Introduction: Writing Latgale

What do a nationalist Latvian Communist Party (LCP) official, a dancer from a small border town in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR), and a Soviet Latvian writer have in common? In late 1958, one would find all three in Riga, celebrating eastern Latvian – Latgalian – culture during one of the most grandiose performances of regional cultures in the Soviet Union. One year later, the same party member would be purged and exiled, the dancer’s language and culture de facto banned, and the writer would find himself in trouble with the Latvian Glavlit.

The Latgale Culture Week in December 1958 brought together more than 700 participants from Latgale for a week of concerts, performances, and exhibitions in Riga. Reflecting on the elevated mood leading up to the event, on December 8, 1958 – the opening day of the Culture Week – the newspaper Padomju Jaunatne (Soviet Youth) reported that

Dzimtenes Balss (Voice of the Motherland) declared that the event was to become “a vivid testimony to the flourishing of Latgalian culture” (Reference Balss1958). The Riga Carriage Works factory, State Electrotechnical Factory, workers’s clubs, State Philharmonic, and State Academic Drama Theatre all hosted dances, performances, and concerts by Latgalian artist collectives, and journalists extensively covered the event in LSSR newspapers, TV programs, and radio. “Wherever our dancers and singers performed, the audience rewarded them with sustained applause and flowers,” reported Balvu Taisnība (Balvi Truth) on the successes of performances by artists from the Latgalian city of Balvi during the Culture Week. Similar to Latvian and Estonian song festivals, the Latgale Culture Week was not only supposed to highlight Latgalian culture but also act as a vehicle for demonstrating national unity in a coherent “cultural expression of non-Soviet mood” (Misiunas and Taagepera Reference Misiunas and Taagepera1993, 177) at the precipice of the power struggle between nationalist and pro-Soviet factions within the LCP between 1956 and 1959. The Culture Week was to set an example for other large-scale nationally oriented public actions taking place in the years following 1958, such as the Latgale Song Festival in 1959 in Daugavpils and the annual Poetry Days after 1965 (Streičs Reference Streičs2018, 15). Seen as an event fostering nationalist sentiment in the LSSR by the LCP hardliners, however, no such Culture Weeks were organized after 1958, and shortly thereafter Latgalian culture entered into a steep decline, the effects of which are still felt today.Footnote ²

This article analyzes the imaginaries and topoi deployed by members of the Soviet Latvian intelligentsia – writers, scholars, and journalists – who wrote about Latgale’s history, identity, and culture before, during, and after the Culture Week. Through the discursive practices adopted by the authors this article examines, Latgalian culture was ultimately transformed from a domain of meanings, beliefs, and histories of an identity group into a mere political instrument to be used to advance particular party agendas within the LCP. What were, then, the specific mechanisms that rendered Latgalian culture political during the Culture Week? What descriptions did the intelligentsia defer to when talking about Latgalians? Where did these imaginaries of Latgalian identity come from in the first place? By using the Culture Week as the starting point, this article attempts to write a postcolonial cultural history of Latgale. Most major Anglophone literature on the cultural history of Latvia during the Soviet occupation (Gibson Reference Gibson2016; Misiunas and Taagepera Reference Misiunas and Taagepera1993; Smith et al. Reference Smith, Galbreath and Swain2010) only briefly pays attention to the developments of Latgalian culture that took place in the post-Stalinist era. In the context of existing literature on the cultural politics of the Khrushchev Thaw, historians have largely focused on the political effects of the national communist movement, as well as the Latvianization policies pursued by the faction between 1956 and 1959 (Bleiere Reference Bleiere2002; Bleiere Reference Bleiere2006; Bleiere Reference Bleiere2016; Loader Reference Loader2015; Loader Reference Loader2017; Prigge Reference Prigge2015). Latgale, however, has generally not figured as a specific focus of the current scholarship on the Thaw. Further, scholarship examining the problem of Soviet colonialism in the Baltics (see Kelertas Reference Kelertas2006; Annus Reference Annus2012; Kalnačs Reference Kalnačs2016) has tended to flatten the multiple experiences of Soviet colonialism in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia by taking up the geocultural category of “the Baltics,” or one of the individual nation-states, as the preferred unit of the political, cultural, economic, or social analysis of the region’s postcolonial condition. In the case of the cultural history of Latgale, such a homogenous methodological approach ignores the fact that the effects of Soviet colonialism, particularly in the sphere of culture and language, were experienced differently in Latgale than in Riga. In response, this article complicates this existing application of a postcolonial lens to the study of colonial discourses in Soviet Latvia by foregrounding the variegated effects of Soviet cultural policy within the republic itself. The discursive analysis of Soviet and Latvian colonial narratives in periodicals in the context of the Latgale Culture Week will show that postcolonial analyses of the history of Latvia have so far largely failed to account for the ways internal pre-Soviet historical legacies have differently shaped the experiences of Soviet colonialism in the Latvian interior.

