Politics of a Refugee Community: AMERICAN LATVIANS

Politics of a Refugee Community AMERICAN LATVIANS leva Z a k e

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2010014941

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zake, Ieva. American Latvians : politics of a refugee community / Ieva Zake. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-1451-5 (alk. paper) 1. Latvian Americans--Politics and government. 2. Latvians-- United States--Politics and government. 3. Refugees--United States- -Political activity. 4. Political activists--United States--History. 5. Anti-communist movements--United States--History. 6. Latvian Ameri- cans--Social conditions. 7. Refugees--United States--Social conditions. 8. Community life--United States--History. 9. Latvia--Relations--Soviet Union. 10. Soviet Union--Relations--Latvia. I. Title.

E184.L4Z35 2010 973’.0049193--dc22 2010014941 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1451-5 (hbk) Contents

Preface vii

Introduction 1

1 Into Exile 17

2 American Latvians as Ethnic Anticommunists 49

3 Ghosts from the Past 89

4 Surviving the Soviet Pressure 125

5 The End of Exile 161

Conclusion 197

Index 211

Preface

This book is a product of my more than a decade long interactions with the American Latvian community involving both informal observa- tions and formal research. I began writing about the American Latvians in 1995 when I arrived in the United States as an exchange student. One of my very ﬁ rst papers written at University of Michigan was for an anthropology class where I used the American Latvian community in nearby Toledo, Ohio as the subject of my study. Their efforts at preserving Latvian identity, their cultural events and political meetings fascinated me. Everything they did seemed strangely familiar and alien simultaneously. Having grown up in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia and strongly identifying as a Latvian I felt tightly connected to these exiles’ dedication to maintaining their ethnic identity. At the same time, I was frequently reminded about the many ways in which we were fundamentally different. Admittedly, I had heard about American Latvians while growing up under the Soviet regime during the 1970s and ’80s. Most of what I was had been exposed to was extremely critical of them. The Soviets perceived Latvian émigrés as a threat and disseminated vitriolic propaganda against them. As most Soviet citizens, I was well trained at distrusting, but never openly questioning what I was told by the Communist regime. Undoubtedly, the vigilance of Soviet anti-émigré propaganda heightened my and other Latvians’ interest in the exiles. The fact that the Soviets disliked and feared Latvians in the West so intensely made them appear powerful and almost heroic. At the same time, I knew that although Latvians in the West were “Latvians,” they were also “Westerners” and therefore very much not like me and anyone I knew. I was not completely sure if I could trust them and whether they trusted me. Overall, Soviet Latvians, including me, carried notably ambiguous and often confusing perceptions of the émigré community. I had ﬁ rst met a number of American Latvians during the early 1990s when they visited Latvia in increasingly bigger numbers. Just as I had

vii viii American Latvians anticipated, they were different from us. They spoke with a funny accent (it actually became a running joke among Latvians in Latvia to imitate the way that American or Canadian Latvians would always insert “uh” when speaking in Latvian). They were loud and unrestricted in their manners and laughed in public like nobody in Latvia would dare. They were smart and interesting and knew a whole lot of things that most of Latvia’s Latvians had never heard of. My parents attended a couple of lectures given by distinguished émigré professors from the U.S. and talked for days about the ideas of democracy, liberty and free market that they had learned from these outsiders. The visiting exiles represented to me, my parents and majority of Latvians in Latvia, a life that we were longing for and yet did not know how to get there. Unsurprisingly, American Latvians were admired and envied by the Latvians who were slowly emerging from the grips of the Soviet regime. At the same time, Latvians in Latvia could not help but notice that on many occasions Latvians from the West were clueless about our life in the USSR. American Latvians seemed so sheltered and unaware of the diffi culties that Latvians in Latvia had gone through. Moreover, in the interactions between the émigrés and the locals, it increasingly seemed that American Latvians looked down on Latvia’s Latvians as badly educated, brain-washed and mentally unhealthy paupers in a dire need for salvation. And it appeared that the émigrés perceived themselves as the only hope for any improvement in Latvia. In response to this perceived arrogance on the part of the émigrés, Latvians in Latvia harbored feelings of resentment. Some began saying that the exile Latvians had chosen the easy way out by fl eeing the Soviets. Others were angry that the Latvians in the West had betrayed Latvians under the Soviet rule. As noted, Latvians in Latvia had very mixed feelings about American Latvians and other Latvians from the West and these sentiments began reaching the surface of the public discussions with increased regularity. In fact, they continue still today. When I arrived in the U.S. my attitudes had been greatly infl uenced by these emerging confl icts between the two parts of the Latvian nation. I could not help but become aware of my differences from the American Latvians. To be sure, they treated me extremely well and welcomed me. Yet, I was unable to immerse myself into their community. Our experiences simply could not be matched and I often felt like an outsider although we all spoke the same language and shared a culture and an ethnic identity. Consequently, in my interactions with the American Latvian community I always remained a neutral observer. I was sympathetic, but Preface ix

