Figuring out the past
RIGA – History plays an important part in the inter-ethnic relations in Latvia as well as in the relationship between Latvia and Russia. It has a direct impact on people here.
Russians who live here in the Kremlin-saturated media sphere know about the Soviet occupation. It’s hard not to. The Occupation Museum is next-door. Some have naturalized and answered the question about what happened on June 17, 1940. Latvia has many, many days of mourning, commemorating those who had been sent to Gulags.
Elderly people – the ones waving red flags at the Victory monument last weekend – get their news from Moscow. Young people like to watch comedy shows, music shows, films available on Russian TV.
Of course, some of those shows are turned into propaganda. In a Russian film “We’re from the Future” (trailer) four young hip heroes – you know they’re hip because they drive hip cars and one of them even has a hip tattoo of a swastika, another has a hip nickname like Borman – anyway, four young hip heroes make a living selling World War II medals they find in graves outside St. Petersburg. They uncover a mud-hut with skeletons inside. Anyway, they go skinny dipping in a nearby lake. They dive in. And when they come back out they end up in 1942 on the Soviet side of the front, learning an obligatory lesson that connects their modern lifestyle with those soldiers who perished during the Second World War.
But the film is not about Stalin, or his crimes. It is part of the great search for the national identity.
When it comes to the Stalin crimes, much wood has been turned into paper for publications about that topic. The Soviet Union Congress of Deputies, a fully elected parliament, in 1989 even adopted a resolution (the link’s in Russian) condemning the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 and its secret protocols declaring them void from the moment of their signing.
At the same time, the press took a whiff of freedom and became high on publishing anything about the Stalin years – from a documentary research on the crimes to an absurd accounts of private lives of Stalin and his comrades.
A documentary was released here in Rīga trying to piece together communist crimes to persuade the West to place an equal sign between the communist crimes and the crimes of Nazi Germany. Surprisingly, the film caused little interest – some 900 people saw the film called The Soviet Story since it opened last week. But, the film would actually be a waste of time for educated Russians in the Baltics even if it’s subtitled in Russian. Nothing the film shows people don’t already know.
Most sane people without any political agenda don’t question whether Stalin’s crimes had taken place. In fact, the Russian-language press here went into great length to show that Baltic Russians (some did live here before 1940), too, suffered under Stalin. Russians generally question the necessity of those atrocities. They attempt to explain away deportations of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Russians, Jews from this part of the world into Siberia. They say they deserved it for being too rich, or too intelligent, too political, too influential, or too nationalistic.
The disagreement is not whether crimes have taken place. The disagreement is about the interpretation of those crimes.
May 13th, 2008 at 19.34
How about they were deported and murdered because the Communists were friggin’ *crazy*? Seems like a plausible explanation.
May 13th, 2008 at 19.40
Crazy people deport everyone. Seriously, I don’t think the Soviets were crazy – they just liked power and who could blame them for killing the creme of the crop to retain the unlawful power. No regime likes challenges…
May 13th, 2008 at 20.30
“In the 1930s the USSR was turned into a grotesque, gargantuan laboratory of social engineering and human misery. Tens of millions toiled in indescribable deprivation to build the dams, canals, factories and new towns that the five-year plans demended. Millions died from exhaustion, maltreatment or execution. Whole classes like kulaks, or small landowners, were slated for elimination when agricultural land was collectivized. Whole generations were uprooted and sent for slave labour. And whole countries, like Ukraine, which had resisted, were laid waste. Never in human history had such a gigantic spectacle of applied ideology been staged. …
To add to the misery, Stalin mounted a campaign of state terror that makes all other forms of terrorism pale in insignificance. The scale and audacity of the killings was unprecedented, breathtaking. Lenin had killed off most of the regime’s active opponents and undesirables. The collectivization campaign had accounted for the peasants, the largest class of non-sympathizers. But from 1934 to 1939 Stalin conceived a programme for killing a large part of the regime’s most devoted servants. He aimed to sow such fear and trembling, such mental paralysis, that no one, least of all his close associates, could even dissent. He killed every surviving member of Lenin’s original Bolshevik government. Through endless false accusations, he created a climate of collective paranoia which cast everyone and anyone into the role of suspected spy or traitor or ‘enemy’. Through orchestrated show trials, he forced distinguished Communists to confess to absurd indecent charges. Through the so-called ‘purges’, he would thin the ranks of the Communist Party, and then, having put the comrades into a mood of zombie-like deference, he would order the exercise repeated again and again. Everyone would be cajoled or tortured into naming ten or twenty supposed associates in crime. By 1938 he reached the point where he was ordering the shooting of citizens by random quots: 50,000 this month from this province, 30,000 next month from the next province. The OGPU (the latest incarnation of the Cheka) sweated overtime. (They too were largely purged.) The death pits filled up. The GULag became the biggest employer of labour in the land. State officials, artists and writer, academics and soldiers were all put through the grinder. Then, in March 1939, it stopped, or at least slowed down. The Census Bureau had just enough time to put an announcement in “Izvestia” saying that 17 million people were missing before the census-takers themselves were shot.
No society in history has ever been subjected to such traumatic self-immolation. …”
Norman Davies
NO SIMPLE VICTORY
May 13th, 2008 at 20.36
And now ambersun in your own words…
May 13th, 2008 at 20.58
Atrocity was part and parcel of the communist regime from the start. It didn’t begin with Stalin. He just cubed the horror and terror that Lenin started during the Russian Civil War. True believers can justify anything through their own philosophy, especially, it seems, when linked to a utopian view of the future. Communism and Nazism brought a couple of the worst we’ve ever seen.