This article proceeds, first and foremost, from situating Latgale as a geographical double periphery under Soviet rule, resulting in a Latgalian identity that is suspended between Soviet and Latvian colonial imaginaries thereof. Such a theoretical approach rearticulates understandings of power relationships between the colonial core and the periphery in the study of sub-republican groups in the Soviet Union by rejecting the view that casts Soviet colonial peripheralization as a one-sided process through which the non-Russian Soviet republics are homogenously interpellated as “the colonized” by the colonial Russophone center. Instead, by centering the case study of Latgalian identity in 1958, this article shows that in the non-Russian Soviet republics, and in the LSSR in particular, pre-Soviet ideologies that set in motion processes of internal colonial peripheralization continued to coexist and were concomitantly reinforced with practices of Soviet colonial peripheralization, ensuring and strengthening the extent of the continued peripheralization of intra-republic subaltern cultures. Therefore, this article considers Latgale in the late 1950s as a colonial periphery of another colonial periphery, located, on the one hand, in a peripheral republic of the Soviet Union and, on the other, situated internally as a peripheral territory and what will be referred to as the “internal Other” of Latvia.

Latgale’s historical trajectory radically diverges from the imperial histories of the other three Latvian historical-cultural regions, contributing to the formation of dominant social attitudes that have identified the region as the nation’s internal Other. As part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Latgale saw the influx of Jesuit priests from Poland who converted the local population to Catholicism in the 16th century; in the 17th century, Old Believers, persecuted in the Russian Empire, sought refuge in Latgale. The history of Jewish presence in Latgale can be traced to the 17th century, and following the region’s incorporation into the Russian Empire in the 18th century, Latgale was later subsumed under the Pale of Settlement. By the beginning of the 20th century, Latgale was thus considered the most multicultural and “the least ethno-linguistically ‘Latvian’” of all Latvian regions (Gibson Reference Gibson2016, 20). Latvia’s Russophone population in particular was mostly concentrated in Latgale (Tables 1 and 2), and this demographic distribution became a particularly salient issue during the national communists’s attempts to Latvianize Latgale in 1958 and 1959.

Table 1.

Census data for Latgale (1897, 1925, and 1935 censuses)Footnote ³

Table 1. Long description

From the top row downward, the table lists Latvians, Russians, Belarusians, Jews, and Poles. For Latvians, percentages are 51.5 in 1897, 56.9 in 1925, and 61.3 in 1935. Russians are 15.8, 26.4, and 27.2. Belarusians are 13.5, 5.3, and 2.5. Jews are 12.9, 5.9, and 5. Poles are 6.3, 4.7, and 3.5. Each ethnic group is a row, and each census year is a column, showing changes in population share over time.

Table 2.

Census data for Latvia (1897, 1925, 1935, and 1959 censuses)

Table 2. Long description

From top to bottom, the table lists Latvians, Russians, Belarusians, Jews, and Poles. For Latvians, percentages are 68.4 in 1897, 73.4 in 1925, 75.5 in 1935, and 62 in 1959. Russians: 8.1, 10.5, 10.5, 26.6. Belarusians: 4.1, 2.1, 1.4, 2.9. Jews: 6.5, 5.2, 4.8, 1.7. Poles: 3.4, 2.8, 2.5, 2.9. Each value is aligned under its respective year, showing changes in ethnic composition over time.

Descriptions of the Culture Week and Latgalian identity are reflective of the ways the Soviet Latvian intelligentsia attempted to (re)construct a distinct Latgalian identity in the context of the historical-political circumstances of the mid-to-late-1950s. The volatility and significance of this period in the history of the LSSR – specifically, the ascent of the national communists in the ranks of the LCP between 1953 and 1956, the Thaw, and the subsequent purges of the national communists in 1959 – underscore the impossibility of viewing Latgalian identity and culture in isolation from the broader political zeitgeist in which the Culture Week took place.

This article analyzes essays, articles, and news reports published in Literatūra un Māksla (Literature and Art), the official publication of the LSSR Union of Writers,Footnote ⁵ that explicitly covered topics of Latgalian history, culture, and identity in the context of the Culture Week. Read by members of the intelligentsia and creative unions, Literatūra un Māksla gradually expanded its readership throughout the years of its existence (1945–1994), ultimately becoming a forum for fostering a vibrant intellectual life in the LSSR, particularly after Jānis Škapars assumed the editorship of the publication in 1969. It was one of the most politically significant publications in the LSSR (Škapars Reference Škapars2006), and it played a pivotal role in carving out space in the Soviet Latvian public sphere where some of the most pressing questions in national history, ecology, education, economics, and language politics could be discussed. As the editor (1969–1985) of Literatūra un Māksla, Škapars (Reference Škapars2006) notes that the publication closely reflected the political, social, and cultural landscape in the LSSR. Therefore, looking at the pages of Literatūra un Māksla between 1958 and 1959 allows us to trace the Repetition shaping broader debates in the public sphere during the time, while specifically paying attention to interpretations of Latgale’s history and culture by some of the most prominent Soviet Latvian intellectuals at the time.Footnote ⁶

After tracing the historical context in which the Culture Week took place, beginning from the establishment of the independent Latvian state in 1918 to the Thaw in the mid-to-late 1950s, this article applies Francine Hirsch’s (Reference Hirsch2014) notion of cultural performativity and Benedict Anderson’s (Reference Anderson2016) serialization to outline the specific mechanics of how Latgalian culture became a vehicle for asserting particular political positions within the LCP in 1958. The article then shows that representations of Latgalian identity between 1958 and 1959 discursively reinscribed the power differential between the historically Otherized Latgale and the national center while reproducing Soviet narratives of modernity that instrumentalized Latgale’s subaltern position for the Soviet state’s own colonial objectives in its maintenance of internal center-periphery relations. Ultimately, this article proposes that in the late 1950s, Latgalian culture,Footnote ⁷ lodged between Latvian and Soviet imaginaries of the region, was rendered a culture without its authentically own “coherence, identity, and sense,” to refer to Edward Said (Reference Said1979, 86). Having been politicized in its entirety, it instead became a site where Latvian nationalist and Soviet fantasies of state-building played out.