I was not taking sides in the internal confl icts of the community. I under- stood them, but I was not one of them. Although sometimes frustrating, this disconnection, I believe, was actually helpful in the writing of this book. In it, I am engaged and sympathetic to the American Latvians, but I am also analytic and not emotionally attached. When I began studying the American Latvian community as a pro- fessional sociologist I was quite surprised to fi nd how little academic writing was available on this émigré community. It seemed that refugee groups such as Latvians had arrived in the U.S. and become adapted to its culture and social context without anyone noticing them. While many other American ethnic groups received lots of attention from many different perspectives, it appeared that émigrés such as Latvians or other Eastern Europeans of the post-World War II period were strangely non- interesting to academics, journalists or politicians. These refugees had never complained or asked for help, they had worked hard and pushed themselves to succeed. They had sent their children to college and accomplished a comfortable middle class standard of living. And exactly because they had been so successful, they had become invisible as a distinctive ethnic group. However, the more I looked at their case, the more apparent it became that they were a truly unique minority with a compelling story to tell. They had a strong and persistent ethnic self-understanding and a sophisticated organizational network. They were articulate, mobilized, politically active and intellectually vigorous. They were also loyal to the United States and strong supporters of American values and political principles. They were a model minority that rarely received any acknowledgment. This book is my attempt to correct the omission of American Latvians from the literature about ethnicity in the United States and to offer a take on the nature of this ethnic community and its controversial place in American political context. The book argues that one of the most important factors that allowed American Latvians to preserve their ethnic identity was their well-defi ned political position. At the same time, their complex politics might have also been the reason for why they had remained intentionally or not unnoticed by the scholars of American ethnic history and sociology of immigration. I hope that this book shows that by studying small immigrant and refugee groups such as American Latvians we can gain a highly valuable perspective on American immigration and problems of ethnicity. The book therefore is intended as both a contribution to the literature by and for the émigré community itself and the larger knowledge about the plurality of American society as a whole. x American Latvians

I would like to acknowledge that the research for this book was par- tially funded by the Non-Salary Financial Support Grant (in 2005/2006 and 2007/2009) of Rowan University and by the Emerging Scholars Grant (2009/2010) of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. Most of the archival research was carried out at the Immigra- tion History Center in University of Minnesota and I am grateful to its Director Dr. Donna Gabaccia and archivists Halyna Myroniuk and Daniel Necas for their enormous help. The Center generously provided me with two Grants-in-Aid to carry out research in its archives. Many thanks go to Valters Nollendorfs and Andris Strautmanis for helpful leads and suggestions as well as to the extremely supportive and interested audiences at my two research-in-progress presentations at the Immi- gration History Research Center in February of 2007 and April 2009. I would like to acknowledge the research and editorial contributions of my undergraduate assistants Laila Bundza and Graham Gormley. I am also indebted to the audiences at the 66th annual meeting of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America at Philadelphia in 2008, 21st Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies at Indiana University in 2008, the 123rd Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association at New York City in 2009, the Eastern Sociological Society’s meeting at Philadelphia in 2007 and the 20th Annual Confer- ence of the Association for the Baltic Studies at Washington DC in 2006. They heard various parts of this book and offered helpful insights and criticisms. Finally, earlier versions of parts of this volume appeared in the book “Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S.: Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees” (Palgrave-Macmillan 2009), the Journal of Baltic Studies and the Journal of Cold War Studies. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Irving Louis Horowitz and the editorial board at Transaction Publishers for their interest in this book project. Special thanks go to my editor, Andrew McIntosh, for his efforts in seeing this book to its publication. Finally, I an indebted to numerous American Latvians who were will- ing to participate in this study and provided me with invaluable insight into their experiences. The book is dedicated to the émigré Latvians who inspired me to come to study in the U.S. and who took care of me when I got here—Ilze Kļaviņa, Rūta Kļaviņa, Ilze Švarca, and Agnese and Kārlis Bomis. Introduction

As a rule, Latvians in America call themselves American Latvians, not Latvian Americans. This name has a larger signifi cance—it refl ects the self-perception of the community. It shows that Latvians in America privilege their ethnic identity over their host country and it also signals the importance that the refugee status plays in how they defi ne themselves. 80 percent of Latvians in the United States are descendants of political refugees from the destroyed Europe of post-World War II.1 They came to the U.S. as the Displaced Persons, grateful to be accepted and thus able to escape the onset of the Soviet regime. This fl ight had not been their choice. They were forced out of their homeland and while trying to make a new life in the United States, most of them were convinced that they were there only until it would be safe to go back home. Therefore they accepted the American context, but did not immerse themselves in it completely. They resisted assimilation also because they believed that they might be the only Latvians left after the Soviet occupation, forced Russifi cation, political prosecution and deportations in their homeland. Consequently, the refugee mindset remained strong even when the émigrés and their children had a chance to return to Latvia in the 1990s. Most of them did not, but they continued to call themselves American Latvians thus preserving the refugee identity as the foundation of their community. This phenomenon suggests that there is something unique about the population of refugees that sets them apart from other immigrants. The present book deals with specifi cally political aspects of this difference. Research on American immigration and ethnic groups has greatly expanded in the recent decades. For example, the newsletter of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society that comes out about twice a year regularly lists close to a hundred books and articles recently published on the issues of immigration and various aspects of ethnicity in the United States. This growth of empirical research has fostered a notable expansion of theoretical discussions about the nature of immigration

