Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Vecrumba (talk | contribs) at 20:17, 25 September 2006 (→Occupation of Baltic States). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Thanks

Thanks for making updates to Portal:Latvia! I really hope that it can be made into a good portal and that the Latvia-related articles could also be better featured. Solver 13:48, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Order № 001223

It belongs to wikisource because it is not an article. Other than that, good job on merging the occupation articles. Renata 06:23, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

There are a slew of NKVD and other "Orders" in Misplaced Pages, I was just following convention. Is there some easy way to move? Lots more to do on the consolidated occupation article, but I'm happy with it so far. If you could take a quick peek at a redo of the History of Russian in Latvia, a comment or two would be appreciated! Pēters 06:28, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

There must be some way to transwikify, but I don't know. You can leave the intro here, but the original text should go. The other orders too. I will read history of Russians, but only in the morning. It's almost 2am here (should be the same at your place :)). Btw, you have a very nice homepage at latvians.com :) Renata 06:37, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

I took a look at Wikisource, and it seems more a place to reproduce written works (a la Project Gutenberg) than to be a document repository. Pēters 08:27, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

I would disagree. Yes, books are more prominent. But there is a bunch of national anthems, There is USA Patriot Act, speeches, interviews, all that. Its purpose really is to gather all sources that don't belong to WP. Oh, and the title, would it be possible to say whose order it is (what institution, kgb, nkvd, gru, smth else)? See for example, NKVD Order № 00439. And here is one with original text in wikisource NKVD Order № 00593. Renata 16:24, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

No. 593 looks like a good example to follow. I've always assumed it's NKVD, but not 100% positive, so I didn't automatically call it a NKVD order. Pēters 16:43, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

It was not NKVD. It was NKGB. `'mikka (t) 06:27, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Hello! Sorry, I've been away from Wiki for a while for personal and health reasons. The deporation directives and orders in the Baltics pre-date the existence of the NKGB--they were issued and remained in effect under the authority of the NKVD. Are you refering to those or the examples--00593 or 00439? Thanks! Pēters 05:25, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Russians

I have read the article, not the talk page (way too long :D). Here are my comments: the first two sections are quite vague. Sometimes I could not really understand what you are trying to say. Also, it would benefit enormously if you could add footnotes. For example, about Old Believers that they did not get involved. Where is that from? And many other generalisations. It is a big contrast to the POV marked sections were there are many facts and numbers. Also, the end favors Latvia's government (it looks like that to me). The article also needs a proper lead :) I hope it helps, Renata 19:23, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to let it sit for a couple of days and go back and read again. As histories go, I thought it was fairly detailed (not vague). The first population figures available anywhere are from the 1897 empire-wide census (even those are not precise)--so that kind of precision is simply not possible. It's a straightforward story: early Russian settlements along the eastern parts of today's Baltics, Russian presence was mainly traders at first, influx of Old Believers fleeing persecution in the 16th century, a continuing (small) increasing presence, building faster after all of Latvia became part of the Russian empire, especially with industrialization, and developing its own sense of identity as "Latvian Russians" apart from "Russian Russians." There was no "influx" per se, there was only a gradual process over time. I thought that was all pretty clear, I can always go back and see about tightening the edit. The second part (including Old Believer types not being fervent revolutionaries) is in one of the academic links cited (which itself was based on a fairly wide-ranging consideration of other academic studies/books/etc.). I didn't want to endlessly footnote. The main point of the second section is that until 1905, interests of Latvian Russians and Latvians and Latvian nationalists and even the tsar's Russification coincided: what provided the "glue" was the definition of the controling Baltic Germans as the adversary. After that, paths diverged, nevertheless, anti-"Russian" sentiment was directed at Bolshevism, not at the native Latvian population or Russians fleeing the revolution. There was no Latvian government at that time--I'm not trying to paint a "positive" or "negative" picture, merely what the picture was. I'm not doing this from any particular POV. (We'll see how well I keep to that when I get to contemporary Latvia!)

