European Document/Gorbo, Pugo, and a Captive Nation
Kalnins, Ojars
EUROPEAN DOCUMENT GORBO, PUGO, AND A CAPTIVE NATION Ask a party boss in Soviet-ruled Latvia what he thinks of Gorbachev's reforms, and like the dutiful puppet he's learned to be, he'll publicly...
...Part B presents more complex structures and additionalnot have been his intent, Lenin's Bolshevik coup d'etat weakened the Czarist empire enough to enable the Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians to break away and form independent states in 1918...
...Once in the not too distant past, a loyal apparatchik like Boris Pugo, First Secretary of the Latvian Communist Party, had it easy...
...Then came the Latvian Writers' Union Plenum, held on June 1 of this year, in anticipation of the XIXth Party Conference in Moscow...
...At this moment we can do nothing," Dzenitis said, "but in the future we will recommend criminal actions...
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...The authorities pegged Helsinki 86 as extremist and its followers as social outcasts, claiming that no self-respecting Latvian shared their radical ideas...
...The party bosses were dumbstruck...
...Prague Spring had arrived in Riga...
...Yes-men like Pugo, responsible for maintaining his Latvian satrapy, liked it—and kept it—that way...
...With the voices of Baltic dissent safely stilled in Siberia, all was quiet in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia...
...It was Lenin, after all, who condemned the imperialism of the Russian Czars and defended self-determination and independence for Czarist-ruled territories...
...Pugo thoughtfully responded: "Yes, that is a view that is seriously being expressed...
...As a consequence of the meeting, the party leaders published a strongly worded criticism of the recent "excesses...
...The lengthy document called for separate representation at the U.N...
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...But if he gives the people toomuch power, they're going to run with it—right out of the Soviet Union...
...He could do what he pleased, arrest anyone he wanted, Ojars Kalnins is public relations director of the American Latvian Association and chairman of the Joint Baltic American National Committee...
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...Rather than intimidate the masses, the statement infuriated them...
...and never had to hear a dissenting word...
...9'1 he one-two punch of the Writers' 1 resolution and the June 14 rally prompted the party leaders to call a special meeting on June 18 to deal with rising nationalist unrest in the country...
...Glasnost has suddenly enabled him to demand that right...
...As the ceremony got underway, more than 4,000 Latvians, waving flags and anti-Soviet posters, marched onto the scene...
...A clandestine tape recording was made of the explosive meeting and transcripts were leaked to dissidents in Latvia and to the Munich-based Radio Free Europe...
...more...
...The moment Gorbachev took the muzzle off public criticism, the Balts went to the heart of the matter: the demands were for self-determination, sovereignty, and the right to secede...
...Cloth...
...For now, the nationalist forces in Latvia have formed an alliance with Gorbachev against the local party leadership...
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...Surely we will find criminal codes under which we can lock up the informals...
...On July 16, over 30,000 people gathered in an outdoor amphitheater in Riga to demand the rehabilitation of the former national flag of independent Latvia...
...If it weren't for Gorbachev and his troika of glasnost, perestroika and democratization, the local party wouldn't have to stand for this kind of public embarrassment...
...Eduards Berk-lays, a recently rehabilitated former party leader purged by Khrushchev in 1959 for excessive nationalism, condemned the Russification of Latvia...
...Within days, most of the Latvian population had their first insight into the uncensored thoughts of their party leaders...
...Dozens of the flags dotted the audience and lined the stage, as speaker after speaker intermingled calls for "a sovereign Latvia" with criticism of the existing government...
...While a demonstration for greater press freedom may mobilize fifty protesters in Moscow, rallies in the Baltic States generate 100,000...
...In a resolution published on the front page of the Union's newspaper, Literatura un Maksla (Literature and Art), the Writers' Union demanded that Latvia be acknowledged as a "sovereign state...
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...A rigged election brought forth a made-in-Moscow puppet government, which—surprise!—begged the Kremlin to liberate Latvia from sovereignty and reincarnate it as a Soviet Republic...