1 2 American Latvians and differences among immigrant groups. One of the aspects relevant for this particular study is the debate about the meaning and place of the category of “refugee” in immigration history and sociology. The older perspective on this issue has been called a realist approach. It made a straight-forward proposition that immigrants were usually people who pursued economic gains through migration. In other words, immigrants were those who chose to leave and who had the possibility of returning to their homeland if they wished so. Refugees, on the other hand, were people who had been driven out of their countries due to political reasons such as wars, military occupations, ethnic violence etc. Peter Rose, who represented the realist perspective, put it simply that immigrants were pulled out of their homeland, while refugees or exiles were forced out.2 In other words, the basic difference between the two populations, according to the realists, was that refugees faced political pressure and their fate had been decided by someone else. They would not have left if they had not been made to by some highly negative political circumstances. The immigrants instead were the people who made the decision to leave for themselves and usually due to economic reasons. The nominalist or social constructionist perspective rejected the distinction between the two populations.3 Some of the early critiques of the realist perspective were introduced by the world systems theory, which argued against the dichotomy “because political conditions can cause the economic problems that lead to migration.”4 In other words, both refugees and immigrants were pressured to leave because their countries (notably those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America) were in continuous economic distress caused by the political inequality between the First and the Second and Third Worlds. In other words, economy was political as well for the nominalists. They expanded their argument to propose that the title “refugee” was merely a bureaucratic label, which certain governments had put on specifi c immigrant groups in order to treat them differently than the rest of the migrating population. Sociologically there were no clear-cut differences between immigrants and refugees according to the nominalist perspective. The distinction had been socially constructed by the states—both the homelands and the hosts—following specifi c, usually foreign policy related, political motives. As a result, refugees were welcomed with positive immigration policies, while immigrants were harassed and deported. At the same time, the countries from which the people were leaving treated immigrants as merely a tran- sitory phenomenon and encouraged contacts with them, while refugees were defi ned as traitors who had put their selfi sh interests above those Introduction 3 of their nation. In addition, a number of international organizations and various legal institutions had been developed to perpetuate and enforce these constructed differences between the two groups. In sum, as argued by the nominalists, the category “refugee” was ultimately just a label invented to create politicized distinctions among immigrants, while in reality they were more similar than different. Both realist and nominalist perspectives had certain conceptual advan- tages and disadvantages. Realists’ research generated reliable evidence that effectively described the circumstances surrounding refugees’ decisions to leave. In particular, the realist perspective was good at showing how the emergence and destruction of nation-states and confl icts among them triggered refugee movements. The realists were also successful at demonstrating that refugee experience was signifi cantly different from that of other immigrants. For example, the realist-oriented research was able to prove that the trauma of fl ight and exile had a lasting impact on the formation of the refugee identity. The realists acknowledged that the treatment of refugees by their host countries was often politically determined, however the realists argued that this did not mean that the category “refugee” as such was merely a product of government policy. To them, it was an effective way to describe and analyze attitudes of the host society toward particular immigrants. According to realists, it was important to remember that refugees were people who could not go back even if they wanted to and this situation had major consequences in terms of their behavior in the host country including the networks they built and the extent of their accommodation. One of the major problems with the realist perspective was that it generated studies on specifi c cases, which failed to make generalizable conclusions about global immigration processes. The nominalist approach was stronger in this respect. Its research revealed general patterns of international migration and adaptation in the context of complex relations between nation-states. The nominalist position was supported by research that showed how nation-states imposed cohort differences on immigrants and refugees by admitting them in waves and thus restructuring their communities. The nominalist writing also pointed out that there was little difference in how immigrants and refugees used social networks and family connections when deciding about their destinations. In sum, they demonstrated that assimilation process was very much alike for the two groups and that the label “refugee” had no signifi cant effect on how particular immigrants adapted to the new situation.5 4 American Latvians

