COURAGE

connecting collections

The Latvian Communist Party Central Committee (LCP CC), its administrative apparatus and its Bureau, were the highest political and administrative institutions in Soviet Latvia. One of its main functions was the ideological control of society, and the monitoring of any activities considered to be anti-communist or anti-Soviet. Its documents contain an extensive amount of information about direct and hidden resistance to the Soviet regime, about the mood and activities of the intelligentsia, especially writers, artists, etc, members of the creative intelligentsia, and about youth activities, etc. These documents also reflect relations between Moscow and Riga on ideological matters, and hidden and open cultural resistance, especially from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s, when Soviet Latvian ideologues tried to adapt Stalinist cultural policies to the new realities of the outside world in connection with the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, the Prague Spring and its suppression in 1968, the  influence of the Western youth movement, etc. The archival documents of the LCP CC contain a vast array of documents of very different kinds, such as the minutes of Party congresses and CC plenary meetings, the minutes of CC Bureau meetings and special meetings on ideological matters, information about the mood, and developments in the cultural sphere, etc.

The Latvian SSR Committee for State Security (KGB, Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti) operated in Latvia under different names (NKVD/NKGB/MGB/KGB) from August 1940 to August 1991. It acted as the secret police, with the aim of suppressing internal dissent against the Soviet regime, using different techniques and a vast web of informers. The organization was liquidated by a decision of the Supreme Council of the Latvian Republic on 24 August 1991.

The Latvian State Archive (LVA) was established in 1961 as the Central State Archive of the October Revolution and Construction of Socialism. In March 1991, the archive acquired its present name. Since 2011, it has been a part of the National Archives of Latvia. The LVA holds archives of the highest administrative institutions and other state institutions of the Latvian SSR and the Republic of Latvia, the Riga and Jūrmala municipalities, personal papers, archives of Latvian emigre organisations, archives of the Latvian Social Democratic Party and the Latvian Communist Party, and documents from the former State Security Committee (KGB) on persecuted people. Most of the documents stored in the archive cover a period starting from 1940, although there are also files from earlier periods of time.

The Latvian Soviet Writers' Union was created in October 1940, modelled on the Soviet Writers' Union and based on the statutes of the organization. In October 1940, the first 13 members signed a declaration on the foundation of the Union. The name of the organization was initially the Writers' Union of the Latvian SSR, but its official name was soon changed to the Latvian Soviet Writers' Union. Its first conference was convened on 14 June 1941 (the day when a mass deportation from Latvia took place), and the conference itself was renamed the 1st Congress of the Union. With the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, the leadership of the organization fled to Russia. In the autumn of 1944, when Soviet power returned to Latvia, the Union was reestablished. Until December 1965, the leadership of the organization was run by writers who had spent the war in the Soviet rear or fighting in the Red Army, and was loyal to Soviet power. The Union contributed considerably to the sovietization of Latvia, and to the imposition of methods of Socialist Realism on Latvian literature. The Writers' Union had quite a considerable proportion of Communist Party members (39 out of 108 members in 1958) in comparison with other creative unions. Although under the influence of limited liberalization processes in the USSR and socialist countries in Europe there were slightly freer debates at the 4th Congress of the Union in 1958, the older generation managed to retain power and limit liberalization quite effectively for some time. But things started to change, because in the second half of the 1950s and at the beginning of the 1960s, a new generation of talented writers emerged (the poets Ojārs Vācietis, Vizma Belševica, Imants Ziedonis, Māris Čaklais and Imants Auziņš, the novelists Regīna Ezera and Zigmunds Skujiņš, the playwright Gunārs Priede, etc). At the 5th Congress of the Union in December 1965, this generation dominated discussions that were much freer than before and after, until the beginning of perestroika. In elections to the Board of the Union, the five candidates who were considered to be the most loyal to the Soviet authorities were ousted, and the leadership of the organization changed considerably to a more liberal one. After the 5th Congress, the Union developed into an organization that managed to defend more effectively the combined interests of its members and creative freedom, and in some cases to limit the attacks by the authorities on some writers. With the beginning of perestroika, the Union became an important source of legal political and cultural opposition. In cooperation with other creative unions, it organized a plenary meeting of creative unions on 1-2 June 1988, the first meeting at which public concerns about national, economic and ecological problems were expressed from an official tribune; and even more importantly, it was said that in 1940 Latvia did not join the Soviet Union voluntarily, but was occupied. In the summer and autumn of 1988, the Union participated actively in the creation of the Latvian Popular Front, which became the main force in the struggle for the restoration of national independence.
At the tenth congress in 1990, the work of the Union was restarted under the name the Latvian Writers’ Union.