Latvia - A Work in Progress? E-Book

Marina Germane

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 556

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A quarter century after the formation of the Popular Front and a decade since joining the EU, processes of state- and nation-building in Latvia are still on-going. Issues such as citizenship, language policy, minority rights, democratic legitimacy, economic stability, and security all remain objects of vigorous public discussion. The current situation also reflects longer-standing debates on the relationship between state, nation, and sovereignty in Latvian society and polity. By examining different aspects of these relationships, this volume aims to reveal both key turning points and continuities in Latvia's development, thereby helping to inform current debates.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Contents

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 90thanniversary 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 BalticProvinces 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 factoif notde 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 ofa 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 ade jureexistence.”

The first and most essential step in any modern state-building process is to define thedemos(ordemoi) 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 thenew 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 inthe 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 20thcentury, 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 thecoupof May 1934, though—as Deniss Hanovs and Valdis Tēraudkalns outline in the thirdchapter on the interwar period—Kārlis Ulmanis’ regime embodied a conservative and person-centredauthoritarianism with an emphasis on “traditional values” which distinguished it from the more radical nationalism propounded by the extra-parliamentaryPērkonkrustsmovement. In their chapter, Hanovs and Tēraudkalns illustrate the main lines of this ideology through an analysis of the authorities’ attitude to the neo-paganDievturimovement, whose ideas were seen as potentially disruptive to the state’s relationship with established religious denominations.

While the two decades of interwar independenceprovide 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 thehalf 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 byDavoliūtėwith 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 ofSovetskii narodbecame 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 toRealpolitikin 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 Moscowputschof 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 restoredde factoon 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.

In Bennich-Björkman’s view, however, the approach to citizenship can more plausibly explained by reference to geopolitical motives—namely, the argument that most Russian-speakers (even if they supported independence) retained strong historical and cultural ties to the Russian and Slavic cultural sphere and, had they obtained citizenship immediately and unconditionally, would have pressed for continued political and economic affiliation with the former Soviet space as opposed to the course of integration with the West advocated by Latvia’s independence movement. This argument, one can add, was given further weight by reference to the continued presence in Latvia of former Soviet troops as well as Russia’s own vision at a time when it was manifestly struggling to define a national identity not linked to the Soviet and longer-term imperial past.

By this interpretation, the citizenship law was dictated byRealpolitikand (on the part of many former Popular Front activists) a perceived need for consensus that could unite a majority of the state’s population. One can of course only speculate what might have been transpired had citizenship been made immediately available to all residents back in 1991. Nevertheless, citing the contrasting examples of other post-Soviet states such as Moldova and (to use a currently topical example) Ukraine, Bennich-Björkman suggests that the design of the citizenship law—and its consequent exclusion of a prospective “eastward-leaning” electorate—likely served to facilitate Latvia's remarkably fast and smooth association with the West and its membership in NATO and the EU, as well as making it easier to enact reform policies in support of this goal.

As Bennich-Björkman also observes, however, this approach can be seen as a departure from the democratic principles that were regarded as being of symbolically central importance in the repudiation of the former authoritarian regime. Democracy, she writes, “is inescapably rule not for, but by the people who are affected by decisions.” By this understanding, Soviet-era settlers and their descendants did not immediately become part of ademosor community of citizens with the right to participate in processes of state- and nation-building. Instead, they were recategorised as a Soviet “immigrant minority” which, in order to join the political community, first had to undergo naturalisation on terms set by representatives of (a now predominantly ethnic Latvian) citizenry. The naturalisation paradigm was adopted partly in response to external pressure from the Western democracies and international organisations with which the newly-sovereign Latvia was now seeking to engage. While these endorsed the principle of legal continuity as a basis for state-building, they were not willing to lend their support to the discourse of “decolonisation” propounded by the more radically nationalist parties that emerged from Latvia’s independence movement. They therefore insisted that Latvia should do its utmost to facilitate the rapid naturalisation of the large non-citizen population created in 1991.