What I’m curious about is that the people of Latvia and Estonia, etc., seemed to be totally clueless about the Red Terror of the 1930s, even though millions were dying, and certainly locals had relatives in Russia. How did that happen?
May 13th, 2008 at 21.37
I didn’t want to write this but, why not make it personal. From my wife’s side there is: Priit — her great uncle — died in the Soviet prison camps in 1943. His crime was belonging to the equivalent of the Estonian national guard in the 1930s.
Then both of her great-grandfathers. Martin, an ethnic Estonian, arrested in 1948, given 25+5 for several reasons. 1) He was in the Estonian War of Independence. 2) He owned a farm. 3) He belonged to the national guard.
Alexander, my wife’s other great-grandfather, was an ethnic Russian. he was arrested in 1946 and given 10+5.
I suppose he was considered hostile to the state because he had fought in the army of White Army General Nikolai Yudenich. Both Martin and Alexander were around 50 years old at time of arrest. Both returned to Estonia after Stalin’s death.
In this scenario, you may begin to understand why the war didn’t seem to end in 1945 for people like my wife’s grandfather Karl, who had turned 18 in 1946 when his father was deported, and didn’t see him again for a decade. It didn’t end for his wife, Laine, who had to hide in the forests with her mother to escape deportation in March 1949. Her older sister was deported with her father.
I don’t want to exploit the tragedies of their lives for the sake of wallowing in the past. I feel almost shameful discussing it here, but it seems to only way to explain how personal this stuff is for people. I just want to point out that from about 1940 to 1955, most Estonian families were torn apart, and so 1945 doesn’t particularly stick out as a date to celebrate.
May 13th, 2008 at 21.40
I don’t think many people outside the fringes of the political spectrum make the claim that people who were deported deserved it. My impression has been that the usual claim of the Russian-language press is that the deportations were an act of political repression that was no more brutal than the other excesses of the Stalinist regime, and that they were not directed solely against ethnic Latvians.
The big points of contention are not the deportations but the question of what happened on June 17, 1940, and on July 4, 1941.
May 13th, 2008 at 21.42
Scott,
People were not clueless. I once happened to read a 1933 issue of a Russian-language Latvian newspaper. It had a surprisingly accurate description of the famine in Ukraine.
May 14th, 2008 at 4.20
Again my argument: as long as slave workers are not seen as they were: slave workers (only one aspect of the Soviet history) I have no sympathy for a symplified view on the end of WWII:
from Wikipedia:
Many OST-Arbeiters were still children or young teenagers when they were taken away and wanted to return home to their parents. Others who became aware or understood the political realities of the 1930’s declined to return. Those in the Soviet occupational zones were returned automatically. Those in the French and English zones of occupation were forced to return, and after the signing of the Yalta Agreement which stated that “Citizens of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia were to be handed over to their respective countries, regardless of their consent”.
In October 1945 General Eisenhower banned the use of force in repatriation in the American Zone. As a result many began to escape to the American Zone. Some, when faced with return to Soviet reality chose to commit suicide.[4]
On return to the Soviet Union OST-Arbeiters were often treated as traitors. Many were transported to far off locations in the Soviet Union and were denied basic rights and the chance to get further education.[1] Nearly 80 per cent of [Russian workers and prisoners of war returning from Germany] were sent to forced labour, some given fifteen to twenty-five years of ‘corrective labour’, others sent off to hard labour; all were categorized as ’socially dangerous’.[8]
Those who returned home were also physically and spiritually broken; moreover, they were considered by the authorities as having “questionable loyalty,” and were therefore discriminated against and deprived of many of their citizenship rights.
OST Arbeiters suffered from state-sanctioned stigmatisation, with special references in their passports (and the passports of children and relatives) mentioning their time in Germany during the war. As a result many jobs were off-limits to anyone unlucky enough to carry such a status, and during periods of repression former slave labourers would often be ostracised by the wider Soviet community. Many victims have testified that since the war they have suffered a lifetime of abuse and suspicion from their fellow countrymen, many of whom have accused them of being traitors who helped the Germans and lived comfortably in the Third Reich while Ukraine burned.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_worker
Remember the 90s when even Germany had problems to create a compensation fund for them. Eh, they counted in millions, millions!!! They had to be silent, the others could celebrate. And still there is the same habit against them. You can hear them when they are coming to Germany. Each bigger city in Germany with companies who used slave workers got theses visits since years.
May 18th, 2008 at 17.22
Snork,
And a year later, from 1934, such freedom of information mostly disappeared — under the Ulmanis regime.
May 19th, 2008 at 12.38
I was on transit through Minsk, Belorussia on May 9th, and they were displaying posters of Lenin and Stalin on little billboards across town. I stared in disbelief…
May 19th, 2008 at 23.12
Luarvik, “I stared in disbelief…”
The New Cold War, By Edward Lucas
Why the West must wake up to the threat posed by Putin and the Kremlin
Reviewed by Virginia Rounding
Thursday, 7 February 2008
Independent.co.uk
“… Lucas convincingly argues that a version of Soviet history is being peddled that glorifies the Soviet Union… . In a new teachers’ manual, Stalin is presented as a great leader who had to take a few harsh decisions. The book comes with Putin’s blessing… .”
Peteris,
I note your mention of Ulmanis and the restriction on freedom of information in 1934 in Latvia. You must have run out of space to mention who and what caused the famine in the Ukraine that was not reported “adequately” in Latvia - or for that matter - in the rest of the “free” world.