Latgalian Identity in the First Half of the 20th Century

Latgale occupied a prominent position in the elite-led processes of Latvian identity construction and nation-building during the first half of the 20th century. The region was central to how Latvian state-builders imagined a territorially bound and culturally cohesive Latvian state as plans for declaring independence were put into action in 1917. In May 1917, during the First Congress of Latgale – the first democratically elected assembly of people’s representatives from the region – members of the Latgalian intelligentsia voted “to unite with the other parts of Latvia while still preserving local self-government and cultural autonomy in Latgale” (Krauze Reference Krauze2014, 39). Latgale became an official administrative and territorial unit of the unitary Latvian state, which was centrally governed from Riga. As Plakans (Reference Plakans1995, 104) notes, however, the Latgalian intelligentsia understood well that “merging western and eastern Latvians would require far more attention than that process had needed in Courland and Livland.” Most notably, the Latgalian writer and member of the First Congress Francis Kemps, writing about processes of Latgalian integration for the Latgalian newspaper Dryva in 1917, argued that “[i]t is not possible to blend us but to position us side by side as the two independent national organisms we have historically grown into and matured” (Krauze Reference Krauze2014, 39). For Latvian nationalists, Latgalian identity confirmed the national imaginary of Latvia as a united and territorially cohesive nation. Latgalian culture, therefore, became a component of broader articulations of Latvian national culture, and it had to manifest itself according to the parameters set forth by the Latvian cultural imagination of itself and, consequently, of Latgale. Viewed as simultaneously culturally Other and indispensable to the formation of Latvian statehood, Latgalian identity functioned as a vehicle for confirming the cohesiveness of Latvian national identity by signifying the birth of the state through Latgale’s national homecoming following the First Latgale Congress, which constituted a crucial milestone in Latvia’s path to independence after the First World War.

The Latvian state’s definition of a “national minority” was based on the basis of language spoken at home (Smith and Hiden Reference Smith and Hiden2012, 31), which resulted in a straightforward application of the law with respect to linguistically cohesive national minorities, such as the Baltic Germans and Jews. The law specifically established that “wherever a district contained 30 children speaking a particular ‘family language,’ the state was obliged to provide schooling in that language” (Smith et al. Reference Smith, Galbreath and Swain2010, 32). While Latgalian was recognized as an administrative language in Latgale (Krauze Reference Krauze2014, 39), schooling in the ethnically heterogeneous region took place in multiple languages, including Latvian, Latgalian, and Russian.

In line with the Latvian government’s emphasis on education, teachers from other regions of Latvia (who were locally known as the “Balts” [baltieši]) began to arrive in Latgale in the early 1920s to teach in regional schools; however, as Arnis Strazdiņš (Reference Strazdiņš2015, 70) finds, local communities in Latgale often expected these teachers “to emphasize values of regional identity and to cultivate the Latgalian written language.” With this rarely being the case, Latgalian educators and cultural workers thus saw the “Balts” as suspicious and untrustworthy, emphasizing fears that the “Balts” might be “bringing with them ‘their ideas and propaganda,’ and ‘suffocating the Latgalians and Latgalian language’” (Strazdiņš Reference Strazdiņš2015, 70). This distrust between Latgalians and the “Balts” intensified following 1924, when a secret committee of nationalist bureaucrats (first known as the “Joint Committee for Bringing the Border Zone Economically and Culturally Closer to the Rest of Latvia”Footnote ⁸ (Purs Reference Purs2002, 62)) in the Latvian government was set up to draft an agenda for “nationalizing” Latgale “by drawing non-ethnically Latvian pupils out of minority-language schools and into those teaching in Latvian” (Smith and Hiden Reference Smith and Hiden2012, 67). The committee discussed the potential rural colonization of Latgale by resettling ethnically Latvian farmers to the border areas to “secure the frontier” and create a separate class of ethnically Latvian “Cossacks” (Purs Reference Purs2002, 64). For the nationalist bureaucrats in the late 1920s, Latgale was thus “an ambiguous ethnic frontier that had to be made Latvian to guarantee the survival of the state” (Purs Reference Purs2002, 71).

Following the 1934 Latvian coup d’état, the authoritarian government of Kārlis Ulmanis formally instituted a Latvianization policy in Latgale, which, similar to the Polonization campaign pursued in Poland by Józef Piłsudski between 1926 and 1935, sought to phase out Latgalian from public life and mark a “‘return’ of the ethnically akin, yet religious and linguistic Other, into the environment of a ‘restored’ Latvia” (Hanovs and Tēraudkalns Reference Hanovs and Tēraudkalns2013, 79). Hanovs and Tēraudkalns (Reference Hanovs and Tēraudkalns2013, 84) go on to say that by 1934, “the perception of Latgale largely rested on perceiving Latgale as a district of a lower state of economic development, thus laying the foundations for an image that also continues to be stable in the present political and media discourse in Latvia.”