What's been gathered in the first two sections then forms a backdrop to the role of the Latvian Russian minority during Latvian's first independence. Hope this helps. Pēters 03:46, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

I will have to read through it again and see if there is something I can do about the language, but some footnotes would really help. Renata 04:06, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

(A response to your last post at Talk:History of Russians in Latvia)

I agree with regard to dislodging German as the language of prestige and the language of administration being the main goal for both the Russian government and most of the Young Latvians (note, though, that Russification also took place in the ethnographically Latvian part of Vitebsk guberniya for a longer period and more thoroughly, but quite differently , where the Germans had been Polonized and there was a Polish and Russian aristocracy) -- even so, Russification in Courland and Livland was most dramatic in education, and in this it strongly favored the Russians (or, more accurately, the Russophones) and affected not only the Germans but the Latvians (for example, at Tartu , the number of Lutheran students fell threefold between 1892 and 1901, whilst Russian enrollment rose ten times, partly because the graduates of Orthdox seminaries were admitted -- destroying that nest of Baltic separatism was one of Manasein's main recommendations ). Latvians largely supported Russian instruction in the schools, and many even supported Russification (e.g., Valdemārs: "Speaking Russian, Latvians are never lost to their nation -- not even when some of them have begun to forget how to speak Latvian." ) Baltijas Vēstnesis was the influential newspaper led by Fricis Veinbergs, who remained a Russophile even unto 1917.

Your point that the Latvian nationalists "were not agitating for independence" is very important. Fricis Brīvzemnieks (Treuland), brought in as an inspector of public schools by Kapustin at Valdemārs' request ("it was politically advantageous for the government that Russification would be introduced by the Latvian and Estonian nationalists themselves"), wrote a letter to Kaudzītes Reinis in 1886 in which he rejects an article Kaudzīte had written; the part about the friendship between Russians and Latvians, acording to Brīvzemnieks, is fine -- but the rest of the article needs to be amended to note that "defenders of the German Ritterschaft are trying to spread the belief among Latvians that the Tsar's government and the Russian people want nothing more than to deprive Latvians of their language and religion Latvians have heretofore habitually expected good things only from the Russian government, and harmful things from their German overlords they know that the government has nothing to fear from the Latvian or Estonian languages because the Latvians and Estonians have never been independent nations and the seed of separatist thought finds no soil among the Latvians..." Brīvzemnieks goes on to say that the fears of Russification in Latvia are either "exaggerated or completely baseless." (Švābe, p. 462)

The fact is that fears of Russification were growing and they were rooted in reality and not in a plot by the Ritterschaft -- Valdemārs, entwined with the Slavophiles in Moscow, was increasingly irrelevant and no longer understood what was happening in the Baltics. The overall situation in education is also important to an understanding here (as it wasn't to Manasein): the Baltic provinces were the most advanced parts of the Russian Empire in education, whilst the Baltic Russians were comparatively ill-educated -- in Riga in 1881, for example, 47,8% of Russians over age 14 could not read or write (vs. 23,7% of the Latvians and 23,0% of the Germans). According to the official Russian statistics for 1886, there was one public school per 654 inhabitants in Southern Livland, vs. 1:2147 in Moscow guberniya and 1:3155 in Pskov guberniya. 2.37% of children in all 50 gubernii attended public school -- but this percentage varied considerably by guberniya: 9.25% in Finland, 9.87% in Southern Livland, 5,42% in Courland, 0,81% in Kovno, 3,44% in St. Petersburg, 2,01% in Kiev. In Vitebsk guberniya, and thus in Latgola -- 1,13%. 87,5% of the Old Believers in Latgola were illiterate, and 77,2% of the Belarusians (but even there, literacy was considerably higher in the ethnographically Latvian part of the guberniya and among Latvians). Latvian literacy also depended upon the rural and parochial schools, and to a very large degree on home schooling -- but home schooling in Latgola, which was particularly successful for females, was criminalized during Russification. ("Baltijas 'jaunā ēra' un rusifikācija"; Švābe, op. cit.) It might be noted, too, that the situation in the heavily Slavicized Ilūkste district in Semigallia was similar to that of Latgola, and Manasein in fact suggested that it be joined to Vitebsk guberniya.

