Anti-Latvian agitprop
Agitprop — PROPAGANDA, especially: political propaganda promulgated chiefly in literature, drama, music, or art. First used in 1925, borrowed from Russian Агитпроп "Agitprop", shortened from Агитационно-пропагандистский отдел ЦК КПСС (Agitatsionno-propagandistskiy otdel TSK KPSS) "Agitation-Propaganda Section of the Central Committee of the CPSU" (1920—1928); later used for the head of such a section, or in compound names of political education organs, as agitpropbrigada "agitation-propaganda brigade"1
Cold War Soviet assault
Soviet post-war trials of Nazis and their accomplices, while exaggerating victims,were nevertheless still fact-based. That changed in the 1960's as the Soviet Union launched a concerted, deliberate propaganda campaign denouncing the émigré leadership of their most troublesome nationalities as Nazi collaborators and war criminals.
That campaign included propaganda (print, film, broadcasts, that is, classic "agitprop") disseminated at home and abroad and KGB-organized show trials including fabricated evidence placed into archives. One litmus test is the description of the Askaris in Russian archives as Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians — when, in fact, they were Russians and a smattering of eastern Ukrainians who fought against the Soviet Union.2
- 1960 — show trial of Latvian 18th Police Battalion, partially in absentia. Individuals documented to not have been present declared guilty and executed. Current scholarship still perpetuates the Soviet lie via bogus archival records, maintaining the battalion slaughtered all the inhabitants of Slonim, Belarus3; however, the battalion arrived after the Germans, per German documentation, who had already exterminated Slonim's Jewry—nor had the Latvians been in Slonim when the Soviets alleged.
- 1962 — Paulis Ducmanis authors the fabricated by his own admission Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They? for the KGB, published in "Soviet" Latvia. Daugavas Vanagi is the Latvian veterans' welfare organization, founded after WWII, its initial membership made up of former Latvian Legionnaires.
- 1963 — Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They? is published in English and German.
- 1971 — the KGB hands Ducmanis's work, with its list of names, to Gertrude Schneider during her visit to Latvia, launching the hunt for Latvian Nazis. It becomes the handbook for an incensed Jewry having been informed that Latvian Nazis "live among us." Per Holocaust scholar Prof. Andrew Ezergailis's reflections:
The slate of Latvian suspects would have stayed on a slow boil, had it not been for the happenstance that a fellow historian, a Holocaust survivor, and a former friend, Prof. Gertrude Schneider, made a research trip to Riga in 1971. According to her own telling, in Riga she met “Latvia’s Cultural Minister” who showered her with Soviet publications, that included the baited brochure [the "bait" being its list of names], the one that has managed to overwhelm humanity’s resistance to falsehood, penetrated the shield that members of the legal profession are reputed to possess in double density. The pamphlet Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They? is a matchless work, in a class by itself. From the array of recovered addicts, I do not exempt myself.
The "minister," later defector, was KGB Lieutenant-Colonel Imants Lešinskis. - 1976 — U.S. authorities institute deportation proceedings against Vilis Hāzners, a prominent anti-Communist émigré Latvian, and the first target of the U.S. hunt for Nazis. Hāzners was named as a murderer of Jews in Daugavas Vanagi, Who are They?.
Post-Soviet Russia
Latvia has been under constant assault in the Russian press and by Russia's politicians for decades, primarily for its grousing about half a century of Soviet occupation and thanklessness for its so-called "liberation". As Boris Timoshenko of the Moscow "Foundation for the Defense of Glasnost" has observed: "The results of the survey are not surprising. They reflect the influence of government propaganda. People in Russia can't understand when the Baltic states and Poland compare the Soviet occupation with that of the Nazis. The Russians are still expecting the discussion about the past to end with a 'thanks for liberating us'."
In a Baltic trifecta, 49% of Russians polled in 2005 named Latvia as an enemy (1st place), Lithuania 42% (2nd), and Estonia 32% (3rd). Russia's war in 2008 with Georgia over South Ossetia ousted Latvia from first place, while over the course of the ensuing decade, the United States eventually rose back up to its historical adversarial role. Levada's 2008 survey report did not contain the friends and enemies rankings tables.