During the subsequent Soviet occupation in 1940 and in line with the Soviet rejection of nationalist-bourgeois culture, Latgale was

The occupation preserved Ulmanis-era restrictions on Latgalian, and the language was mainly used at home or in church services (Lazdina and Marten Reference Lazdina and Marten2012, 77). In speaking about the status and usage of regional languages and dialects in the context of the Soviet Union more broadly, it is worth noting that korenizatsiia policies in the Soviet Union had already stopped being enforced under Joseph Stalin in 1938 at the latest (Chulos and Piirainen Reference Chulos and Piirainen2000). This would come into play in the late 1950s, when questions concerning Latgalian identity – including language, which constitutes its most important aspect – would finally appear on the political agenda of the Soviet government, both at home and in Moscow.

The Turning Point: The Thaw and the National Communists (1953–1959)

Stalin’s death in 1953 marked the beginning of an era of “new openness and possibilities unimaginable just a few years before” in the LSSR (Prigge Reference Prigge2014, 305). At the same time, the postwar years bore witness to a rapidly changing linguistic and demographic landscape in the LSSR due to the influx of Russian-speaking settlers from other Soviet republics. As a response, believing that “the characteristics of (…) each republic must be taken into consideration” in building communism (Bleiere Reference Bleiere2006, 393), the national communists emerged as a force to counter what they saw as the post-war Russification of Latvian life. Characterized as a “general state of mind” and not as a strongly defined group (Bleiere Reference Bleiere2006, 396), the national communists were not merely just ethnic Latvians but rather represented a diverse front of “like-minded individuals from a range of backgrounds, ethnicities and ages” (such as Pavel Cherkovskii, the Deputy Minister of Culture of LSSR between 1958 and 1959, who was an assimilated ethnic Belarusian from the city of Ludza in Latgale), all of whom were united in the struggle against the Russification of Latvian culture (Loader Reference Loader2015, 90). As Bleiere (Reference Bleiere2016, 121) notes, the national communists enjoyed support among the Latvian nomenklatura and intelligentsia, as the defense of Latvian culture emerged as the national communists’s very raison d’être (Loader Reference Loader2015, 113).

The national communist faction gradually formed between 1953 and 1956, and following Khruschev’s Secret Speech in the 20th Party Congress in 1956, the national communists felt confident enough in their ability to “launch a series of campaigns and policies in an effort to realise their vision for Latvia” (Loader Reference Loader2015, 87). For the national communists, the Thaw, marked by the Secret Speech, thus gave ample opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with

The national communist faction in the LCP was led by Eduards Berklavs, the deputy chairman of the LSSR Council of Ministers (1956–1957 and then again 1958–1959). He was joined most notably by Vilis Krūmiņš, Pauls Dzērve, and Voldemārs Kalpiņš (Minister of Culture of LSSR between 1959 and 1962), among other like-minded and nationally oriented LCP members. Their primary target of attack were the old-guard Stalinist-era LCP members, with Arvīds Pelše at the forefront. Pelše, a Russianized Latvian, was the Secretary for Propaganda and Agitation of the LCP Central Committee. In the struggle between the national communists and Pelše, the latter of whom “always had the final word in culture” in the LSSR (Prigge Reference Prigge2014, 310), any national communist “[v]ictories in culture struck directly at Pelše and the Stalinists” (Loader Reference Loader2015, 144), for the arenas where most battles were fought by the national communists were cultural – song festivals in particularFootnote ⁹ (Stradiņš 1998, 33 in Loader Reference Loader2015, 113–4). In fact, Pelše even declared in the summer of 1959 in a speech to the Riga gorkom that “[i]t was the Russian people, the Party [Central Committee] and the Soviet government, which helped to create our [Latvian] culture” (Loader Reference Loader2018, 273). For him, “[a]nything that was connected to spiritual culture, the legacy of the past, and ethnic relations was not negotiable” (Bleiere Reference Bleiere2006, 404).

After the 20th Congress of the CPSU, as Jānis Lapsa notes in his interview with Kalpiņš, “there was also a revival in Latgale’s culture, new currents emerged, new collectives and new names made their debut. The spiritual life of Latgale rose like well-leavened dough, promising a rich feast of culture and art” (Lapsa Reference Lapsa1988, 113). The Thaw, crucially, briefly reanimated Latgalian identity and culture as a topic of public discourse and debate. Misiunas and Taagepera (Reference Misiunas and Taagepera1993, 134) note that

The Thaw “raised high hopes in cultural circles” (Misiunas and Taagepera Reference Misiunas and Taagepera1993, 151). In 1957, however, Khrushchev had already reined in on free thought, “having encountered the dangers [thereof] well before 1957” (Prigge Reference Prigge2015, 68). By then, Pelše, too, had finally felt emboldened enough to start his own campaign of “cultural purification” (Prigge Reference Prigge2015, 68). Culture thus became “the key battle in Latvia because of what it represented. For Pelše, culture was a question of primary allegiance: either to the Latvian nation or the Soviet Union” (Prigge Reference Prigge2015, 68). In particular, Pelše had become notorious for “venerating the ‘historic’ tie between Latvians and Russians and the great benefits that, according to him, Russian ‘protection’ had brought to the Latvian people” (Plakans Reference Plakans1995, 159).

By 1959, the national communists’s influence had also reached the editorial offices of Literatūra un Māksla under the leadership of Kalpiņš, who was the editor-in-chief of the publication between 1954 and 1958 (Loader Reference Loader2015, 99). Consequently, the media coverage of Latgalian culture in 1958 in national communist-controlled publications like Literatūra un Māksla was aimed at proving “that Latgale had its own cultural history and that its past was not solely marked by backwardness” (Zeile Reference Zeile1988, 7). While Latvian culture at large was situated at the center of both the national communists’s and Pelše’s struggle for political control over the LCP and the LSSR (Bleiere Reference Bleiere2002, 114–15), this article extends this argument to situate Latgale – and Latgalian identity specifically – as one of the most important realms in which the culture wars of 1958 and 1959 were waged.