The right-of-centre political parties that gained ascendancy in Latvia from 1993 struggled to reconcile these external demands with their own agenda of rebuilding a nation-state around a Latvian ethnocultural core, as well as with the associated discourse that deemed post-war Russian-speaking settlers “illegal occupants”. The resultant tension was reflected in initially restrictive naturalisation provisions—adopted only in 1995—that set annual quotas on the number of people who could apply for citizenship. Ultimately, however, the geopolitical logic of integration proved most compelling, and Latvia subsequently liberalised provisions for acquisition of citizenship as one of the conditions for entry to the European Union in 2004. On the back of these changes, substantial numbers of non-citizens underwent naturalisation during 1998–2004, while further changes to legislation mean that anyone born to non-citizen parents after 1992 can now obtain Latvian citizenship without fulfilling the naturalisation requirements, provided their parents request this when registering the birth. This means that access to citizenship is set to become increasingly moot as time goes on. The period since 1991 has also seen a marked growth in knowledge of the Latvian language amongst Russian-speakers, especially those of the younger generation.

Despite these encouraging trends, societal integration in Latvia still remains in many respects “a work-in-progress” when seen from the standpoint of 2016. The legal categorisation of Soviet-era settlers as an “immigrant minority” following independence obviously disregarded the complex institutional legacies bequeathed by Soviet rule: these mean that many Russian-speakers living in Latvia have maintained a strong attachment to their particular ethnocultural identity, and this has underpinned political mobilisation along party lines and around a range of issues, not least the longer-term maintenance of publically-funded education in the Russian language and the often diametrically opposed interpretations of World War II and the Soviet past that still predominate within the two ethno-linguistic communities. For the now politically dominant Latvian majority, meanwhile, the ethnic boundaries inherited from the Soviet period raise the question of whether the political community can be renconfigured along more culturally pluralistic lines, and those naturalised after 1991 accepted as full and equal members of this community.

This question is one of several addressed in the next chapter by Geoffrey Pridham, who offers a wide-ranging assessment of the extent to which, more than two decades on from the restoration of independence and a decade on from EU accession, Latvia can be considered a fully consolidated democracy. Here, Pridham focuses on different levels (state and institutions; intermediary actors (parties, NGOs, media); civil society and economy; external actors) and dimensions (structural, attitudinal and behavioural) of consolidation, setting these against the formidable challenges arising from the Soviet legacy and the need to effect what Claus Offe has elsewhere termed a “triple transition” entailing concurrent political liberalisation, economic marketisation and (re)construction of a sovereign nation-state.[12]Overall, Pridham sees evidence of considerable progress, especially as regards the routinisation and institutionalisation of democracy. EU accession and subsequent membership have had a significant impact in particular areas, while contributing to an international environment far more benign than the one with which Latvia was constructed between the wars. It remains to be seen whether the multiple crises currently besetting Europe (over Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the Eurozone and refugees) will mutate into the kind of “drastic international circumstances” that could shake the foundations put in place since 1991. Barring this, however, Pridham considers that democracy “has far stronger prospects of survival” than it did during the period of the interwar republic. Key challenges nevertheless remain, not least in the form of the still limited legitimation attained by democracy over the past two decades, as well as weaknesses in the internalisation of new rules and procedures. Continued ethnic divisions are also highlighted as a factor undermining participation, which, as already pointed out by Bennich-Björkman, can be considered a key hallmark of any democratic system.

Pridham’s analysis also leads him to conclude that adaptations made during Latvia’s accession to the EU had an opportunistic quality, which can be seen by some degree of backsliding since 2004. This issue is explored more fully in the chapter byPēteris Timofejevs Henriksson, who uses the case of Latvia’s post-2004 foreign aid policy as a lens for revisiting and moving beyond the long-standing “rationalist” versus “constructivist” dichotomy that exists within the literature on “Europeanisation East.” In the case of foreign aid, Timofejevs Henriksson finds that Latvia (one of the poorest of the new member states) did not in fact comply with standard rationalist expectations of policy backsliding during the post-accession period, as aid volumes continued to increase in absolute terms and policy continued to evolve, even following the severe financial crisis that set in after 2008. His findings suggest that this can be attributed in large part to the fact that domestic decision-makers perceived peer pressure from governments of other EU member states and feared the opprobrium that might result should they fail to comply with the expectation that they provide aid to developing countries. This sensitivity, he argues, should be linked not to any measure of EU conditionality. Rather—adopting a constructivist perspective—he sees it as arising from a continued deeply-felt need for ontological security. This drives policymakers to present and act according to a coherent narrative of state identity capable of appealing to both a domestic and an external audience, and of sustaining a sense of coherent “Self” that would ensure Latvia’s credibility and predictability within the wider international community.