Top 10 enemies of Russia, 2006-2016
By total percentage accumulation
| 2006 | 2007 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | |
| USA | 37% | 35% | 45% | 26% | 33% | 35% | 38% | 69% | 73% | 72% |
| Georgia | 44% | 46% | 62% | 57% | 50% | 41% | 33% | 19% | 11% | 10% |
| Latvia | 46% | 36% | 35% | 36% | 35% | 26% | 21% | 23% | 25% | 23% |
| Lithuania | 42% | 32% | 35% | 35% | 34% | 25% | 17% | 24% | 25% | 23% |
| Estonia | 28% | 60% | 30% | 28% | 30% | 23% | 16% | 21% | 19% | 16% |
| Ukraine | 27% | 23% | 41% | 13% | 20% | 15% | 11% | 30% | 37% | 48% |
| Poland | 7% | 20% | 10% | 14% | 20% | 8% | 8% | 12% | 22% | 24% |
| Great Britain | 5% | 3% | 8% | 6% | 8% | 7% | 9% | 18% | 21% | 18% |
| Afghanistan | 12% | 11% | 7% | 14% | 15% | 8% | 10% | 5% | 4% | 2% |
| Germany | 2% | 2% | 3% | 1% | 4% | 3% | 3% | 18% | 19% | 19% |
Even Latvians...
An excellent reference for what is, and is not, true of Latvians and Latvian history is Jukka Rislakki's The Case for Latvia: Disinformation Campaigns Against a Small Nation. Even Latvians falsely indict their own.4
It was to the advantage of [Germans and Russian] to brand the Latvians as violent fascists and anti-Semites, bigots, "different" kinds of Europeans. Often this propaganda has been absorbed by the international public and sometimes even Latvian scholars have swallowed the claim as truth.
In 1999, Walking Since Daybreak, the work of Modris Eksteins, a Latvian-born Canadian professor, was awarded a prize as the best historical text of the year in Canada. According to the commendatory review in The Washington Post, Eksteins "with his book placed Latvia within the world's imagination."
However, as a person who left Latvia in childhood and has lived all his life abroad, Eksteins seems to have used his own imagination boldly. He generalizes about Latvians and other "East Europeans" — whomever that term may include. In his work, they are stereotypes of violent and bloodthirsty human beings. The notion among some book reviewers in the West, that "the Latvians slaughtered a large part of the country's Jewish population before the Nazi killing machine could be set up," stems from that book.
According to Eksteins, in small East-European countries, "radical sentiment, especially of a fascist stripe, was widespread. ... Patriotism and national pride easily shaded into xenophobia and hate."
Regarding Latvia, Eksteins writes, with no particular grounding or indication of sources, that "Holocaust was a State of mind here before it was Nazi policy." According to him, Latvians were in the grip of a monstrous hatred; in Eastern Europe "fear and hatred were a way of life." Why was it so? Eksteins offers an explanation: "This was a frontier land where borders and peoples had fluctuated throughout history and where the Jew and the Gypsy were symbols of transience and instability" Further: "Moral feeling had been blunted again and again in this part of the world. ... extermination was the only answer."
Sensationalism garners awards and sells books. Eksteins's "best historical text" is rife with blatant falsehoods. (We do not call them "lies" only because that would imply Eksteins knows better.) As Andrew Ezergailis painstakingly documents in his seminal The Holocaust in Latvia, anti-Semites denounced Latvia as a "Jewish country" because of Latvian society's positive attitude regarding its Jewish minority. Latvia was the only European country to ban anti-Semitic literature. It served as a transit country for Jews fleeing Hitler's Germany. There was no emotional or moral blunting, no dehumanization, no widespread fascism or xenophobia or hate. Post-Nazi-invasion reports back to Berlin bemoaned the Latvians' apathetic unresponsiveness to Nazi anti-Semitic incitement. Nor did Latvians murder "a large part of the country's Jewish population before the Nazi killing machine could be set up." There was absolutely no history of pogroms as elsewhere in the former Russian empire.
The Germans established immediate and total control upon arrival, including disarming the populace under pain of death. The Holocaust was a forcibly imported German "state of mind" and invention, a killing machine that was in full operation as the Germans advanced. The Holocaust in Latvia was not some latent or overt aberration of Latvian society waiting to explode.
We dig deeper into the birth and dissemination of anti-Latvian agitprop in our investigation of Vilis Hāzners's deportation case. Even the United States Department of Justice — convinced Latvians were Nazis — was not above regurgitating Soviet propaganda and lying about Nuremberg trial records in order to railroad the innocent — and, in failure, finding solace in having ruined Hāzners's life, regardless.
| 1 | Definition and etymology of "agitprop" at Merriam-Webster website, with additional materials. |
| 2 | The term originated with local forces which fought for the colonial powers in Africa. |
| 3 | Slonim, Belarus, 1942, account by Alexander Statiev in The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands. |
| 4 | Page 25. |