes right after that he would step into the neighboring cells to open their windows and would linger there for several minutes. Walking down the corridor on cleanup duty past the open door of the duty room, I always saw wide-open windows with no bars at all.

I worked out that precisely at such a moment, quickly stepping out for cleanup, one could turn into the duty room and climb down a rope from the open window onto the sidewalk. The streets of that aristocratic district were completely deserted in the early morning hours.

To carry out my plan I needed to get hold of a thick cord — which in itself was a hard problem to solve. Much also depended on who would be on morning duty in the holding area that day. If it was Gorilla, who was always at the prisoners' heels, there was no point even thinking of escape. They had nicknamed that duty officer "Gorilla" because he looked exactly like an ape...

But the circumstances were turning out quite favorably. Starting the new week, mornings were covered by a tall, broad-shouldered old man recently taken on at the okhranka. He was very different from the others in many ways. Because of his religion the prisoners had nicknamed him "the Baptist." He was very polite to me and actually did not yet have a clear idea of what his duties were here or of the okhranka's role at all. It seemed very strange how such a man could have ended up in this service. Apparently,

The building that housed the political okhranka (formerly Alberta Street, now Friča Gaiļa Street)

...only because the okhranka had no doubt about the political reliability of the adherents of that sect.

And I decided to make immediate use of this newcomer to the okhranka when he came into my cell to ask whether I wanted to buy anything to eat at the shop. I asked him to bring me white bread, three hundred grams of Krakowska sausage, and half a kilogram of sugar, since here they gave us only boiling water. And then, as if having forgotten about a few small things, I added something about

...fifteen to twenty meters of strong linen cord. The old man slowly and meticulously wrote everything down on a separate sheet of his oblong notepad.

Agitated, I paced the cell and waited impatiently for the Baptist to return with all the items I had ordered. Better conditions for escape simply could not have existed.

But my hopes were dashed. Half an hour later the old man came back, entered the cell, and laid on the table the parcels of sugar, sausage, and bread he had bought. Then with a rather embarrassed look he added apologetically that the cord he had bought had been confiscated by the inspector: in the cells, prisoners were forbidden to keep any kind of cord or rope. From his flustered look it was clear that he had received a stern reprimand from his superiors for so serious an infraction. I never saw the Baptist at the okhranka again.

I was taken to the investigator again and questioned about why I had needed the cord. For this question I had prepared an answer in advance: knowing that I was to be transferred to prison any day now, I had decided to get hold of cord in order to tie up properly the blanket, pillow, and other things sent to me from home. Of course they did not give me the cord back, but such a straightforward answer seemed convincing.

Thus my rather shaky plan for an escape from the okhranka collapsed...

It was the last evening of my stay at the okhranka. The reflections of the setting sun gilded the upper stories of the massive stone building on the opposite side of the street. From a wide-open window came the sound of a piano. Beethoven's stirring music gave way to Chopin's poetic melodies.

On that beautiful spring evening I sat for a long time at the large table, my gaze fixed on the cell window with its iron grating. I thought about life, about the struggle, about friendship — that strong, whole feeling that grows even stronger in hardship and trial.

The next day, at midmorning, I was told to get ready to be sent off to prison.

In the corridor, where it had always been quiet, the okhranka officials were now noisily bustling about, and the loud voices of the police escorts could already be heard. Two groups were being made ready for transfer: the men to the Central Prison and the women to the Urgent Prison. The okhranka cells were once again being emptied for new political detainees...

When they led me out into the corridor, I met Šalms there — he too was being sent off to prison. We exchanged a few words. We were still pretending not to know each other. Both of us were glad that the fourteen days of interrogation at the okhranka were finally over — after which even prison began to seem desirable...

They took us along Elizabetes, then Krišjāņa Barona, and then along Matīsa Street, which had become the usual route for prison transports.

We crossed the railway tracks at the end of Matīsa Street, passed a wide sandy waste lot, and turned into a narrow lane. On the left side ran the stone wall of Matvejev Cemetery. Deep within it, towering above the world of the dead, stood slender pines. Looking at them, I recalled the famous lines of Rainis:

And no matter how strong the winds, The proud pines would not bow their backs.

On the right side of the lane, behind a low hedge, the railway tracks running close by could be seen.

The escort was approaching the Central Prison. The heavy breath of its dark-gray buildings could already be felt. The sentry stepped out of the guard booth and threw open the gates onto the prison yard.

At that very moment, from the direction of the rail bed, came unusually long whistles and drawn-out horn blasts. And it seemed to us that the railway workers were in their own way greeting us right at the prison's threshold.

Already very close at hand could be seen the small barred squares of the windows of the solitary cells of the second and fourth blocks, and the large first block.

"There they are — our 'workers' universities' in bourgeois Latvia," Šalms said to me jokingly as he walked beside me.

Walking across the prison yard, I thought about the fifteen months at liberty that had flown by so unbelievably fast, and about the long years of imprisonment that were beginning all over again.

In the prison they placed us in the basement so-called "sorting" cell. From here new prisoners were distributed on Wednesdays and Saturdays to the various blocks and cells.

Here what we had previously only suspected became absolutely clear. In the most conspicuous places on the stone wall and on the old wooden table, two words had been gouged out in large letters: "Zaļums — traitor!" This was how the politi-

...cal prisoners who had been transferred here from the okhranka three weeks earlier were warning their comrades.

The next day they called us out into the corridor one by one, where the sorting was being conducted. I was led last to the table, behind which sat the senior warders of all the blocks and the deputy warden for administrative matters, Kirštein.

"Here again!" Kirštein said with malicious glee, and stared straight at me with his glassy eyes. "How many times in prison now?"

"Third," I answered.

Kirštein whispered something quietly to his subordinates.

That was how the sorting ended.

Soon I was brought to the first wing of the first block, to cell number three. At the big barred door of this cell the inmates greeted me with whoops and jeers. It held repeat offenders. There were burglars and robbers of every kind — men who had made theft and armed robbery their permanent profession. At first I was the only political prisoner in the cell.

From the very first days in the prison I again tried to think through, in detail, all the circumstances of my arrest.

The traitor Zaļums had unquestionably handed over many comrades. But he didn't know either me or Šalms. So it followed that, besides Zaļums, there had to be another provocateur — one who was still active outside, and whom the okhranka was carefully shielding. This thought never left me.

I remembered Pacevič, who had aroused the suspicions of many comrades. A few days before my arrest I had had a meeting with Pacevič. Before that I had not known him

and was meeting him for the first time. Talking with him left me with the impression that he was not showing much initiative in organizational work. But certain circumstances especially put me on my guard.

From what he himself said, it appeared that he was personally handling not only organizational but also propaganda and technical liaison with the city committee. From the standpoint of clandestine work, such a concentration of different functions in a single person was utterly impermissible. It made it easier for the okhranka to smash the underground organization and made it extremely hard to rebuild it afterward. So in trying to concentrate everything in his own hands, Pacevič was acting on some particular considerations of his own.

For greater caution I proposed arranging the next meeting outside the city, in the evening, when it had grown completely dark. From experience I knew this was less dangerous. Pacevič unconvincingly argued the opposite: that the safest meetings were in the city itself and only in daylight. Apparently he was, for some reason, afraid of being outside the city after dark...

Although by trade a metalworker, and long unemployed, Pacevič showed no particular concern about this situation. He was supposedly working temporarily as a yardman.

The bust on Hanzas Street was no accident. Pacevič knew Šalms very well, so it was easy to put him under surveillance. My illegal apartment, which I had left to go to the meeting, had not been uncovered. So no one had been tailing me.

All this led me to the final conclusion: that Pacevič really was a provocateur — an agent of the okhranka. And I passed all of this on to the comrades outside.

And a month later, right after the fascist coup, this provocateur was already publicly appearing "in the name of the workers" with speeches of gratitude addressed to the leader of the coup, Ulmanis...

Compared with earlier years, conditions for political prisoners had grown even worse. There were no longer separate cells in the prison for politicals. As a rule, they were now placed together with the criminals. So I felt rather strange in the cell of repeat offenders.

This was the very "bottom" of bourgeois society, with all the manners and customs that go with it. These men had nothing but contempt for honest work. All their everyday conversations were confined to a narrow circle of habitual interests. They talked about every kind of thieves' adventure outside, about their many girlfriends, about the witnesses they hoped to use to muddy the investigation, and about the expensive but profitable lawyers who were closely tied to the judges.

Gambling was strictly forbidden in the prison. During the frequent and unexpected searches in the cells of the repeat offenders, what they especially looked for was playing cards. And the warders almost never found them. But all day long here they would play "twenty-one"...

There were also operators here who shrewdly took advantage of the demand for cards. They painted whole decks and peddled them, and for their use also got a certain percentage from the players.

What, you might wonder, could a criminal locked up in prison stand to win or lose?

In fact, a great deal. In the first place,

they gambled away their own clothes and shoes — which prisoners under investigation were allowed to wear. The losers were left with nothing to do but put on prison garb even before trial. They gambled away the food packages sent in from outside, the tables, the beds and other things still at home, whose sale was entrusted to relatives.

The smaller-fry thieves gambled away even themselves, agreeing to wash dishes for months, take cell duty for the winners, and serve them in every way.

Since the cell was overcrowded, some of the inmates slept on the bunks while the rest slept on the floor. The latter, in turn, would move up to vacated bunks as already-sentenced men were transferred to other wings. Hopelessly losing gamblers would in the end stake even their place on the bunks, and themselves go off to sleep on the floor.

So one day a situation arose in which most of the bunks had been won by an inveterate card-shark who was trafficking in them. And when my turn came to move up off the floor onto the bunks, I had quite an argument before I could prove that I was in no way bound to recognize the rights of someone who had "won" all the bunks in the cell. By the same logic, he might just as well have won the whole prison...

There were several men in the cell who were constantly mocking the communists and who loved to argue with me about politics. Among them, one who especially stood out was the seasoned recidivist Yas-Yekabson [? Latvian name uncertain]. Of his half-century of life he had spent more than thirty years in various prisons; he remembered what the regime had been like in each of them and would tell stories about the bloody reprisals against politicals he had witnessed at the Central Prison in nineteen-oh-five.

All his life he had never worked, mocked those who toiled honestly, and talked about his own "free will" and his inalienable right to live as he pleased — in defiance of human morality and any laws of society.

He defended fiercely the freedom of will of the career thief, citing the most reactionary German philosopher, Schopenhauer...

Once, in the course of a conversation, Yas-Yekabson posed a tricky question to me:

"All right then — but what will you communists do with people like me when you come to power?" he said, and insisted on an answer.

I explained that a workers' and peasants' regime would give each of them the chance to reform. But if, for instance, Yas-Yekabson still stubbornly refused to take part in working life, and used his actions to obstruct the building of socialism, then the new state organs would have no choice but to isolate, or even to shoot, him.

Hearing this clear, perhaps too blunt, answer, Yas-Yekabson's face changed instantly; without a word he got up and walked off to the other end of the cell. After that he did not speak to me for a couple of weeks and did not let pass a single chance to attack everything that was being done in the Soviet Union.

Just at this time the need arose for united action between the political and criminal prisoners in the four cells on the ground floor. It was decided to use a boycott to force the replacement of a warder who was terrorizing the prisoners at every turn. But the comrades from the first and second cells reported

that the criminals housed with them agreed to take part in the boycott only on condition that the third cell also joined in. And in that cell everything depended on Yas-Yekabson, who enjoyed among the criminals an unquestioned authority as ringleader. His word was law to them.

