document

Otto Latsis

Farewell to the Communist

Party in Latvia
During its 25th Congress, the 86-year-old Communist Party of Latvia
split in two.* A third of the Congress delegates walked out, and
several days later, on 14 April, the founding congress of the new Independent Communist Party of Latvia was held. A small group of
people, headed by the Partys former first secretary, Jan Vagris, tried
to avert the split, but in vain. Neither the majority nor the minority at
the congress left any room for conciliation, and both sides appeared
satisfied with the outcome.
I was in Riga during the few days between the first congress and the
second. I read the local newspapers, listened to the radio and talked
with various people, including the leaders of both parties. I heard as
though in a dream various rumours about the division of property,
newspapers, journals and party subscriptions, and about the setting
up of new organizational structures. Yet I heard almost nothing about
the things which were crying out to be discussed. Such as that the
Communist Party of Latviathe party of the majoritycontains virtually no Latvians. A Latvian Communist Party with no Latvians in it
is nonsense, rightly observed For The Motherland, the newspaper of
the Baltic Military District. With no peasants or members of the cultural intelligentsia either, one might add, and with almost no support
from industrial workers or scientists. Suffice it to say that the new first
secretary of the Central Committee of the CPL, Alfred Rubiks, who for
many years had headed the executive committee of the Riga soviet,
lost this post in the spring elections. Yet it is here in Riga, where
Russian speakers made up two-thirds of the population, that the Communist Party of Latvia draws its main support.
In the new Supreme Soviet of the Latvian Republic, the CPL does not
command even a third of the votes needed to veto any change to the
Constitution. The party of the minority, however, although it carried
great weight with the native Latvian population when it was part of
the united CPL, cannot now count on any serious influence. A Communist Party founded on an ethnic base (not according to its programme, but in fact) is also nonsense. It will be influential in isolated
* This article was originally published in the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya, 18 April 1990.
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rural districts, but will have almost no influence in the major towns,
or in the countryside either. A party, moreover, which still has no slogans or strategies to attract the republics Russian-speaking citizens,
who make up 48 per cent of the population. In short, as a result of the
split, Latvias Communists, who have ruled the republic for half a century, have now become the political opposition.
The majority in the Latvian Supreme Soviet consists of a collection of
movements and parties which are all now demanding independence
from the USSR. The minority Independent Communist Party of Latvia
joined this alliance, but not as its leading force. The ICPLs presence
there is subordinated to the far more powerful Latvian Popular Front,
which although not formally a party, is increasingly seen as such.
Various well-known figures in the republic who set up the Front have
one by one left the leadership to behold their creation with amazement. When the Front was formed in 1988, most of its members categorically, and I am sure sincerely, rejected the notion of independence
from the USSR. Independence suddenly began to be widely discussed
in the spring of 1989, and the idea is by now already widely accepted,
with only tactical questions remaining to be debated.
If it is genuinely better for the people of Latvia to turn their backs on
two centuries in Russia and half a century in the Soviet Union, then so
be it. Imperialist greed is an unreliable and impractical basis for politics in our century. But I am convinced that the Latvians have not yet
had the chance calmly to consider their own best interests or the kind
of future they want. It is as though people are in a trance. All the arguments I have heard for leaving the Soviet Union are based on the
events of the past. We cannot change the past, only the future. Yet the
factors which will define this future are never discussed.
Latvian people are deeply shocked by the recently emerging facts of
their own history. They have been swindled, they are far worse off
than the small independent countries bordering on the USSR. Fifty
years ago, unenthusiastic but unresisting, they became part of the
USSR as their best defence against the Hitlerite dictatorshipa very
real danger, which had by then engulfed almost the whole of Europe
excluding Great Britain and the USSR. But it did not defend them,
and Latvia had to endure all the horrors of Nazi occupation. It then
endured the horrors of the Stalinist dictatorship, followed by a decade
of stagnation, which, according to a number of objective indicators,
reduced a country that had formerly held its own with the economically developed countries of Europe to the ranks of the most backward
of them.
History has now presented the Latvians with yet another paradox:
many of those who cursed Stalins Soviet Union now want to break
loose from the Soviet Union of Gorbachev too. Yet if this is the same
empire, the same regime of occupation (how easily these phrases
spring to peoples lips nowadays!), how is it that we can freely discuss
secession, prepare for secession, and elect to the Latvian Supreme
Soviet a majority in favour of secession? And if things have changed,
why is it necessary to be in such a rush, rather than to discuss
everything rationally?
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Rational discussion has not been helped, however, by the majority in

