Latvia - A Work in Progress?

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

David J Smith

State, Nation and Sovereignty amidst Uncertainty and Change: Turning Points and Continuities in Latvian Society and Polity

Part One

Andrejs Plakans

Death and Transfiguration: Reflections on World War I and the Birth of the Latvian State

Marina Germane

Latvians as a Civic Nation: The Interwar Experiment

David J Smith

Why Remember Paul Schiemann?

Part Two

Deniss Hanovs and Valdis Tēraudkalns

The Return of the Gods? Authoritarian Culture and Neo-Paganism in Interwar Latvia, 1934–1940

Geoffrey Swain

“Come on Latvians, Join the Party—We’ll Forgive You Everything”: Ideological Struggle during the National Communist Affair, Summer 1959

Irēna Saleniece

“At First We Missed Our Latvia...”: Attitudes towards Latvian State during the Soviet Period

Part Three

Ieva Zake

Latvians in Exile and the Idea of the Latvian State

Una Bergmane

International Reactions to the Independence of the Baltic States: The French Example, 1989–1991

Li Bennich-Björkman

“You Are Not the People”: Revisiting Citizenship and Geopolitics

Part Four

Geoffrey Pridham

Post-Soviet Latvia: A Consolidated Democracy in the Third Decade of Independence?

Pēteris Timofejevs Henriksson

The Europeanisation of Latvia’s Public Policy: The Case of Foreign Aid Policy 2004–2010

Daina S. Eglitis

Paradoxes of Power: Gender, Work, and Family in the New Europe

Part Five

Alfs Vanags

Reflections on the Political Economy of the Latvian State since 1991: The Role of External Goals. What to do now that Externally Defined Goals have been Realised?

Aldis Purs

The Unbearable Myth of Convergence: Episodes in the Economic Development of Latvia

Matthew Kott

The Roots of Radicalism: Persistent Problems of Class and Ethnicity in Latvia’s Politics

State, Nation and Sovereignty in a Century of Uncertainty and Change: Turning Points and Continuities in Latvian Society and Polity

David J Smith, University of Glasgow

In a world where memorialisation of the past is increasingly ubiquitous, the period 2013–2016 in Latvia was replete with significant anniversaries. In May 2014, the country could take stock of 10 years as a member of the European Union (EU) and NATO, having just joined the Eurozone while looking ahead to assuming the EU Presidency at the start of 2015. The same period also marked 25 years since the set of events that began with the establishment of the Popular Front of Latvia (1988) and led to a newly-elected parliament declaring (on 4 May 1990) an end to Soviet rule and the start of a transitional period to independence, finally confirmed 16 months later following the final collapse of central Soviet authority in Moscow.

Legally speaking, at least, the Latvia that emerged in August 1991 was not a new state, for it was proclaimed and internationally recognised on the basis of unbroken continuity of the Republic of Latvia declared in November 1918. Seen from this perspective, Latvia celebrated the 90th anniversary of its independence in 2008, and will soon be marking its centenary.[1] In the meantime, the current wave of commemorations surrounding World War I is giving cause for fresh reflection on the events that swept away the pre-existing political, social and economic order of the Baltic Provinces and—in the space of only four years—transformed nascent calls for Latvian national autonomy into demands (actualised in November 1918 and internationally confirmed over the following four years) for a Latvian nation-state.