Like it or not, I had to enter into negotiations with him on the matter. Despite his concealed resentment, Yas-Yekabson came out in favor of organizing a joint boycott.

So began the fight against the new petty tyrant of a warder, Rudinski.

When he came on morning duty and opened the door of the first cell to let the inmates out for cleanup, no one came out of the cell. The other cells did the same. Then everyone also refused to take the bread and the so-called coffee.

In complete confusion warder Rudinski went running from one cell to another, but everywhere he met with the same response — everyone demonstratively turned away from him. It was hardly pleasant for him to have to report what had happened to the authorities. After all, this was a kind of strike, and in a prison at that...

Rudinski hurried off for help to the wing warder, but got nowhere. In all the cells the men loudly told the wing warder that the boycott would continue until the bullying warder was removed. The same thing was repeated at lunchtime. The prisoners refused their food and would not come out for cleanup or for the exercise walk.

The boycott worked. Rudinski did not come on duty again; he was replaced by another warder...

The investigation in the case of the Riga Committee continued.

Armīns Ankups

The ordinary days and months passed in the cell of the recidivists, where some thirty men were constantly talking loudly among themselves, arguing noisily, and sometimes starting fights.

In such conditions one could only read or study a language in snatches. Every day I waited impatiently for the exercise walk, on which they let us out together with the neighboring cell, which had more politicals. During the brief walks we hurried to talk about a great deal and to learn the news.

I was greatly surprised one day when a warder from the prison office, holding some kind of written order in his hand, called out my name in the corridor.

"Pack your things, quick!" he announced.

"He's going free!" many in the cell shouted.

"Where to?" I tried to find out.

"To freedom," the warder answered.

But I did not believe it. How could it be that, given so much incriminating material, they would suddenly release me from prison? "It must be that they have mixed me up with a namesake from the Social-Democratic opposition, who was being held under the Kerensky law in another block," I thought. There had, after all, been just such a case a few years before in this very prison: of two political prisoner brothers named Gulbis, one was due to be released because he had been elected a deputy to the Saeima. By mistake the other brother was released first, and then they had been forced to let the deputy out as well...

I cheered up at this thought, and a plan immediately formed in my mind for how, once I was outside the prison gates, I could disappear straight to the home of acquaintances.

So that the office would not have time to catch on, I packed up quickly, leaving some of my things in the cell. I also passed up the lunch that was being handed out at the time and hurried out of the cell behind the warder. At the end of the corridor the warder led me down the steps — but not to the left, into the property storeroom where prisoners were taken before release, but straight to the entrance to the inner prison yard.

"They've tricked me!" I realized.

The door into the second block opened, and after a quick search they led me up the by-now-familiar iron staircase to the third floor, into a corner solitary cell.

"Aha, they've brought us the lecturer," senior warder Saulīts called out spitefully across the whole block from his desk. Warders Blednieks and Kronbergs guffawed too — they were especially conspicuous for their

cruelty toward political prisoners.

Now it was clear to me why I had suddenly been moved here. The reason was my political conversations in the common cell...

That same day they placed Ankups in the neighboring solitary cell: he had been transferred here from the common cell of the fourth block.

The two of us were kept in strict isolation and were taken on the exercise walk alone, no less than five paces apart from each other.

During my first sentence we had spent nearly two years in the same solitary cell, every morning doing physical exercises and cold rub-downs together, together studying Marx's Capital and taking part in producing the illegal prison journal.

But we could not even dream of finding ourselves, while now in different blocks, suddenly placed right next to each other, side by side. Evidently the jailers, together with our current offenses, had also remembered our earlier sins in the fourth block... And of course we laughed a great deal and rejoiced at such an unexpected reunion in prison.

This time I had been arrested more than a year later than Ankups. We managed to tell each other a few things — tapped through the wall. But there was still much we had not talked about. We tried to seize every convenient moment on the exercise walk to exchange a few brief phrases and share a bit of information.

And a week later, just as unexpectedly, I was led to the "little window."

"For talking during the walk — seven days in the punishment cell," the deputy warden

deputy warden Azis declared dismissively, and curtly ordered the warders: "Next!"

They took me straight down to the basement, where the punishment cells were. Common cell, solitary, punishment cell, solitary again... So once more the prison routine stretched on for the arrested and convicted underground communists...

The rumble of an engine broke the silence. The small tug Slava was barely moving downstream on the Lielupe. Behind it she was towing a long raft made up of several thousand graded logs bound for the Riga sawmills.

By the campfire built on the raft sat five men accompanying it. A light breeze fanned the flame, and over the still river came the crackle of the burning resinous chips. In a large cast-iron pot suspended over the fire, breakfast was cooking. It was my first time on a raft. Two months of searching for any kind of work at all had brought me here. Feeling like a novice among men who knew their trade well, who were used to life on the water, with its hardships and its dangers, I listened and watched my companions with interest.

This was at the very start of the log drive, at the end of April 1922. Counting on a normal run, we expected to be in Riga with the raft in three days. Every one of us very much wanted to take part in the May Day demonstration that the workers' trade unions were putting on.

Jelgava had been left far behind; we had also passed the remains of the bridge over the Lielupe, destroyed during the World War. The low, gently sloping banks opened up wide vistas to the eye. Especially picturesque...

…the right bank was painted with the bright crimson of the rising sun. These were places where battles long since ended yet never to be forgotten had once thundered — Kalnciems, Machine-Gun Hill.

Gazing at the bank, the tall, elderly Vilnis and the still comparatively young Ērglis spoke at length and with great animation about the battles fought here, in which they themselves had taken part. Both of them, as if reliving it all over again, recalled the details of those memorable engagements in which the Latvian Riflemen had defended every inch of ground with their breasts and heroically beaten back the repeated attacks of Kaiser Germany's divisions.

I listened attentively to these former participants in the defense, who remembered well every hummock and every tree behind which they had taken cover. In those days I never imagined that precisely these places, so bound up with the past, would in the future become witnesses to the courage and revolutionary fortitude of the fighters for Soviet Latvia. Nor, of course, did I imagine that the road of life would bring me here too, that here of all places my strength and will would be put to their hardest test…

Many years have passed since I first saw Kalnciems from a slowly drifting raft, lit up by the crimson of the morning April sun.

But in my memory Kalnciems rises up before me again and again as it was in the heavy hour of the fascist night — the Kalnciems penal labor camp of the nineteen-thirties.

In the prisons of Latvia the condition of political prisoners worsened with every passing day. They were subjected to the so-called system of categories and

became the victims of the unrestrained power and arbitrariness of the prison administration. In the second wing of the Central Prison the heavy clanking of leg and hand irons was already to be heard, fastened on the communists Murins and Vortslavs, who had been condemned to death. Medieval tortures were being revived and new methods of tormenting people were being devised.

To humiliate the political prisoners still further, every personal book and textbook that had survived the confiscations was taken away from them.

From the prison libraries they removed not only all publications of a sociopolitical character, but also the literary works of contemporary progressive writers. Books by Rainis and Upīts grew ever rarer. The works of Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky and Leo Tolstoy were also classed as dangerous and seditious literature. The obscurantist hand of the punishers did not spare even pre-revolutionary legal journals forty and fifty years old. The entire library collection of the Central Prison was destroyed — a collection that, since tsarist times, had been built up chiefly from books donated by political prisoners. This rich collection of books in many languages of the world on economics, history, biology, literary studies and art, which two generations of revolutionaries had read and reread, was in 1934 burned in the firebox of the prison's engine room.

The last of Ulmanis's time-servers, the jailer Veitmanis, was particularly inventive in this field. Having in the space of several years made his career from prison warden to minister of internal affairs,

he had considerable experience in dealing harshly with political prisoners. It was precisely under his authority that, in the Remand Prison, Emīlija Blumberga, Paulīna Liepa and Ērika Melnalksne were tortured to death and dozens of other communists and Komsomol members were physically crippled in the punishment cells. During his brief tenure as director of the prison department, as a result of newly introduced regulations on disciplinary punishments, the death rate in Latvian prisons reached unprecedented levels.

Yet even this seemed insufficient to the fascist government. On its special instructions the minister of internal affairs Veitmanis traveled to Hitler's Germany, where he carefully studied the methods of mass extermination of people in prisons and death camps.

And so, modeled on the Nazi pattern, alongside the terrorist regime in the Latvian prisons, the fascist penal labor camp at Kalnciems was created.

The Kalnciems quarries became the site of the most monstrous torture and abuse of political prisoners. Through inhumanly heavy labor, hunger and savage beatings the authorities sought to break their health, to maim them mercilessly, and to destroy them physically.

In their drive to conceal from the people the crimes being committed at Kalnciems, the authorities tried to isolate the political prisoners held there completely. One "black month" after another — depriving them of the right to visits, parcels and correspondence — made it impossible to maintain normal contact with their closest relatives. The surrounding population, which knew of much that was

going on in the quarry, was intimidated by every means and forced into silence.

But news of the terrible things being done at Kalnciems still reached the prisoners of other prisons, and working people on the outside heard of them widely. At illegal mass meetings and flying rallies, the workers of Riga, Liepāja, Ventspils and Daugavpils protested against the fascist terror and expressed their warm sympathy and solidarity with these steadfast and indefatigable fighters.

This news also reached the working people of other countries. The pages of the workers' and democratic press in France, England, Sweden and Norway carried indignant accounts of the atrocities being inflicted on communists in the prisons and penal camp of fascist Latvia.

Louder still rang the protests of the public organizations and the press of the Soviet Union, sharply denouncing the Ulmanis clique — the direct and immediate authors of this bloody terror.

And in the prisons as on the penal camp, through impenetrable stone walls and tall barbed-wire fences, messages dear to them and still more inspiring reached the political prisoners. Letters from their patrons — the workforce collectives of enterprises in Moscow, Gorky and Kharkov — were passed secretly from hand to hand. In letters printed on thin silk paper, Soviet workers sent fiery comradely greetings to the prisoners of fascism in Latvia, reporting in detail on their successes in socialist construction.

"Chronicle of the Kalnciems Penal Camp" — under such a heading the central organ of the Latvian Red Aid regularly published letters from the collective of the Kalnciems political prisoners. These letters, smuggled out into freedom with unimaginable difficulty, told of the appalling conditions of penal labor and daily life of the imprisoned communists. They also publicly named all the monsters and tormentors of the camp, men forever marked out for the contempt and curses of the people.

The pages of the underground publications now carefully preserved in the archives, telling the story of the fascist penal camp, have noticeably yellowed. Their pages described only individual, most important episodes. There was not room enough in them for the everyday and daily reality of the camp. But the burning lines of those very brief chronicle notes still speak vividly to this day of the Kalnciems experience, of the unbreakable revolutionary will of the communists which the fascist executioners could in no way break. On the stony Kalnciems ground the hidden and open, stubborn and desperate struggle of the political prisoners against the cruel terror did not subside for a single day. Ordinary, simple people — people from among the masses — showed here heroic endurance and deep devotion to the party and the people.

Fifteen kilometers from Jelgava and twenty-five kilometers from the Gulf of Riga, on the dolomite ground of Kalnciems, in the spring of 1935 the stone building of the penal-camp prison was hastily put up. Its walls were nearly a meter thick.