Alfs Vanags’ chapter on political economy further underscores the importance of EU and also NATO accession as “external anchors” for state and nation-building. The goal of entry to these two organisations, Vanags argues, served to depoliticise key issues and greatly assisted in “creating at least the infrastructure of a modern democratic state—if not always the substance.” A similar anchoring role is apparent in the case of entry to the Eurozone, which was used to justify austerity measures adopted in response to a 2008 economic slump exacerbated by fiscal irresponsibility during the boom years of the pre- and immediate post-accession period. The strategy of “internal devaluation” used to combat the crisis has since enabled Latvia to redress the steep decline in GDP during 2008–2010, but has further exacerbated levels of poverty and social inequality that are amongst the highest in the European Union.

The social costs of post-Soviet economic transition provide the focus for the contribution by Daina Eglitis, which uses the case of Latvia to illustrate a “new crisis of men” across the countries that have emerged from behind the former Iron Curtain. To talk of such a crisis is paradoxical, given the continued dominance (with some notable exceptions such as Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga) of men within the Latvian elite and,more broadly, the persistence of a societal context that privileges male actors and masculinity. This structural context, however, has seen the emergence of a population of marginal men characterised by poor health and increased mortality, as well as low educational attainment and labour market participation (in the latter case, Eglitis points to a further paradox whereby women’s apparent advantage in the labour market is in part built on a foundation of disadvantage—namely, a concentration within the lower-wage areas of the economy). Statistics also show that during the crisis years of 2009–2010, men were disproportionately represented amongst those leaving Latvia, in a flow of outward labour migration that has become arguably the most pressing issue facing the state following accession to the European Union. As Aldis Purs reminds us in the penultimatecontribution to the volume, the scale of this phenomenon provided a key argument for former President Andris Bērziņš’ alarming assertion in 2013 that “unless Latvia achieves the average income level of the EU in 10 years’ time, it will cease to exist as apolitically viable state.”

While Purs characterises Bērziņš’ statement as exaggerated and ill-informed, he nevertheless sees little prospect that Latvia will achieve convergence with the leading modern, industrial economies of Western Europe anytime soon.In this regard, he cites an analysis suggesting that in order to attain EU average GDP per capita by 2023, Latvia’s growth rate would have to outstrip that of the Union as a whole by 5% annually over the entire period in question. Expectations that Latvia would quickly catch up economically with its Western neighbours were widespread in 1991, and perhaps even more so immediately after entry to the EU in 2004. Underpinning such hopes was a prevalent historical narrative which held that the three Baltic States had attained parity with their Scandinavian neighbours during the interwar period and, had it not been for the ensuing Soviet occupation, would today enjoy comparable living standards. For Purs, however, this claim is unfounded, and part of a wider long-standing “myth of convergence” with the West. In so far as it had not been entirely decimated or dismantled during World War I, the economic infrastructure inherited by the interwar Republic of Latvia had been largely geared to the requirements of a large empire rather than to local needs. The post-war situation meant that there was no prospect of reviving the industrial base established in the late tsarist period. In its place came a system largely based on early-stage small market agriculture, which (while vital in undergirding the political legitimacy of the new state) was ill-placed to attract the capital and technical investment necessary to achieve rapid economic modernisation. With the Soviet takeover came a reversion to patterns of development characteristic of the tsarist era, creating an economic base which again all but collapsed with the demise of the USSR.