It was during the “Cherkovskii affair” in late 1958 that Latgale’s significance to the political aims of both the national communists and Pelše was made particularly visible. The events of the “Cherkovskii affair” took place after Berklavs had expressed concern with the implementation of the national communists’s Latvianization program in Latgale (Loader Reference Loader2015, 217) – and in the city of Daugavpils specifically, whose majority-Russophone and pro-Pelšist administration had positioned itself as hostile to the national communists’s efforts to promote Latvian culture in the region (Loader Reference Loader2015, 218). As Deputy Minister of Culture and enforcer of the national communists’s cultural agenda, Cherkovskii was subsequently dispatched to Daugavpils ahead of the Culture Week to report back on the cultural activities in the Latgalian city. His report confirmed Berklavs’s concerns about the state of cultural and public affairs in Daugavpils and Latgale. Cherkovskii ultimately concluded in his report to Berklavs that in Latgale, “Latvians as the indigenous people of this land have been deprived of the opportunity to speak in their mother tongue” (Loader Reference Loader2015, 219).

The conflict over Daugavpils reflected the broader national communists’s struggle against the Russification of Latvian culture (Loader Reference Loader2015, 219). Therefore, to rectify the situation in Daugavpils, Cherkovskii recommended that “a large number of experts in Latvian culture be dispatched to carry out the changes in Daugavpils and Latgale” (Loader Reference Loader2015, 220). This also included training cultural workers from Latgale in Riga, organizing traveling exhibitions of Latvian artists in Latgale, and sending theater groups, choirs, and philharmonic groups from Riga to cities and districts all across Latgale (LVA PA-101. f., 21. apr., 126. l., 252–3. lp.).

The regulations of the Ministry of Culture regarding the organization of the event, which were approved by Berklavs, began with an explicit statement that the “goal of the Latgale Region Cultural Week is to promote the flourishing of culture in Latgale and introduce the capital’s working people to the region’s cultural features and achievements” (LVA, 678. f., 2. apr., 39. l., 2. lp.). Importantly, the national communists demanded that the “repertoire of choir and dance groups, as well as individual performers, must include Latgalian folk songs and dances” (LVA, 678. f., 2. apr., 39. l., 3. lp.). One of the most prominent Latgalian intellectuals, Pēteris Zeile, noted that the Culture Week was part of a distinct national communist agenda on Latgale, which strategically encompassed “a series of initiatives – the regional song festival, the establishment of a professional theater in Daugavpils, the development of choirs, and more” (1988, 7). However, these cultural initiatives, steered from Riga, remained suspect in the eyes of the Pelšists. Regarding the establishment of a Latvian-language theater in Daugavpils, Kalpiņš wrote in a letter to Jānis Peters in 1988 that

Following the end of the Culture Week in January 1959, the national communist-controlled LCP Central Committee sought to continue pursuing its nationally oriented cultural agenda, with Latgale at the very center thereof. The Central Committee at the time, for example, obligated Kalpiņš to organize lectures and presentations on Latgalian art in Latgale and to create a traveling exhibition featuring the best works from the fine and applied arts showcased during the Culture Week, which would then be dispatched to all Latgalian districts (LVA, PA-101. f., 22. apr., 37. l., 109. lp.). At the same time, on the Pelšists’s side, in a report titled “Regarding the Latgale Culture Week,” hardline critics offered the following review of the event, based on an article written by the composer and conductor Jānis Ozoliņš:

The necessity to organize the Culture Week precipitated precisely because of the national communists’s goal of Latvianizing the republic’s, as well as Latgale’s, culture; indeed, as Alīda Zvagule reflects, the Culture Week in Riga was prepared by Kalpiņš precisely “to emphasize Latgale’s Latvianness and belonging to Latvia” (Grāpis and Miglāne Reference Grāpis and Miglāne2011, 141). While the national communists believed that “local culture was something worthy of preservation,” Prigge (Reference Prigge2015, 69) writes, “Pelše viewed it as a dangerous relic of a bygone age.” Therefore, both the national communists and Pelše sought to appropriate Latgalian identity in order to create and set in motion a new ideological discourse on Latgale – and it was Latgale with which the culture wars could be won.

Kalpiņš was at the forefront of this endeavour. He originally envisioned that it would be Latgalian artists who would play a major role in asserting national autonomy against the encroaching Soviet threat. Indeed, many of Kalpiņš’s contemporaries, including the Latgalian conductor Terēza Broka, believed that the Culture Week would prove that “Latgalians, with their unique ethnic character, and the living blood of folk art, are no less capable than our neighboring regions” (Grāpis and Miglāne Reference Grāpis and Miglāne2011, 146). Recalling previous performances of Latgalian culture in Moscow, during which Latgalian choirs and dance performances drew special attention from their Moscow audiences, Kalpiņš remembers Russian experts noting that Latgalian culture was “the pure stuff without any foreign admixture,” a productive medium in which Soviet proletarian culture could emerge (Streičs Reference Streičs2018, 9).