the CPL and its affiliated Interfront, which claims to minister to the
needs of the Russian-speaking population; Their stubborn, even
haughty refusal to acknowledge the bitter truths about our past does
not help to convince Latvians that the Soviet Union is in the process
of genuine reform. The opposing sides forces are roughly equal.
Neither side can possibly resolve any of Latvias problems by ignoring
the interests of the other. Yet both sides still spend far more of their
energy in attempting to defeat their opponents with empty rhetoric
than in seeking reconciliation and mutually acceptable solutions.
Of course the Soviet central government has not been above reproach,
for the protracted piratical behaviour of its industrial managers and
its extreme reluctance to learn from the experiences of the Soviet Congress of Peoples Deputies. Its most conspicuous failure has been its
refusal to open negotiations on a new Soviet treaty as soon as the idea
was first mooted. This is a separate issue, however, which concerns all
the republics and merits separate discussion. Here I want merely to
draw attention to the chief danger facing Latvia at the moment: the
fact that the main parties in the political struggle have not taken the
trouble to study their own best interests, and are walking blindfold
towards an uncertain future. It is not only the Latvians who should
take a sober look at what is happening. There are lessons here for the
whole country as we approach the equally acrimonious and emotional
debates of the 28th Party Congress. I have no revelations to offer. I
have no monopoly on the truth; we must all seek it together. But I do
want to draw attention to several facts about our past and our present, which we forget at our peril. I shall refer wherever possible to my
own personal experiences and to those of people I know. I hope this
will not appear presumptuous; I have learnt that the perceptions we
arrive at on our own are far more powerful than borrowed clichs.
A Short History of the CPL

I myself have never been a member of the Latvian Communist Party,

and have always worked for it as an outsider, but I am not indifferent
to its fate. My father gave fifty years of his life to the Communist Party
of Latvia, and this fact determined the very circumstances of my birth.
My father joined the Party in 1921, when membership offered neither
wealth nor career, but prison and the bullet. The bullet awaited his
old childhood friend Eduard Smilten, who in 1933 was caught by the
police at a conspiratorial flat in Riga used for publishing the Latvian
Komsomol newspaper Smilten was shot forthwith in the street while
attempting to escape. In 1937 the Stalinist government caught up
with his wife in Moscow, so thanks to the efforts of two successive
governments Smiltens children were orphaned. My father was merely
thrown into prison: he was arrested in Riga in 1928 for belonging to
the Cultural Society of Workers, and he escaped a longer sentence
only by emigrating to the Soviet Union: the Latvian secret police were
clearly anxious that I should not be born in Latvia, where my ancestors had lived for centuries.
My father always remained a rank-and-file member of the Party, and
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by the standards of this stormy century he led a fairly ordinary life,

