Fighting for 'Socialist Pluralism' in Latvia
KAZA, JURIS
A CLASH ON MANY FRONTS Fighting for 'Socialist Pluralism' in Latvia By Juris Kaza Riga Latvians are uneasy about the arrival of 1989. To a visitor who senses their apprehensiveness, they...
...The Russian-speaking workers now actually form a majority in Latvia, and a natural political constituency for the resor (important ministry operated) industries and their local and Moscow bosses...
...All of these developments have come in the wake of a summer marked by enthusiastic demonstrations, the resurfacing of independent national flags and songs, and the founding of Popular Fronts in the three Baltic states...
...The somewhat more moderate Latvian Popular Front, which claims over 200,000 members and is bigger than the Communist Party, evolved directly from the bombshell resolutions of the Latvian Writers' Union and other artists' societies last June...
...Indeed, the Latvian National Independence Movement had already drafted a curriculum for teaching Latvian history that was officially sanctioned as an experimental program in local schools...
...Ruta Burikina, a Latvian woman, and her 19-year-old daughter Daiga were searched by a special team of 12 customs inspectors who seized books on social, economic, political and military history written by Latvian scholars in the West...
...Although the three Baltic states failed as parliamentary democracies during their short lifetimes, they were as much experiments in radical European liberalism as manifestations of 19th-century nationalism...
...The ideas the Writers' Union put forward were originally formulated by Helsinki '86—today again being labeled "a handful of extremists" in official circles...
...The atmosphere, at times, was reminiscent of the 1960s' student revolt with its all-night meetings, leafleting, demonstrating, etc., transferred to a slightly different planet...
...In the months since the vote on the Constitution, the neo-Stalinists here, who are its effective beneficiaries, have consolidated their power and started to show their teeth against the "rebellious Baits.' With the consumer economy continuing to slide toward collapse accross the USSR, and Gorbachev increasingly desperate for the smallest sign of real perestroïka to show to his opponents, it is little wonder that Latvians fear a replay of 1959...
...Last year the head of Latvia's branch of Glavlit, the Soviet censor's office, said most of the nearly 4,000 books once put in restricted library collections by his agency were being released to the general public...
...And early in January of this year, Latvian Communist Party First Secretary Janis Vagris urged the banning of two well-known "informal" organizations, the 5,000-member National Independence Movement and the smaller Helsinki '86 human rights group...
...With only five Latvian deputies voting against them, the Supreme Soviet approved changes that maintain the Kremlin's extensive powers over the union republics and effectively closes off the fast-track to reform through local autonomy, initiative and diversity...
...Both, he charged, have been spreading antiSoviet lies and falsifications—terms echoing still existing statutes that were used to punish activists with long prison sentences during the pre-gfenosr days...
...Janis Ruksans, the wild-hatred botanist and radical editor of a gardening magazine who called for Latvia's total independence, could have been lifted from 1968...
...The same attitude was voiced by the 700 founders of Interfront, who claimed to represent the working class, but over 80 per cent of whom were middle and upper managers from large industries and State agencies...
...Officially, this crumbling of Communist authority has been called the emergence of "Socialist pluralism...
...Yet it could not have escaped Gorbachev and his advisers that such organizations in the Baltic would necessarily give vent to the whole spectrum of nationalist sentiment...
...He was nominated as a candidate from an election district in Saldus, only to have his name vanish from the ballot without explanation...
...He has thus virtually linked arms with Interfront and the forces behind it—a gesture that spoke louder than any promises of new ways and better days...
...As his new "allies," the Soviet leader seems to have chosen the czars of the entrenched industrial ministries and their armies of bureaucrats who might have been unseated by a peaceful, resolute revolution from below...
...The first strong hint that it all might be the first act of a tragedy came when the vote was taken in Moscow on the amendments to the USSR's Constitution...
...The latest reported incident occurred on January 8 at Grodno, on the SovietPolish border...
...These openly declared that the period of postwar Soviet rule has been a disaster for Latvia and called for a form of "national sovereignty...
...Strangely enough, large excerpts of the "anti-Soviet" interview were published in the Russian-language daily Sovetskaya Latvija on January 4, as part of a long article falsely claiming that I was an agent of a CIA-controlled Latvian Social Democratic Party in Sweden...
...Last summer, a leading Moscow historian said in a moment of excessive candor that no nation on earth had lied about its own past as much as the Soviet Union...
...The situation is no different for those leaving the country...
...Even the cast of characters appeared similar...
...An example isthecaseof Eduards Berklavs, a high-ranking member of the Latvian Communist government before the 1959 purge, and a leader of the threatened National Independence Movement as well as of the recently formed, officially tolerated Popular Front...
...Continuing Russification is probably the most pressing issue for Latvians...
...So it is perhaps not surprising that in step with Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians-demanding that their languages and ethnic rights be secured in their own homelands, the other Baltic ethnic minorities have reawakened...
...The Fronts were approved by Mikhail S. Gorbachev in an apparent effort to form direct alliances between radical reformists in Moscow and those most eager for change on the periphery...
...The Popular Fronts were also behind the gathering of millions of signatures in the Baltic against the amended Constitution—and for this, at least the Latvian Front drew the anger of the Communist power structure...
...Distressing, too, are the machinations surrounding the elections to the USSR's new All-Union Congress of People's Deputies...
...At its subsequent official founding congress a few weeks ago, Interfront intensified a campaign to secure the squatter's rights of its members and to restore the orthodox political climate of the recent past...
...One remarkably frank radio commentator in Riga said the main problem for Interfront appeared to be "that there is this Latvian nation here that is getting in their way all the time...