Simply put, what precipitated the organization of the Culture Week by the national communists was the fear of losing Latgale’s perceived “Latvianness.” Here, opera singer and member of the Daugavpils’s Latvian theater cast Alīda Zvagule’s recollections of Kalpiņš are particularly illuminating. In her memoir, Zvagule describes a conversation with Kalpiņš, in which he “told us that the idea of annexing Latgale to Belarus was being floated in the highest echelons in Moscow” and that this, consequently, “created a pressing need to prove that Latgale was an inseparable third starFootnote ¹⁰ of Latvia” (Grāpis and Miglāne Reference Grāpis and Miglāne2011, 140–1). In his memoirs dedicated to Kalpiņš, Streičs writes:

By late 1959, however, it felt “as if a new Zhdanovshchina (cultural purge) was blowing over Latvia, and the chill was to continue for many years” (Misiunas and Taagepera Reference Misiunas and Taagepera1993, 162). The growing infighting in the LCP on ethnolinguistic and cultural issues between the national communists and Pelše attracted the attention of Soviet leadership in Moscow. Letters denouncing rising nationalism in the LSSR had already been pouring into Moscow for a while, and Pelše quickly seized the opportunity to purge the national communists from power in 1959. Initially, Khrushchev disfavored a purge (Prigge Reference Prigge2015, 127), but he understood the implications of a potential “nationalistic uprising,” recognizing that “such outbursts could quickly spread, threatening Soviet rule in other republics” (Prigge Reference Prigge2015, 117). As Prigge (Reference Prigge2015, 117) continues, both “Berklavs and Khrushchev had enemies in the Kremlin who sought simultaneously to remove a nuisance in Latvia and weaken the premier in Moscow,” prompting Khruschev to act swiftly to remove Berklavs – and the national communists – from power following his visit to Latvia in June 1959.

For Latgale, the purges “thoroughly changed the cultural atmosphere” and the ways in which writers would address Latgalian identity in their works (Misiunas and Taagepera Reference Misiunas and Taagepera1993, 162). As Kursīte and Stafecka (Reference Kursīte and Stafecka2003, 38) remark, “[t]he new ban on printing for Latgalians began soon after the Culture Week, when the authorities in Riga began to see divisiveness and manifestations of nationalism in the Latgalians’s desire to develop their culture and identity.” This meant that, between 1958 and the restoration of independence in 1991, the Latgalian language was only spoken at home and not used in public life (Lazdina and Marten Reference Lazdina and Marten2012, 70). What followed the Culture Week, then, was not a renewed celebration of Latgalian identity but a crackdown on Latgalian culture on a level not observed since the 1865 print prohibition (Housden and Smith Reference Housden and Smith2011, 54). The brief period between 1956 and 1959, therefore, offers a glimpse into an attempt by the national communists to (re)construct a distinct, albeit Sovietized, Latgalian identity while still navigating the ideological constraints that limited free and open public discourse about questions of (sub)national identity.

Latgale Comes to Riga: December 1958

While many Soviet Latvian writers writing about the Culture Week attributed colonial exploitation to interwar (and particularly Ulmanis-era) government officials, clerics, or 19th-century imperial authorities, colonial attitudes toward Latgale were still deeply present in Soviet Latvian public life in the late 1950s. To many in Riga, the idea that Latgale was completely devoid of culture was rooted in the internal colonial gaze on Latgale that had undergirded the Latvian state’s relationship to the region during the independence period. One such illustrative example is Andris Vējāns’s (Reference Vējāns1958) travelogue to Latgale, in which he describes the everyday life of Latgalian youth in the village of Marguči in Latgale, whose only joy, in light of the historical poverty of the region, had so far been “danc[ing], dr[inking] beer in the fall and maybe knock[ing] down one of the poles on the side of the road in the morning.”

While the Latvian state, particularly under Ulmanis’s rule, was concerned with the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic integration of the “foreign” Latgale into the national community, the Soviet state located Latgale’s economic inferiority as the main contributing factor to Latgale’s historical “backwardness.” In the Soviet Latvian intelligentsia’s attempt to bridge the periphery to the center (more specifically, both Latvian and Soviet centers of power) in their descriptions of Latgalian culture and identity in Literatūra un Māksla, these writers nevertheless deployed language that had historically molded Latgale into the nation’s internal Other and rendered Latgalian culture, stripped of autonomous meaning and agency, a mere vehicle in which ideological messages could be embedded.

Throughout the preparations for the Culture Week, the authorities in Riga had the final say in what made true and authentic Latgalian culture. As such, the national center had to decide which performances of Latgalian culture were most accurate and representative of the region in the overall selection process of Culture Week participants. Determined to only select the “best,” the jury for the Culture Week often issued highly charged decisions. Pabērzs (Reference Pabērzs1958) writes that, in one instance, “jury decided: let Daugavpils, Līvāni, and RēzekneFootnote ¹¹ continue to work and compete with each other. The winner will be decided shortly before the Culture Week.” This “Judgment of Solomon,” as Pabērzs (Reference Pabērzs1958) puts it, “was based on the consideration that [artist collectives] would benefit from the continuation of competition.”