In short, Purs argues that the longer term economic development of Latvia over the past century has to be “measured against a backdrop of near constant change and frequent ruin.” Having reattained “agency” as a state in 1991, Latvia has linked its economic fate to that of the European Union, but still faces the challenge of how to access capital and expertise while maintaining a degree of local control over development. This challenge, moreover, should be viewed not simply in terms of attaining parity with the EU in per capita GDP terms, but also as one of eradicating pronounced levels of inequality and poverty within society. In his earlier chapter, Alf Vanags attributes the high degree of inequality in Latvia to the very modest redistribution generated by the current tax-benefit system, and advances concrete recommendations such as tapering of the withdrawal of benefits as earnings grow above currently very low minimum income thresholds. Vanags also offers further prescriptions for tackling key challenges such as strengthening education, eradicating the shadow economy and increasing accountability of elected representatives as a means of improving policymaking now that the previous external constraints are no longer in place.

Vanags’ key question—what to do now that all externally defined goals have been realised?—is of course one that has broader relevance beyond the economic realm. EU and NATO membership may have been hailed as marking an end to “transition” and a return to “normality”, but what does it in fact mean to be a “normal” (or “proper”, to use Timofejevs Henriksson’s term) European country amid the crises and political divisions currently besetting the European Union over monetary union, the response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine and, now, “Brexit”? During 2012–2016, the issue of European norms has also been thrown into especially sharp relief by the question of how to respond to thearrival in Europe of hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Iraq. In a much earlier work on neighbouring Estonia, published in 1993, Rein Taagepera hailed that country’s return to independence, but underlined the scale of the challenges posed by independence in an increasinglyinterdependent world.[13]Nearly a quarter of a century on from the fall of the Soviet Union, Latvia and the other Baltic countries are still coming to terms with this state of affairs. As several the contributions to this volume underline, much still needs to be done to deliver on the initial promise of restored independence and to consolidate a democratic nation-state. At the same time, the nation-state modelper seoften appears ill-placed to contend with the challenges of the contemporary world.

These challenges are alluded to in the concluding chapter to the volume by Matthew Kott, who strikes a cautionary note in a further wide-ranging historical overview spanning the period from the 1905 Revolution right up to the present day. Taking as his central focus the intersection of class and ethnicity in Latvia’s politics, Kott highlights a persistent trend towards the securitisation of ethnicity and the “ethnification” of social issues, the result being a vicious circle of radicalisation that has consistently hindered the consolidation of an open, pluralistic, and inclusive polity. The experience of the past 100 years, Kott claims, has given rise to a nation “constructed to view itself as constantly under threat” and to a continued tension between ethnic and civic nationalism that appears to have grown sharper since 2010. While the current international context means that security—as more conventionally understood—remains a real issue for the restored Latvian state, history shows that ethnification and securitisation of social issues offers no long-term perspective. Only by breaking the cycle so often repeated in the past can Latvia hope to move towards the situation of human security that has proved so elusive over the past century.

[1]David J. Smith, David J. Galbreath and Geoffrey Swain, eds.,From Recognition to Restoration: Latvia's History as a Nation-State(Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2010).

[2]Timothy Snyder,Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin(London: Bodley Head, 2010).

[3]The editor and authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support for this event provided by the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies (UCRS) and the Centre for Russian and Central and East European Studies (CRCEES) of the University of Glasgow.

[4]Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan,Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe(Baltimore, Md., London: Johns Hopkins University Press,1996), 16.

[5]Artis Pabriks and Aldis Purs,Latvia: The Challenges of Change(London, New York: Routledge, 2001), 22.

[6]Pabriks and Aldis Purs,Latvia, 23.

[7]On the Lithuanian case, seeVioleta Davoliūtė,The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War(Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013).

[8]Quotation fromDavoliūtė 2014, 3.

[9]Ronald Suny, “Incomplete Revolution: National Movements and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire,”New Left Review189 (1992): 113.

[10]Rogers Brubaker,Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe(Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8.

[11]V. Stanley Vardys, “Modernisation and Baltic Nationalism,”Problems of CommunismSeptember–October (1975): 36.

[12]Claus Offe, “Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe,” in Claus Offe, ed.,Varieties of Transition(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 29–49.

[13]Rein Taagepera,Estonia: Return to Independence(Boulder: Westview Press), 217–220.