The experience of the ensuing two decades of sovereign statehood is, however, still overshadowed in official narratives by the events of 1939–1945. In this respect, the period since 2013 has seen a further set of anniversaries connected with (to paraphrase Aldis Purs in his contribution to the current volume) Latvia’s “loss of agency” as a state. Thus, 23 August 2014 marked 75 years since the signature of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which consigned Latvia to a Soviet sphere of influence and paved the way for military occupation and forcible incorporation into the USSR. With this, the country and its inhabitants were drawn into what Timothy Snyder has famously termed the “Bloodlands” of Central and Eastern Europe.[2] The transformation (de facto if not de jure) of the Latvian Republic into the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic under Stalinist auspices was accompanied by arrests, executions and mass deportations during 1940–1941. This was followed by three years of Nazi German occupation, which saw the systematic killing of almost the entire Jewish population. In today’s Latvia, the subsequent expulsion of the German forces by the Soviet Army and the end of World War II is officially remembered not as liberation, but as the replacement of one occupying regime by another: independent statehood was not restored, and the resumption of Soviet rule (preceded during 1944–1945 by a large-scale exodus of Latvians to the West) brought a further wave of arrests and deportations, as well as several years of bitter partisan warfare in the Latvian countryside. The official version of events is, however, still widely questioned amongst the large population of Soviet settlers and their descendants which was established in Latvia during the post-war decades, in a wave of migration that radically transformed the ethno-demographic make-up of the territory.

The cluster of significant anniversaries outlined above provided the original inspiration for this collection of articles reflecting on the historical processes that have shaped present-day Latvia and which continue to inform its development as the country looks ahead to 2018 and the 100th anniversary of the original Declaration of Independence. As Geoffrey Pridham notes in his contribution to this volume, on 21 March 2013 Latvia recorded the 7,884th day since the restoration of its independence in 1991—one day more than the duration of the first period of sovereign statehood from 18 November 1918 to 17 June 1940. Entry to NATO and the EU in 2004 was widely portrayed in official discourse (both Latvian and European) as setting the seal on the reconstruction of a liberal democratic and market-oriented nation-state, by having drawn a line under the events of World War II and its aftermath and returned Latvia to the state of European “normality” it had attained during 1918–1940. However, a quarter of a century on from the restoration of independence, processes of state and nation-building in Latvia are still ongoing. Issues such as citizenship, language policy, minority rights, legitimacy of democratic institutions, economic stability and security all remain the object of public discussion, as does public commemoration of events in Latvia’s past. The current situation reflects in turn longer-standing debates over the course of the past century concerning the relationship between state, nation and sovereignty in the context of Latvian society and polity. By examining different aspects of this relationship this book seeks to reveal both key turning points and continuities in its development and thereby help to inform current debates.

The collection incorporates contributions by established and early career scholars drawn from a range of countries and disciplines, who first came together at a workshop held in Uppsala in December 2013.[3] It addresses the key questions outlined above, whilst also focusing on some hitherto largely unexplored aspects and dimensions of state and nation-building over the past 100 years.

In the opening contribution to the volume, Andrejs Plakans illustrates how the constant upheavals during the past century have made it difficult to craft the kind of coherent “master narrative” of the past that is generally seen as a crucial component of the modern national state. Reflecting on the independence proclamation of 18 November 1918, Plakans argues that the circumstances in which it was adopted and the state of uncertainty and flux which surrounded it make the event difficult to situate within a linear narrative painting independence as the preordained endpoint of the 19th-century National Awakening. While the vision set out by the state founders did ultimately provide a platform for victory over the Bolsheviks and the attainment of international recognition, “18 November in itself was not a transfigurative moment but the start of a transfigurative process” marking the start of a “relatively slow diffusion of the idea of a Latvian state.” In this sense, Plakans argues, “the Republic of Latvia remained a ‘work in progress’ well into the 1920s even though it had already acquired a de jure existence.”

The first and most essential step in any modern state-building process is to define the demos (or demoi) which constitutes the basis of the political community.[4] While the founding Declaration of 1918 referred to sovereignty within united ethnographic boundaries, fully one quarter of the inhabitants of the new state were non-Latvian by ethnicity. As Marina Germane demonstrates in the first contribution dealing with interwar Latvia, the need to accommodate the ethnic diversity of the local population had been acknowledged already prior to World War I, in the treatises on Latvian nationhood published by Marģers Skujenieks and Miķelis Valters in 1913 and 1914 respectively. A civic understanding of nationhood was carried over into the early post-independence period, contributing to a 1922 constitution adopted in the name of a political “nation of Latvia” as well as to broad rights of cultural self-government offered to national minorities as part of an ambitious (and by the European standards of the day largely unique) experiment in pluralist democracy.