Since you don’t appear to have the time to compare the relatively- benign dictatorship of Ulmanis and press restriction in Latvia in 1934 with the barbarous totalitarian dictatorship of Stalin and complete press censorship in the Soviet Union - and place them in their appropriate historical context and exposit on the role either had in the famine (or its under-reporting) - I suggest the readers turn to Robert Conquest’s THE HARVEST OF SORROW: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.
May 20th, 2008 at 1.58
“And a year later, from 1934, such freedom of information mostly disappeared — under the Ulmanis regime.”
And even before 1934, for every such newspaper there may have been a pro-communist one claiming, a la Bernard Shaw, that famine reports are a lie. Moreover, this was a Russian-language newspaper, and my guess is that Russian community were more anti-Soviet than the country as a whole - after all, many of its members were white emigres with first-hand experience of life in the proletarian paradise.
May 20th, 2008 at 7.16
“Since you don’t appear to have the time to compare the relatively- benign dictatorship of Ulmanis and press restriction in Latvia in 1934 with the barbarous totalitarian dictatorship of Stalin and complete press censorship in the Soviet Union…”
This blog is called “All About Latvia.” I don’t think the subtitle is “any criticism of anything Latvian must immediately be balanced with references to the much, much, much worse barbarity of the USSR and its heirs.”
I don’t see anything “incomplete” about Ulmanis’ censorship. I was addressing the topic of cluelessness re Red crimes — the fact is that criticism of the Soviets was mostly a taboo subject under the Ulmanis regime, esp. after the Mutual Assistance Pact was concluded.
Under Ulmanis, more than 100 periodicals were banned; half of the 12 daily papers disappeared. “Relative benignity” is really not very interesting, Ambersun — it doesn’t help us understand the failure of Latvian democracy or the effect of the Ulmanis regime on the Latvian psyche today.
May 20th, 2008 at 20.34
Latvia did not exist on her own planet then and she certainly does not now. The topic here in “ALL About Latvia” is “Figuring out the past,” which seems pretty comprehensive. You point out that “…the fact is that criticism of the Soviets was mostly a taboo subject under the Ulmanis regime, esp. after the Mutual Assistance Pact was concluded.” I would guess it would have been difficult to obtain information about the Soviets what with all that total, draconian censorship of Soviet news critical of the Soviets by the Soviets themselves. Maybe Latvia should have looked to the “uncensored” news in the rest of the “free” world that was critical of the Soviets, like to the U.S. and the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, Walter Duranty, in the vaunted New York Times. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/791vwuaz.asp?ZoomFont=YES ·
“I would like to add another Duranty quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. (”An American Engineer in Stalin’s Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934,” University of California
Press ). The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP’s Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:
Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.
And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.
In his masterwork about Stalin’s imposed famine on Ukraine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” Robert Conquest has written:
As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty’s denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper’s prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.
What is so awful about Duranty is that Times top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda, but did nothing. In her exposé “Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s man in Moscow,” S.J. Taylor makes it clear that Carr Van Anda, the managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, an assistant managing editor, and Edwin L. James, the later managing editor, were troubled with Duranty’s Moscow reporting but did nothing about it. Birchall recommended that Duranty be replaced but, says Taylor, ‘the recommendation fell by the wayside.’ “
May 20th, 2008 at 21.05
“I would guess it would have been difficult to obtain information about the Soviets what with all that total, draconian censorship of Soviet news critical of the Soviets by the Soviets themselves.”
And I would guess that you’d be dead wrong, as per what Snork wrote. You may as well suggest that Jews had no idea how bad Nazi Germany was. But then I would ask you to consider the boycott of Germany by Latvian Jews, which led to increased anti-Semitism among Latvians — what do you think of that, Ambersun? Can you ever talk about Latvia? Indeed, it’s not o its (her) own planet — wasn’t then, isn’t now. Never will be. We’s all on the same planet, I guess. So how does incessantly pointing to how horrible Stalin or Hitler were help me with my part of the planet? When you address the fact that Latvia succumbed to dictatorship all by its own beautiful little self, I will consider listening to your Russophobic rants.
May 20th, 2008 at 22.16
Peteris,
Re: “Relative benignity” is really not very interesting, Ambersun — it doesn’t help us understand the failure of Latvian democracy or the effect of the Ulmanis regime on the Latvian psyche today.
Not so fast. I think it is far more “interesting” and downright helpful to look at the occupation of Latvia by Soviet Russia to help us “understand the failure of Latvian democracy [and its] effect on the Latvian psyche today.”
Understanding Latvia’s continued deformation from any remote semblance of its original identity as democratic republic to a totalitarian Soviet vessel of Soviet occupation, Russification, and colonization, moving to the cultural and ethnic genocide of Latvians, will not be helped by arresting one’s understanding of “the failure of Latvian democracy” with Ulmanis temporary suspension of democracy in the Republic of Latvia before the occupation. I’m sympathetic that your Latvian psyche is still reeling under your “memory” of “the Ulmanis regime,” but, forgive me, “relative benignity” suggests to any reasonable person that a fifty-year, foreign-Soviet/Russian, Latvian-negating occupation of Latvia played a far greater role in the harm to “the Latvian psyche today.” Certainly one has had relatively less time since the Soviet occupation than the Ulmanis “occupation” to purge the Latvian psyche of any ill-effects.
The title of the latest “All About Latvia” topic is not “Why is Savickis not afraid of Ulmanis” but “Why is Savickis not afraid of Russians.”