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...This criticism attacked corruption within the system, but rarely the system itself...
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...They also knew that, at least in principle, the rest of the free world agreed...
...The Writers' Union resolution was remarkably similar to a ten-point proposal set forth by the "extremists" of Helsinki 86 just six months earlier...
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...Unbeknownst to Pugo, glasnost had penetrated even the party's inner circle...
...Now, thanks to Gorbachev and glasnost, he has had to endure a series of indignities that as a former KGB chief he could never have imagined possible...
...One Central Committee member ominously mused that the increasingly confrontational atmosphere in the country may not be all bad, because if the situation continued to get worse, there were always tanks in the nearby town of Adazi...
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...SS =KGB," "DOWN WITH 40 YEARS OF STALINIST OCCUPATION," and "A FREE LATVIA IN A UNITED EUROPE...
...According to Vulfsons, the Soviet version of Latvian history for the last forty-eight years—one which, he confessed, he had also espoused—had really been a "sham...
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...In the Baltic States, however, every Latvian, Lithuanian, or Estonian, from the lowliest street sweeper to a university professor, qualifies as a dissident if he believes that his nation has a right to sovereignty and self-determination...
...In Moscow, allowing intellectuals to criticize the entrenched bureaucracy, the crimes of Stalin, and the stagnation of Brezhnev may have made sense...
...With an uncomfortable Gorbunovs standing nearby, Berklays told the cheering crowd, "The present government in Latvia is incapable of dealing with existing problems, and therefore must step down...
...Less than a month later, an annual Latvian folk festival in Riga turned into what the New York Times's Moscow correspondent, Philip Taubman, described as "an exuberant nationalist rally...
...Stanislaus Zukulis, the Latvian KGB chief, complained that "the KGB has not performed its duty properly 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 because we have not been given concrete orders...
...While it may What sort of people need to learn a • foreign language as quickly and effectively as possible...
...Close to 100,000 people jammed city streets, waving the outlawed maroon-and-white national flag of independent Latvia and carrying signs that read, "RED ARMY GO HOME...
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...Anatolijs Gorbunovs, the chief ideologist on the Latvian Communist Party Central Committee, even agreed to join dissident clergymen and national rights activists on the podium for the event...
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...Pugo warned that the party was losing control of the population...
...The working classes have had little interest in overthrowing the Soviet government and little sympathy for the likes of Sakharov and Grigoryants...
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...The Latvian intellectuals in the audience applauded wildly...
...What many in the West are calling Gorbachev's "second Russian Revolution" is looking more and more to Baits as a golden opportunity to make history repeat itself...
...But the resurgence of nationalism in Latvia, which is paralleled in neighboring Estonia and Lithuania, poses an even stickier dilemma for Gorbachev himself...
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...Stalin's political stage-managing was so clumsy and transparent that even now, forty-eight years later, few Western governments are willing to recognize the Baltic States as Soviet Republics...
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...Fueled by glasnost, nationalism has expanded the ranks of Soviet dissent a thousandfold...
...Within days a demonstration was held at the Central Committee headquarters to protest its actions...
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...Get him off alone, out of earshot of his bosses in the Kremlin, and he'll tell you what his country really needs is a little dose of that old-time stagnation...
...Knowing they couldn't prevent the rally, party officials tried to defuse it a day earlier by placing an article in Latvian newspapers lamely asserting that the old maroon-and-white flag had never been illegal, and thus didn't need to be "rehabilitated...
...If the hard-line Communists that rule Latvia have souls, these are the times that were meant to try them...
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...To which one rally speaker responded, "If that's the case, then every arrest and imprisonment over the last forty-eight years for displaying the Latvian flag must itself have been illegal...
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...Once again, the party got more than it had bargained for...
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...Gorbachev would no doubt like to see the anti-reform foes in the Latvian Communist party removed and thus may welcome the support of the dissidents...
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...Mavriks Vulfsons showed up and amplified his Writers' Union speech...
...The power is being taken from the Party...
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...And then came Gorbachev and glasnost...