Nevertheless, this book contributes to the realist perspective, which has fallen into a disfavor due to the infl uence of social constructionism in the sociology of immigration. To counter this tendency, the present study builds upon the traditional concepts of Peter Rose’s “sociology of exile.”6 He agreed with nominalists that the politics of rescue, that is, the process of developing immigration legislation and practices in the host country, played important role in defi ning who counted as a refugee and how they were treated. However, he stressed the importance of such aspects of the refugee experience as perpetual sense of loneliness, the loss of control over their own destinies, the startling realization that they were a minority in the host country, which complicated their relations with the host society, as well as the refugees’ self-centeredness and preoccupation with their fate. These experiences had undeniably strong impact on the lives of refugee groups and therefore, according to Rose, warranted a conceptual approach that distinguished refugees (exiles, émigrés) from immigrants. This study utilizes Rose’s insights and offers additional empirical evidence to strengthen his approach. In particular, this book points out that one of the most signifi cant, though often overlooked, characteristics of exiled groups is their political activism. For example, this book provides ample evidence that refugees unlike immigrants are politically engaged and mobilized right from the arrival in the new country. In fact, this book supports Cheryl Benard’s contention that life within a refugee community is “governed by its own ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ politics,”7that is, refugee groups are almost like nations or polities by themselves with their own political realities and processes.8 The largest part of this internal political activism of the refugee groups deals with retaining a strong connection to the homeland. Refugees often keep double citizenships or see themselves as members of two different nations for much longer than immigrants do. In those cases when the political entity they left behind no longer exists, refugees actively work to preserve their lost country both in their memories and their politics. Thus, refugees are much more likely to act as “governments-in-exile”9 than other immigrant populations. This also means that refugees are more likely than immigrants to create a double identity in which they successfully assimilate socially and economically, but refuse to adapt culturally and politically. This does not mean that they do not participate in the political processes of the host land. Exactly the opposite is true—they often are a lot of more politically engaged and active than the rest of the host country’s society. However all of their attitudes and forms of activism are governed by their refugee condition, that is, they Introduction 5 make political decisions not on the basis of domestic considerations of the host country, but rather due to foreign policy considerations. Refugees tend to be concerned fi rst and foremost about how one or another policy will impact the situation in the homeland.10 The present book provides ample evidence of this process in the American Latvian community. Latvians in America remained tightly connected to their occupied homeland. In fact, their pro-Americanism was rooted in the belief that the U.S. was the only true friend of their Communist-dominated country. So they were proud Americans because it was extremely important for them to remain Latvians. Their experience in the U.S. was determined by their sense of being the possible very last carriers of Latvian ethnic identity. Thus their personal and their nation’s past continued to play a signifi cant role in how they built their future in the host country. Interest- ingly, this tendency did not decrease with new generations of Latvian émigrés, which indicated that their pattern of assimilation was distinct from what is usually expected of immigrant groups. In addition, similarly to other refugee groups, Latvians in America were fairly homogeneous community and they migrated as whole families, when possible. Their family networks played an important role not only in terms of creating a tightly knit community, but also in replicating certain class-based behaviors in the host country. The social and cultural cohesion of this refugee group had a long lasting impact on their ethnic identity. Latvians in America represented a selective stratum of the inter- war Latvian society—mainly the upper and middle classes with a very high proportion of politicians, public fi gures and intellectuals among them. Due to this, they immediately formed numerous political and cultural organizations and founded a multitude of periodical publications. Every small group printed a newspaper, a literary magazine, a children’s paper and a church newsletter. These exiles had strong opinions and they were used to expressing themselves. They wrote, read and eagerly discussed each other’s publications. This helped the American Latvian community that did not live in ethnic enclave to nevertheless maintain strong social, intellectual and cultural ties. Apart from shedding light on the debate about differences between refugees and immigrants, this study makes other contributions to the larger understanding of American history, history of immigration and sociology of ethnic groups. One of the most valuable areas that are explored in this book is the nature of the cold war in the U.S. The book aims to de-emphasize the importance of governments and state institutions when studying the cold war period, but instead focus on the people’s 6 American Latvians lived experiences during this time. This approach, for example, pays a lot of attention to the nature of propaganda in the two countries and its impact on the way Americans and Soviet citizens perceived themselves and each other. This book acknowledges that, of course, the cold war was “fought” on the higher echelons of the U.S. and USSR leadership and it was a dramatic military and political opposition. But, as it is shown here, the cold war also played itself out in the cultural and social lives of people who were not directly connected to the governments of their countries. In the case of Latvians in America, the micro-level internal dynamic of their community was powerfully impacted by the macro-level processes of the cold war era. As refugees from the USSR, Latvian émigrés not only engaged in political activism against communism and on behalf of the American interests, but they also directly felt the pressure of the Soviet state, which tried to use them for espionage and propaganda purposes. At the same time, American Latvian community mobilized itself and invested a lot of time, energy and fi nancial resources in preserving American anticommunist stance, which in the post-McCarthy era caused them to become labeled as right-wing fanatics. In fact, the story of American Latvians reveals much about the changing American relations with both domestic and international communism during the cold war. Furthermore, a careful historical and sociological analysis of American Latvians illuminates the complex reality behind such vague blanket-categories as “white Americans” or Americans of “European descent.” This book suggests that many ethnic groups, which at some point were all termed “white ethnics,” had distinct cultural, political and social positions. Finally, this book also addresses the issues related to the broader phenomenon of repatriation where émigrés and their descendents migrate back to their homeland after a prolonged period of time. The book gives an insight into the experiences, diffi culties and issues faced by American Latvian repatriates who decided to return to Latvia during the reestablishment of Latvian national independence. It has to be made clear that this book selects and focuses on the most striking and politically relevant moments of the experience of American Latvian émigrés in the U.S. between the 1950s and 1990s. It highlights such controversial topics as ethnic anticommunism (Chapter 2), the hunt for Nazis among American Latvian émigrés (Chapter 3), the Soviet propaganda war against the émigrés (Chapter 4) and the national independence movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s (Chapter 5). The book does not aim to offer a comprehensive history of the American Introduction 7