The Kalnciems penal-camp prison

Inside, the prison resembled a large barracks. Down the middle ran a continuous platform of plank bunks, and along the walls bunks had been built in two tiers. The place was half dark. Daylight barely struggled through the small, iron-grated windows.

The prison was always overcrowded, and many had to sleep on the floor. The stale air and damp made it hard to breathe. From evening on, opening the windows was strictly forbidden. There was nowhere to dry clothing soaked through by a day's work in water and on snow. The prisoners piled it up in a heap for the night beside a small cast-iron stove. And in the morning,

after fishing his clothes out of the heap with difficulty, each man had to put them back on still nearly as wet as before.

The food at the penal camp was even worse than at the Central Prison. It was made from the worst of provisions. A watery soup with shreds of spoiled meat, rotten cabbage, decayed potatoes mixed with putrid herring, and a thin gruel of coarse hard groats — "shrapnel" — that was the unvarying ration at Kalnciems. Such food, of course, did nothing to restore the strength expended in exhausting labor.

The food was as a rule served undercooked, and there was not a trace of the necessary cleanliness in the kitchen. The cooks and bakers could not cope with their duties: by day, and most often by evening, they too were driven out to the quarry.

The work of breaking up the strata, dressing the stone and pushing the heavily loaded ore-carts up to the surface went on year-round and in every kind of weather. In hard frost, in summer heat and under driving autumn rains, the working day lasted fourteen to eighteen hours.

The daily quota was set by the administration in such a way that even on long summer days, working from early morning to late evening, it could not always be met. And in the autumn and winter months, however utterly the men exhausted themselves, standing all day in icy lime-water, they simply could not break out and haul up the thirteen-to-sixteen carts of stone required of every team. This circumstance was deliberately used as grounds for systematic beatings of men who were already utterly worn out and worn down.

The monstrous abuse here often drove men to suicide. In 1935 alone there were five such cases. Four of the criminal prisoners cut their own arteries, and one slit his belly open with a razor. The political convict Alekseyev too could not endure the tortures. Three months before the end of his sentence he went out of his mind at Kalnciems.

The chief inquisitor at the penal camp was a manifest sadist — the senior warder Pūtis. This beast in human form devised the most refined methods of torture and found satisfaction in the unceasing torment of men.

His closest assistants in all his bloody orgies were the warders Zaļzirnis, Zirnis, Rudinskis, Karstājs, Rehtšprehers and squad leader Karlovs. The pack of fascist hirelings carried out the tasks set by their masters with precision — to physically wear out and exterminate the imprisoned communists. Pūtis spoke of it quite openly.

"I shall torment and torture you so that you will not leave Kalnciems alive," he declared more than once.

Complaints were repeatedly sent from here to the prosecutor, the director of the prison department and the minister of justice, in which the unbearable conditions of the penal camp were described in detail. The situation, however, remained unchanged. For the creation of such conditions for political prisoners was provided for and encouraged by every organ of the fascist state. And it was not without the knowledge and direct instructions of those above that, at Kalnciems, those who wrote complaints were dealt with harshly. Here any expression of protest against the savage arbitrariness and terror was cruelly punished.

Once at morning roll-call — this was in

the first months of the penal camp's existence — all the prisoners stood in two ranks in the yard. One after another they began loudly to protest against the back-breaking, inhuman labor and the beatings, demanding that the prosecutor be summoned.

"I'll show you a prosecutor!" the senior warder Pūtis shouted, brandishing his fists. — And he did show them…

On his orders the column that had formed up was led straight to the pit. The whole party of political convicts who had recently arrived, whom Pūtis regarded as the initiators and organizers of the protest, was ordered to remain in place. Among them were Brīvkalns, an activist of the Ventspils underground organization and chairman of the transport workers' union, Krasovskis and the Lurje brothers, who had been convicted for belonging to the Latgalian party organization, and the Riga underground workers Cesvans and Iraids.

They were ordered to take ten steps forward, to approach the stone wall of the prison and turn to face it. Behind their backs, on Pūtis's command, a platoon of warders raised their rifles to the ready and loudly clicked the bolts.

After this staged execution the whole group was led, one by one, to the punishment cells. The first to be taken was Brīvkalns, who had spent more than a hundred days in the punishment cells alone. This stocky worker always bore himself courageously before the inquisitors. By his unshakable steadfastness and imperturbable calm he was an example for the young communards in the hardest conditions of the struggle in the penal camp.

In the punishment cells the convicts, stripped naked, were savagely beaten. Six

warders with rubber truncheons would set on each man at once. Those who lost consciousness were brought round and the torture went on. After seven days and nights in the punishment cell they were driven out to work hungry, and that same day all of them were thrown back into the cell again.

Such was the result of a single complaint at Kalnciems…

Because of the rapid pace of work, the use of old and unfit tools, and the complete absence of any safety measures, accidents were a constant occurrence at the penal camp. Broken legs and other grave injuries were everyday events here.

Long years of imprisonment also took their toll — most of the political convicts suffered from lung, heart and stomach ailments.

But at Kalnciems no internal illnesses were recognized. It was completely useless to ask for a day or two off work, even with the most serious illness. Anyone who had not yet had an arm or leg torn off was definitely considered a malingerer.

Since one was simply not supposed to fall ill at the penal camp, no medical treatment was provided either. In the role of medical attendant here was the warder Gulbītis, whose relation to medical practice was a most distant one. No longer young, short, in a long black warder's greatcoat that came down to the ground, he also stood guard over the prisoners with a rifle slung over his shoulder. His large purple nose and flushed face spoke convincingly at all times of his unrestrained taste for the pure alcohol issued for "cleaning

wounds." In reality, wounds here were never cleaned with alcohol.

The most miraculous medicines for the sick, in Gulbītis's view, were aspirin and iodine. With these, like a folk healer, he treated every kind of illness. It was no wonder, then, that the prisoners called such a medical attendant simply "the conjurer." It became his inseparable second name. Usually, on examining any patient, he limited himself to his noncommittal pronouncement: "There's something there, but nothing serious…"

Once he committed a sin: he gave a sick prisoner a day off from work. The senior warder, in a fury, then wanted to drive "the conjurer" himself out to work in the pit in place of the patient he had released. After that Gulbītis made no more such blunders. To patients who would not accept his unvarying diagnoses he, sniggering maliciously, suggested they apply to Pūtis…

And Pūtis boasted that he could quickly "cure" any ailment. His chief remedy was the punishment cell.

It was well known what punishment cells in prisons were like. But the Kalnciems punishment cells, which made up a whole system of torture and abuse, surpassed them by far. Being put into the cell here was always accompanied by an obligatory beating in which, besides Pūtis, Zaļzirnis, Karlovs and Rudinskis took part. Then the prisoners, naked, were driven into the dark cell, which had previously had several buckets of water poured over it.

In this state, even without their once-a-day bread ration, men were held for a whole week, often longer.

Pūtis used other methods of tormenting the sick as well. Rožbahs, who was serving his term of penal labor, suffered from epilepsy and often had seizures during the night. At such moments he had to be held tightly so that he would not fall from the upper bunks. Yet he always went out to work and tried not to lag behind the others.

But the day came when Rožbahs could not so much as move. The conjurer examined him and recorded that no swelling was visible anywhere on his body. "And since that is so, there is no illness either," — concluded this servant of prison medicine…

That, of course, did not make the sick man any better, and, drained of strength, he remained lying on the bunks.

Soon Pūtis came into the barracks and ordered two criminal prisoners to carry Rožbahs out to the pit at once. The sick man was propped against the quarry wall and made to stand there all day with an iron crowbar in his hands.

"Take a look at this ape! You'll have to fulfill his quota too," — Pūtis said to the team in which Rožbahs worked.

There was always plenty of water in the pit. So Pūtis often tortured men in icy water, especially in autumn and winter.

At the same time as quarrying out the stone and hauling it to the surface, every team was required each day to clear its section of large quantities of rubble. This was dumped in a huge pile in the far corner of the quarry. To carry the rubble there in boxes, the prisoners had to cross a narrow wooden plank over a deep, water-filled pit.

And so Pūtis took it into his head to test and check, in his own way,

on one sick prisoner. He led the man to the plank and shoved him into the water. The sick man floundered in the water, struggling with all his strength to get out. And Pūtis immediately declared him a willful malingerer.

"A real sick man, once in the water, ought to remain in it completely motionless," — Pūtis declared sententiously.

So, each by his own method, the conjurer Gulbītis and the executioner Pūtis "treated" the sick…

On the fifteenth of October work was under way in the quarry to break out the very lowest stratum. The stone had to be brought up out of deep water by then. Consequently loading it onto the carts went rather slowly. The warders shouted and hurried the men by every means. In the rush one of the prisoners was caught between two moving carts and broke his leg. Even so he was not taken to the hospital but left lying in the barracks. That same day a cart traveling at full speed caught the leg of another prisoner. Lacking the strength to get up with a broken leg, he remained lying beside the rails. His comrades hurried to help the injured man.

"Throw him out of the way and drive on!" the senior warder Pūtis commanded.

On the sixteenth of October one of the political prisoners broke his leg at work. To ease the pain he took the boot off the injured leg. A warder rushed up and ordered him to put it back on. The injured man refused. Causing him unbearable pain,

the warder set about forcing onto the broken leg the heavy boot caked with hardened clay. And in this state the injured man had to sit in the pit until evening.

On the seventeenth of October one of the men working in the pit suffered a severe heart attack. Pūtis called the sick man a mutineer and, without giving any help, threw him into the punishment cell.

A cart that had run off the rails smashed the arm of the political convict Duškins. He was not released from work, and with a badly swollen arm he had to stand in the pit all day. He was given no medical help whatever.

That day one of the teams could not meet its quota. In the darkness, in the rain, they were made to go on working. After nine o'clock in the evening part of the team was led back to the barracks. Four political prisoners were left in the pit — Liekņis, Gordins, Kagans and Biksons. The last two were beaten heavily with rifle butts and pushed several times up to their necks in the water. Beaten and soaked through, they were driven out to work again and beaten again.

The political prisoner Šulmeisters was put in the punishment cell for seven days. He was accused of conducting communist propaganda among the criminal prisoners.

In the night the drunken squad leader Karlovs and the warder Zaļzirnis burst into his cell. They savagely beat Šulmeisters and demanded that he renounce his political convictions. Having gained nothing by beating him, they threatened to shoot him. Šulmeisters was repeatedly stood up against the wall, with shots fired right over his head.

In autumn, when the water level rose in the Lielupe, the lower strata were heavily flooded —

in the pit. Already in October the quarry was knee-deep in water, while up above lay impassable clay bogs. Yet even at such a time the prisoners were made to go about in bast sandals. The boots they had been issued could be worn only in winter — again with deliberate intent: in tight boots which barely went on even over thin summer foot-wraps it was easy to freeze one's feet.

On the twenty-fourth of October it rained in torrents. The bast sandals of nearly everyone were full of holes, and most of the prisoners had put on their boots first thing in the morning.

Seeing this, the senior warder Pūtis ordered them at once to put on their bast sandals. But he did not wait for his order to be carried out. As soon as the prisoners had managed to take off their boots, Pūtis at once ordered them all out of the barracks. So, with their bast sandals and foot-wraps in their hands, barefoot, they were all driven out to the pit along a road strewn with sharp, cutting rubble.