...The moment Ulme concluded his fiery speech, the presiding party apparatchiks hastily declared the rally over and fled the scene...
...A week later, while Pugo was still overcoming the shell-shock of Vulfsons's public confession, the Writers' Union detonated an even bigger bombshell...
...The movement may ultimately force a reassessment or redefinition of the "dissident" movement in the Soviet Union...
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...The ultimate insult came on July 21, when the party leadership held its annual rally to commemorate the forty-eighth anniversary of the installation of Soviet power in Latvia...
...Several thousand workers, mostly Russians, were bused in from factories to listen to Pugo and company give the standard stump speeches in praise of the party...
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...While many of the suddenly intimidated "official" demonstratorsbegan slipping away into the trees, the Latvians moved to the front of the crowd and demanded that one of their spokesmen be allowed to address the rally...
...The real issue was whether the Soviets had a right to be there in the first place...
...In the Baltic States the incompetence and cruelty of past Soviet rulers had been devastating, but it was essentially a secondary concern...
...Yet under the iron reign that began with Stalin and continued through Chernenko, no one dared raise a fuss unless he was prepared to spend the rest of his life in the Gulag...
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...and the Olympic Games, local control over the press and foreign travel procedures, freedom to forge closer ties with Latvians abroad, and the right to assert greater control over military and secret police activities...
...Like its Baltic neighbors, Estonia and Lithuania, it won its independence in 1918 and was doing just fine as a sovereign state until Stalin invaded in 1940...
...With Pugo and company in the audience, Mavriks Vulfsons, a longtime party loyalist and trusted political commentator for Latvian state TV, ascended to the podium and told Latvia's party elite that "there was no revolution in Latvia in 1940, just a Stalinist occupation...
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...Although they had yet to formulate an official response to the intellectuals' demands, the party bosses grudgingly approved a request by unofficial Latvian groups, sometimes called "informals," to hold a public rally in Riga on June 14 to commemorate the victims by Ojars Kalnins of the Stalinist deportations in Latvia in 1941...
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...The Soviet masses, concerned with more concrete economic reforms, are largely unimpressed...
...Pugo's growing problem is rooted in the nature of the Latvian situation itself...
...lthough there's no question that Pugo and his hard-line supporters are outraged by the boldness of the Latvian nationalists, their real nemesis seems to be Gorbachev...
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...Behind the speakers was displayed a huge English-languagebanner which read, "LATVIA, LITHUANIA AND ESTONIA, COME TOGETHER TO FREEDOM...
...The rally turned into the largest nationalist demonstration in Latvia since the Soviet occupation...
...Of course, it was the Balts themselves who were least of all willing to accept the legitimacy of Soviet rule...
...Throughout last year, as a result of Gorbachev's permissiveness, the fledgling Latvian human rights group "Helsinki 86" was able to generate several sizable street demonstrations with unmistakable nationalist overtones...
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...After all, criticizing Stalin was all the rage in Moscow, and the rally would give the restive population a chance to let off a little steam...
...The Balts knew they didn't...
...Moscow dissidents, although well known in the West, have always represented a minuscule part of the Soviet population...
...A seething Pugo acceded to the demand and had to stand by silently as Arvids Ulme, president of the Latvian Environmental Protection Club—the largest and most active independent group to emerge in Latvia in the last year—accused the government of genocide against the Latvian people and destruction of their environment...
...Janis Dzenitis, the party's head procurator, castigated Vulfsons, the Latvian press, and the informal groups that had organized the June 14 rally...
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...EUROPEAN DOCUMENT GORBO, PUGO, AND A CAPTIVE NATION Ask a party boss in Soviet-ruled Latvia what he thinks of Gorbachev's reforms, and like the dutiful puppet he's learned to be, he'll publicly recite the latest paeons coming out of Moscow...
...To date, these relatively few dissidents and intellectuals have also been the prime beneficiaries of glasnost, since it enables them to express their views without fear of imprisonment...
Vol. 21 • October 1988 • No. 10