The next contribution, by David J. Smith, develops Germane’s central point by revisiting the life and ideas of one of the key participants in this interwar “experiment”—the German Latvian politician, journalist, lawyer and “Thinker of the European Minorities Movement” Paul Schiemann. Born into the ruling elite of the late tsarist period, Schiemann lived through the creation and subsequent vicissitudes of the independent Latvian state during the first half of the 20th century, dying in 1944 in Nazi-occupied Rīga. Clearly a figure of international stature during the 1920s, he was a prominent minority rights activist, but also a strong patriot of Latvia and passionate advocate of European peace and unity, as outlined in the acclaimed biography published by John Hiden in 2004. The appearance of this biography in Latvian- and Russian-language translation in 2016—the result of an initiative lasting several years and bringing together many prominent figures within society and politics—suggests a continued resonance for Schiemann’s ideas in today’s Latvia. Smith uses this contemporary initiative as a point of departure for analysing Schiemann’s thinking on state- and nation-building and his wide-ranging contribution to the life of the interwar Republic, during an era which can be seen to offer many lessons both for present-day Latvia and for Europe as a whole.

As Germane shows in her analysis of 1920s debates on language use and citizenship, the Latvian state created after World War I was ultimately ill-equipped to sustain its founding vision. In a vulnerable position internationally and faced with growing pressure from nationalist political forces that called for a “more Latvian Latvia”, it ultimately rejected parliamentary democracy in favour of stability and strong leadership. These ideological currents were translated into practice following the coup of May 1934, though—as Deniss Hanovs and Valdis Tēraudkalns outline in the third chapter on the interwar period—Kārlis Ulmanis’ regime embodied a conservative and person-centred authoritarianism with an emphasis on “traditional values” which distinguished it from the more radical nationalism propounded by the extra-parliamentary Pērkonkrusts movement. In their chapter, Hanovs and Tēraudkalns illustrate the main lines of this ideology through an analysis of the authorities’ attitude to the neo-pagan Dievturi movement, whose ideas were seen as potentially disruptive to the state’s relationship with established religious denominations.

While the two decades of interwar independence provide an obvious exercise in contrasts when it comes to the nature of the political regime, there seems much to be said for Artis Pabriks and Aldis Purs’ claim that “the accomplishments of the state [during this period] ... were very real and palpable to its citizens.”[5] In this regard, the two authors describe as “prophetic” the reported claim by Ulmanis that “the ultimate defence of the Latvian state in the face of Nazi or Soviet aggression would be the memory of the independence era.”[6] That the state did much to instil a basic identification on the part of most of its residents is one of the key conclusions that can be drawn from Irēna Saleniece’s contribution to the present volume, which uses oral history as a means of exploring popular attitudes to the half century of foreign rule between 1940 and 1990. Following the Soviet takeover, any public expression of identification with the interwar Republic was denounced as “bourgeois nationalism” and expressly prohibited. Privately, however, the period of independence remained a reference point for the generation born in Latvia during 1910–1935. In Saleniece’s view, the surviving members of this group (while often ambivalent towards post-1991 realities) played a crucial role in the restoration of statehood, by acting as a “bridge” between two periods of independent Latvia and transmitting concrete knowledge about state order, traditions and symbols to their children and grandchildren. A similar “bridging” function can of course be discerned in the case of the large exile communities that were established by those who fled Latvia ahead of the reconquest by the Soviets in 1944. Not least, these became the guardians of the legal continuity ideal which emerged during 1988–1991 as the cornerstone of the movement for independence. This role is explored by Ieva Zake in her wide-ranging contribution on Latvians in the United States, which explores the idea of the Latvian state held by both post- and pre-1940 exile communities.