On the twenty-ninth of October, using his customary method of dividing the political prisoners, Pūtis sent most of them off to earthworks. Ten political prisoners were left to break out stone in the pit. The guard that day was specially reinforced.

The warders did all they could to hamper the work of these ten political prisoners, driving them from dry spots onto flooded sections. The heavy blocks of stone had to be hauled out of cold water all the time — and so the skin on every man's hands had cracked, and they felt a sharp pain in their fingers.

To increase their suffering still further, they were made to exchange their best carts for broken-down

ones, which, fully loaded, ran off the rails every few meters. That was all the warders wanted! They cursed the prisoners without let-up and threatened them:

"You vermin, you're throwing the carts off on purpose. Just you wait, you'll get it for that!.."

It was already past seven in the evening, and the political prisoners were still working in the pit. Exhausted and hungry, they understood very well that the executioners were preparing yet another nighttime beating, in which all the warders usually took part.

"Move quicker, you swine, look lively!" — the rough shouts grew more frequent and louder. Soon Pūtis appeared in the quarry with an additional detachment of warders armed with rifles and rubber truncheons.

"So that's it — you slept by day and now want to work by night! I'll knock the Marxism out of your heads!" Pūtis shouted.

"Beat them!" he ordered the warders.

And dozens of warders, with a bestial roar, fell upon the worn-out political prisoners, beating them with rifle butts, whips and keys. Those who fell they trampled underfoot.

They beat them for a long time. Those bleeding heavily had their heads dunked in the water and were beaten again.

When the warders no longer had the strength to go on beating, a new order from Pūtis followed:

"At the double — to the punishment cell!"

Liekņis, Mihelsons, Duškins, Špungins, Biksons and others were thrown, stripped, into the wet and cold cells. After serving seven days and nights in the cell they were taken straight out to the pit in the morning.

And once again everything was repeated — the same work, the warders' shouts, and in the evening — another beating. And then all ten political convicts, naked and battered, were thrown back into the cell again.

In Notes from the House of the Dead Dostoevsky depicted the tsarist penal labor of the eighteen-fifties — the grim daily life of the convicts in one of the distant Siberian prisons. In that work he gives a very vivid description of the bathhouse to which the prisoners were taken. Here is a brief passage from it:

"…When we threw open the door into the bathhouse itself, I thought we had entered hell. Imagine a room about twelve paces long and the same wide, into which perhaps as many as a hundred men were crammed at once, and certainly at least eighty, since the prisoners had been divided into only two shifts, and there were as many as two hundred of us who had come to the bathhouse. Steam blinding the eyes, soot, filth, crowding so dense that there was nowhere to set a foot… Somehow, with the greatest difficulty, we squeezed our way to the benches across the heads of people sitting on the floor, asking them to bend down so that we could pass… But the places under the benches were all taken too — people were crawling about there as well. On the whole of the floor there was not a hand's breadth where prisoners were not sitting, hunched up, splashing themselves out of their basins. Others stood up straight among them and, basins in hand, washed standing; dirty water ran from them straight onto the shaven heads of those sitting below. On the bench

and on all the steps leading up to it sat the bathers, hunched and crouched…"

Such was the bathhouse on the tsarist penal camp in the middle of the last century. But to many, to very many, this description recalled the bathhouse on the fascist penal camp in Latvia!

In the Kalnciems prison bathhouse there was the same unimaginable crowding, the same total darkness, filth, and acrid smoke that one could not open one's eyes for. To find a spot in it and somehow get washed, even standing up, was no easy matter. Only a few minutes were allowed for washing, after which the prisoners were driven out of the bathhouse.

But there was also one essential difference. On the tsarist penal camp it was, after all, somehow possible in the end not only to wash but even to steam oneself. The bathhouse at the fascist camp, however, was also used for every kind of abuse, — and very often the convicts were led out of it less washed than beaten…

On Saturday, the twenty-seventh of October, it was rainy and cold. Work in the pit was finished with the coming of darkness. On reaching the barracks the prisoners began to prepare for the bath. But before they had even managed to take off their mud-caked aprons and clothing, the warders came and drove them all to the bathhouse.

Into the tiny dark bathhouse, in which ten or fifteen men could only with difficulty wash at one time, forty men were driven all at once. There were not enough basins: there were only sixteen in all. Crowded in the darkness and shifting from spot to spot, most of the prisoners waited their turn for the chance to soap themselves at least once. Some washed two or three from a single basin, into which they took the

hot water issued here in a strict measure — all of two liters per man.

Less than ten minutes had passed when Pūtis came into the bathhouse with a group of warders, every one of them with a rubber truncheon in hand. Lighting up the prisoners' faces with a pocket flashlight, he cursed and looked for those who had "been washing for two whole hours already." And together with the warders he zealously set about driving everyone out of the bathhouse, beating the naked men with truncheons.

In the darkness even the constant informer — the criminal prisoner Chizhik — caught it badly.

"Mr. Officer, you are mistaken — I am not a communist after all," — Chizhik whined plaintively…

Without giving them even time to dry their wet bodies or throw their clothes over their shoulders, all of them were driven straight from the bathhouse out into the cold of the yard and led naked back to the barracks.

The convicts often spoke among themselves of the races at the racetrack. By this, of course, they had in mind anything but equestrian sport with winnings and losses on the totalizator.

At Kalnciems "the races" was the name given to days of loading stone into the barges, when one had to run all day without pause to the landing on the river with full carts and back — with empty ones.

On one November day the prisoners, as always, were working from early morning in the pit. They all noticed with anxiety that the time was approaching noon and they were still far from half their quota.

Standing at the edge of the pit, the warder Zalzirnis silently watched every movement of the prisoners. He was "gathering" material for his report to Putis, so that yet another nighttime beating could be arranged.

Each of the Kalnciems torturers had his own "individual" traits. The warder Zalzirnis, for instance, made it his rule always to be the first to strike a political prisoner and, without losing his composure as others did, carried out his "work" with deliberate, cold-blooded poise.

He could be standing and talking with a prisoner, then for no reason at all give him a hard punch in the head and… go on with the conversation as if nothing had happened.

Putis came rushing up to the pit and said something quickly to Zalzirnis. Zalzirnis ordered the crowbars and shovels to be gathered immediately in one place and the prisoners to fall in. The prisoners were puzzled: were they really being taken back to the barrack? An order was given, and the column was indeed marched toward the barrack. But halfway there, by the old lime-burning kiln, the column was halted. Senior warder Putis, the squad leader Karlov, and the warders were waiting for them. They ordered everyone to carry stones and load them onto the trolleys.

Noticing the bewilderment among the prisoners and hearing someone object that there was nothing yet to load, Putis swore viciously. Soon ten trolleys were brought up and the rush began. The working men were goaded without pause.

As soon as a trolley was loaded, it had to be hauled to the river. Tired men, drenched in sweat, suffering sharp pain in their shoulders from pushing the heavily loaded trolleys, were all the same

forced to run at a trot the whole time. Karlov and a group of warders followed literally on their heels.

"Out of the way, you almshouse!" Karlov shouted, and the warders pressed all the harder on those pushing the rear trolleys, so that they would ram the prisoners running in front.

Approaching the riverbank, on the steep slope, one trolley jumped the rails and blocked the way for the others. A group of political prisoners set about lifting it together.

"Get away from the trolley, you bandits!" yelled Putis as he ran up, and he ordered them to carry the stones to the river on their own backs.

The empty barge at the landing rode high on the water. The large stones had to be hoisted up to the gunwales against one's chest. For that reason, loading went slowly at first. Putis and Karlov dashed back and forth along the bank, hurrying everyone on.

As soon as the barge's sides were half-submerged, the pace of the work picked up sharply. An indescribable din rose all around: one after another the stones flew into the barge. Afraid that the bottom would be punched through, the boatman begged them not to throw so many stones at once. But Putis paid no attention to the boatman's warnings and kept shouting:

"Move faster, faster!"

The moment a trolley was emptied, the prisoners, breathing heavily, ran them back at a dead sprint. The first trolley was pulled by Ansis, the prison horse. Any prisoner who could not keep up with that lead trolley was beaten by the warders with rifle butts. Squad leader Karlov sat in the first trolley, jeering loudly at the exhausted men running after it on their last strength.

Putis was waiting up ahead. Granting not a minute's rest, he ordered them to load the trolleys again at top speed.

So throughout the day and into late night the races on the Kalnciems "racetrack" went on. The large barge was already full, and the loading of a second, smaller barge had begun. Putis announced that once it was loaded everyone would be marched off for the night's rest.

Another two hours passed. The men, in spite of their crushing exhaustion, hurried to finish the work.

At last the final trolleys were emptied. The prisoners drove them back into place and waited for the order to head for the barrack. But they were made to carry stones once more and to push the heavy trolleys at a run to the river until a third barge had also been filled.

It was a dark, starless night. The exhausted, hungry penal prisoners walked silently behind the empty trolleys on the way back from the river. The night's stillness was broken only by the iron clatter of wheels on the rusted, warped rails.

Another day at the fascist penal camp had come to an end…

In December the camp administration ran riot. Beatings were arranged almost every night. From early morning, senior warder Putis and warder Zalzirnis sought — and of course found — pretexts to harass the politicals, so as to keep them at work the longest and beat them.

When the work crews were formed, all the physically weaker political prisoners were deliberately put into a single

crew. Behind them, on the stone-hauling, they would station a crew made up of specially picked, physically strongest criminal prisoners. Eager to curry favor with the bosses, these men piled stones into the trolley with great haste and pushed those in front in every way they could.

"Get a move on, you scum! Don't work themselves and don't let others work either," Zalzirnis would curse, trying to set the criminals against the politicals.

And the lead crew, made up of physically weak politicals, before they had even managed to load the trolley, was forced to push it half-empty up the hill. It was obvious that no matter how the men strained and exerted themselves, they could not possibly meet the quota under such conditions. And the quota was simply whatever amount of work Putis had set by eye that morning. On top of that, members of the weak crew were often pulled off for various auxiliary tasks, which were never hard to find for them.

There was a lot of water in the pit. And Zalzirnis invented new assignments: bailing out the water and moving large stones from one place to another.

"You two bail out all the water from this corner, and you over there from that one," Zalzirnis would order. "If in two hours there's no less water there, then it's clear you're loafers, unworthy even of the crust of bread you're given," this torturer announced in advance.

But no matter how much water they bailed, it kept rising and flooding the pit. Some prisoners were made, in the punishment cell, to run carrying large barrels filled to the brim with water.

In the middle of December all the prisoners were on the earthworks up above. They were clearing a patch of ground of a one-and-a-half- to two-meter layer of earth. Heavy frosts had already set in. The frozen earth and clay were very

hard to dig, and they had to be broken loose with crowbars.

Soon Putis ordered the earthworks to be broken off and everyone transferred down into the pit. Since the water had not been pumped out of it for a long time, the pit was flooded. The water had frozen and the pit was covered with a thick crust of ice. Under the ice lay the whole rail track along which the stone was hauled up.

The communist Shpungin tells of the torture by ice that the Kalnciems torturers devised.

Posting guards all around, Putis drove everyone down into the pit. He ran about the pit pushing each man:

"Just take it and carry it, take it and carry it up — like Abyssinians!"

"Move, move faster! Herring and fresh bread are waiting in the barrack," he taunted the hungry, exhausted men. The warders, of course, did not lag behind their chief.

