Decline of a Dictator

Colonel Rusteika, head of the Lithuanian secret political police, lay on his bed at Kovno last week snoring soundly. Two young students burst into his bedroom, shot him in the head, stabbed him in the body. Colonel Rusteika is corporeally tough. He did not die. The students were captured. Their confession led straight to the most interesting man in Lithuania, Augustine Waldemaras, Prime Minister-Dictator of Lithuania from 1927 to 1929.

Recently fortune has frowned on kinetic, scrub-brush-headed Augustine. Year ago he was driven from power. Month ago, interned by the government on an estate at Kroettingen as a menace to public safety he made an abortive effort to escape (TIME, Aug. 11). Fortnight ago Mme Waldemaras went to a fortune teller. The oracle, emerging from his trance, informed Mme Waldemaras that her husband would regain political power over the bodies of twelve persons. She went back to the internment farm and that night M & Mme Waldemaras drew up a little list. First on the list was Colonel Rusteika. Four others, according to the students' confessions, were the Ministers of War and Justice, Chief of Staff of the Army, and the president of the potent Tautininku Sagunga (Nationalist Union) party.

Half the politicians in Lithuania, fancying themselves among the unknown eight, shouted that ex-Dictator Waldemaras should be committed as a lunatic.

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