The independence movement that took shape from 1988 did not, however, emerge as the result of some kind of primordial national reawakening. Rather, it was shaped and led by leaders that had been socialised under Soviet rule and which in most cases had formed part of what could be termed the Soviet Latvian establishment. As scholarship on neighbouring Lithuania has now begun to acknowledge, this invites deeper reflection on the nature of Soviet nationalities policy and a recognition that state- and nation-building were not simply suspended during a Soviet period which carried its own formative legacies for what came after 1991.[7] According to the official ideology of the Soviet regime, 1940 was a popular revolution that overthrew an “unnatural” interlude of bourgeois dictatorship, marking a resumption of the Soviet rule briefly declared in 1918–1919 and making Latvia part of a voluntary federation of sovereign republics. The LSSR was not in fact sovereign in any politically meaningful sense, at least not until Gorbachev’s liberalisation in the late 1980s allowed its institutions to acquire a life of their own. However, by casting the LSSR as the territorial homeland of a Latvian nation defined in narrowly ethnic terms, Soviet ideology exhibited a “paradoxical continuity” (to borrow a phrase used by Davoliūtė with regard to Lithuania) with the policies of the Ulmanis regime during the 1930s, airbrushing out interwar minority communities like the Germans and Jews from the history of Latvia.[8]

Apparent elements of similarity with the 1930s are, however, significantly outweighed by those of difference when one considers the ultimate aims of Soviet policy and the economic and ethno-demographic changes it wrought in Latvia over the course of half a century. While one can speak of genuine cultural autonomy in the form of Latvian-language schooling, media and other institutions that helped to sustain a Latvian ethnonational identity, the Soviet authorities saw this identity as strictly subordinate to identification with the overall USSR and the top-down project of a building a single “Soviet people” (Sovetskii narod). From the 1920s, the Soviet regime had deliberately nurtured the particular identities of non-Russian ethnic groups as a means of promoting their “development” (and—more importantly—of consolidating Soviet power). Yet, the doctrine of “national in form, socialist in content” attached no intrinsic value to the longer-term reproduction of these identities within its overall understanding of socio-economic modernisation. Increasingly denuded of its original Marxist-Leninist ideological content from the 1940s onwards, the construction of Sovetskii narod became more and more akin to a standard, culturally-based project of national integration, within which Russian was accorded growing importance as a state language and the Russian people cast as the core, state-bearing nation.

From the perspective of non-Russian ethnic groups living in their “own” republics, what was officially termed “Sovietisation” thus became synonymous with Russification. Such feelings were especially apparent in Latvia, where centrally-dictated Soviet policies of industrialisation brought large numbers of Russian-speaking settlers to the Republic from the 1940s onwards. In the course of 1944–1989, the proportion of ethnic Latvians within the overall population fell from 75% to 52%, and use of Russian became ever prevalent within the public sphere. One can, therefore, point to inherent contradictions within a Soviet nationality policy that, in the words of Ronald Suny, “nourished cultural uniqueness but denied its expression.”[9] Or, put another way, “[institutionalised] both territorial nationhood and ethno-cultural nationality” as well as the tensions between them.[10]

These tensions and contradictions are explored in Geoffrey Swain’s contribution (“Come on Latvians, Join the Party”) which revisits Latvia’s National Communist “Affair” of 1959. Latvian communists had seen socialism as something to be built within a national frame of reference. They now attempted to graft this onto a society that had experienced “an alternative, non-Soviet and self-determined national existence”[11] for fully two decades prior to 1940 and in which individual citizens had experienced a variety of fates and experiences during 1939–45. Some of those who founded the LSSR genuinely adhered to the Leninist dictum of “national in form, socialist in content” which seemed to be making a comeback post-Stalin and was indeed seen as a necessity if hearts and minds were to be won for Soviet power. They were, however, soon disabused of this notion by more conservative elements of the local and all-union party-state bureaucracy.