Latvian community or of all Latvian groups throughout the world. Its goal is, however, to provide a careful description and analysis of the complex political experience of Latvian refugees during the post-World War II period. To create such a sociological portrait of an émigré group, this study employs the perspective of interpretive sociology that attempts to understand complex historical situations from the point of view of the motivations of their participants. In terms of the data, the book uses such varied sources as semi-structured interviews with the leaders and members of exile Latvians’ organizations, archives of the largest émigré organizations, the vast amount of émigré publications and periodicals, Soviet documents from the recently opened secret archives of the Com- munist Party in Latvia and a multitude of secondary sources and media materials from Latvia. It should also be noted that this is one of the very fi rst scholarly books written in English about the community of Latvians in America. Most of the existing texts in English about American Latvian experience have been memoirs or autobiographies. They have been good at offering an invaluable insight into the traumatic past of this refugee group, but they have failed at providing a neutral and analytical perspective on this minority group. Most of these books told the story of escape from the threats of the Soviet regime and documented life in the post-World War II Europe. They were written by émigré Latvians themselves and their purpose usually was to relate the true story of the fl ight into the exile to the Western audiences. Many of these books ended with the refugees’ settlement in the U.S. and thus they did not explore the internal dynamic of the refugee community in its host country.11 One exception to this was a controversial memoir “A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile” by Agate Nesaule,12 a daughter of Latvian Displaced Persons and a professor of English and women’s studies in the U.S. Her book was brutally honest about the horrors of the war and fl ight from Latvia. It was also apparent that the author’s goal was to not only talk about the refugee experience in general, but also emphasize the women’s perspective such as the perpetual threat of rape and violence. At the book’s center was Nesaule’s complicated relationship with her mother whose traumatic experience cost the relationship with her daughter. Nesaule’s mother’s spirit was broken by the war experience and nothing can mend it and help the daughter and mother become close again. Apart from exploring her personal perspective on the war and exile, Nesaule’s memoir also contained numerous 8 American Latvians sad stories about American Latvians who either committed suicide, or killed and psychologically tortured their spouses or became alcoholics while carrying the deep and painful scars of war and the loss of their families and homeland. This book did not offer the optimistic ending of émigrés having found the safe haven in the U.S. Instead, Nesaule’s description of the exiles’ soul showed how individual American Latvians battled with pain and misery, while the community as a whole tended to avoid discussing such issues openly. In Nesaule’s portrayal, American Latvian society of the post-World War II period was hardly an example of success, prosperity and stability, which was the image that it tried to present to the Americans. In reality, the émigré life was plagued with failures, exclusion, poverty and personal disappointments. Neither the émigré society, nor the Americans appeared in a positive light in Nesaule’s writing. While the refugee community was shown as quite narrow-minded, dogmatic and obsessed with its nationalist agendas, the Americans were portrayed as arrogant, ignorant and uninterested about anything beyond their own little worlds. Naturally, Nesaule’s memoir received mixed response in the émigré community. It was confused as to why she had to make Latvians look so bad. The book generated positive interest in the Western and Latvian academic world where it was studied as an example of a feminist auto- biographical writing. Most, if not all, of analytical research on American Latvian community has been published in Latvian.13 Moreover, often such texts were intended as contributions to the controversies inside the group itself, that is, they were hardly neutral in their analysis of the processes inside the émigré community. The only other major discussion of American Latvians that was objective and sociologically broad discussion was the dissertation of a promising sociologist Juris Veidemanis. He completed this research in 1961 at the University of Wisconsin. His very thick and detailed doctoral thesis analyzed the changes and continuities in Lat- vian value system from independent Latvia, to the Displaced Persons camps to resettlement in the U.S. The dissertation offered an insider’s look into the experiences of Latvians as refugees and recent arrivals in America, particularly in the Milwaukee area. The study showed that although Latvians shared quite a few values with the American context, they would be likely to assimilate only in the 5th or 6th generation. One of the main reasons for this resistance to assimilation was the way in which the Latvian exile community had preserved most if not all of the values from their society back home. This also allowed Veidemanis to Introduction 9 make a strong case for a claim that refugees such as Displaced Persons from Europe were different from other immigrant groups. Veidemanis published a few articles based on his research, however, he never turned his comprehensive thesis into a book.14 No other comprehensive studies of the American Latvian community followed Veidemanis’ example. This lack did not, of course, mean that there were no people with academic interests and training to carry out such a research in the émigré community. American Latvian society contained a large number of highly qualifi ed researchers and academics. The Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies consisted of hundreds of Latvian scholars who were dedicated researchers of all matters Latvian inside and outside of Latvia. Yet, the majority of Latvian scholars in the West were fascinated by the processes inside Latvia. They studied Latvia’s history and wrote about the nature of the Soviet regime. They worked hard to become well versed in the realities of the post-Communist life in Latvia and its political, economic and social development. Doing research on Latvia undeniably sustained their ethnic identity through the post-World War II years, while researching the émigré community appeared too limit- ing and even irrelevant to them. The exile society was what they had to live with, not what they wanted to write about. Undeniably, in social sciences a researcher always has to deal with the issues of closeness and distance vis-à-vis the subjects of one’s study. It is hard not to develop emotional reactions and attachment to the people one is studying. At the same time, being too connected can be counter-produc- tive because it can become diffi cult to separate oneself from the object of one’s study. Research can lose its effectiveness and value if it turns into a mere extension of the personal characteristics of the researcher. This can help understand why émigré scholars were more interested in doing research on Latvia as opposed to their own community. Latvia and its people were both close and alien to them. They could relate to the problems of Latvia, yet they were not ultimately immersed in it. At the same time, Latvians who arrived in the West during the 1990s (such as me) perceived the émigré society as a fascinating area of research. They were able to analyze and discuss the exile Latvians with enough connection and disconnection—Latvians in the West were strange enough to be interesting and close enough to be understandable. This book is a product of the closeness and simultaneous distance that I have maintained in my relationship with the community of Latvians in the U.S. To provide a general background for the discussion of American Latvian community, it can be helpful to take a brief look at the history 10 American Latvians of Latvians as a nation. Latvia is a small country of about 2.5 million inhabitants on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It borders Russia on the east, Estonia on the north and Lithuania on the south. The early ancestors of the current Latvians were Baltic tribes whose lives were dramatically changed when the fi rst German Christian missionaries arrived during the mid-1160s and began Christianizing the Baltic pagans. A few decades later, Pope Innocent III declared a full-blown crusade against the pagans in Baltic territories. Armed with a mission to make Christianity perma- nent in the Baltic, the fi rst bishop Albert arrived in 1200. He founded the city of Rīga, which is the contemporary capital of Latvia, and used it as a military fortifi cation. The Saxon soldiers that had accompanied him were transformed into an order of knights and were granted land as Albert’s vassals. Meanwhile, the surrounding Baltic tribes were enslaved and turned into the serfs for the German knights. The conquest was completed by 1290 when the medieval state of Livonian Confederation was established on the Baltic territories. The Livonian state was a notable player in the politics of northern Europe up until the end of the 16th century. Its 250,000-300,000 non- German inhabitants were all made into serfs by the end of the 15th century thus establishing one of the last systems of hereditary serfdom in Europe. Although the Livonian state survived through multiple internal disputes and even military confl icts, the situation became particularly complicated when the arrival of Lutheranism caused violent riots in the Germanized cities during the 16th century. In the end, Protestantism won in Livonia and most of the rural landlords converted their peasants to Lutheranism. Although, the Baltic serfs had little to say about the conversion one way or another, the change brought some unexpected benefi ts to them. Due to Luther’s insistence that the Word of God must be made available to all churchgoers in their native language, the fi rst congregation for the speakers of Latvian was founded in Rīga. Livonian clergymen now had a strong incentive to learn the tongue of their parishioners and translate important religious texts into it. This process inadvertently created foundation for some of the earliest understandings of ethnic, not just class, differences between the German landlords and Latvian-speaking serfs. As noted, the confl icts caused by Reformation weakened the unity of already unstable Livonian state and made it an easy prey to such land- hungry neighbors as Russia. It conquered a part of Livonia at the end of the 16th century. Eventually, the fate of the Livonian Confederation was decided among the competing powers of Sweden, Poland-Lithuania Introduction 11 and Russia. After a number of transactions, peace treaties and continu- ing warfare, Livonia was parceled into pieces. This split situation was put to an end by Peter the Great’s conquest of the Baltic territories in the 18th century. Under the Russian rule, the system of estates and serfdom were preserved and even perfected. This situation allowed the Baltic German nobility to strengthen its position in the Baltic provinces. Therefore, when in the mid-18th century, Catherine the Great attempted to centralize the Russian state and consolidate the imperial power, the well-established German nobility both in the Baltic provinces and Moscow effectively sabotaged her reforms. The following Tsar Paul was sympathetic to the Baltic Germans and revoked many of Catherine’s reforms. Due to this, it appeared at the time that the old ways of the Baltic German dominance in the region could never be changed. But the 19th century proved otherwise. By then, the Russian imperial government as a whole had become more conscious of and dissatisfi ed with the Baltic Germans who were able to effectively undermine Moscow’s rule in the Baltic region and run things as they wished. To counter this, some infl uential anti-German forces in the Russian administration actually sought an alliance with the Baltic peasantry to oppose the German landowning nobility. The Russian imperial government also helped this process by ending the serfdom in the Baltic provinces and by creating conditions for the development of a rural middle class of landowners and professionals. As part of this campaign, Russian institutions of higher education were made accessible to the Baltic peasants, which effectively fostered formation of a native intellectual class that later ushered in the age of ethnic nationalism in the Baltic region. Aware of the potential threats of regional identities, Russian imperial government unsuccessfully attempted to stop the rapid formation of national consciousness among the Baltic peasants at the end of the 19th century. Moscow attempted to enforce Russifi cation and conversion to Orthodox Christianity, but it was already too late. Imperial measures were ineffective and only helped to heighten the anti-imperial and anti- Russian political radicalism in the newly created Baltic intelligentsia and working and middle classes. The aborted Revolution of 1905 was the fi rst explicit signal that the times were dramatically changing in Russian empire. A number of socialist and nationalist activists from the Latvian territories participated in the unrest. The imperial backlash sent some of them into exile and others to Siberia, but it did not manage to stop the spread of ideas of socialist radicalism and nationalist anti-imperialism among the educated classes, the peasantry, and working class of the 12 American Latvians