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

Andrejs Plakans, Iowa State University

1.Short-Lived “Master Narratives”

In contemporary historical research the concept of “master narrative” has had considerable success in becoming a component in descriptions of modern nation-states. It is widely believed that nation-states generate from within their cultures a dominant interpretation of their long-term history, bordering on the mythical or at least containing mythical elements. In time, the interpretation takes on hegemonic characteristics because it is reiterated over generations, appears in the textbooks of primary and secondary schools, and speads widely throughout popular culture. A “master narrative” is taken to reflect a collectivity’s sense of self—its identity—and often serves as an overall justification for domestic or foreign policies and for conceptually separating “us” from “them,” the members of the national collective from those who do not belong to it.[1]The term “master narrative” is sometimes used interchangably with an analogous phrase—”official history”—the latter suggesting that the “master narrative” has been produced, directly or indirectly, at the behest of the central government in order to legitimise existing power arrangements.[2]Critical assessments of “master narratives” and “official histories” have for a long time taken both to task for not having insufficient distance from Power—meaning State Power—and for subordinating the investigation of a country’s past to the interests of those in power. Other critics tend to be less condemnatory because they recognise that the origins of a society’s understanding of its own past emerges through far more complicated processes than simply on “orders from above.” Also, most historians will admit that the desconstruction of established “master narratives” is not self-justifying but can be a power-play in disguise, aiming to substitute a new “master narrative” for a prevailing one because the new narrative better serves the political purposes of its proponents.

With respect to Latvian-language history writing in the 20th century—the century in which it became a continuous activity—it can be said that various proposed “master narratives” have had little luck in living a long life. Latvia has not been an hospitable context for the development of all-inclusive historical accounts of the kind that frequently characterise the writing of history in nation-states with relatively stable borders, stable governments,a stable population, and institutional continuity among the professional researchers who call themselves historians. At the end of the 19th century, Jānis Krodznieks (1851–1924), who is understood to be the “founder” of modern Latvian historiography, sought to depose what he believed to be the “master narratives” about the Baltic littoral in the history writing of Baltic German scholars.[3]Yet, even as Krodznieks was writing, he was already finding himself in competition with the Marxist-inspired general history of Kārlis Landers (1883–1937), who sought to dethrone both the Baltic German and the early Latvian nationalist historical discourses.[4]In the meantime, a “popular” narrative of the Latvian past, accumulating in the pseudo-historical writings of Latvian nationalist activists, was constructing a long-term story about the centuries-long travails of the Latviantauta(Engl. nation) that, according to this version, had been blocked from normal historical nation development by the arrival in the 13thcentury of German merchants and crusaders who in due course established themselves as regional overlords. How firmly any of these competing “master narratives” seized the imagination of the Latvian-speaking population of the Russian BalticProvinces remains an open question. But they probably were more appealing than those being written by ImperialRussianhistorians, who conceptualised the Baltic region as a borderland and tied its story to that of the rise of the Russian state.[5]

The “competition of narratives” before World War I was temporarily rendered moot by the founding of the Latvian state in 1918 and the gradual entrenchment of a self-referential national historical narrative with the Latviantautaas the central actor.[6]Historical developments over the centuries were evaluated in terms of how they affected Latvians, and judgements were made about other peoples in terms how helpful they had been in the emergence of Latvians as a distinct and self-conscious people. As it happened, the interwar Latvian historians—numbering no more than perhaps a dozen—were opening themes that elsewhere in Western history writing became popular some 30 years later: the focus on Latvians was certainly “history from below” (in the Baltic context), and because details of their everyday lives in the past were now at center stage, it was also “social history” andAlltagsgeschichtesimultaneously. This thrust was was inevitable if one was to highlight the bottom layer of Baltic society—the peasant estate,Bauernstand—to which most Latvians had either belonged for centuries or from which they had become in recent decades only one or two generation removed. The new master narrative that struggled to emerge from these “national” studies meant to link centuries of subordination to the 19th-century “National Awakening” and eventually to the appearance of the Latvian state in 1918, the latter—a relatively recent event—being portrayed as the culmination toward which long-term historical change was pointing. In these reconceptualisations, Latvian academic history moved closer to the “popular” version of the same story, since both weretauta-centred.