May 20th, 2008 at 22.32
Just to intervene before we get too carried away psychoanalyzing the titles of posts. I’d recommend taking a look at this post, entitled Tautas Vienibas Svetki.
May 20th, 2008 at 22.46
I am sure that there are a lot of ingredients in the Lettish jambalaya. Andrejs Makwitz quotes Variety re a film: “This lumpy game stew tastes of sub-Tennessee Williams meat gone bad, then oversalted with Baltic miserabilism.” Love it!
“Certainly one has had relatively less time since the Soviet occupation than the Ulmanis ‘occupation’ to purge the Latvian psyche of any ill-effects.”
Though I admire you for the somewhat logical and poetic length of the sentence previous to this one– what’s the difference? On the ground, the efforts of Ulmanists or Soviets to get people to obey orders are pretty much the same. Don’t sit on the grass.
Skujenieks (Knuts) called the Ulmanis era “nothing but a prelude to the Soviet” — why do you think that is? Forget the why not for now — why so?
I think you know my answer — it was totalitarian. Amusingly, you helped prove that by trying to suck up to “Mr LL” — oh, gee, the sun shines upon all!
That period recedes, Ambersun. I think you know I do not sweep things under the carpet. But someday soon — one could care less whether you tried to rehabilitate the Third Reich in the guise of a Legionnaire or a Red soldier in the guise of whatever.
When do you plan to address the here and now? Because even your history is off — please respond to what I wrote about Valters. You asked — I answered. Please do me the honor of reacting to what you questioned.
I was in Slavas skvērs today, as I am three or four times a week. Nice park. Giant monument to the Soviet liberator, young people on the surrounding benches. The monument is by a Latvia sculptor. The model for “Alyosha” in Tallinn was an Estonian.
Have we really been purged of effects? Which? Why do you keep talking about the neighbors, instead of taking care of your garden?
May 20th, 2008 at 23.43
I realize it helps you pass under the radar with your own “person of Latvia” “spontaneous rants” against Russians - when “righteously-not-Russophobically” provoked - (for example as in previous posts) by their celebrating May 9 with “nationalistic” gusto in Riga, or refusing to speak Latvian to you in your pharmacy in Daugavpils, or refusing to learn Latvian as your Latvian-speaking toddler’s doctor, etc. - if you can create a “Russophobic” “Latvian person” to reprimand for crimes against “the people of Latvia.” My “hackles” are as un-Russophobic as yours, even when (righteously) raised. Calling me Russophobic is as helpful as calling any of the Russians you rant against “Latvianphobic.” Or maybe the latter is where you should start with your name-calling.
May 21st, 2008 at 8.46
There are plenty of Lettophobic Russians (and Lettophobic Belarusians, Lettophobic persons of mixed ethnicity, and even Latvian Lettophobes) — there are people who don’t like galerts, even. So what?
What provokes me is sentences like this: “Understanding Latvia’s continued deformation from any remote semblance of its original identity as democratic republic to a totalitarian Soviet vessel of Soviet occupation…”
As Aleks points out in the post he links to, and as I’ve pointed out to you repeatedly in various venues — the democratic republic came to an end in 1934, six years before the occupation. To try to brush off Ulmanis’ dictatorship as a “temporary suspension” of democracy is not just silly; it’s dangerous and malefic. It is also quite contrary to the ideology of the Ulmanis regime, which was explicitly anti-democratic and weighted with an (often ludicrous) personality cult.
Say you live in a fairly nice house between two nasty behemoths. The behemoths wreck your house. You get the house back. I have no doubt that the behemoths have a powerful effect upon your psyche — but your effect on the behemoths is minimal. I’m afraid you can’t blame everything on the behemoths, and neither can you take your house back in time. The parts of your house that weren’t nice prior to the behemoths’ intrusion were probably faulty because of your doing. That’s something you can have an effect on. If the roof was leaking because you didn’t fix the tiles, it would be dim to blame the behemoth for that, even if the behemoth broke the beams. That won’t help you get a nice roof.
Write the history of the house, with due attention to the behemoths — but doesn’t staring at the shadow of the behemoth to the exclusion of everything else get old, and actually preserve the dominance of the behemoth?
A lot of nations have suffered — not a few of them more than we have. Many don’t even have houses!
I obviously didn’t mean, above, to compare the relative malignity of the regimes, just as I don’t care much about the relative benignity when addressing specific issues. Natch, Stalin was a million times more badder. Happy?
That a murderer is much worse than a thief doesn’t excuse a thief’s thefts. You can say that it doesn’t matter, ’cause the thief got snuffed — but it does matter, because the thief has kids (some of them fathered by the murderer, even). It’s my impression that you’re so obsessed with the murderer that you won’t bother teaching the kids not to steal.
“Understanding Latvia’s continued deformation from any remote semblance of its original identity…”
Latvia is not the bornless one. Most nations have changed radically, and even the occupation was neither simple nor changeless — nor even entirely negative. People worked, studied, and loved. They made and watched movies — they still like them, in fact, as the crowds singing along with tunes from Soviet flicks at a Ventspils town festival would prove.
Latvia’s past in 1920 was in many ways darker than the past seen from 1991; there had been no Latvia before, the fabric of society was in tatters, and the country was physically devastated. People set about building and rebuilding… and snatching things from the hated Germans. The discontinuities of our history are as riveting as the continuities. How many Year Zeros? How many myths, whether of the paradise between the wars or the innocent pagans frolicking in the trees before the arrival of Bishop Albert?