taking in two wars, which were finally to bring him home. Demographers now tell us that of 200,000 Latvians living in the Soviet
Union before 1937, 70,000 died. That means virtually every adult
male. My father used to tell me that after he returned from Spain
(where it was far less dangerous at the front than in Moscow), he
found that almost everything from his old life had been destroyed: the
Latvian section of the Comintern, Latvias Prometheus publishing
house and hundreds of his friends and acquaintances had all vanished
without trace. I shall not list a lot of important namesall innocent
victims deserve pity, whatever their rank, and it is not possible to
name everyone who died. I want to talk about something else. Hypocritically hiding behind the name of the Revolution, Stalin dealt a
savage blow to members of the Party which had sent such an extraordinarily large number of its sons to serve the Revolution. This stab
in the back did not destroy the faith of those who survived: their
choice was determined by the inevitable battle with Fascism that
loomed ahead. How many attacks like this did the Latvians need to
convince them that their grandfathers had been wrong to support the
Russian Revolution in October?
For the people of little Latvia, 1937 was not the first big bloodletting of
the twentieth century. Nor was it the last. During the war, in the
Russian village of Simonovo outside Staraya Russa, on the road to
Moscow, where my fathers military career was halted by serious
injury, his company contained 120 men in the morning, and by the
evening there were only 20 left. The 43rd Latvian Guards Division fought on outside Staraya Russa for several months. Nor did
the sacrifices end with the war. Ahead lay the deportation of the class
enemies in 1949. I was told about this by a survivor named Voldemar
Indzer, a friend and comrade of my father from the Latvian Communist underground of the 1920s. Indzer had also been arrested for
belonging to the Cultural Society of Workers, and he had been sentenced by the Latvian court in 1929 to three years in prison. Berias
system of justice in 1949 dispensed with trials, but it never missed its
mark. Gestapo members, criminals and members of the pro-German
Russian Vlasovite army were all thrown together into one cell,
expecting to receive sentences of ten, fifteen or twenty-five years. The
Communists, who had completed the sentences passed during the
1937 purge and had now been arrested a second time, generally
without any new charge, would invariably return uttering the one
word: Life.
All this passed, as did the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist
Party, which restored the names of many Latvian Communists to our
history. But the dark days were not yet over. Ahead lay one more
blow, not a bloody blow this time, but politically the most difficult of
all for Communists in Latvia, since it came three years after the 20th
Party Congress, and thus could only mean that socialism had still not
purged itself of Stalinism. What happened in 1959 is still a painful
wound in the soul of the Latvian people. In that year a group of
Latvian Communist Party leadersartists, writers and scientists
were accused of bourgeois nationalism, investigated by the Party and
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dismissed from their posts. Some were found guilty of raising the
same painful problem of Latvias economy and culture which we are
now trying belatedly, and in much worse conditions, to solve. Others
were charged with even worse crimes. Communists, partisans, former
underground members and war veterans, Latvians, Russians and
Byelorussians were all branded as Latvian bourgeois nationalists
(generally understood to be a synonym for Latvian fascism).
All this happened at the July plenary of the Latvian Communist Party
Central Committee in 1959. In his final word to the plenary, the then
first secretary of the Central Committee, Jan Kalnberzin, paid fulsome
tribute to the courage of the genuine internationalists, the Latvian
Guards Division who had defended Moscow. This was quite appropriate. Amongst those attending the plenary were six veterans of the
battle for Moscow. All six of them had been slandered as nationalists. Who was judging whom? Many non-Latvians will be familiar
with at least one of the names of the accused: that of Alexander
Alexandrovich Nikonov, former secretary of the Latvian Communist
Party Central Committee, now president of the All-Union Academy of
Agricultural Sciences and a prominent figure in the perestroika of
agriculture.
Let us not exaggerate: most people in Latvia were not unduly bothered
then by the replacement of a few dozen Party officials. It was the
policies themselves that produced a lingering sickness in the popular
consciousness, policies which have shown an increasingly crude
disregard for the local peoples interests. The most savage expression
of this was the senseless banning of the feast of St Ivan, known in
Latvia as Ligo. This popular national holiday had been observed for
hundreds of years under numerous different governments. The only
previous attempt to ban it was by German bishops and barons in the
twelfth century, but they had rapidly reversed their decision, realizing
it would be both pointless and dangerous. This shameful deed was
repeated in the 1960s, and dealt perhaps the greatest blow of all to
Communism in Latvia.
Occupation: Reality or Rhetoric?

Meanwhile a series of disastrous economic policies were imposed on

the republic. Huge factories were built in areas which lacked raw
materials, energy or manpower. These factories have been as unprofitable for Latvia as for the other republics, notably the RSFSR. They
have syphoned off surplus young people, thus depopulating the
Russian countryside. They have poisoned the Latvian countryside.
People are now advised not to swim at the popular seaside resorts of
Yurmal, Daugava and Lielup on the gulf of Riga, and when children
in kindergartens in Ventspils go swimming they are taught how to put
on gas masks in case there is an accident at a factory which has been
built in the very centre of the town.
Demographic problems have been further exacerbated by an artificially created influx of settlers. We constantly hear people in
Moscow complaining about out-of-towners who get self-contained
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flats, while native Muscovites have to make do with shared ones. I

