Rethinking resistance in Soviet-controlled Latvia: new insights from an ongoing research project

In this seminar, researchers will present some of the insights arising from the ongoing research project, “The archaeology of independence: Towards a new conceptual perspective on national resistance in Latvia” based at the University of Latvia The project started in 2022, and will be completed at the end of 2024.

In his presentation, “No ‘People’s War’: A Bordieuan Perspective on the Postwar Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance in Latvia”, Matthew Kott revisits the question of how the brutal and unpopular Soviet regime in occupied and annexed Latvia was able to quell the postwar wave of armed guerrilla resistance. Why were the so-called “forest brothers”, despite significant support amongst the local population, unable to foment a large-scale, popular insurrection against the oppressive foreign rule? By operationalising the concept of People’s War and applying some of Bourdieu’s theoretical ideas on social relations as analytical tools, Kott offers an explanation that looks at underlying societal factors inherent to Latvia as a complement to the more usual analyses focusing on the nature of Soviet power and military-political factors.

Mārtiņš Kaprāns will also present his paper, “Critical Discourse and Societal Shifts: Latvian cultural elite and the Soviet Existential Crisis of the early 1980s”, exploring how rapid transformations in the Soviet habitus posed substantial challenges for the Communist Party in the Brezhnev era. In this presentation, I will focus on how the Latvian intelligentsia sought to interpret social changes. Central to my paper are the discussions about the problems of Soviet society organized by the influential newspaper, Literatūra un Māksla (LuM) in the early 1980s. The newspaper’s relatively peripheral status within the media system of Soviet Latvia afforded it greater leeway to address sensitive topics, including more direct criticisms of the social reality and political order.

Prominent representatives of cultural elite and Soviet officials were involved in these discussions. How did they frame the issues of the Soviet system and potential solutions? To what extent can this framing be linked to the rise of nationalism spurred by Gorbachev’s perestroika? These are the main questions I will explore in my presentation. Additionally, I will examine the processes that occurred behind these public discussions, namely, the relationship between the apparatus of the Latvian Communist Party and the editorial office of LuM. Analysis of archival sources reveals how a conditional synergy could exist between the Latvian intelligentsia and the local Communist Party in the late Brezhnev era, fostering a critical discourse on the Soviet order. I propose examining these complex relationships through the lens of situational interest groups that emerged in the late Soviet period. These interest groups helped to reconfigure the field of power, arguably setting the stage for the developments during perestroika.

Matthew Kott is an historian and researcher at IRES, whose primary expertise is on the contemporary history of Latvia. Already in his doctoral thesis (2007), he examined the negative effects of war, genocide, and occupation on civil society in Latvia. He is also attached to the University of Latvia as a project researcher (2022–2024), and is affiliated with the project “The ‘Soviet West’ Revisited: Individual and Collective Agency in the Contact Zones of Everyday Life in the Estonian SSR” (PRG2140) based at Tallinn University, Estonia, 2024–2028.

Mārtiņš Kaprāns holds a PhD in Communication Science and is a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Latvia. His current research interests focus on Baltic Russophone communities and the Latvian intelligentsia during the late Soviet and transition periods.