How is it in Joyce — “I know so little of history I can almost breathe”?
May 22nd, 2008 at 23.58
Peteris,
You write well but you don’t write history well, unless you are willing to call it your own little history story. No matter how much Latvia is the center of your universe as a citizen and resident of Latvia, Latvia is but a speck in the sea of world nations and mentioned most frequently only in the context of other world events. The world affects Latvia rather than Latvia appreciably affecting the world. Latvian news is virtually no news. I will gladly hand-deliver a copy of Norman Davies NO SIMPLE VICTORY, which covers “no simple history” of the events pre-, during, and post-WWII and mentions Latvia on only seven pages and Ulmanis never among its total 544 pages. It would be hard for you to get a serious hearing from Norman Davies on “Latvia’s monumental failures of the Ulmanis regime and their effect on the rise and fall of nations and world democracy” - plus your creative version of the “behemoth story.”
It is necessary for Latvians to know their own history (only 14% of the Russian-Latvians in Latvia according to you think that Latvia was occupied by the USSR) but events of Latvian history in isolation of dominant world events - especially agendas of world domination by behemoths !!!! - is just an incomplete story and useless, except as to serve a personal political agenda.
Here’s a better behemoth story than yours. Can you place little Shamils in the story?
From NO SIMPLE VICTORY by Norman Davies, Chapter Three, pages 133-4.
POLITICS, Before, During and After the War
“…[T]he First World War spawned two radical movements, Communism and Fascism, which both appealed to violence and manifestly spelled trouble for the democratic order. It was no accident that each of the excluded powers was drawn to one of these ‘totalitarian’ alternatives, rather than to liberal democracy. Indeed, in Germany, the Nazi Party was able to gain a hold on the country by acting as a counterweight to the German Communist movement, which in the early interwar years had seemed markedly more dangerous. The German Communists were threatening to join forces with the Soviet Communistss to launch a Europe-wide revolution, and in 1920 they had come within an ace of doing so. Unfortunately, most analysts have emphasized the incompatabilities of the Fascists and Communists. Few at the time saw the totalitarian similaritites. And few had the imagination to predict a scenario where the totalitarians would postpone their differences in order to engineer the overthrow of the hated ‘Versailles Settlement’. Yet it was to be the unexpected junction of the German Fascist (the Nazis) and the Soviet Communists which precipitated the Second World War.
Talk of continuities, however, equally prompts discussion about post-war events. If 1918 can be viewed as the start of a hiatus in the middle of a longer conflict, so too, can 1945. There are very good reasons to regard the Cold War as a continuation of the unfinished business of the Second World War. In that case, one has to envisage Europe’s ‘Seventy-Five years “War’ (1914-89), and to think in terms of an opera in three acts with two intervals, 1918-39 and 1945-48. This could be the framework which historians of the future will adopt.”
I firmly believe, unlike you, that democracy was “interrupted” in Latvia under Ulmanis and that it would have been restored by the Latvian people after the war in the Republic of Latvia had Latvia not been occupied by the Soviet Union for a brutal, democracy-squelching half-century.
You write: “…[T]he occupation was neither simple nor changeless — nor even entirely negative. People worked, studied, and loved. They made and watched movies — they still like them, in fact, as the crowds singing along with tunes from Soviet flicks at a Ventspils town festival would prove.”
Under such an attractive occupation scenario, I’m not sure I understand why you did not return to live, love, and sing in Soviet Latvia.
P.S. I don’t know in which post you tripped on my writing “Latvia, she,” but what’s the problem here? It all gets back to “original intent” - matriarchal Latvia (as in the dainas), “mate Latvija”(mother Latvia). I sing “Tevija” - as the “original intent” and the male-chauvinism of that time determined for the Latvian national anthem. Which leads me to your explanation of the “original intent” of the Latvian-nation founders in writing “Latvijas tauta,” its true meaning, and the difficulty of an accurate tanslation into English: How is “the People of Latvia” the same as “Latvijas tauta” and the best English translation satisfying the original intent of the “Latvijas tauta,” who, probably not speaking Latvian, probably couldn’t tell the difference between the English “People of Latvia” or “Latvian People.” Latvijas=Latvian; tauta=rahvas (Estonian)=no equivalent word in English, but possibly “nation/people.” I will more fully answer you in Marginalia and LOL in your expositions about Mikelis Valters.
Finally, the phobia against Latvians is “Latvianphobia” or “Latvianophobia,” even “Latophobia. ” Maybe clumsy, but certainly better than “Lettophobia” unless you also like singing about the letts of das vaterland.
May 23rd, 2008 at 2.54
Correction: How is “the People of Latvia” the same as “Latvijas tauta” and the best English translation satisfying the original intent of the “Latvijas tauta,” who, probably not speaking ENGLISH, probably couldn’t tell the difference between the English “People of Latvia” or “Latvian People?”
May 23rd, 2008 at 13.37
The Greek word for “Latvian” is “Λεττονική” (”Latvia” is “Λεττονία” — “v” is the letter Nu, transliterated as “n.”) Lettophile and Lettophobe not only reflect the German — they’re based on a probable parallel Baltic form that is actually closer to the root form (”Formas ar ‘e’ ir tuvākas saknes pamatformai” — Karulis, I, p. 560). The Latin for Latvia is Lettonia, and one sees variations of this in many languages (Spanish Letonia, Italian Lettonia, Hungarian Lettország, French Lettonie, Turkish Letonya, etc.). The Latin demonyms are found already in the 13th C — Letti, Letthi, Letthigalli, Letigalli, etc. A similar Slavic form (-lot) appears in the 11th C in Nestor’s chronicle. Things Latvian, as objects of study, are called Lettonica (the address of my blog is http://lettonica.blogspot.com/ for that reason).