The next day forty prisoners were picked to clear the ice out of the pit. Six prisoners were assigned to chop the ice, and they were strictly forbidden to break it into smaller pieces. The rest had to carry the ice up out of the pit. We had to drag blocks of ice that were hard even to get our arms around. On top of that the ice kept slipping out of bare hands, and climbing up out of the pit with it was excruciatingly hard.

The warder who shadowed me kept threatening me:

"Just you try breaking up a piece of ice — then you'll see the devil!"

And the moment I climbed up, warder Karstais was already waiting there. He would run straight at me, shouting why I was walking and not running.

If I did not run as fast as Karstais ordered, he would catch up and strike me with the butt of his rifle. Mouth wide open, breathing heavily, I was forced to keep running all the time. My temples pounded as if struck by a great hammer. Everything spun before my eyes, and I felt that I was losing my last strength…

On February 4 many prisoners worked in the freezing cold with bare hands. The canvas mittens, long since unchanged, were utterly torn and cut to shreds on the stones. The political prisoner Gostiņš severely frostbit his fingers. The political Mikhelson was made to work with a badly wounded hand. Only on the fourth day was he taken to the local village doctor — wooden splints had to be put on his arm.

A new batch of political convicts arrived from the Central Prison. Some of them were thrown straight into the punishment cell. The Central Prison had now established the practice of doubly punishing politicals — with the punishment cell and with dispatch to Kalnciems. So it was with P. Sprogis and Stepanenko, who were sent here.

On February 7 the political Tupiņš fell ill. Sick as he was, he was forced to work a whole week. Only on the eighth day was he sent to the prison hospital in Riga.

On February 14, at evening roll call,

senior warder Putis used his fists on a prisoner who had taken the wrong place in line.

On February 15 the political Fridrihson fell ill. In serious condition, with a high fever, he was forced to work in the pit, and then thrown naked for seven days into the freezing punishment cell.

In those days there were a great many minor injuries at work. The hands of politicals Valcis, Pinksis, Shulmeister, and Grinberg were torn up. All of them, their wounds unhealed, were forced to carry heavy stones.

Two prisoners were thrown into the punishment cell for telling, while they were temporarily transferred to the Central Prison, what the situation in Kalnciems was like.

On February 16 the political Shternberg was put in the punishment cell for agitating among the criminal prisoners.

On February 17, in the barrack, in full view of everyone, a criminal prisoner was savagely beaten. The warders beat his head against the wall until he lost consciousness. Speaking for all the politicals, the convict Briedis lodged a protest against such mistreatment. For this he was brutally beaten and thrown into the punishment cell for a week.

On February 24, from early morning Putis, as always when he was hung over, was "in a bad mood." "This will be a heavy day," thought the prisoners. They did not have long to wait. Soon Putis came down on the political Grinblats, supposedly for deliberately damaging tools, and led him off to the punishment cell.

When he came back, he set immediately on the political Slogs, supposedly because he was breaking the stones too small,

was breaking the stone blocks. Slogs replied that the prisoners did not have the strength to carry huge stones. For this he was severely beaten and led off to the punishment cell.

Putis at once ordered the warders to "pick out" five more communists for the punishment cell.

That day there was a hard frost; the work was especially difficult. Late in the evening some of the prisoners were sent off to the barrack, but the rest were made to keep working in the pit.

It was already pitch dark when they were pushing the last trolleys of stone up the slope. At that moment a squad of warders led by Rudinsky fell on them from behind, beating them with rifle butts and rubber truncheons. The political convicts Vidžups and Belyi got it the worst.

Slogs was beaten again in the punishment cell.

February 25 was likewise bitterly cold. In the morning, right after reveille, the order to fall in was given. The prisoners had not even managed to get dressed, but they were driven half-clothed and hungry into the pit. All the politicals were made to work that day until late at night.

There was no little despotism in senior warder Putis's treatment of his subordinates as well. Warders who did not show particular zeal in beating the prisoners he openly cursed in front of everyone and reviled in every way.

"One day you'll be breaking stones here yourselves. You're not warders, you're old women — you're hand in glove with the communists!" he threatened them.

In March the political Gutmanis was badly injured at work. His comrades carried him to the barrack. With broken ribs he lay on the plank bed for two weeks

without any medical aid at all. Only on the fifteenth day after the injury was he sent to the Central Prison hospital.

That month there were fewer accidents. But, as before, the tortures and the night work went on.

\*

Such is a brief and far from complete chronicle of the Kalnciems penal camp from October 1935 to March 1936.

November 1937 was drawing to a close. A cold, gusting wind blew in the open field beyond the Central Prison; it was freezing.

The last train-loads of fuel laid in for the prison were arriving from the peat cuttings. Large heaps of peat, unloaded the day before straight onto the field by the railway track and now covered by the snow that had fallen in the night, were a reminder that the peat-cutting season was over. Once again a fresh redistribution of prisoners was at hand — those working in the Sigulda bogs, as well as those who had been working in the prison itself unloading and hauling peat to the engine-house yard.

It was getting on toward noon. Pushing the loaded trolleys forward with effort, the column of prisoners drove into the prison's outer yard. This was already the fourth run we had made that morning. And as on every occasion, we stopped at the gate of the inner yard, where the mortuary stood — the building the prisoners called "the sixth wing." In tsarist times

the Central Prison consisted of four wings. Under the rule of the home-grown bourgeoisie one more small stone building was added, the so-called "fifth wing." It was meant to house prisoners who had become mentally ill in the prison. But more often than not it was here that, by means of a whole battery of special tortures, they tried to drive perfectly healthy political prisoners insane.

Quickly seating themselves on the steps at the entrance to the mortuary and the laundry next to it, or simply leaning against the stone wall, everyone hastily caught their breath.

The break lasted exactly as long as it took the guards to lock the inner gate again and open the gate into the engine-house yard. In those moments of rest the politicals tossed jokes back and forth, laughing at the latest gems from the speeches of the loquacious local "Führer" Ulmanis and his zealous helper, the aizsargs commander Bērziņš.

At that moment the wicket gate opened and from the prison office, with mincing steps, senior warder Klaus came toward us, waving some sort of paper. On his long, pock-marked, perpetually angry face there played a gloating smile.

"Listen carefully," he shouted loudly as he walked. "Whoever I call from the list — drop work at once and follow me."

"They're sending off another group to Kalnciems," each political prisoner decided to himself, waiting for his own name to be called this time. The senior warder called out several names. Among them were two political prisoners — Augusts Kārkliņš and myself.

"Healthy?" he asked each man briskly. Kārkliņš and I both answered yes. In such cases it was useless to plead illness. Everyone knew that the prison administration used dispatch to Kalnciems as a particular form of punishment. The preliminary medical examination was nothing but an empty formality. Whatever a political prisoner was suffering from, the prison doctor Lindemut always pronounced him fit for hard labor in the quarry.

\*

That evening the two of us were issued new prison-camp clothing, new wooden clogs, and mess-tins for our food. While we were changing, the warders took away my woolen jersey, which I wore under my prison clothes in cold weather. The transfer to Kalnciems was leaving the next day.

After the evening roll call, our basement cell in the fourth wing was, as always, lively. Together with the second-term political convicts who were here — Kārlis Ozoliņš, Makar Yakovlev — and the "first-timers" Anton Granits, Voldemārs Kalpiņš, Yevdokim Potashev, Getzel Donkhin, and others, we talked about many things. We spoke of the immediate prospects of the revolutionary movement, recounted once more what was left of our sentences, joked about our future meetings at Kalnciems, and worked out arrangements for staying in contact with the camp.

And then, after lights-out, lying on the plank bed, I could not sleep for a long time and thought with a heavy heart about what would happen the day after tomorrow — visiting day and the day for prison parcels.

As a convict in the penal class, I was allowed visits only once a month, and even then only by my closest relatives. My old mother never missed her chance to see me, even through the double mesh of solid wire grilles. Despite her advanced age, on that day she would set out from home early in the morning. Leaning on a stick, dragging her sick legs heavily and stopping often along the way, by midday Mother would reach the distant prison.

And so, having lived for a whole month with the thought of the coming visit, denying herself many things in order to prepare the parcel with care, that Friday she would set off for the prison at the crack of dawn. Having at last waited her turn in the long line at the prison gates, Mother would learn that her hope of this meeting had been in vain. I could picture how the warders, going out of their way to trample roughly on her mother's feelings, would say to the old woman:

"Get out of here! Your communist has been sent off to Kalnciems. How the earth still bears such as you — to have raised a villain and a bandit…"

The large prison truck, half-loaded with sacks of flour and crates on which the guards and prisoners sat, raced through side streets of the city and crossed the bridge over the Daugava. Following Sloka and Kalnciems Streets, the truck came out onto the Kalnciems highway.

The men hardly spoke to one another. Each was occupied with his own thoughts.

We were being transferred out of the Central Prison, in whose solitary wings we had had to endure and live through so much. But we were being taken away from the city where we could at least, now and then, see our loved ones and family. And ahead of us lay the still untried, yet by all accounts well-known, torments of the Kalnciems penal camp. True, of late something had changed there. Under the pressure of the steadily growing protests of the working people inside the country and the active campaigns of the antifascist public abroad, the Ulmanis clique had been forced to slacken the terror at Kalnciems somewhat, and even to remove from there the chief inquisitor — senior warder Putis. But the Kalnciems penal camp went on being the same dreadful pit of tortures and humiliations.

The truck's high plywood-sided body was completely open at the rear. The prison vehicle sped forward fast, but we could see clearly the scattered farmsteads and the coniferous forest stretching along both sides of the road.

Eyes accustomed to the half-dark of prison cells took in keenly the freshness of bright colors — the extraordinary blueness of the sky and the dazzling white of the snow. The wonderful winter landscape, the boughs of the shaggy spruces thickly powdered with snow, gave deep joy. With greedy excitement I drank in the world around me. From childhood I had loved the forest; I loved the green banks of the Daugava, near which I had grown up. I could sit for long stretches alone on the bank, marveling at the river's stormy current in flood time and at its calm, mirror-like surface on sweltering summer days.

The hardest time in prison was the spring. At that season, when under the life-giving rays of the sun all of nature was being renewed and reborn, I felt particularly keenly the gloomy grayness and weight of the prison walls. The prison stifled every living thing. Even the young grass that grew alongside the narrow circle for the brief prison exercise periods seemed to wither from its close proximity to the prison's stone wings.

Among the escort was one warder who treated the politicals comparatively decently and, while on duty, sometimes told us a few items of news. Along the way he told me about his own troubles. By order of the prison governor he was being transferred for three months to Kalnciems for a minor disciplinary offense. Alongside the picked cutthroats, always ready for any sort of reprisal against the communists, those guards who had committed offenses were also sent to Kalnciems, including the few among them who felt some sympathy for the working people.

The truck stopped at a village of about ten houses with an old cemetery on its outskirts. This was the parish center of Kalnciems, situated right on the Lielupe.

The banks of the river were already iced over, and repeated attempts to ferry the transport across by ferry came to nothing. For a full half day we, dressed in gray prisoners' coats and round little flat caps, shivered in the cold by the river.

Taking advantage of my farsightedness, I peered intently at the outline of the opposite bank. There, in the middle of an enormous snow-covered field, several buildings could be made out. In the foreground a long, low stone building stood out particularly, surrounded by a high fence of barbed wire.

There it was, the Kalnciems penal camp, where every effort was made to break, crush, and destroy those who with all their might fought against the fascist regime.

