Latvian Social Democrats Return
KAZA, JURIS
AFTER 55 YEARS Latvian Social Democrats Return By Juris Kaza Stockholm Latvia's Social Democratic Workers Party (SD), once the largest party in a faltering democracy, is struggling to...
...As 1990 begins, the Latvian KGB at least is again on the offensive against the democratic aspirations of the Latvian people...
...Their leaders say that veiled efforts to split and otherwise undermine the party continue...
...The suitor was publicly rejected when Hirssons, veteran of an elite military unit and a former movie Stuntman, led a small group of independent activists carrying the old Social Democratic flag in the May Day Parade in Riga...
...Should the Committee, officially headed by Kalnins, become convinced that the party in Latvia has indeed been co-opted or infiltrated by the Communists or the KGB, it would not hesitate to make that fact public, Zalkalns says...
...That was an explicitly defiant gesture aimed at Kezbers and his liberal Communist cohorts, who had hoped to exploit a revived Social Democratic Party as an example of the government's commitment to pluralistic reforms, and to set it up as a lifeboat should their own party finally sink...
...He publicly remarked that if history is any indication, Latvia probably would not regain its independence without bloodshed...
...In addition, the SD has helped to form a new coalition called Demokratiskais bloks (the Democratic Bloc), made up of non-Communist democratic organizations that favor restoration of the independent Republic of Latvia...
...An enormous campaign is going on to conceal and confuse the issue of legitimizing the LSSR and letting the Communists get away with what they have done," hesays...
...We are completely against actively encouraging Communists to come to us...
...Nevertheless, skeptics are not letting down their guard...
...Juris Kaza, a previous contributor to The New Leader, is a freelance journalist based in Stockholm who keeps a close watchonLatvianpoliticaldevelopments...
...The 42-year-old Zalkalns, who is also the editor of the Social Democrats' exile monthly Briviba (Freedom) as well as a part-time journalist, has himself been implicated in the Hirssons case...
...There are, he continues, "maybe 50 people in Latvia who know what is happening, and who have been told by the Kremlin that they will retain their power, privileges and popularity if they just keep selling this 'new Latvia' idea with themselves as the leaders...
...Others in the Democratic Bloc fear that would open the way to some kind of "federation" with Moscow during an undefined "transition period" and ultimately prevent the achievement of full independence...
...The party, for example, has distanced itself from the Hirssons case, which the KGB appears to be trying to prepare as a show trial, complete with allegations of underworld ties and political terrorism...
...It has been suggested by one faction of the party that if the SD wants to regain its former prominence, it will have to overcome its instinctive dislike of anything "socialist" associated with thedecades of Communist rule...
...The victory, small as it was, boosted the morale of the resurgent SD...
...He defends the stringent screening policy that is keeping his party's numbers down...
...A 40-year-old geography professor, Steins was elected head of the SD at the December Congress, the first officially tolerated SD meeting on Latvian soil since 1934...
...After the brief "honeymoon" of late 1988 and early 1989, these attacks appear to be resuming...
...According to this view, the SD could most successfully defeat the Communists by bleeding them to death of their best and brightest members...
...Yet a similar concept is advocated by Popular Front President Dainis Ivans, a journalist and former Communist Party member, who speaks of "building a new Latvian statehood" through existing parliamentary means...
...A prominent SD activist, 34-year-old Leo Hirssons, was arrested last November 24 on what many people believe were trumped-up charges that he had been hiding an arms cache...
...It published an English-language version of The Bankruptcy, a scurrilous attack on Latvian Social Democrats in exile and particularly on their leader, Bruno Kalnins...
...More neutral observers note that the Front-supported Communists most often ran against the candidates of the Latvian Communist Party...
...These include many large local chapters of the 15-month-old Latvian Popular Front, a 200,000 member movement that does not exclude Communists—leading to considerable apprehension...
...He has been held incommunicado by the Latvian KGB ever since...
...Earlier, itwas briefly believed that he was behind the remarkable thaw in official attitudes toward Kalnins expressed in the state-run Latvian press...
...Supported during its heyday by tens of thousands in a nation of just over 2 million, the reborn Social Democrats now have about 700 members...
...His arrest came one week before the Social Democratic Congress scheduled for December 2-3, and his party affiliation was played up in the press and television coverage of the case...