The basic tension, however, remained unresolved and fed into mounting discontent over the next three decades, which was quickly articulated once Gorbachev initiated political liberalisation during the late 1980s. This gave rise to a mass national movement which quickly adopted the legal continuity of pre-war independence (and consequent illegality of Soviet rule) as its defining argument. The government elected in 1990 took the first steps in post-communist state-building, but could only do so much without the achievement of full sovereignty, which in turn rested on formal external recognition of statehood. This international dimension to the independence struggle is explored by Una Bergmane in her chapter, which (drawing on previously unseen classified documents) focuses on the until now largely unexplored question of France’s policy towards the “Baltic Question.” As Bergmane demonstrates, the demands for restored independence of Latvia and the other two Baltic countries placed Western leaders in a quandary. They could not publicly renounce the legal continuity principle which had guided their interactions for half a century, especially given the need to acknowledge growing support for the Baltic cause amongst their own publics. The restoration of sovereignty to Moscow’s satellites in Central Europe and the pending reunification of Germany (marking the end of the Yalta system) also further reinforced the moral case for the restoration of independence. Generally, however, legal continuity was secondary to Realpolitik in the thinking of François Mitterand and other Western leaders, whose eyes were firmly on the bigger picture of the USSR and who were reluctant to undermine the position of a Soviet leader who rejected any talk of Soviet occupation and viewed the Baltic territories as an integral part of the USSR. With the elected Baltic governments in a state of limbo, final realisation of independence had to await developments at the Soviet centre and the dramatic collapse of Soviet power following the abortive Moscow putsch of August 1991. The Baltic parliaments seized the initiative and declared immediate and unconditional restoration of their independence on the basis of legal continuity. Smaller countries took the bold step of recognising this. The larger powers only did so following the decision by Russia to extend recognition on 24 August. In this sense, Latvia owes much to Yeltsin’s Russia.

For all of the positive cooperation evident during 1990–1991, the Baltic and Russian governments were on a different page when it came to the legal foundations governing Baltic independence. The Yeltsin government made it clear that it saw Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania not as pre-existing states restored de facto on the basis of legal continuity, but rather as newly-created entitites which should accept the legacies bequeathed by Sovietisation and whose relations with Russia should be governed by treaties signed in January 1991 prior to the fall of the USSR. This brought into focus the question of the large population of Soviet citizens that had settled in Latvia over the previous 50 years and which now made up around a third of the population. The size of this community gave pause for thought and explains why (as Bergmane highlights in her chapter), Latvia followed a more gradual, cautious approach to the question of independence from the USSR. In the course of 1989–1991 the ruling Popular Front had worked pragmatically to unite all residents behind the cause of independence. Among other things it gave assurances that anyone who applied for Latvian citizenship would be granted it unconditionally. This had had some success, though there was an undoubted ambivalence on the part of a large section of the settler population. August 1991 brought a dramatic change in the political situation. Initiative passed to the parties of the Right, which advocated a more restrictive policy of granting citizenship only to those who had held citizenship between the wars or who were descendants of interwar citizens.

In the first of the contributions dealing with post-1991 state- and nation-building, Li Bennich-Björkman revisits the question of why this more restrictive policy was adopted. A common tendency, she observes, has been to attribute this turn of events to a process of nationalist outbidding in which nationalist parties were able to harness a deeply-held but hitherto repressed desire on the part of the Latvian majority for retributive justice and for the restoration of a nation-state as the only viable means of ensuring the longer-term survival of the Latvian language and ethnonational identity. There can be little doubt that the parties of the Right effectively mobilized such feelings in support of a state-building approach that ensured their ascendancy in the elections of 1993 and paved the way for their subsequent dominance within the political system. In so doing they could point to the sanction given to legal continuity by Western governments, which had set no conditions for recognition of independence and had in many cases simply re-established formal diplomatic links severed following the Soviet takeover of 1940.