Baltic region. By then, the notions of Latvian, as well as Estonian and Lithuanian ethnic identity were quite developed. During the World War I a number of highly active Latvian socialist and nationalist activists sought refuge in Russia and during this period the fi rst open demands for Latvian statehood were formulated. The end of the World War I and the doctrine of national self-determination as promoted by the victors provided a unique opportunity for the nationalist- oriented Latvians to establish a nation-state. The Republic of Latvia was proclaimed on November 18, 1918 and it lasted until June 14, 1940 when the Soviet Union, following its secret agreement with the Nazi Germany, occupied Latvia by force and incorporated it into the USSR. During the period of independence, Latvia was a liberal democracy with a full-fl edged parliamentary system. It had multiple political parties and a high voter turnout showing popular trust and interest in the political system of the newly-founded state. The new Republic adopted a Constitution and implemented a land reform that seriously undermined the power of the Baltic German landowners and created instead a strong land-owning class of Latvian peasants. The two main political forces of independent Latvia were the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, which represented the interests of the urban working class, and the Agrarian Union, which was supported by the Latvian peasants and rural inhabitants. It is notable, however that Latvian Social Democrats were usually able to win the parliamentary elections, but they consistently refused to participate in the creation of coalitional governments. They continued to doubt whether a Latvian nation-state was liberating enough for the working class. Due to this, most of the governments in independent Latvia were led by the second largest political force—the nationalist- oriented Agrarian Union. Although Latvian democracy was young, it already had quite a few opponents. Among the critics of democratic parliamentarism were not only some of the more radical politicians, but also well-respected intellectuals and public fi gures. According to them, democracy was merely a transitionary political system that could not survive because it responded to the lowest common denominators, it gave power to unworthy people and it caused too much social confl ict and strain. They argued instead for the politics of strong ideals and leadership. To them, noble principles were more important than free and equal political process. In the light of the popularity of fascist anti-democratic ideology and authoritarian rule in Europe in the 1930, it was not surprising that Latvian intelligentsia and politicians were taken by such ideas.15 Introduction 13