The use of “let[t]” for the philia and phobia is established — in Augusts Deglavs, for example. Writing of a highbrow German girl, a Lettophobe, who becomes an avid Lettophile due to the song festival: “Mamzeli dziesmu vara bija pilnīgi pārspējusi un no karstas ‘letofebes’ [sic] padarījusi par karstu ‘letofili’.” The Young Latvians (”jaunlatvieši”) were also known as Lettophiles — “letofili.” Švābe translates the Russian “latyšefili” as “letofili,” too, on p. 390 of his history of his history of Latvia 1800-1914 (they’re put under police observation in 1863, for example, being dangerous). Your neologisms are out of the question, Ambersun — they’d be like saying “marketophobia” or “publicophobia” for “agoraphobia.”
May 23rd, 2008 at 16.02
Strike one of those “of his history”… and the Slavic form should have been written “lot-” — not “-lot” (I won’t reproduce the Slavonic forms here, ’cause I don’t have the fonts).
Continuing –
“You write well but you don’t write history well, unless you are willing to call it your own little history story. No matter how much Latvia is the center of your universe as a citizen and resident of Latvia, Latvia is but a speck in the sea of world nations and mentioned most frequently only in the context of other world events.”
And just what is that supposed to mean? Every small country is a speck in some sense, Ambersun. Of course it is the center of my universe — I live in it. You could say what you are saying of _any_ place — uh, the Cajuns are part of the US and most histories of the US don’t pay much attention to the them. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have a history. The Cajuns don’t have a nation-state. Latvians do. Davies’ book is obviously a sweeping view — but I am damn sure Davies wouldn’t deny particularities of place.
“I firmly believe, unlike you, that democracy was ‘interrupted’ in Latvia under Ulmanis and that it would have been restored by the Latvian people after the war…”
Wow — a what-if game in which your Monopoly money is secured by an article of faith. Furthermore, the sentence suggests that Ulmanis’ coup was a response to war clouds — it was not. On p. 149 of the Jumava book: “Ulmanis informed the President of what happened [on 16 May 1934]; according to the Satversme, Kviesis was to defend democracy with all his powers. Without the slightest formal protest, he accepted the coup and betrayed democracy. Nothing threatened Latvia at the time that could have justified killing democracy. Neither a political nor an economic crisis encouraged the coup; to the contrary — the approaching end of the economic crisis would have prevented Ulmanis from accusing democracy of weakness.” On p. 151: “the coup of 15 May was not a preventative action but an illegal act consciously directed against Latvian democracy.” p. 153: “Latvia in the time of Ulmanis was characterized by a distinctly anti-democratic government. The May 15th regime was the most authoritarian in the Baltics and possibly in all of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, it was virtually the only dictatorship in Europe that retained no formal elected representation whatsoever.” P. 159: “The idea of the unity of the people was closely allied with an idea of leadership opposed to parliamentary democracy — an idea of leadership practiced by Ulmanis in making decisions as a dictator with practically unlimited powers. Official propaganda attempted to portray him as a leader given to the Latvian people by God himself. [...] The praise and flattery accorded him very quickly developed into an exaggerated and ridiculous cult of personality — the Vadonis was dubbed ‘the greatest statesman in Europe’; he was ‘the Great Sower’ and the ‘Double Genius’. This worship of Ulmanis was interwoven with an uncritical assessment of authoritarian rule devoid of any objectivity. Latvia’s monolithic press usually lauded even the least achievement with the words, ‘we’re headed straight up’.”
What an “interruption”! And the funny thing about your protestations is that you can see perfectly well that Mr LL, glorifying the dictatorship, is quite adamantly anti-democratic and ethnocentric in the extreme– he is, at least, honest.
May 23rd, 2008 at 16.28
By the way, it’s indeed quite possible that democracy would have been restored, and that Ulmanis’ regime would even have had some salutary effects — he was, after all, “the great modernizer.” As a friend of mine said after a recent visit to Portugal — rightist dictatorships seem to do less damage than leftist totalitarianism, because much of life continues along old rails. That’s debatable — and depends on who, what, when, where, and why, obviously — but what I find unutterably disgusting in what you write, Ambersun, is your refusal to look at the negative deeds of Latvians (this morning at LOL, you even extended that to an attack on my mention of Latvian mass murderers). You seem to want comic book, not history — and a very, very bad comic book at that. This stance becomes especially perverse when you indulge in Russophobia — Putin is not _nearly_ as totalitarian as Ulmanis, sorry. Demanding that Russians face their history is fine, and I insist upon it — but the demand is only legitimate if we face our history. You constantly veer into PR — oh, don’t stoke lettophobic myths, etc. The way one cuts through them is by being brutally honest. That’s the only way. Latvian history is complex, and can be looked at from a multitude of vantage points. In your comic book, you’re even trying to take away our history now — a bunch of angels (in terms of relative benignity) dancing upon a speck in Russo-German winds? That is unspeakable bull — Latvians were prominent actors in history from the early 20th C. The first c-in-c of the Red Army you so detest was a Latvian. The person who invented the GULAG was a Latvian. According to Rayfield, 75% of the Cheka’s central management in 1919 was ethnically Latvian. Oh, the poor victims, eh?