"No!" I thought with confidence. "They can, of course, torture men in captivity, ruin tens and hundreds of fighters in penal labor — but they can never halt or hold back the revolutionary movement of the masses, never destroy the party, that tested and battle-hardened organizer of theirs!"

Evening was drawing in when we heard the distant noise of a motor. Up the Lielupe came a small cargo-passenger steamer, the *Jūrmalnieks*, slowly moving from Jelgava to Riga. Breaking the thin ice crust that already covered even the middle of the river with its iron prow, the steamer with difficulty made its last run of the season.

At a signal from the head of the escort, the steamer put in to the bank. After brief negotiations between the guards and the captain, the order was given to load up. We were glad of the chance to warm up — at a run we carried the heavy sacks and crates of provisions and stacked them on deck. Once everything was loaded, we and the guards crowded standing into the little cabin.

The *Jūrmalnieks* carried the whole transport across to the far side of the Lielupe and then continued on its way to the Riga winter port.

In single file, off any road, in wooden clogs that kept falling off our feet, we trudged through the deep snow. On our backs we carried bundles wrapped in thin prison blankets. Beside us walked the guards, dressed for winter.

Having crossed the open snow-covered field, the transport approached

the wide-open doors of a large shed. The Kalnciems guards were already waiting for us here. After the roll call and sneering taunts at the newcomers, the customary search began.

Under the guise of an inspection, things were tossed out of our untied bundles. Strewn across the snow lay all the meagre belongings of the political convicts: a change of state-issue underwear, a mess-tin, a spoon, photographs of loved ones, letters from outside that had been read and re-read at trying, weary moments. There also lay books, which always provoked fits of fury in the half-literate jailers, and a pair of thick exercise-books, laced with cord and sealed with sealing wax, containing the prisoner's personal notes — their contents were always under especially close scrutiny by the administration.

The whole procedure ended with a thorough personal search of every new arrival. Then we were led through a gate into a courtyard fenced in with barbed wire some ten meters high, and herded into a dim stone barrack.

Inside it was very cramped. The narrow room was crammed with solid rows of plank beds and tables set on tall trestles. Only along the wall did a small passage remain, just wide enough for one man to squeeze along. Holding our bundles, Kārkliņš and I stopped at the door to get our bearings in this densely packed space. We had hardly had time to look around when we were surrounded by a group of prisoners, and firm handshakes began. They were familiar political convicts, eager to hear news of life in the "central" and on the outside.

Among them was Tālivaldis Bagāts, with whom I had shared a cell after the verdict came into force in

a solitary cell in the Central Prison. He had been sent off to Kalnciems several months earlier. Unable to hold back, I hastened to ask Bagāts whether the rumor that had been going around the prison was true, that some new court case had been cooked up here against him. Noticing, however, that he turned the question aside, I realized I had been wrong to bring it up so abruptly, and switched immediately to another topic. The comrades wanted to hear the latest news from the Riga prisons and spoke of their own life here.

The Kalnciems political convicts shifted their straw sacks even closer together on the plank beds and squeezed the new arrivals' mattresses in between them. Although space was already lacking here, and at night one could only lie on one's side, the politicals refused to let their own sleep on the floor.

\*

Stirred up by the new impressions of the journey and of the place, I could not fall asleep for a long time. In the half-dark of the barrack I conversed in whispers with Bagāts, lying beside me. He now told me in detail how a new political case had nearly been brought against him, and how he had so far gotten off with only the punishment cell. Somehow a letter he had encrypted, prepared to be smuggled to the outside, had fallen into the administration's hands.

Always cheerful, in prison Bagāts studied tirelessly. A young worker who had become a communist through active Komsomol work, he, like all the political prisoners, took particular pleasure in his progress in learning Russian.

Before my arrest I used to meet Bagāts at meetings of the Riga Committee of the party, which he attended

as the representative of the Komsomol city committee. In prison we lived together amicably for a whole year in a solitary cell, read together, and serious quarrels never arose between us. Only once did I, completely unintentionally, hurt my cellmate's feelings.

It was a day for parcels. Among other foods, Bagāts had been brought from home a piece of raw, lightly salted fish, sliced lengthwise. In the family of a Mangaļi fisherman this was considered the tastiest and finest of dishes.

By the rota the two of us had agreed, Bagāts was that week the cell quartermaster. For supper he served his favorite dish.

It was hard for me to make myself eat raw fish. But Bagāts pressed me so insistently that it was awkward not to try a bite. And no sooner had I taken a small bite, sensed up close the smell of raw fish, than I set it aside again. Bagāts took it as a personal slight, sulked the whole evening and refused to speak…

I reminded him of this episode from our life in the solitary cell. The two of us had a hearty laugh and, by the dim flicker of the night electric bulb, at last fell soundly asleep, the last in the barrack.

\*

Already in my first days at Kalnciems I managed to get a little acquainted with the life of the local political collective.

In the brutal conditions of the penal camp, where the jailers tried at every step to humiliate the politicals morally, to weaken their organization, to emphasize in every way and at all times the advantages of incorrigible thieves and

hardened recidivists over the communists, the politicals had also worked out their own particular methods of struggle against the arbitrariness and terror of the administration. Here a particularly strong cohesion and an unshakable unity of the entire collective were essential.

The tireless organizer of the collective — a former farmhand and member of the underground Vidiena party organization, Jānis Cēriņš — initiated me into the questions of local secret-work and the tactics the politicals followed at work, and told me about relations with the criminal prisoners.

The internal life of the collective at the penal camp had also taken on a particular form. Fearing informers among the criminals, the politicals never decided pressing questions openly, as a whole collective. Their discussion was always carried out separately, by groups into which the collective was divided. In each of the groups, made up of four or five men, organizers of their own were elected. They kept direct contact with the leading troika they themselves had elected, and continuously kept the members of their groups informed of all current matters. Thus, mostly after the evening roll call, in one-to-one conversations or in seemingly chance exchanges between two or three comrades sitting or half-reclining on their plank beds, all the most important questions were quietly and unobtrusively discussed. Then, taking the results of these discussions into account, the troika adopted definite decisions, which had to be carried out strictly and unconditionally by every member of the collective of politicals.

In this way, despite any attempts by the administration to drive the prisoners to exhaustion with unbearable labor, the troika fixed an average pace of work to which all the politicals

…were to be observed at the quarry. The troika also took decisions on boycotting individual warders and informers from among the criminal prisoners.

In the same way the collective formed its view on how to mark revolutionary dates: the anniversary of the Great October Revolution, the First of May, and the day of the Paris Commune, which had also become the day of "Red Aid" — the underground organization that helped imprisoned revolutionaries and their families. In the groups a desired thematic plan was drawn up for seminars on particular questions of political economy, dialectical and historical materialism, and all kinds of housekeeping matters were settled.

As in all prison collectives, the Kalnciems convicts lived on communist principles. Parcels and money received from outside, as well as the two to two-and-a-half lats earned here each month, every man turned over to the collective. At the so-called "commissary withdrawals," once every three or four weeks, the most essential foodstuffs for combating exhaustion, and tobacco for smokers, were bought. Everything received from outside and bought through the commissary was distributed in equal portions among all members of the collective at breakfast, dinner, and supper. Those responsible for running the housekeeping rotated periodically.

The administration understood what it meant for political prisoners to be able to get hold of a good book, to read it with delight and then to talk over what they had read. That, one might say, halved the burden of imprisonment. By forcing them to toil hard in the quarry from early morning until night, the authorities aimed to leave the prisoners not only no time…

…for reading, but not even for normal sleep. For that reason no books from the prison library were brought here.

The political prisoners settled this question, too, in their own way. They themselves built up a small library of their own out of the personal books they had been left with. The criminal prisoners were also able to use the books of this little library. Since it had become harder and harder to smuggle a needed book into the prison through the ever-tightening barriers of censorship, it had become a tradition that comrades who had served out their sentences left all their books to the collective.

At the penal colony two illegal journals were produced, in a very small format convenient for concealment, on thin cigarette paper. The content of the two journals differed — one was intended for the political prisoners, the other for the criminal prisoners. A literary circle worked regularly, made up of young poets and prose writers. At its meetings questions of literary theory and criticism were studied, and new poems and sketches written by comrades were also discussed.

By and large, all collective activities were held on non-working days — on Sundays — and the administration could of course not help knowing of them. But it had reluctantly to put up with such self-organization on the part of the politicals. Nothing — neither the countless provocations, nor the brutal hard labor — could halt the irrepressible drive of these men toward genuine knowledge, toward the beacon of the revolutionary struggle.

Cut off from the outside world, isolated on a small patch of stony field, they still never lost their firm bond with the world outside, with the party,

nothing could tear them away from life. Together with all working people they rejoiced at every new victory of socialist construction in the Soviet Union, they grieved deeply over the defeats of the Republican forces in Spain, and they followed attentively, on their homemade maps, the successful operations of the Chinese people's army. They always strove to grasp and assess correctly every important event in any corner of the world.

"Out for work, quick!" — early one Monday morning came the loud, clipped command of squad-warder Karlov, already standing at the door of the barrack.

Without having time to finish a mug of black barley coffee, and gnawing a hunk of dry bread on the move, the prisoners came out one by one into the yard, where it was still dark.

"Look lively, fall in, faster!" — the warders shouted in chorus, hurrying the prisoners to form up for the morning roll-call.

Senior warder Balodis, working through a long list without pausing, called out names and announced which team each man was to work in. The teams were once again reshuffled and mixed. Roll-call and assignment were carried out so rapidly that I did not at first understand where I had been placed.

The winter was unusually cold. That day a blizzard was raging and the frost was severe. All the prisoners were made to work not in the pit, but up in the open field, in the bare wind. The task set was to clear from a meter of snow a new section for the quarry.

A keen north wind cut the face, hands froze inside mittens of sackcloth, ears, nose, and cheeks went numb. Spotting one another's whitened patches, the comrades rubbed them down with snow. To get even a little warmer, to save hands and feet from the frost, one had to work at full pitch without pause, to keep up an unbroken movement.

Wielding four-cornered wooden shovels nimbly, the prisoners were clearing the field. Enormous mountains of snow rose up. But squad-warder Karlov was not satisfied even with this pace of work. Dressed in a fur coat, tall felt boots, and an ushanka under which only a round, thick nose and large bulging eyes could be seen, he kept goading us on and, grinning maliciously, repeated:

"Lo-ovely, lo-ovely weather!"

In the following days the blasting work and the working of the dolomite seams began. I was sent to clear snow down in the pit. Usually such auxiliary work was given to sick men or to those badly exhausted. I was very surprised at this. Could the doctor really have noted that my heart was not in good order? But within a couple of days I was pulled out of there and assigned to the team of trolley number seven — for loading and hauling stone up to the surface.

Even before our first day in the quarry, Cērinš had given me detailed instructions on how to work in the pit so as to avoid injury. And on the comrades' advice I began with small and middle-sized stones, gradually moving on to the larger ones.

To break out, heave, lift, and carry stone blocks for a whole day is truly hard-labor toil. Many of the prisoners, from such heavy

and unfamiliar labor, especially at the start, very often ruptured themselves.

To make the work even more agonizing, the prisoners were strictly forbidden to break the large stones up. The political prisoners nevertheless tried to split the big blocks, or to lift and carry them in pairs. This too was one of the constant forms of struggle against the administration's design to maim as many men as possible. And this struggle, of course, did not pass without victims — beatings, the punishment cell, and "black months."