While the mainstream political parties fought with each other and criticisms of democracy became louder, the extremists on both the political left and right intensifi ed distracting and often violent activities. In an alleged effort to put an end to the growing political chaos, a popular prime minister from the Agrarian Union, Kārlis Ulmanis, took matters in his hands and executed a coup d’état in 1934. He dismantled the parliament, banned all political parties, including his own. He instituted censorship in mass media and established a corporatist political and economic administrative system that was consciously modeled after the Italian Fascist system. Over the years, Ulmanis effectively encouraged the glorifi cation of his persona as the “Father of the Nation” and “the omnipotent Leader” in mass media, art, literature and education. Meanwhile, he gradually minimized the role and authority of his cabinet and eventually concentrated all power in this hand thus establishing an authoritarian political system. He justifi ed this destruction of Latvia’s democratic beginnings as necessitated by the need to save and protect the Latvian people. When the Soviet Union threatened and later occupied Latvia in 1940, Ulmanis’ “omnipotent” leadership turned out to be cowardly, helpless, and incapable of putting up any resistance. In a famous radio address to Latvia’s residents on the wake of the Soviet tanks entering Latvia, he merely declared: “I am staying in my place, and you should stay in yours,” thus effectively telling the citizens of his country not to oppose the invasion. When the Soviet Union had completed the incorporation of Latvia into the USSR, Ulmanis was imprisoned and deported to Si- beria where he perished. During 1940 a large portion of the independent Latvia’s cultural and political elite were thrown into prison, deported to labor camps, or executed. In the collective memory of Latvia’s residents this year was ingrained as the time of terror and oppression. When in 1941 Latvia was invaded by the Nazi Germany, it cannot be denied that certain parts of the Latvian society welcomed the Nazis as liberators chasing out the hated Communist regime. Latvia was under the Nazi occupation until 1944 and experienced the creation and destruction of Jewish ghetto as well as forced recruitment of Latvian men into the Nazi military. At the end of the World War II in 1944 the Soviets defeated the Nazis and re-established the Communist regime in Latvia. Fearing another wave of persecutions, a large number of Latvians packed up and fl ed just ahead of the returning Soviet forces. These were the refugees that this book is focused on. After fi ve decades under the Soviet regime, Latvia became independent again in 1991 when the USSR rapidly disintegrated. Latvia, along 14 American Latvians with Estonia and Lithuania, were the fi rst Soviet Republics to declare their independence from the Soviet Union and they are often credited as the initiators of the ultimate destruction of the Soviet empire. Since 1991 Latvia has developed a parliamentary democracy and market-based economy. The political processes in Latvia often are unpredictable as one coalitional government is replaced with another sometimes even twice a year. However, the principles of free political system and protection of individual’s rights are highly respected in contemporary Latvia. One of the biggest recent achievements of Latvia’s Republic has been its entrance into both NATO and the European Union. Before embarking on the detailed description of the political experiences of American Latvian community, I would like to add a note on terminology. Throughout a book, the terms such as refugee, political refugee, émigré, or exile are used interchangeably. I do not identify the American Latvian community as immigrants and this book is an explanation of the reasons for this distinction. Also, I use the term “American Latvians” to talk about the political refugees who arrived in this country in the 1940s and ’50s as a result of their fl ight from the Soviets at the end of the World War II. I also include their children and grandchildren in this category. I sometimes refer to the Latvians who entered the U.S. before World War II as American Latvians, too, although I tend to usually identify them as the so-called Old Latvians. The more recent immigrants who have moved to the U.S. in search for education or jobs since 1991 (and whom American Latvians refer to as “Latvia’s Latvians” or “LLs”) are not discussed in this book and are not thus included in the category of American Latvians as it is used here. Notes 1. Tirgus un sabiedriskās domas pētījumu centrs SKDS, Pētījums par ārpus Latvijas dzīvojošajiem bijušajiem Latvijas iedzīvotājiem, viņu pēctečiem un kopienām (Rīga: SKDS, 2006), 13-16. 2. Peter Rose, “Tempest-Tost: Exile, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Rescue,” Socio- logical Forum, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1993): 5-24. Other authors who fall into the realist category are: R.R. Fagen, R.A. Brody, T.J. Leary, Cubans in Exile: Disaffection and the Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968); G.P. Kelly, From Vietnam to America: A Chronicle of the Vietnamese Immigration to the U.S. (Boulder: Westview, 1977); W. D. Stanley, “Economic Migrants or Refugees from Violence?,” Latin American Research Review 22 (1987): 132-54; S.J. Gold, Refugee Communities: A Comparative Field Study (Newbury Park: Sage, 1992). 3. As an example of the nominalist writing, see R. Bach, “The Cuban Exodus,” in The Caribbean Exodus, ed. by B.B. Levine (New York: Praeger, 1987), 106-30; A. Portes and R.L. Bach, Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the U.S. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Introduction 15