May 23rd, 2008 at 17.03
Finally, re the translation of “the people of Latvia” — I usually urge a note. In Latvian, “Latvijas tauta” and “latviešu tauta” are very different things, and the distinction is what matters when it comes to law. That’s the point of the phrase on the Constitution, which does indeed translate to “the people of Latvia” — it includes those who are not ethnically Latvian. In Ireland (where English, not Irish, is the lingua franca), people refer to everybody from Latvia as “Latvian,” even if they’re curious Dvinskian thugs who can barely say “sveiki” and would rather not — this is pretty much true in any English-speaking country. People who know more about this speck understand what “I’m from Latvia, but I’m Russian” or “I’m a Russian from Latvia” means. This is not a rarity — there are Hungarians from Romania. Finland Swedes, etc. Even in the brand new Latvian EU passports, one can have one’s “tautība” (ethnicity — and in some senses also nationality) printed, optionally. In law, “nationality” usually refers to citizenship. Not always — there are the peculiarities of post-imperial Europe, and of the USSR. In France, everyone is French. France won’t even sign the Framework Convention, much less ratify it. Many Latvians and many of Latvia’s Russians, and members of other minorities in Latvia, do not take kindly to having their ethnicity absorbed and/or diluted. This is not, and never was, a melting pot.
May 24th, 2008 at 4.51
Peteris,
You will have to forgive me, but I just don’t have the time right now to do your elaborate posts justice. I can’t, however, not respond. Everything you write is transparently driven by your personal politics. That’s just fine by me but don’t set yourself in the role of the authority on each and every Latvian subject. At times I agree with you and other times I could just jump out of my Latvian skin because of your blatant contradictions, far-fetched comparisons, over-reaching assertions, and gratuitous sacrifice of certain Latvians. Your writing is more complex than necessary but gives at least some little satisfaction to everyone in your diverse audience, n’est-ce pas?
As I’ve said before, I don’t come from Latvians who “idolized” Ulmanis or even voted Republican. To gag at your statement that “Putin is not _nearly_ as totalitarian [as Ulmanis]” is a normal reaction to one of your peevish provocations and reveals more about your dogmatic politics than helps explain either Ulmanis or Putin. Sticking with today: Putin is the totalitarian menace in any Latvian’s life now, not Ulmanis, and to sacrifice the seriousness of this threat to Latvia and even your own Latvianness - as identified by many authoritative non-Balt historians, politicians, and journalist (like Edward Lucas), etc - in order to convince recalcitrant Latvians and students from the international friendship brigade to detest the long-departed Ulmanis as much as you do, is just not helpful for your Latvian future alongside Putin’s Russia.
I’m glad you have your followers and you cultivate their support admirably by speaking from all sides of your political being - but you are not the only Latvian in town. Or - you are not the only “reasonable and progressive” “person of Latvia” - Latvian, wordly not merely. No pathetic, parochial, patriotic and xenophobic “Latvietiba” of the Ulmanis-”idolizing”-type for you - the only other Latvian option seemingly available, manifest in Mr L L of LOL. Mavriks Vulfsons rises and falls in one sentence in your pantheon of Latvian heroes, and I’m left wondering why you mentioned him at all, if not to demonstrate how difficult it is to hold anyone to some static Latvian identity.
I agree with you that the Latvianness of Mikelis Valters is admirably complex, in part like yours, and makes total sense as an evolutionary, political transformation of a Latvian on the way to creating the best nation for “Latvijas tauta,” the Latvian people. Valters had no qualms about calling himself an unabashed Latvian patriot through all the changes. I grant that the Latviesu/Latvian subject is dense and even more difficult to understand in English translation but you make it more complicated than it needs to be. We don’t have to agree, but I certainly know that Valters would not have worried first to create Latvian language and English translations to accomodate the post-Soviet-occupation colonists to Latvia before first and foremost considering what is best for Latvia, Latvians, and the Latvian nation. To use the construction “the people of Latvia” to betray his earlier ideal for Latvia as a healthy homeland for “Latviesi” and a healthy home for “Latvijas tauta” is just wrong. He did not know about the occupation of Latvia, Russification, and the manipulated demographic change of the Latvian nation. He envisioned Latvia’s Latvianness not the EU’s Europeanness, as Aleksejs would have us believe is intended in Valters’ “people of Latvia.” Valters never would have wanted Latvia to be just another “caurstaigajama istaba” (walk-thru room) of Europe.
I appreciate the history you trace for the origin and use of “Lett” and the like. I did not say that Lett only evokes the German connection, but it certainly is the most recent and common. You reinforce this Germanic identification with your own example from Deglavs! Also, you write that “Švābe translates the Russian ‘latyšefili’ as ‘letofili,’ ” without touching on the “lat” in the Russian “latysefili.” I believe in Latvians not only claiming and writing their neglected history, as I often state, but also using a self-chosen and self-created identity rather than repeating an imposed one. I rarely choose to identify myself as a Lett because the German connection is still the predominant one. The attacks from Russia and elsewhere connecting Latvians to WWII Germans and “Fascism” is still unrelenting. Just yesterday you effectively responded to the ignorant accusation of Latvian WWII collective collaboration and war criminality in a comment to an article in the May 22 ECONOMIST reviewing (the Latvian film) “The Soviet Story.” My identity is Latvian. Hence, the neologism of “Latvianophobia” or even “Latophobia” is a better “non-word” than “Lettophobia.” I already touched on this in another forum about googling “Lettophone” only to get “let to phone.” There is also no google recognition of the word “Lettophobia” and it appears its only life is when anyone chooses to use it as the short-cut way to describe the phobia of Latvians.