To guard against escapes, warders armed with rifles stood at the rim of the pit during work. In the quarry itself everything was run by senior warder Balodis and squad-warder Karlov. The latter prowled the quarry all day long, shouting and goading the men at work.

One day Karlov lingered for a long time near our team. Loading of the trolleys was under way, and he was plainly looking for something to fault. At that moment I was trying to lift a large four-cornered stone lying in the snow. Feeling, however, that the stone, deeply embedded in the snow, was too heavy for me alone, I left it for the time being and turned to another.

Squad-warder Karlov, who had been watching me, at once ran up and ordered me to lift that very large stone — the one that had proved beyond my strength — and carry it to the trolley immediately.

The matter was taking a serious turn. Karlov hoped to intimidate me, to force me to carry out all his orders and to make me abandon the tactic of passive resistance which the political prisoners followed. Realizing this, I firmly resolved not to give in. Formally complying with the squad-warder's order, I with diffi-

In the quarry. Drawing from the illegal journal "Red Aid."

…culty raised the stone as far as my knees and, unable to hold it, let it slip from my hands.

Karlov flew into a rage.

"If you work like this in the quarry, you won't even earn five centimes a day," he shouted insolently.

"You needn't trouble yourself about my earnings. I know why I was brought here to you," I answered loudly but calmly.

Karlov's thick red face twitched with bestial rage.

"Watch out — you'll remember me your whole life long," he flung at me menacingly.

"Yes, I won't forget you," I retorted, unable to hold back.

The incident took place in full view of all the prisoners. They were very pleased that the political convict who had recently arrived had not flinched before the brute.

It was not the boldness of a lone man; I felt myself a part of the tightly knit collective of political prisoners, who never stopped struggling and knew how to stand up for themselves even here, in fascist hard labor.

An incident unusual for the administration occurred in the quarry the next day.

It was already growing dark. The full daily quota had been fulfilled. Each team had loaded and hauled to the surface sixteen trolleys of stone. Having cleared the rubble from its section, every team was waiting for the order to go to the barrack.

But from up above came a quite different order. The warders shouted that we were once again to drive the empty trolleys back into the quarry. It turned out that, taking no account even of the established quota, they wanted to force us to work into the night. This stirred up strong indignation among all the prisoners. The political prisoners and the criminals alike stayed down in the pit and, sitting on the stones, did not budge from the spot in spite of the warders' order, repeated again and again from above. Even the team of the first trolley, made up of repeat-offender criminals who were always set against the politicals, did not dare to break the common solidarity. And the administration had to give way: the prisoners were formed up and led to the barrack.

And the next day the usual hard labor began again, and the hidden resistance to the fascist drivers went on.

It was 31 December 1937.

In prison the line between the departing and the incoming year was always felt with particular sharpness. For many of the political prisoners in Kalnciems, the coming year of 1938 was their last year of confinement. The hearts of the others, too, grew lighter: one more year less remained before the end of their terms…

Already during the day a rumor went round the barrack that, on the occasion of the New Year, we would be allowed not to lie down to sleep until twelve o'clock at night. The criminal prisoners awaited the evening with impatience, and the most lively among them were quietly preparing some entertainment numbers of an underworld kind.

We had to make the meeting of the New Year meaningful, to try to give it an entirely different direction. And the initiative-taking organizers among the politicals hurriedly set to work preparing their performances.

Immediately after the evening roll-call all the prisoners began to gather on one side of the barrack. Those who came earlier seated themselves on the edge of the bunks; the others arranged themselves in a semicircle, standing.

The improvised New Year's program began. The criminal prisoners performed first. This order was a tactical necessity: it was, after all, at their request that the administration had given permission to stay up that evening past lights-out. Two trashy little humorous skits, a flat farce featuring

…a prisoner dressed up as a woman — that, in the main, was all they had prepared.

After a short break the extensive program of the political prisoners began. Former Riga athletes and dashing Latgalian dancers showed off their skill. They were succeeded by comrades who recited with fire the revolutionary verses of Rainis and Leons Paegle. Tellers of political anecdotes — popular and current at the time among the people — wittily mocked the machinations of the Ulmanis clique. Then the comrades struck up favorite tunes, and soon the whole barrack rang with the collective singing of Latvian folk songs and Russian airs about cruel captivity, about the chained men of Siberia.

Midnight was drawing near, but no one disturbed the singers and no one interrupted us. The heavily drunken administration did not even come out of its house, which stood at a distance from the barrack. As for the young warder on duty outside that night, behind the locked doors, he was evidently very little interested in the melodies or the content of the songs.

The political prisoners grew bolder, struck up in chorus "With a fighting call on our lips," "Boldly, comrades, in step," and the "Warszawianka"; together they sang the "Song of Kakhovka," "Partisan Zheleznyak," "The Eaglet," and "Wide Is My Native Land." The words of the "Hymn of the Kalnciems Political Convicts" rang out loudly.

By the end of the night two choirs had formed among the politicals. As soon as one choir fell silent, the other started up a new song. Russian and Latvian songs alternated.

The hard labor camp was singing!

In that collective singing was deeply expressed the longing for freedom, the heavy and harsh daily life of Kalnciems

…and the indomitable, unshakable will to fight for the freedom and happiness of the people.

For the first time within the walls of the Kalnciems prison there rang out so loudly, at full voice, the singing of soulful and mournful, old and new, harsh and joyful songs of struggle and toil.

Outside it was already growing light. Having met 1938 with songs, we were turning in to sleep. But more than once afterwards we remembered that New Year's night, when in song we poured out everything that had built up in our hearts during the long years of imprisonment.

The days of January came on, days of unceasing extraction of stone from the pit. After a short night's rest, men straightened their backs only with effort.

The very lowest stone seam, lying under water, was being broken open. One had to climb back up cautiously, clinging to the sharp projections of the stone walls, at risk every moment of plunging down together with one's heavy load.

On one of those frosty January days, early in the morning, a long column of prisoners — as always still tired from the previous day's late work — was once again being led to the pit. With great hammers, heavy crowbars (the "moni"), iron bars and iron shovels on our shoulders, surrounded by guards, we walked silently toward the quarry.

When the column drew near to it, the prisoners were surprised by a strange circumstance. At the entrance to the quarry, on a tall wooden mast erected during the night, hung a red-white-red cloth —

…until now, after all, it was known that there was no holiday at all on this day. We therefore asked one another in undertones, in puzzlement, on what unknown occasion they had suddenly seen fit, for the first time at the penal camp, to hoist the state flag of bourgeois Latvia so high.

Having clattered down the narrow-gauge track into the pit on empty trolleys, all the teams set off for their own sections and got down to work.

A short time passed — no more than an hour. One of the escorts called out my surname — I was being unexpectedly summoned to the office.

Up above, the sinister figure of warder Rudinsky appeared, the executioner known to everyone at the penal camp. No beating of political prisoners here was carried out without his taking part.

"To the chief," Rudinsky announced curtly, looking at me dully, and fell in behind me.

Walking along the straight, smoothly cleared snow path to the office, I mentally turned over every possible reason for being summoned to the chief. Recently I had given a talk to the collective on the international situation. Only that morning I had laughed loudly over an unknown state holiday. Afterwards it transpired that the flag had been raised in honor of the name-day of the fascist leader Ulmanis. And there were any number of other things they might be charging me with.

Or perhaps they had finally decided to answer the long-standing petition for permission for a visit from my wife — herself a former political convict. The prison administration absolutely refused to recognize her as my wife and throughout the entire term had not allowed her to come on a visit. But all the same it was hard to believe that so urgent a summons during work hours boded anything good.

With these thoughts I came up to the building in which the office was housed.

At the very moment when I crossed the threshold of the corridor, the warder Rudinsky, who was following behind me, snatched out a rubber truncheon hidden under his coat. Now I no longer doubted that something nasty was being prepared here.

Without any preliminary wait I was led straight into the chief's office. At the table on which a folder with my personal file lay, slightly hunched, sat the still-young but pale-faced, dull-eyed chief Lumanis. Until quite recently he had been thriving in the role of an agent of the criminal police, well known to many Riga thieves as a petty bribe-taker, a frequent drinking companion of theirs, and an out-and-out cocaine addict. After the fascist coup he had ended up in the post of one of the four assistants to the head of the Central Prison.

The charge brought against me was that I was inciting the other prisoners to riot and persuading some of the criminals to escape. The accusations were so absurd that it was very easy for me to prove their falsity. Encouraged by this, I at once began to refute them.

But Lumanis cut me off, with no intention of listening to explanations from a communist, a man whom the courts had stripped of all rights.

"For attempts at incitement and inducement to escape — seven days in the punishment cell," pronounced the cocaine addict.

The same instant, the warder Rudinsky grabbed me by the collar and shoved me out of the office into the street.

Being escorted to the punishment cell, on the way I did not meet…

…a single one of the prisoners. None of them saw or learned that I was being taken to the punishment cell. Everything had been arranged in advance so that the comrades would remain in complete ignorance of what was happening. That day even seriously ill men were driven out of the barrack to work.

In the narrow corridor by the punishment cell senior warder Balodis was already waiting. Demoted in rank and post at the Central Prison for systematic drunkenness, at Kalnciems he had again worked his way up to senior warder and was now Lumanis's deputy. His chronic drunkenness had even helped him here to restore his service standing…

"Strip!" ordered Balodis. And the very moment I began to undress, Rudinsky set about beating me with savage fury. Striking blows over my whole body with a thick rubber truncheon, he aimed above all at the head.

Glancing over the bare walls, I saw at the end of the corridor a small window opening out toward the quarry. In the hope that they might hear me out there, I only managed to shout aloud: "Comrades!.."

The torturers rushed to the window, slammed it shut and with even greater frenzy went on beating me, by then stripped naked.

In wild rage Rudinsky turned the rubber truncheon round in his hands and began striking with the other end of it — the one with the large copper hook by which the truncheon was usually fastened to the warder's belt.

Seeing this, I thought it was unlikely I would get out of there alive. And every time Rudinsky again drew back the truncheon, I instinctively tried to shield my eyes, covering them with my mangled hands.

This pre-cell execution lasted about half an hour. Then, naked and beaten, I was shoved into a dark, cold punishment cell and the door was locked.

Through the door, slightly opened a moment later, a pair of summer underwear and thin bast shoes without foot-cloths were tossed in to me. I put them on at once, although such clothing was very poor protection against the bitter cold.

Footsteps were again heard in the corridor. Through a small window in the door, opened from outside, someone was eyeing me appraisingly. From the voice I recognized warder Rudinsky. He hurriedly thrust an aluminum bowl filled to the brim with cold water at me. Such a noble gesture from the torturer suddenly seemed strange. I did not want to drink, and I set the bowl of water on the floor.

Only fifteen or twenty minutes went by, and the ice on the floor had become wet and mushy. I thought that in the dark I had accidentally bumped against the water vessel. Feeling about with my hands, I made sure that the bowl was standing untouched in its former place, but was now completely empty. I wanted to check this incomprehensible transformation.

Through a small hole in the tightly boarded-up window, a very thin, barely perceptible ray of light made its way into the cell. Carefully examining the inside of the bowl above the glowing hole, I saw that its bottom had been driven straight through with a nail. And the bowl was brand new. Everything became clear. Not content with the water poured into the cell beforehand, which had already had time to freeze, they had also slipped me a leaking vessel —

…with water — so as to dampen the ice and cause yet greater suffering.

