European Document/Breaking Away
Kaza, Juris
EUROPEAN DOCUMENT BREAKING AWAY by Juris Kaza Summon the kalpi! Summon the serfs! Out of the dark forests, On to the roadway .. . Tomorrow or the day after, Shell awake, our lady, Queen...
...Juris Kaza is a Latvian-American freelance journalist who frequently visits Latvia...
...On some farmsteads, no doubt parts of a kolkhoz or sovkhoz now, barns and outbuildings sag as if made of wet, gray cardboard...
...One homestead is a gutted wreckage, like an aerial shot after a bombing when I replay my tape...
...The reformed, sovereign republic, envisioned by the gaisie speki or "forces of enlightenment" in the Latvian Communist party, may even face "temporary economic difficulties" such as fuel and raw material shortages and plead for international help...
...We circled the center of Cesis, a picturesque town with a stone church some fifty miles northwest of Riga...
...It is not consciously meant as an insult to the modern, clean, efficient nations that make up the real Asia in 1989...
...t the same time, some variations on the "extreme circumstances" theme are not to be dismissed...
...Perhaps its owner was among the 60,000 rural Latvians deported in 1949 to speed collectivization...
...A considerable effort is underway, both through the "Declaration of Sovereignty" and the drafting of liberal-sounding legislation on the specific trappings of nationhood, such as "Latvian SSR citizenship...
...Out of the dark forests, On to the roadway .. . Tomorrow or the day after, Shell awake, our lady, Queen Latvia...
...Latvian television reported in June that two of the then-latest victims were an old woman and her four-year-old grandchild in the provincial town of Daugavpils...
...The expanses of forest—are they like those where the meza brali, the "forest brothers," held out into the early 1950s...
...These failed...
...They were surprised in an apartment by tiritaji, "cleaners-up"who did just that with anything of value, especially Western electronics...
...The Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic on August 23 could have celebrated nearly a month of the "complete sovereignty" declared by its Supreme Soviet on July 28, and encompassing all of the nation's natural resources, industries, agriculture, and so on...
...W hile Latvians take to the streets, their local Soviet rulers are busily working on a Potemkin-village model of parliamentary democracy whose main aim is to overturn the United States' and other Western countries' non-recognition of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states...
...With the Kremlin, backed by Gorbachev, thundering against this peaceful manifestation, one wonders whether the thin armor of world opinion will protect the Baits any better than the desperate, scattered struggles of the late 1940s...
...It was the single largest voluntary gathering in European history for a single purpose: to demand independence for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania...
...Bo-jars has also argued that occupation regimes, such as the one undeniably created in Latvia after the MolotovRibbentrop Pact of 1939, could be legitimized through certain political processes, such as the alleged democratization of Latvia's public life...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 the KGB-maligned helicopter ride), presented such a hypothetical situation to Wisconsin Sen...
...The "cast adrift" scenario—also buttressed by a Popular Front-sponsored competition on "Economic Models of Latvia in Extreme Circumstances"--somehow ignores the possibility that instead of cutting off Latvia's energy and raw materials, the crumbling remains of the USSR would sell the country anything it wanted for foreign currency...
...But in the "forces of enlightenment" scenario, which sweeps such unpleasantalternatives under the rug, there will be the semblance of democracy, even if it is ar nabaga tarbutith the beggar's bag...
...One possible future, as a female Latvian TV journalist put it, "is something like that video film Mad Max...
...Here much work has been done by Juris Bojars, a former professional KGB officer turned law professor and Popular Front activist...
...No one can doubt any longer that the Baltic states want their complete independence restored, nothing more, nothing less...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 35...
...Though it is evening—the bells will toll for all to link hands at 7:00 p.m.—wisps of mist rise from the dark green forest...
...Thesurrounding kulturainava is slowly covering it with low shrubs, almost as if the vegetation wished to put a blanket over the corpse of its own manor...
...The hope here would be to turn around the very effective Latvian/Baltic lobby on Capitol Hill to support the "independent" Latvian SSR, through images of malnourished children huddled in heatless flats (there are enough such scenes without the republic being economically expelled from the USSR...
...The line snakes by the obligatory statue of Lenin in the main square...
...The "new look" Latvian SSR, according to the Soviet scenario, will outwardly resemble a sovereign, democratic state so much that it will be embarrassing for the United States not to take a second look at non-recognition...
...Seven hundred sad years, She has slept by the sea . —Popular Latvian rock song, 1987 W hat's between the lines of Latvian rock music one year is happening on the streets two years later...
...The senator diplomatically replied that he, personally, would be inclined to assist Latvia in such a situation...