Discourses of cultural “backwardness,”Footnote ¹² predicated on the historical differentiation between Latgale and the rest of Latvia – a durable mental template for imagining Latgalian identity (Hanovs and Tēraudkalns Reference Hanovs and Tēraudkalns2013) – made their way into language about the Culture Week. Against this backdrop, the organizing committee of the Culture Week echoed similar sentiments: since Latgale’s political, social, and economic structures were weak, the region was incapable of managing itself. Accordingly, this meant that Latgale had failed to adapt to modern life and was therefore unable to produce contemporary culture. Juris Pabērzs describes such attitudes, writing that

In an editorial published in the fall of 1958, it was noted that the “success [of preparing for the Culture Week] would be much greater if the people entrusted with the management of Latgale’s cultural development were more concerned about it” (Literatūra un Māksla 1958c). In Literatūra un Māksla’s coverage of the Culture Week, Latgalians were often described as incapable of managing their own cultural affairs, paving the way for Riga to intervene and extend a helping hand to Latgalians. For those artist collectives whose work was deemed not yet “sufficient to travel to Riga,” for example, the organizing committee decided that “it would be good if the Riga theaters took over the running of these collectives” (Literatūra un Māksla 1958d).

At times, some Latgalian intellectuals writing for Literatūra un Māksla sought to critically examine the strained relationship between the republic’s periphery and the center. Pēteris Zeile (Reference Zeile1959), for example, noted that

It becomes apparent that Latgale – the internal Other, the budding success story of Soviet modernity – is only opportunistically invoked in discourse by the political center. For Zeile, the right kind of focus on the region was necessary to correct the injustices of the past that were specific to Latgale. The editorial board of Literatūra un Māksla, on some occasions, took a similar line in examining the biases inherent in its coverage of Latgale. In an editorial published in the spring of 1958, the editors recognized that

The editorial sought to dispel a totalizing myth of Latgale – as underdeveloped, backward, and lacking in cultural vitality – and instead shift the focus to the historical and social circumstances that had relegated Latgale to its position of permanent alterity. As Antons Stankevičs (Reference Stankevičs1958) notes, the economic differential between the republican center and Latgale had also transposed itself onto the internal cultural hierarchies within the LSSR: he later suggests that Latgale’s “artistic performances have been very mediocre or even unsatisfactory” precisely because “Latgale seems to have been left out of our fast-paced, vibrant cultural life.”

The act of being able to represent oneself in Riga, as one editorial laid out, ought to have been viewed by Latgalians as a privilege, a “great honor to represent the culture of your native region, to represent the new modern Latgale in the capital of the republic” (Literatūra un Māksla 1958e). Artist collectives had to “earn” the right to go to Riga to showcase the most technically polished representations of Latgalian culture. Failure to accurately represent Latgalian culture in front of a potential crowd of Rigans had tangible consequences for artist collectives. The privilege of participating in the Culture Week was quickly bestowed upon those deemed “Latgalian enough” by the jury committees. Surveying these folk groups selected to take part in the Culture Week, one editorial remarked that these “representatives of the ‘Land of the Blue Lakes’Footnote ¹³ have done a great deal to ensure that their visit does not disappoint the capital of the Republic” (Literatūra un Māksla 1958b).

The colonial exploitation faced by Latgalians in the hands of Polish and Russian imperial authorities and landowners, as well as by the Latvian landowners during the interwar years, was often invoked when attempting to situate the Culture Week in the broader imaginaries of Latgalian identity in Literatūra un Māksla. Writing about the history of economic exploitation of Latgale and the possibilities of remedying this “backwardness” that Soviet modernization efforts could offer, Jānis Sudrabkalns (Reference Sudrabkalns1958), for example, lamented that, historically, in Latgale, “[t]he isolation and backwardness was not only in the minds of the obscurantist clericals but also of the big landowners of Vidzeme and Zemgale, who sought cheap labor in Latgale as well as in Lithuania and Poland.” An editorial from May 17, 1958, also echoed Pabērzs by stating that “the relative poverty and the backwardness in industry and agriculture inherited by the Soviets in Latgale are hard to compare with conditions in Vidzeme, Zemgale, and Kurzeme” (Literatūra un Māksla 1958a). It is precisely due to the efforts of the Soviet state that “Latgale’s sad traditional backwardness is disappearing in all sectors, now also in the cultural field” (Literatūra un Māksla 1958b). After all,

Latgale was highlighted as a geographic site for germinating the Soviet idea of friendship of the peoples, which stood in stark contrast to the intense cultural strife between state officials and Latgalians that played out during the last years of Latvian independence (Literatūra un Māksla 1958a). In line with this belief, “[t]he revival of cultural life in Latgale, which will be particularly rapid in the future, must embrace all these nationalities and serve to further strengthen the friendship and mutual respect between the peoples” (Literatūra un Māksla 1958a). The Culture Week, then, was a step toward the final integration of Latgale into the republic’s cultural and social life – a socialist homecoming. For this reason, authors in Literatūra un Māksla often urged Latgalians to be thankful for the Soviet state’s attempts to pull the region out of its economic and social misery, locating the Culture Week as the prime opportunity for expressing their gratitude to the Party. “In the crown of the ancient, distinctive art of the Latvian region,” as one editorial put it, “the working people of Latgale will inscribe in golden letters their gratitude and joy for the bright horizons opened up for Latgale by [their] guide – the Party” (Literatūra un Māksla 1958e).