4. Jeremy Hein, “Refugees, Immigrants, and the State,” Annual Review of Sociology, 19 (1993): 55. 5. Hein’s article (“Refugees, Immigrants, and the State,” 43-59) provides a complete discussion of the differences between the realist and nominalist positions. See also Jeremy Hein, States and International Migrants: The Incorporation of Indochinese Refugees in the U.S. and France (Boulder: Westview, 1992). 6. Rose, 5. 7. Cheryl Benard, “Politics and the Refugee Experience,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 4 (1986): 617. 8. Ibid, 624. 9. A very illuminating discussion on this point can be found in Yossi Shain, “Ethnic Diasporas and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 109, No. 5 (1994): 811-841. 10. Rogers Brubaker calls this “the triadic relation between diasporas, host states, and home states.” See his Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Ques- tion in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 59. 11. See, for example, Irene Zarina White, Fire Burn: World War II Diaries (Bloom- ington, IN: Xlibris, 2006). 12. Agate Nesaule, “A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile” (New York: Soho, 1995). Another recent text that critically explored the impact of the refugee experience of his Latvian parents to his personal formation is Sven Birkerts, My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time (New York: Penguin, 2003). 13. A recent valuable addition to the literature in Latvian on the post-World War II refugees provides a detail portrait of the émigré community in Denmark. See Guntars Saiva, Latviešu bēgļi Dānijā (Rīga: Retorika A, 2008). 14. Juris Veidemanis, Social Change: Major Value-Systems of Latvians at Home, As Refugees and as Immigrants (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1961). 15. More on the appeal of anti-democratic ideas among Latvian intellectuals, see Ieva Zake, Nineteenth-Century Nationalism and Twentieth-Century Anti-Democratic Ideals: The Case of Latvia, 1840s-1980s (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).