The two interwar decades turned out to be too short for a “national narrative” to be consolidated. Two occupations—the Soviet (1940–1941) and the Nazi-German (1941–1944)—rendered impossible for a half-decade any written version of Latvian history that was not Communist Party-approved during the first and did not fit with Nazi ideology during the second.

To the Communist Party, the interwar Republic meant domination of the “Latvian working people” by a “bourgeois clique” and after 1934 by a “fascist dictatorship”; Nazi propaganda foresaw Latvians—a racially somewhat inferior population—either being expelled from the Baltic region or Germanised if continuing to live there. The imperfectly formulated “master narrrative” of the interwar decades, however, lived on in the work of a handful of Latvian historians who in 1944–1945 fled Latvia and after the late 1940s came to settle in such new homelands as Sweden, the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Canada.[7]In exile, no organisation of Latvian historians existed, however, and individual professionals were on their own. Some of those who had been trained as historians in the late 1930s entered other lines of work and continued to write Latvian history in their spare time. Given their very small number, their efforts hardly constituted a “master narrative” in the normal sense, i.e. an agreed-upon version accepted by hundreds of professionals, the consensus view of an entire field. Generally, the first generation of Latvianémigréhistorians (with some exceptions) continued to have weak institutional anchors in their new homelands; those who did, did not seek to launch a new narrative but continued to work within the general framework of interwar national history.[8]In the course of time, the first and second exile generations had to yield the stage to younger professional historians of Latvian background whose approaches to the Latvian past were influenced far more by interests and research directions in the Western historical professions than by the formulations of their senior Latvian colleagues.

In the meantime, during the decades of the Cold War the historians of the Latvian SSR produced several successive editions of Party-approved “master narratives,” of which the most recent (1986) replaced an earlier Stalinist-era version.[9]Ironically, this last work appeared just at the start of the internal upheavals that eventually destroyed the USSR and returned state sovereignty to Latvia, so that for all intents and purposes the 1986 “master narrative” of the Soviet era was stillborn. Latvia entered a new phase of its history without a “master narrative” other than the rather sketchy variant on offer from theémigréLatvian historians. Convinced that a “master narrative” was needed, however, the researchers of the post-1991 Latvian Intitute of History and the Faculty of History (both entities eventually at the University of Latvia) set out to create one dealing with the history of of the Latviantauta(people) and state during the 19th and 20th centuries. As of this writing, three volumes have been produced by this effort but the intended series remains unconcluded.[10]The intent of the series was to lay out the interpretation of the past that Latvian historians could produce after being freed of ideological contraints. Unfortunately, during the first decade after renewed independence, the reading public remained deeply suspicious of the entire historical profession in Latvia. Pre-1991 historical writings had for decades formed a kind of easily recognised congealed orthodoxy that demanded repeated demonstrations of loyalty from researchers and from several generations of secondary school pupils and university students. The suspicion was extended to all manner of official-sounding and official-looking historical publications, even though they were being produced in the total absence of a “Party line.”

Unsurprisingly, the further development of the Latvian historical profession during the past two decades has not brought into prominence a new commanding version of Latvian history in the long term—i.e. no “master narrative.” Nearly every component of previous “master narratives”—especially of the Marxist-Leninist variant but also of the interwar era and of the writings of theémigréhistorians—has been evaluated, reexamined, deconstructed and if necesary disagreed with.[11]The period since 1991 has thus been an era of contestation, but not—it should be noted—of ringing condemnation of earlier Latvian historical writing. Some descriptions of short streches of the Latvian past have been accepted, possibly becoming candidates for a later “master narrative,” if one appears. Somehave been closely reexamined (Kārlis Ulmanis’ authoritarian rule, for example) and new interpretations offered, while entirely new research domains have been opened and as of this writing are in the process of gaining currency.[12]New versions of monographspublished in the Soviet decades have been produced, with their empirically-based sections preserved and the Soviet-era theoretical framework discarded. Headway has been made in new fields of historical work—oral history, the workings of historical memory, cultural history—but the products of these still remain discrete and unmerged into an all encompassing long-term story. The role of Baltic Germans and other minority populations of historic Latvian geographic space is seldom treated any longer as involving “outsiders”, but is described respectfully or at least without the assumption that non-Latvians in the Baltic littoral were always oppressors.