invite these Muscovites to imagine for a moment that there are
hundreds more of these out-of-towners in the capital, all of them of a
different ethnic group; that they are already the majority population
there, and that Russian is heard less and less; that spokesmen have
appeared amongst them who lay claim to these areas and even
describe them as their own national property. This is how it is in Riga
now.
With the advent of glasnost these problems have been publicly aired
in Latvia, and have become the subject of noisy discussion. There are
equally open discussions of the events of 1940, when the arrival of the
Red Army forestalled elections to the national Sejm, or parliament. In
these conditions, there was only one decent and honourable course for
the Party to take: to open a proper debate on the problems of the past,
the present and the future, to put people in the picture, to take the
initiative in telling the truth. But the Party majority refused to do any
such thing.
To take the simplest thing, a reassessment of the events of 1959. Over
the last two years all the documents of this Central Committee plenum
have been published, a commission has concluded its report, and a
series of official statements have included a correct analysis of these
depressing events, to which nobody has raised any objection. All that
remains now is for this thirty-year-old blunder to be officially
rescinded. Members of the Party minoritythe future Independent
Communist Party of Latviabrought a prepared resolution on the
subject to the Partys 25th Congress, and I could see nothing wrong
with it. However, the majority refused to put the issue onto the
agenda, and the Party newspaper For the Motherland observed contemptuously that the minority was trying to force a debate on the
trifling question of 1959, and that the majority had quite correctly
rejected their motion. What was correct about it, dear comrades?
Why cannot people understand that a rash decision like this will do
far more to undermine Latvians faith in our alliance with the Soviet
Union than any amount of anti-Soviet propaganda? It shows us more
clearly than anything else that the Communist Party of Latvia does not
intend to admit its mistakes, and that there is little reason to hope that
things will ever be put right.
There can be little doubt that the independents went to the 25th
Congress with the intention of walking out. A statement containing
their call for the Latvian Communist Partys independence from the
Soviet Communist Party was published several months before and
rejected outright by the Party majority. A month before the Congress,
they held their own conference. They started well before the Congress
to set up their own organizations (as did the majority). Be all that as it
may, the majority did everything they could at the Congress to convince people that reconciliation was impossible, and that the minority
had taken the only possible option available to it.
And not only at the Congress either. Let us take the problem of 1940.
I do not accept the rhetoric about Soviet occupation used by the
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supporters of independence, or their claim that you cant repeal a

decision that never legally existed. To be sure, the decisions to incorporate Latvia into the USSR, and the CPL into the Bolshevik Party,
would not satisfy present-day legal standards. But must states and
societies be defined totally and irrevocably by their origins? Does
Latvias fifty years within the Soviet Union really count for less than
the few days it took it to join? If so, one might enquire into the origins
of the government which was overthrown in 1940. Did not 72 per cent
of the Latvian electorate, in those parts not occupied by the Germans,
vote for the Bolsheviks in the 1917 elections to the Constituent
Assembly? Did not the German army and the British fleet between
them, during the post-1917 Civil War, destroy the first Soviet Republic
of Latvia in 1919? And did not the invading armies of fourteen states
force Soviet Russia in 1920 to sign the treaty of Riga, accepting Latvias independent status?
There are many states and frontiers in the world today which have
arisen with scant regard for the will of their people. If they were all to
be carved up again on this basis, it would be difficult to know where
to stop. I dont suppose there would have been any objection if
members of the CPL majority had put arguments like these to the supporters of secession. But instead they continued to insist that the
decision to join the USSR in 1940 was freely and democratically taken,
and to describe the events in the Baltic regions that summer as a
democratic revolution. Such arguments only make people realize that
they are being treated as idiots. I confess that I am a Marxist, however
unfashionable this may be at present, and I have always been taught
that revolutionary situations arise under the influence of a complex
series of social and political processes. How can it be seriously suggested, then, that a revolutionary situation had developed in the three
different Baltic countries on one and the same day, and on the very
day, moreover, when Soviet tanks appeared? It is a totally ludicrous
idea, of course, and serious analysis shows that there was no revolutionary situation at all, although there was at that time a high level of
discontent with the reactionary Baltic regimes.
But am I not also being treated as an idiot by those whose talk of
occupation stubbornly equates the events of half a century ago with
those of the present? If there were an occupation regime in place today, even the mildest criticism would be forbidden. It is not only the
people of Latvia who are misled by this rhetoric about occupation. It
is also deeply offensive to the other peoples of the Soviet Union, and
only serves to endorse the opposing sides rhetoricabout nationalism, separatism and anti-sovietism. Who needs all this rhetoric,
apart from those who actually manufacture it?
Costs of Secession