Brīvzemnieks came to regret his position. As Russification intensified (and education declined), he was frequently attacked in the Russian press despite his pro-Russian stance, including by the newspaper you have mentioned -- Рижский Вестник, which demanded the imposition of Cyrillic in the Baltic provinces, as it had been imposed in Latgola, "to pour cold water on the fantasies of those who dream about a Latvian culture." This was their reaction to the success of the third Latvian Song Festival, and it is strikingly similar to the reaction of the Baltic Germans to the first forays of the Young Latvians (e.g., of Das Inland to Alunāns' Dziesmiņas) -- except that Latvian culture and in essence a Latvian nation were no longer a dream but had already come into existence. In 1888, Valdemārs wrote a lengthy defense of his career, explaining that he had worked harder than anybody else for the Russification of the Baltic provinces. This is where I will question the notion of "laissez-faire," Pēter -- to what extent was there laissez-faire, and when, and why? In the late 1880s, the Baltic German press came to defend Latvians against attacks in the Russian press -- Zeitung für Stadt und Land, for example, observed that the Latvians had a third path open to them, besides Germanization or Russification: retaining their identity. In defending Latvian against Cyrillic, Baltic Germans like Bielenstein found common ground with their Latvian political enemies -- to the horror of the Russians. What I am suggesting, then, is that it may have been laissez-faire between the 1850s and the 1880s, but only so long as the Latvians were not nationalists but merely anti-German Lettophiles and Slavophiles, and even apolitical Lettophilia was extremely suspect in an increasingly illiberal empire. "Not agitating for independence," to boil it down, really meant not only "not agitating for autonomy," which they also did not do -- it meant "not agitating for anything."

Valdemārs was a pragmatist and materialist, a "reālpolītisks minimālists" as Blanks defines him, who joined a cultural Lettophilia to an enthusiastic cosmopolitanism; the Russification he supported was education in the language, not coercive assimilation, and he always thought in practical terms (as when he suggested that Latvian veterans of the Russian army being settled in Voronezh guberniya be settled here instead and teach the Latvians Russian; Valdemārs was also quite clever in opposing Cyrillic). Living under police supervision in Moscow, however, he did not appreciate how far his nation had come. Many writers contrast Kronvaldu Atis' more spiritual thought with Valdemārs' -- again, this was a cultural but not a political nationalism, and Valdemārs himself notes that the Young Latvians had no political program at first; Kronvalds saw the Latvians and Russians as entering into a compact, however, with Russia having the duty to protect the Latvian language and culture in exchange for the Latvians' loyalty (thinking similar to the Germans'). Many Young Latvians naïvely believed that they could "drive out the German Devil with the Russian Beelzebub" (Švābe), but this was not be, obviously -- Mikhail Zinoviev, the governor, explained to the Riga Latvian Association in 1887 that "to us, Estonians and Latvians will only be a useful element when they become Russians."

This brings us to the 1890s and the advent of a Marxism that not only the right (e.g., Blanks) but also the left (e.g., Jansons-Brauns) labels dilettantist -- the New Current. Histories and contemporaries indicate, however, that it wasn't a matter of socialism replacing nationalism so much as the national movement reaching a point of crisis; a critic of the New Current, Alexander Weber (Vēbers -- an ethnic German who had in some sense assimilated, but later abandoned "Latvianness" in response to 1905) was among the many who saw it coming, observing the growing gulf between the growing Latvian bourgeoisie and the increasingly desperate masses. The Baltic Germans had lost their potency as the enemy. Much of the left saw nationality and its manifestations as the plaything of an exploitative élite that used and abused the ethnic as part of its business plan. Still, even "internationalism" didn't necessarily bring Russian and Latvian socialists together -- attacks on the war with Japan by the Latvian left, printed in 1904, noted that Asians were the Latvians' allies, victims of Russian imperialism like the Ukrainians, Poles, and Lithuanians, who suffered the most under the Tsar. All of this against a background of very dramatic demographic changes, with Latvia second only to Britain in Europe's urbanization -- meanwhile, there was a rural exodus not only to the cities but also to Russia proper, whilst settlers replaced those who departed (e.g., ca. 68 000 foreigners, mostly Russians, arrived in Latgola between 1895 and 1902, whilst the Dvinsk military garrison alone numbered 12 700 ).