...We are too high and flying too fast to see faces, but people by the tens of thousands are as standing tall and proud as the trees lining the highway...
...And everywhere, roofs of corrugated sheet metal glint in the low sun, a touch of Third World shantytown less than an hour by air from Finland or Sweden...
...Unlike Estonia's similar sounding defiance of Moscow in November 1988, the Latvian SSR's "declaration of independence" was, fortunately, greeted with less international fanfare...
...The groupings of trees and shrubs around the country homesteads give meaning to the untranslatable Latvian concept lauku kulturainava, the "countryside-scenery-shaped-byculture...
...Janis, my journalist friend greets me with a bitterly ironic smile, mocking the first line of "God Bless Latvia," independent Latvia's national anthem...
...The bells rang and hands linked...
...After a grab-and-run at any available Western aid, the Baltic states, with the support of "freely" elected legislatures, will "voluntarily" join a new Soviet confederation...
...His irony about the once-banned national anthem and the play on Gorbachev's slogan of "a common European home" show that many Latvians perceive and understand the "great game" going on behind all the headline-grabbing demonstrations, singing, and flag waving...
...Edvins Inkens, a highly popular TV journalist (also on 2Azija meaning "Asia" is metaphorical Latvian slang for conditions of filth, despotism, and chaos...
...Traffic poured along feeder roads, flashing lights and blowing horns, the mouths of passengers gaping in song as mud-spattered kolkhoz buses carried the kalpi or "serfs" of Soviet agriculture to the roadway where well over one million people would form the Baltic Chain on August 23, 1989...
...Bob Kasten, who was attending an international conference organized by Latvia's National Independence Movement...
...Speaking of murder, the death toll from murder or manslaughter in Latvia, at midyear, was over sixty, which is pretty appalling for a country of just over two million and no tradition of violence...
...has...
...This bears the marks of someone practicing for future career opportunities in gangland murder...
...But the incident in Riga's Kengarags showed the gunman to be firing a 1937 model sniper rifle with a telescopic sight and silencer...
...through the window of her house, and the curious episode of a man in the Riga suburb of Kengarags who was firing a rifle out the window at a parked Zaporozhets...
...From a helicopter,' trying to keep my video camera focused on the road unwinding below, I was struck by what a verdant, beautiful countryside Latvia 'Some two weeks after my helicopter ride with a Latvian television crew, the Latvian KGB, in a widely publicized statement, accused me of violating restrictions on foreign visitors and threatened unspecified consequences for me and the others involved...
...There are a number of economic activities in Latvia capable of generating foreign currency, such as handicrafts, furniture making, fisheries, and, at a later time, agriculture...
...B ut other forces have been at work, too...
...Such random use of firearms is quite common in some parts of America, given the use of drugs and alcohol, or simply the prevalence of malevolent craziness...
...Vehicles ranging from smart-bySoviet-standards Hungarian Icarus buses to thousands of private Zhigulis and Moskviches lined the shoulder of the main highway between Riga and the Estonian border...
...But if we are to believe Latvia's Soviet legislature, then all these people, as the Latvian saying goes, lauzas valejas durvis, "battered down an open door...
...The human chain is a symbolic referendum and a street celebration at the same time...
...Then Azija will be their -common home, now and forever, and the deed, 50-plus years in the doing, will be done at last...
...It is the England of rolling meadows with grazing sheep and cows folded together with great helpings of the birches and pines of Scandinavia...
...And don't forget, Azija2 is our common home...
...According to an announcement signed by the KGB that appeared in the September 17 edition of Cina, the Latvian Communist party daily, I am to be barred from travel to Latvia for five years...
...Also not to be dismissed is the eventual export of labor, with the authorities taking a cut of the hard currency paid for Latvian crop pickers, computer programmers, or even dentists...
...Feelers have also been sent out to Latvian-American exile organizations as to how they would react if Latvia were "cast adrift" economically by the USSR, but not recognized by Washington...
...God bless the LSSR...
...It was a barehanded, unarmed army, perhaps the single largest moral force every gathered by the oppressed in the Soviet Union against their oppressors...
...These anecdotal samples of violence and corruption add up to a pattern that suggests the Baltic could easily decay into a lawless warlord and gang society rather than turning into a democracy once Soviet power lost the last of its authority...
...Hundreds of images and descriptions of the August 23 demonstration have been beamed out to the world...
...They are actually of weathered wood...
...A glance at a few summer issues of the Latvian milicija, or police, weekly, Kaujas posteni ("On the Battle Line" best translates the sense of it), records one young man found shot to death, a woman chairman of a cooperative shot to death at 2:00 a.m...
Vol. 22 • November 1989 • No. 11