Yet, despite the importance of the past, people have an even greater
need to understand the future. Most of the discussions I have heard
about Latvias future in the event of secession from the USSR have
been sheer speculation. The supporters of Soviet unity (that is, the
PCL) frighten their opponents by producing bills for Soviet factories
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and property that Latvia will have to pay if it secedes, and the supporters of independence respond by producing their own bills. It
seems to me that serious negotiations between the two sides would
show that most of these claims would cancel each other outsome
small reparations might be required, but it is not yet clear from which
side. At any rate, there is no point in threatening people in this way:
it just wont work.
The advocates of Soviet unity warn that the USSR will retaliate by
severing economic links. The advocates of Latvian independence
reply that if secession is legally formulated, the USSR will do no such
thing, since it has a direct interest in Latvian manufactured goods.
This is quite reasonable, of course; the first scenario is not. What
neither side will tell people, however, is that in the event of secession
many economic links will indeed be severed, and many Latvian enterprises closed, not as a matter of deliberate policy by either side but
due to inevitable real pressures. The commercial relationship between
Latvia and the RSFSR and the other republics is such that for both
sides to convert from Soviet wholesale prices to world prices, and
from the dollar to the rouble, huge long-term losses will be imposed
on the Baltic states, which at present import raw materials from the
East, and export manufactured goods there. There is an enormous
difference between paying thirty roubles and ninety dollars for a ton
of oil.
Of course the Baltic republics will also demand to be paid world
prices, in dollars, for their goods. But there is a hitch. The quality of
oil does not depend on the labours of those who drill it: it is created by
nature. And the quality of Soviet (and Baltic) machinery and equipment falls far short of the requirements of the world market. Siberias
oil could easily fetch the higher, world-market prices of the oil drilled
at more central, recently discovered fields. If Latvia demands payment
in dollars and at world prices for its electronics, Russian factories will
say: I can buy Japanese goods for that price; if you dont let us have it
cheaper, we wont take it.
People in Latvia know how to work, and if it is decided to leave the
they will of course eventually rebuild their economy. But at what
cost? And will things really be better outside the Soviet Union than
within it? I have not so far heard any convincing reply to this question. People refer to the transition taking two, five or even ten years.
But what if it takes twenty? How many thousand people will lose their
jobs in these years? And what will this unemployed generations
verdict be on their present leaders? None of these issues has been
properly explored.

USSR

In a recent conversation, I learned of the kind of rapid financial

benefits that it is hoped will result from independence. The man I
spoke to listed the very real losses suffered by Latvia through the
appalling bureaucratic mismanagement of its economy. If we eliminate the Soviet bureaucracy, the argument ran, we shall also eliminate
wastage and grow rich. What my interlocutor omitted to say was that
this would automatically happen if bureaucratic despotism was
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eliminated within the USSR. Whereas independence would destroy the

present sources not only of wastage, but of profits too. Everything
would have to be created again from scratch, at considerable cost.
Theres nothing for it, people want independence, and we go along
with them, sighed one of the leaders of the Latvian Social Democratic
movement once to me. But have you explained to them the probable
economic consequences for them of this independence? I enquired.
No, we havent, was the frank reply. Another man intervened
heatedly: The people are prepared for any sacrifices!
Is that so? Have the people of Latvia ever been asked exactly what
sacrifices they are prepared to make, and why? Have they been asked
how much unemployment they are prepared to tolerate, and for how
long? My question about possible unemployment received the candid
reply: We dont want to tell people about that, do we!
I have dealt here only with Latvias economic prospects outside the
these are relatively clear to anyone seriously interested in
finding out. But what about the political future facing the republic
after secession takes place against the will of the Russian-speaking
population? Will we see another Ulster, another Nagorno-Karabakh?
USSR;

I would dearly like to know what my father would do if he was alive

today. I dont imagine for a moment that he would join the majority
CPL, which merely shouts the same slogans that were used so often to
gag him. And what of the minority? Many of the people he respected
have joined the ICPL. Yet he would never have supported secession
from the USSR, however much he criticized Latvias prospects within
the Union. Nor would he have accepted the possibility of a new Communist Party based on ethnic division. And he would certainly be
appalled to learn that the word internationalist is no longer in
fashion. I am sure that the present Communist Party of Latvia has no
chance of becoming a vanguard political force until it learns to talk
honestly, directly and respectfully to the native population of the
republic. I am sure that the Independent Communist Party of Latvia
has no chance of becoming a serious political force until it offers
policies which attract the Russian-speaking population too. To date
there has been no evidence of either.
Translated by Cathy Porter

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