The hours dragged by wearisomely in the punishment cell. There was no walking on the wet floor in bast shoes, and I stood leaning against the wall.

Feeling out, along the left-hand wall, a pair of wet boards on the floor — the place for lying in the cell — I sat down, hunched up from the infernal cold. Tired and worn out by the beating, I soon, without my noticing it, fell asleep.

I woke from the unendurable cold piercing through me and from a muffled noise. It seemed I had slept very long — a whole twenty-four hours. From the noise in the yard it sounded as if the morning of the next day had already come and the prisoners were being formed up for work. But once I had made out the individual words drifting in here, I understood that only half a day of my stay in the cell had passed. And there was still so much left ahead!..

At night and in the morning conditions in the cell were unbearable: outside the temperature stood at twenty-five degrees of frost. To warm myself, I tried doing brisk gymnastic exercises. But a sharp pain in my whole body and head paralyzed me. Tormented by terrible cold and hunger, overcome by drowsiness, I, standing, often slipped into oblivion and woke again.

In this state I spent three days and nights. Carrying their abuse to the utmost limit, the fascist hirelings not only would not let me wash, but did not give me a chance to relieve myself, having deliberately placed in the cell a half-rotten wooden slop bucket. Despite my repeated knocking on the door, no one from the administration came.

On the morning of the fourth day, squad-warder Karlov opened the door of the cell.

"It's no use suffering for the sake of your comrades, and you've ruined your whole life," he began in a sanctimonious tone.

I deliberately fixed my gaze past him and did not answer a single word.

He ordered me to clean out the cell, and then he led me to the washroom. The barrack, through which one had to pass to get there, was empty: everyone was at work, down in the pit.

In accordance with the regulations on prison disciplinary punishments — which, by the way, were by no means always observed — I was placed for twenty-four hours in the "light" cell, a narrow chamber two and a half meters long.

After three days and nights spent in complete darkness and cold, the light cell felt to me like paradise. It was dry there, and one could sense some warmth. My eyes slowly grew used to the light, and I gazed for a long time at the blue sky visible through a small ice-covered window.

At the dinner hour they gave me a slice of bread and a bowl of thin soup, without a spoon. In small gulps I drank the soup from the bowl and bit on the bread. The warm soup warmed me up, but did not still my fierce hunger.

However much I would have liked the time in the light cell to last longer, the short January day soon came to an end and it began to grow dark. Footsteps were suddenly heard in the corridor, keys jangled, and at the door of the cell, flung wide open, there appeared senior warder Balodis, squad-warder Karlov, and warder Rudinsky — all with rubber truncheons

…in their hands. Stepping toward me with a bowl of steaming barley porridge in one hand and brandishing his truncheon menacingly with the other, Rudinsky declared cynically:

"If you tell us who you talked into escaping, you'll get the porridge. If you don't — there'll be no mercy."

I expected that any moment this whole gang would fall upon me. My stubborn silence drove them into a fury. I understood that the administration was preparing a provocation, so that at the end of my term at the penal camp they could once again convict me for "incitement." I also took into account that at this evening hour, when all the prisoners were right there next door in the barrack, the torturers would not dare beat me. It would be enough for me to shout out loud to bring everyone there to their feet.

And indeed, they left without touching me.

Already from beyond the locked door Rudinsky threatened loudly:

"We'll come again, and then you'll talk!"

Finding myself, after three hard sleepless nights, in a cell that was a little warmer, I lay down on the bare plank-bed but tried not to fall asleep. All night I struggled against sleep and, in a state of intense nervous tension, listened to every rustle. I was afraid of being taken by surprise. After all, they could grab me asleep, stuff a rag into my mouth, and then deal with me silently.

The night, full of anxiety, dragged slowly on. But no one else came.

In the morning I was once more transferred to the dark cell for another three days and nights.

After a short respite the long, drawn-out hungry days in the pitch darkness of the icy cell began again.

At last the week, which in the punishment cell had seemed endlessly long, came to an end. The warder who arrived at six in the morning, whistling cheerfully in the corridor, opened the door of the cell and let me out. I ran straight to the washroom, doused my head with cold water and hurriedly inspected, in a small mirror, the wounds and bruises on my body and head. I had not yet had time to start on breakfast when the order to fall in for work rang out.

In the pit, by our team's section, senior warder Balodis stood relentlessly. He watched every movement I made. From all the signs, one of the criminal prisoners on the team was an informer. This made me wary. Any word said out loud by me about what had taken place in the cell would later be represented by the administration in a provocational way as the spreading of false rumors. And that would be the pretext for a new beating.

In the daytime, at the edge of the pit, in Lumanis's company, the deputy head of the Central Prison, Jurka, appeared. They walked along the pit, stood for a while opposite our section, peering at something. Apparently, Jurka had hurried over to Kalnciems that day after Lumanis's boastful report about his "uncovering" of the preparations for a riot…

Jurka had served for a long time in the Valmiera prison and afterwards had been its chief. The whole official career of this jailer was well known to the convicted Valmiera communists who were in the Central Prison. They told how Jurka had taken an active part in the beating and bloody reprisal

…of eleven Valmiera Komsomol members in December 1919. It would, of course, have been disgusting and senseless to complain to him of the beatings here.

Having worked for half the day, I felt strong dizziness. The cell, the physical exhaustion, were telling on me. And when I bent low again to lift and carry to the trolley the next block of stone, blood gushed from my throat.

Seeing large scarlet spots before me on the snow, I grew alarmed: "Can it be that at the very end of this long imprisonment the executioners have at last managed to break me?"

But I stubbornly drove this thought away. After all, freedom awaited me, a meeting with my dear ones and friends — a life full of difficulties and joys in the struggle with hated fascism!

During the dinner break, in conversation with the comrades, I learned that the collective had been entirely in the dark about what had been happening to me. Since one of the criminal prisoners had spoken of a cry from the cell that he had overheard, all the politicals had been preparing on Sunday to write a protest to the prison department against the beatings that had once again resumed here.

The comrades were very alarmed that in a single week I had become so haggard. Then and there, sitting at the common dinner table, the collective accepted the proposal of the political convict Eglajs: for a week, three times a day, to issue me a doubled portion from the food bought through the prison commissary.

It was reluctantly that I made use of my privileged position — I knew how necessary these additional grains of sugar and fats were to each man. But how much comradely sensitivity and warmth of soul there was in this care of the collective for…

…each one of us! The ideological solidarity and iron-bound cohesion of the political prisoners, their readiness for mutual rescue and defense, strengthened in everyone faith in the collective, whose strength was insuperable.

In the evening after roll-call, when the doors of the barrack had already been closed and the sentry was in the yard, medical aid was given to me. The political prisoner Dancis, a former army medical orderly, enjoyed the authority of a healer in the collective. He had charge of a small medicine chest that the politicals had built up from medicines sent in from home.

Dancis attentively examined the swelling above my eye, the scar on my forehead, and my whole battered body. Then he carefully cleaned and bandaged all the wounds, and also gave me an ointment to rub on my frostbitten feet.

It was a kind of demonstration against the jailers. I said nothing — my bared, mangled body spoke of everything itself. Many of the criminal prisoners came up to look at the beaten body, loudly expressed indignation, and approved of the politicals. Among the criminals there were not a few young workers sent here for verbal insults to policemen and aizsargi. There was also a group of drivers convicted to serve time in Kalnciems for particularly grave violations of the traffic rules.

Sunday. More than half of this day usually went on putting clothes in order, patching the canvas aprons and mittens, which quickly tore on the stones, on shaving and on writing letters. And to write…

…a letter out of prison was not at all a simple matter. It had to be thought through carefully, so as to make extra-economical use of a small sheet of writing paper, to manage to tell of many things in Aesopian language, and to avoid having the letter confiscated by the censor.

The time was already drawing near to dinner. Sitting on our bunks, Bagat, Belar, and I were collectively rereading the latest letters received from friends on the outside, which they cleverly contrived to write us under the guise of brothers and sisters.

At that moment Rudinsky came into the barrack. He called out my surname and loudly announced:

"For a visit!"

Sunday was considered visiting day here. On this day each convict was allowed, once a month, to see his closest relatives. But getting to Kalnciems in the winter — which lay off the railway — was no easy matter. One had to ride in from Riga itself by horse cart, which was rather expensive. For that reason the relatives in Riga somehow used to make arrangements among themselves and would bring parcels for several political convicts in a single cart.

Overjoyed at the prospect of the visit at last, I quickly looked at myself in the small mirror and was very pleased with the appearance of my already healing wounds: now it was hard to tell that these were traces of a beating…

Outside it was frosty, but quiet and windless. Walking under the warder's escort, I felt both joy and excitement at the same time: this was the first meeting with a friend in prison, and I was thinking over how, in the warders' presence, to speak about personal matters and to learn at least a thing or two about party life from a half-word, from hints.

But by now we had already passed by the so-called little barrack, where visits were always held, and I was being led somewhere further, toward the Tukums road that ran alongside.

And the joyful sense of awaited meeting at once gave way to indignation. I realized this was another mockery on the administration's part. The warder led me into a large stable, ordered me to clear out the accumulated manure and to haul it on a large sledge, by myself, out to the road. The pitchfork they gave me had its prongs deliberately broken off, and there was enough work there to last until evening.

In this way they robbed me of the Sunday rest I had been so looking forward to. It was in retaliation for the fact that the evening before I had shown the comrades my battered body…

A series of incidents at the penal camp, and the beatings that had once again begun, alarmed the whole collective of political prisoners.

At its secret meeting the leading troika discussed the situation that had arisen and drew the necessary conclusions. The facts indicated that, instead of the mass beatings practiced earlier — which had provoked a storm of protest on the outside — the administration had moved to other methods. It was now resorting to dealing with political prisoners one at a time, making use for that purpose of every kind of provocation.

It was decided to explain this in detail to all the groups of the collective, to warn the comrades of possible provocations. The troika confirmed the correctness of the tactic of passive resis-

…tance and called on the collective, through its inner discipline, to strengthen its force still further in the further struggle for life, for preserving itself for the party. It was also necessary, by every available means, to inform the Riga Party Committee and "Red Aid" without delay of the situation that had arisen here.

Such was the response to the actions of the fascist monsters.

One of the administration's favorite methods was to set the criminal prisoners against the politicals. For this purpose it made use of a small group of repeat-offender criminals. Trusting in a promised early release, they would shrink at nothing to ingratiate themselves with the authorities.

Egged on by the jailers, they tried by every means to step up the already unbearable pace of work in the pit and to provoke constant strife among the prisoners. They were even preparing for a mass beating of the political prisoners. And they had found a suitable pretext.

Among the criminal prisoners was a certain M., convicted by a military court for a disciplinary offense in the army. At Kalnciems he showed himself to be an honest and conscientious man, always interested in political questions. He had practically no contact with the criminals.

From the circumstances of the case framed against him in the army, it was clear that he had in fact been convicted precisely for his leaning toward politics, toward anti-fascism. On the proposal of comrades who had come to know M. especially closely, he was admitted into the collective of political prisoners with the right of an advisory vote.

And so a clique of brazened-up repeat-offender scum, who had been hounding M. all along, one day presented him with a categorical ultimatum: they demanded that he break off every tie with the political prisoners. Failing this, they threatened him with a serious reprisal.