...In November, for the first time in 48 years, Latvians were allowed to publicly celebrate their independence day— coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Latvia on November 18, 1918...
...Through the Popular Fronts, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were the first to declare their readiness to start building new societies based on glasnost, democratic institutions, and economic structures that would replace waste and theft with efficiency and prosperity...
...But now, Berklavs reports, copies of the curriculum are being seized in some schools...
...Edvins Inkens, one of Latvia's most popular TV journalists, had two video cassettes taken away upon returning from a trip to the U.S...
...Juris Kaza, a previous NL contributor, is a free-lance writer based in Sweden...
...They are supposed to be held with some semblance of fairness on March 26, but in Latvia there seems to bea deliberate effort on a wide front to prevent non-Communist candidates from running...
...Burikina called the customs station once she reached Riga, she was told that a "panel of experts" had decided the literature was "anti-Soviet...
...Soon Latvian journalists and intellectuals were expressing concern about a surge of neo-Stalinism, as the republic's Communist Party Central Committee clamped down on the freewheeling Latvian press and television...
...A little over a week later, Latvian TV ran its own interview with the once vilified honorary vice president of the Socialist International...
...Like mostofthe restored ethnic clubs, the Jewish Cultural Society decorated the meeting hall with the red-white-red colors of independent Latvia alongside its own religious and ethnic symbols...
...The tapes showed an interview with the conservative editor of a Latvian language weekly in Toronto and scenes of an American Latvian Association conference in Washington...
...Nevertheless, what appear to be special teams of Latvian KGB and customs officials operate at virtually all major Soviet points of entry, selectively searching and harassing travelers and confiscating printed matter and video films...
...The peak of euphoria associated with these processes of rebirth was probably reached last October, at the nationallytelecast founding congresses of the Baltic Popular Fronts...
...Indigenous multiculturalism" would be a more precise description than "nationalism" for what prevailed then, and what started re-emerging during 1988...
...and Canada in December...
...Gorbachev has promised some kind of reforms "at a later stage" that he claims will satisfy the national republics...
...The clouds were already gathering over this small nation of 2.5 million, barely half of whom are ethnic Latvians, as 1988 drew to a close...
...Vagris also demanded that steps be taken to stop the publication of Auseklis (the "Morning Star"), a typewritten, independent journal of political and social affairs that has produced eight issues since September 1987, and that the Latvian Ministry of Justice act "according to law" to curb an unofficial literary magazine and a private news agency...
...And it was the republic, not the ethnic Latvian nation alone, that was commemorated at the Riga National Theater...
...His true feelings about the ambitions of the Baits, however, seemed to come through when he angrily told off Estonian President Arnold Rüütel a few days before the Supreme Soviet vote...
...In fact, between the Popular Fronts and the various other groups that began to operate openly in the Baltic region, it appeared that the seedlings of a Western-style "civil society" were breaking through the cracked and corroded armor of the totalitarian one-party State...
...The telecast image of a glaring, gesticulating Soviet Party chief led one wit to remark, "The only thing Gorby didn't do was to take off his shoe and start pounding the table.' His attitude was firmly in line with the Russian tradition of trying to solve every problem by exercising strong, centralized power...
...In 1949, more than 40,000 Latvian farmers were deported to speed up collectivization...
...First, the Kremlin blocked Baltic moves toward far-reaching economic and administrative autonomy by having a revised yet highly centralized USSR Constitution adopted...
...One of the tapes contained a long interview with the chairman of Latvia's Popular Front, Dainis Ivans...
...Following a November trip to the Baltic region, I and another free-lance journalist had two videotapes and a considerable quantity of Latvian leaflets and writings confiscated as "anti-Soviet materials" at Moscow airport...
...To a visitor who senses their apprehensiveness, they quickly explain: In 1939, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were sold out to Stalin under the Nazi-Soviet Pact...
...In 1959, after a relatively liberal local Communist administration formed during Nikita S. Khrushchev's thaw was purged, the forced industrialization and Russification of Latvia began...
...invitations were printed in 11 languages and one dialect indigenous to Latvian territory...
...In addition, there has been an upsurge of efforts to prevent tourists and Latvians returning home after visits to the West from bringing in books and other materials that one would think acceptable under glasnost...
...There has also been a revival of independent professional and scientific societies, such as the Latvian Medical Society, as parallel institutions to the State and Party-directed organizations...
...When Mrs...
...Then the International Front (Interfront), described by critics as an organization of Russian-speaking "nomadic industrial labor," emerged as a force...
...In Latvia, hundreds crowded a Riga auditorium on October 30 to celebrate the rededication of the Jewish Cultural Society of Latvia (60 years ago, during the era of parliamentary democracy, there was a plethora of Jewish clubs covering the whole gamut of religious and political opinion...
...This hits hardest at the Baltic states, about the only places in the Soviet Union that had a prayer of a chance at turning back from the economic precipice...
...Annual labor migration in and out of the republic has been over 200,000, leaving a net yearly increase of a few tens of thousands that has accumulated to several hundred thousand over the years...
...All had some of the most far-reaching guarantees of ethnic and religious community autonomy to be found anywhere in interwar Europe...
...At big factories and in many small Latvian towns, Communist Party officials are simply locking up meeting halls and canceling scheduled rallies by both the Popular Front and the more radical independence advocates...
...The revisions of the Constitution have deeply disappointed, if not alienated, Gorbachev's de facto Baltic supporters...
...Another time, while I was going into Riga by boat, the local customs searched me(as I had expected) and confiscated a videotape of an interview with 89-yearold Latvian Social Democratic leader Bruno Kalnins, sent as an unsolicited favor to Latvian television by a Swedish video company...
Vol. 72 • January 1989 • No. 2