...The present caution is a far cry from the days when this writer's mother recalls taking a circuitous route home from school in Riga, because at an announced recruiting rally a clash was expected between hecklers and the sociki—as the Social Democrats, led by a young Bruno Kalnins, were called in the Latvian slang of the'30s...
...The Latvian KGB immediately accused him of inciting Latvians to violence...
...The decision to disseminate such charges could not have been made without the tacit consent of Ivars Kezbers, secretary for ideology of Latvia's allegedly liberal Communist Party and a specialist on social democracy...
...They have brought his plight to the attention of Amnesty International and the major Socialist parties in Western Europe...
...The SD's cautiousness is so pervasive, however, that at times it seems to become outright timidity...
...When you are re-establishing a social democratic movement after years of totalitarianism, you cannot expect membership to grow in leaps and bounds, or that it will be a mass movement right away," he says...
...All prospective SD members are rigorously screened to prevent the party from becoming little more than a sanctuary for disillusioned Communists, and to avoid infiltration by the KGB (Latvians have little faith in the depth and reliability of Gorbachev's reforms...
...Pauls Butlers, a deputy chairman of the Social Democrats and one of the main initiators of the Democratic Bloc, sees the coming elections as a battle against Communists attempting to legitimize the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic "in a new form of Socialist statehood...
...The Bankruptcy charges that Kalnins —the sole living founder of the 1918 Republic of Latvia, and an esteemed honorary vice president of the Socialist International—was a political opportunist and the head of a spy ring...
...The party also has traditionally close ties to Latvia's Socialist-Zionist Jewish Bund, although its ranks have been ravaged by the Nazi occupation, emigration and old age...
...While most Social Democrats are ethnic Latvians, Normunds Belskis, an activist editor at the state-run Latvian Radio, has reported that ethnic Russians have recently formed an SD unit in the town of Ludza, in the eastern part of the country...
...Simply banned or imprisoned by the authoritarian Karlis Ulmanis following his 1934 coup, the Social Democrats were shot or deported by the thousands under the 50-year Soviet domination that began in 1940...
...They will inevitably bring their style and spirit of making politics along with them...
...Butlers ominously points out that in recent local elections Communists took 80 per cent of the seats by running with the endorsement of the Popular Front...
...Most of these were written by Imants Lesinskis, a KGB agent who eventually defected to the West and died in the United States in 1985...
...Valdis Steins disagrees...
...But as the "Century of Dictators" in Eastern Europe and the Baltic draws to a close, the battle promises to be a bit less lopsided...
...Vilnis Zalkalns, the deputy chairman of the Stockholmbased Foreign Committee of the Latvian Social Democrats, shares Butlers' dark view...
...Around twice as many people regularly attend SD meetings held across Latvia, or express interest in joining the party...
...A total of 201 seats are to be filled, but it plans to run only some 20 candidates...
...AFTER 55 YEARS Latvian Social Democrats Return By Juris Kaza Stockholm Latvia's Social Democratic Workers Party (SD), once the largest party in a faltering democracy, is struggling to emerge as a political force after 5 5 years of brutal repression...
...The Foreign Committee, he stresses, remains for now the autonomous representative of Latvian social democracy abroad...
...They argue that while some liberal Communists may intend to deceive Latvia's voters and shore up the power of the Soviet regime, the Latvian Communist Party will self-destruct before those efforts bear any fruit...
...It further charged that Zalkalns—who had met Hirssons when the latter visited Sweden—was connected to the alleged arms cache in Riga...
...Latvian Social Democrats in the West, by contrast, have taken a more active role in publicizing Hirssons' arrest and detention...
...That is why there is such an all-out attack on anyone who might expose them...
...On the politicai front, the SD is preparing itself for the semifree elections to the Latvian legislature, or Supreme Soviet, on March 18...
...Not surprisingly, the Soviet Latvian authorities have, for years, vilified the Foreign Committee as a CIA front...
...Despite their small numbers today, they apparently are still feared by the Soviet authorities...
...But what was beginning to look like a glasnost courting of the Social Democrats cooled off after Communist plans to create a puppet SD party were thwarted...
...Toward the end of 1989, too, almost five years after Soviet Part, chief Mikhail S. Gorbachev launched his policies of liberalization in the USSR, a state publishing house made yet another of its attempts to smear the party on an international scale...
...The book is the latest in a series of similar works issued over the past 25 years in English, German and Swedish...
Vol. 73 • January 1990 • No. 2