This process of change in the historical profession has not been accompanied, however, by a diminution in the sharpness of contrasting viewpoints. This is especially so in the realm of media-generated historical narratives in which collisions continue between the perception in the Russophone and Lettophone populations of the country, especially with respect to World War II and the decades following it.[13]There also remains a fairly substantial cleavage between the careful and fine-grained investigations of academic history and the overall mega-visions often preferred by a Latvian-using general readership. The latter has continued to insist that there is already a usable long-term narrative in place—as exemplified by such perennialy popular works as Uldis Ģērmanis’Latviešu tautas piedzīvojumi(The Adventures of the Latvian People)[14]—and has repeatedly charged that the painstaking investigations of academic historians are too specialised and too hesitant to assist in the “patriotic” education of young Latvians. Finally, due to severe resource shortages, research areas falling outside the time frame of about 1850 to 2014 remain short of specialists and funded projects, which ultimately means that very long stretches of Latvian history will remain unrevised, unsupplemented and unprepared to be included into a new “master narrative” if and when one comes into being. Though one can find consensus about this or that phenomenon in the Latvian past, an overall generally accepted interpretation—a “master narrative” in the usual sense—is therefore as of this writing not close to having formed itself.

2.The Place of the 1918 Independence Proclamation

It is highly likely that a new “master narrative” will assign an important role to the independence proclamation of 18 November 1918, but what that role will be is not yet clear. One meaning that will probably not be resusciated in full would come from the orthodox Marxist-Leninist contention that the 1918 Republic was a “bourgeois” structure. This understanding relied heavily on the idea of historical inevitability and pictured the 1918 state as a product of developments that unfolded according to “historic laws” (Latv.likumsakarīgi). The “national” school—the interwar historians and the first generation ofémigrés—also flirted with inevitability, but its historical references referred to different phenomena. In both of these interpretations the persons on the stage of the building that is now the National Theatre on 18 November 1918 were acting out roles prepared for them by “historical change” over which neither they nor any other human beings had full control.

There is a strong possibility, however, that fragments of the two dominant interpretations will make their way into a new “master narrative.” For the national historians, the Republic of Latvia proclaimed on that date represented the culmination of the final phase of a process that had started in the mid-19th century with the activists of the “National Awakening” and perhaps even earlier. The motor of this process of change was the emergence and growth of a national consciousness (not “class conflict”), at first in the minds of a handful of young educated Latvians and in time in the minds of tens of thousands of other Latvian-speakers of the Russian BalticProvinces. This psychological alteration reflected a very different sense of belonging: a new mentality that differentiated and united simultaneously. The new way of thinking brought Latvia-using individuals to the realisation that in their very beings they were different from other peasants in a particular locality and region in which they were living but also that they were the same as other persons living elsewhere who spoke the same language. Activists believed that they were neither creating nor inventing a new consciousness but rather were uncovering it: its components already existed and had to be “awakened” and “brought into the light.” Ultimately, the goal of the “national awakeners” was to show Latvian-speakers that in the depth of their being they were atautaentitled to self-determination. Everywhere on the European continent similar “awakening” activities were going on, especially among the long-subordinated peoples of the multi-national empires; and the Latvian “awakeners” felt themselves to be participants in a great historical trend that would produce a new Europe consisting of a large array of self-conscious peoples each making a contribution to a composite European civilisation.[15]The task of “awakening” would be long and hard but it would inevitably reach its culmination when the Latviantautareached the highest stage of self-awareness. The “national” narrative would eventually tie together disparate elements of this long story to suggest that no other outcome than the 1918 Republic was possible. The distinction between ineluctability and inevitability was seldom preserved in these later interpretations.