Most of the above doesn't belong in this article, of course -- I'm afraid I must drift into some general observations on "the story of Latvia." My main point is that it is almost impossible to delineate the political currents in that period (those periods, actually -- ca. 1850-1890, 1890-1905, 1905-1914), because they overlap and twist (and are often very shallow, too, with only a few fish in them); it actually took a minor eddy on the extreme left, the erstwhile эсеры Valters and Rolavs, to "invent" autonomy, and in the view of some revive a nationalism that "had gone down into herring" (Rainis) -- Valters moved rightward in the 1920s, abandoning his liberal views with regard to the minorities as impracticable when the nation drifted toward what you are calling "ultra-nationalism." I'm trying to draw attention to some major questions in our history, some of which Jānis Peniķis identified -- for example, what is the meaning of 1905? I recommend this article by Jānis Krēsliņš seniors, published in Diena last January (in Latvian). As Krēsliņš underlines, a definitive history of 1905 has not yet been written. He points to two opposing views of the Revolution, the nationalist and the Marxist, and the fact is that most Latvian historiography holds one of these two prisms. I refer to Ernests Blanks, a rightist ideologue from whose work the concept of the three National Awakenings was derived, deliberately -- as Oļģerts Liepiņš notes in his preface to Blanks' book, our nation-state is in large part the result of 1905, simply because almost all of Latvia's founders "were involved in that mutiny, and many retained their destructive approach to the bourgeois, who were also human and also wanted to enjoy freedom." Liepiņš offers a metaphorical apple tree -- one branch growing democracy, the other turning bright red. This is gross oversimplification, of course, but it helps bring some of the dynamics into relief. These dynamics echo loudly through later Latvian history -- whilst Liepiņš claims that 1905 had a socialist basis and was only later given a nationalist tint, leftists like Fēlikss Cielēns see independence as the child of that revolution. The class differences and their politics are integral to what happened, of course -- why most of the Latvians did not ally with the Germans and vice-versa, though Grosvalds et al. ended up in the Rate; German and Russian lists were together at times, and few Latvians had the money to qualify as voters -- there was also a brief phase in which the Latvian bourgeoisie was allied with the Germans municipally.

I eagerly await the next section, Pēter! Inesis Feldmanis does not mince words when it comes to the Russian minority in the interbellum: according to him, most did not identify with Latvia. In 1930, only 18,9% of the Russians spoke Latvian. The local Russian language press expressed satisfaction at the growth of Russian power with the invasions of Finland and Poland, its true sympathies revealed after the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (Daina Bleiere, Ilgvars Butulis, Inesis Feldmanis, Aivars Stranga, Antonijs Zunda: Latvijas vēsture: 20. gadsimts. Rīga: Jumava, 2005.) I've already said that I disbelieve in historians' objectivity -- I should add that I believe treating more POV rather than trying to eliminate POV is a better way to achieve the fabled NPOV, and IMO this is particularly true when trying to provide an overview, which necessarily involves generalizations. In the case of the Russian and Baltic German minorities, I do not see how the subject (and, indeed, Latvian history in the 20th C and the processes today) can be treated meaningfully without treating the concept of an "imperial minority." --Pēteris Cedriņš 20:00, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

About... simply because almost all of Latvia's founders "were involved in that mutiny--an obvious one is Čakste himself, who had to flee after signing the Viborg Manifesto. And you are right about the Russians during the first independence. When Schiemann was working to define minority rights, the Russians were always a lagging third behind the Germans and Jews. They simply were not as motivated to participate. If you can give me the source for some of your literacy figures, some of that would be some good additional detail to work in! --Pēters 03:35, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Occupation of Baltic States

Great comment on the claim that there was no occupation on the talk page to Latvia - many thanks! I was just wondering .. could you copy-paste the comment to the same claim that has been made on the talk page of the article on Estonia, or, if that's too much of a bother, let me quote you there? I can't think of better words to explain the situation with, but don't want to "plagiarise" you without asking you either.

Thanks!

ChiLlBeserker 00:59, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

I'll be glad to oblige, I'll get to it in the next couple of days (extremely busy at work!) --Pēters J. Vecrumba 01:19, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Take a look at the talk:Lithuania page, I'm assuming that's along the lines of what you're envisioning? :-) Pēters J. Vecrumba 20:17, 25 September 2006 (UTC)