I do believe - and it is my faith in Latvians - that, even as you write, “…it’s indeed quite possible that democracy would have been restored, and that Ulmanis’ regime would even have had some salutary effects — he was, after all, “the great modernizer.” As a friend of mine said after a recent visit to Portugal — rightist dictatorships seem to do less damage than leftist totalitarianism, because much of life continues along old rails. That’s debatable —…”
I strongly believe that Latvia would have restored its democracy; that the government would have been neither extreme right nor extreme left, but probably more left than right; and that Latvia’s future course would have paralleled that of a country like Denmark, as would also have been the courses for Estonia and Lithuania. The dictatorship of Ulmanis was a reflection of the times and not the manifestation of an inherent Latvian-character deformity. It’s more than an a mere “article of faith” because I know the Latvian I would have been in Latvia.
Visu labu and see you at Marginalia and LOL
May 24th, 2008 at 10.48
Sticking with today: Putin is the totalitarian menace in any Latvian’s life now, not Ulmanis, and to sacrifice the seriousness of this threat to Latvia and even your own Latvianness - as identified by many authoritative non-Balt historians, politicians, and journalist (like Edward Lucas), etc.
What evidence would you suggest that Putin threatened Latvian national, or ethnic, if you’d like, identity. I think it’s quite a leap of faith to make from the Lucas’ descriptions of the new Cold War (which also lacks hard evidence) and Russia’s pulling around its weight in recent years on the international arena to the alleged threat posed to the ethnic identity of the titular nation of Latvia. Care to elaborate?
May 24th, 2008 at 11.52
“To gag at your statement that ‘Putin is not _nearly_ as totalitarian [as Ulmanis]‘ is a normal reaction to one of your peevish provocations and reveals more about your dogmatic politics than helps explain either Ulmanis or Putin.”
It is a statement of fact. Though Russia’s democracy is “very limited,” in your idol Norman Davies’ assessment — there are still some functioning elements of democracy in Russia — elections, though severely flawed, still take place. Though the media have increasingly come under the Kremlin’s control, newspapers like Kommersant and radio stations like Ekho Moskvi are not rarely openly critical of the government. Though Putin is idolized, there is not an official personality cult. None of this is true for Ulmanis’ Latvia. Those newspapers and periodicals that weren’t banned were strictly censored — by censors working in shifts within the newsroom, for example. There was not even a pretense of democracy — no elections were held, not even rigged ones. All political parties were shut down. Putin’s Russia is certainly much more violent (and, like Davies, I think Russia is still an empire) — but violence isn’t the only component of totalitarianism.
Regarding some “sacrifice [of] the seriousness of this threat to Latvia and even [my] own Latvianness”… sorry, but I think I’d need a copious amount of kandža to understand how your mind works, at times. The gist seems to be that looking at what Latvians do to themselves (which has a profound effect on Latvia, whether you see Latvia as merely a speck in foreign winds or not) as un-Latvian or even anti-Latvian. The main threat posed by Russia is mostly like the threat a punter poses to girls — there’s no rape going on at the moment; if Latvia wants to sell itself, that’ll be a voluntary transaction made by Latvians.
Regarding my personal politics and the suggestion that I am pandering to an audience — sorry, but there happens to be substance in what I write, and I provide references. What Lucas calls “whataboutism” incessantly infuses your responses. You reach a nadir of total absurdity, for example by asking (at LOL) for a tally of others nations’ war criminals because I brought up Baltic war criminals. Lucas is very critical of Russia — but he also calls countries like Latvia “ill-governed, tetchy, and intolerant.” Address that, without comparison to the neighbors. Otherwise you are like a person in filthy tatters who keeps talking about what other people are wearing.
“Mavriks Vulfsons rises and falls in one sentence in your pantheon of Latvian heroes, and I’m left wondering why you mentioned him at all, if not to demonstrate how difficult it is to hold anyone to some static Latvian identity.” I mentioned Vulfsons in a specific context — towards a definition of “latviskums” in contrast to “Latvia for Latvians”… which definitions are also not immutable (e.g., between Pērkonkrusts, Ulmanis, and Meierovics lies the shadow).
“The dictatorship of Ulmanis was a reflection of the times and not the manifestation of an inherent Latvian-character deformity. It’s more than an a mere ‘article of faith’ because I know the Latvian I would have been in Latvia.” Well why don’t we just sit down on our speck, get blown about by the dread winds of the great powers, and “reflect the times”? Why didn’t Finland reflect the times, Ambersun? Why were the Estonians, also authoritarian, able to hold parliamentary elections in 1938, for instance? Nowhere do I talk about any inherent character deformity — there is such a thing as political immaturity, however, and time doesn’t necessarily cure it. Even today, about half of the Latvian people longs for a “strong hand.” This is not true among most of our neighbors.
Re Valters — of course he knew about Russification; it took place in the Empire, too, not only under the Soviets (in fact, Dunsdorfs suggests that Ulmanis’ mistreatment of minorities was a psychological response to Ulmanis’ mistreatment under Russification).
Re “Lettophobia” — it is not a non-word but an established form, as I explained. The terms for phobias and philias are properly constructed from the Greek, because -phobia and -philia are Greek. Georgia, in Georgian, is Sakartvelo — Georgians are Kartvelebi. You don’t use those words to make a -philia, however. For that matter, you don’t do that for the Germans, either; you use the Greek Γερμανική to get Germanophobe or Germanophile — you don’t say Deutschophile.