For Marxists-Leninists, on the other hand, the 1918 Republic was only the penultimate step of a much more binding process that was taking the proletariat toward its inevitable triumph. The “laws” of historical development required there to be a period of time when the “bourgeoisie” were dominant, and the interwar period served this ideological purpose. The real turning point in this scheme was to come in 1940–1941 when, with the help of the USSR, the Latvian masses finally rid themselves of the oppressive bourgeoisie as a class and cleared the way for the true revolution. The reason this had not taken place earlier, in the World War I period, had to do with the armed interference in Latvian affairs of the capitalist and imperialist countries. This understanding of Latvian history reduced considerably the importance of the 1918 proclamation, seeing it as creating a temporary state structure that was fated to disappear.

The Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Latvian events of course had virtually no currency in Latvia during the interwar decades. For the national historians the important struggle was betweentautas(peoples), not classes, which led them to the medieval era, when the “normal” evolution of the Baltic region had been derailed. The pre-13th century tribal societies had been in the process of becoming states and would have done so had it not been for the invasion of the Baltic crusaders and the subjugation of the native population.[16]It was strongly suggested that throughout the next “700 years of slavery” the desire for political independence lay just outside the reach of the Latvian-speaking population. Certain stylistic mannerisms became charateristic of this discourse, such as the projection of the termLatvija(Latvia) backwards in time and its use as a kind of shorthand to refer to the territory of the Baltic littoral inhabited by speakers of the Latvian language. The name of the political entity that had been proclaimed on 18 November 1918 was used in place of clumsier but more accurate territorial descriptions such as “the territory of the 20th century Latvian state” or “the sector of the BalticProvinces inhabited by Latvian speakers” or “the territory of the two adjacent BalticProvinces of Livland and Courland, plus several districts of Vitebsk.” At the same time, similar usage of collective nouns such as “Latvians” (latvieši) in the description of earlier centuries suggested that the littoral sub-population that spoke the Latvian language (and its precursors) already possessed a proto-consciousness of commonality that was standing by in the realm of the spirit and just waiting to enter historical reality. These usages were present even in the writings of historians who understood perfectly well that they were anachronistic, but the desire to rush into existence the Latvian state and and its supportive consciousness appears to have been irresistible. It was a way of “nationalising” the earlier history of the territory that became the state in the 20th century. “Latvija” was animpliedreality throughout the complicated history of the Baltic littoral, until in 1918 it was finally made anexplicitreality. These usages were an endorsement of the belief widespread among the “national awakeners” of the 19th century that they were simply working to bring to the surface a mentality that was already present among those who spoke the Latvian language—nothing new, in other words, was being created or invented, the 1918 state itself having being always present in the shadows, as it were.

The effort to produce a truly “Latvian” history of the territory that was now a Latvian state came to an abrupt end in 1940 when, as mentioned earlier, the country was occupied and annexed by the USSR and the Marxist-Leninist historical framework became mandatory for nearly a half-century. Most of the leading national historians went into exile in 1944–1945 and, as best they could, continued their work in new homelands. The merger of the efforts of the first and second generation of exile Latvian historians produced a formidable body of work with the so-called “Daugavaseries”—entitled “The History of Latvia” (Latvijas vēsture)—eventually becoming emblematic of this effort.[17]The series title implied that even if the pre-1918 volumes were about theterritoryin which Latvians lived, historical change was preparing the resident population for the appearance of the Latvian state. The individual volumes of the series that were sent to friends or colleagues in the Latvian SSR were confiscated by customs officials, redirected tospecfondi, or simply consigned to the flames. Though on library shelves theDaugavaseries physically resembled what a “master narrative” might look like—a row of eleven volumes each some 600 pages long, handsomely bound, all in the Latvian language—it was able to have only a limited impact outside Latvian-reading population in the West and virtually none at all on potential readers in the Latvian SSR.

For understandable reasons, the 20th-century Latvian state has subsequently had a mesmerising effect on Latvian history-writing, which also means that political history—the emergence, disappearance, dependence, reemergence, and inner workings of the state—have been somewhat privileged. How political events have interacted with those in other domains of life—social, economic, cultural—has not received as much attention, but a certain kind of revisionism has been coming to the fore in recent years as a result of the desire to re-examine the impact on Latvian life of the two 20th-century World Wars. Researchers of the workings of historical memory in Latvia have recently published a series of volumes dealing with World War II, and several conferences in