The positive effects of Soviet rule in Latgale were continuously celebrated in Literatūra un Māksla in anticipation of the Culture Week. Writers emphasized the Soviet state’s efforts to mitigate the effects of those historical circumstances – Latvian nationalist and bourgeois – that had left Latgale impoverished in the past. This was to be done in accordance “with the truth that Soviet life has confirmed a thousand times over: there are no forgotten peripheries” in the Soviet Union (Literatūra un Māksla 1958a). Further, since Latgalian culture had historically been associated with Catholicism, some authors in Literatūra un Māksla pinpointed the large influence of the Catholic Church, and religion more broadly, as particularly harmful to the economic, political, and “spiritual” development of Latgale. In December 1958, at the zenith of the Culture Week, Jānis Sudrabkalns (Reference Sudrabkalns1958) vehemently attacked the Catholic Church, which he saw as complicit in the colonial exploitation of Latgalians:

Preserving the anti-clerical throughline in the descriptions of Latgalian culture and history in Literatūra un Māksla, Stankevičs (Reference Stankevičs1958) further wrote:

The showcasing of Latgalian culture was a necessary component of how Soviet modernization efforts would be implemented in the LSSR. Authors writing for Literatūra un Māksla (1959) often injected ideas of Soviet saviorism in their broader contextualizations of the Culture Week in the national and Soviet narratives of the history of Latgale:

This new, Sovietized Latgalian culture combined elements and practices from the past – filtered through the Soviet lens – with new (Soviet) forms of expression in the present. In Literatūra un Māksla’s editorials prior to the Culture Week, authors often underscored that “the representation of the eastern region of Latvia in the capital of the Republic [must become] a real celebration not only for Latgale but for the whole Latvian nation” (Literatūra un Māksla 1958d). This meant that throughout the Culture Week celebrations, “the Soviet people [were] bringing to light and polishing both ancient and emerging cultural values,” and, as such, “[t]he contribution of Latgale [became] a rich addition to this glorious pool of folk art” (Literatūra un Māksla 1958d). Latgalian culture, once “carried more in the hearts of the people of Latgale than shown to others,” was “awakened by Soviet life” and finally embodied “the ever-flourishing culture of the Latvian people” in the Soviet imagination (Literatūra un Māksla 1958d).

Conclusion: Imagining and Reimagining the Nation

Shortly after the Culture Week had concluded, in early 1959, the Latgalian diaspora newspaper Dzeive (Life) published the following reflection on the event:

The Culture Week was devoid of the cultural “spirit” of the very people who were supposed to represent Latgalian culture, ultimately becoming a site where Latvian and Soviet national imaginaries of statehood played out. It became a discursive stage on which Latgalian identity could be performed; the Culture Week was both Hirsch’s “ethnic exhibition” and Dzeive’s museum of Andersonian cultural objects and logos. Authentic expressions of Latgalian identity – to be appreciated for its own sake – were secondary to the Culture Week itself.

The study of Soviet “local” cultures like Latgalian, as Diana Kudaibergenova (Reference Kudaibergenova2013, 841) notes, “opens up the horizon for detailed and hidden analysis of elite networks in their attempts of constructing the national imagination in the Soviet era.” In the context of existing literature on nationalities in the Soviet Union, these local – and often doubly peripheral – identities largely emerge as objects of study as markers of internal republican ethnic tension.Footnote ¹⁵ While Latgale’s regional autonomy, unlike other culturally distinct subnational territories in the Soviet Union,Footnote ¹⁶ was not officially recognized during the Soviet occupation (although proposals for a change in Latgale’s territorial status had been in the works in Moscow before 1958 (Streičs Reference Streičs2018, 9)), and the region never became a site for intense ethnic confrontation, it nevertheless offers the opportunity to map the national imaginary – both Latvian and Soviet – for which Latgalian identity became the battleground in 1958.

The modes of representing Latgalian culture and identity deployed in the pages of Literatūra un Māksla in service of supporting a particular imagination of the Latvian nation reproduced similar discursive tropes that had originally relegated Latgale to the position of Latvia’s internal Other. In 1958, Latgale was entangled in multiple structures of power, and these were, notably, colonial and not simply hierarchical. Stable modes of imagining Latgale – as Other, foreign, and backward – from the First Congress onward, the complex and strained relationship of Latgalian identity with the idea of “Latvianness,” as well as the policies pursued by the authoritarian Latvian state in the 1930s that sought to Latvianize the region and mark Latgale’s “return” to the Latvian body politic (Hanovs and Tēraudkalns Reference Hanovs and Tēraudkalns2013), formed an assemblage of discursive practices that would be carried into the 1940s and 1950s, creating a distinctly Latvian discursive basis on which the Soviet colonial discourse could take root. Further work analyzing the discursive patronization and inferiorization of Latgalian identity in Latvian and Soviet imaginaries of the region could also take place in rural studies (see Cloke and Little Reference Cloke and Little1997 as an example), constituting a novel framework in the nascent field of Latgalian studies for untangling representations of Latgale’s “backwardness” that came to the fore in light of the Culture Week and the Soviet state’s interest in the region post-1940 more broadly.

Above all, the ebbs and flows of power – from Riga to the eastern borderlands, from Moscow to Riga, and to Latgale, between Latgalian folk groups and their Riga audiences – made the Culture Week one of the most spectacular examples of performing regional cultures in the Soviet Union. Having been hauled to the front of the LCP agenda in 1958, Latgalian culture became political in its entirety, and the event’s reverberations are still felt in the political and cultural landscape of contemporary Latvia, in which the ways of writing and talking about Latgalian identity in the public sphere bear close resemblance to the same developmentalist, saviorist, and Otherizing imaginaries in which it was entangled during the Soviet occupation.