Jews and Communism in Latvia (1918 to June 1941)
Continuing on with my documentation of reality of the jewish involvement with Communism (aka Judeo-Bolshevism) after covering the neighbouring Baltic state of Lithuania: (1) I thought I’d cover Latvia.
Now Latvia is interesting in large part because it never really has had a significant communist party despite Latvians playing a significant early role in the Bolshevik Revolution alongside jews and indeed – despite literacy being used as an argument to excuse significant and sustained jewish involvement with Soviet officialdom and security apparatuses – Latvians were actually more literate than the jews but had little to serious long-term involvement with the same governmental and security structures showing that this is simply a badly-contrived excuse not a valid argument against Judeo-Bolshevism. (2)
The jewish involvement in communism in Latvia – as was the case in Lithuania – (3) is belied by their relatively small numbers in the population with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania between them only having approximately 265,000 jews by 1940, (4) which in turn breaks down as: (5)
Estonia: 4,434 jews (0.4 percent of the population) in 1934.
Latvia: 93,479 jews (4.8 percent of the population) in 1935.
Lithuania: 153,745 (7.6 percent of the population) in 1935.
The situation for the jews in Latvia – like that in Lithuania and Estonia – were some of the best in the entire of Eastern Europe at the time (6) and they even had significant autonomous privileges as a community. (7)
In many ways the jews dominated the newly independent Latvia as they set up the Latvian state bank as well as the new currency, controlled the timber and timber export industry as well as the flax, linen, textiles and chocolate industries in addition to also having control over the importation of gasoline/petrol, coal and wheat into the country. (8)
They were however a heavily urban population (9) and between 1925 and 1935 some 48.6 percent of jews were engage in trade and 28.7 percent in industry which was by far the highest representation in the Latvian population. (10) Symbolic of this fact is the presence of a vibrant Yiddish theatre in Riga in the 1920s and 1930s, (11) which was briefly revived by the Soviet Union after the Second World War. (12)
This helps explain why Marxism and communism were not particularly popular with the jewish population of Latvia from 1917 till 1940, (13) but despite attempts to use this idea to brush the idea of the rug.
The example of Hungary in 1919 - when the jews were in a similar position of significant financial and indirect political dominance over the country only to launch a major ethnic war against the Hungarian state and people under the guise of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (14) which disproportionately targeted non-jews while being disproportionately jewish - (15) provides us with a framework within to understand the jewish ethnic war against the Latvian state and people that occurred when Stalin’s Soviet Union occupied Latvia on 17th June 1940.
Latvia’s communist party was a tiny organization by any standard with a mere 300-400 members in 1940 (16) – indeed by late 1944 it was still only less than 700 members strong – (17) and was under the direct control and domination of Moscow with little to no independence whatsoever, (18) which was made even more complete after the 1937-1938 trial and execution of most of the senior Latvian communist leaders/intellectuals in the Soviet Union (such as Julijs Danisevskis, Roberts Eidemanis, Jekabs Peterss, Jukums Vacietis, Gustav Klutsis and Janis Rudzutaks) on charges that they were ‘Latvian nationalists’ (19) by the NKVD (of whom 19 of its 35 generals in 1935 were jewish according to Sergei Semanov) (20) overseen by its jewish commander: Genrikh Yagoda.
We don’t have any demographic information I can find about the Latvian communist party before the end of the Second World War, but we know that significant numbers of Latvians lived in the Soviet Union (21) of which a significant number were actually jews and moved back to Latvia during the Soviet occupation between 1940-1941 and then from late 1944. (22)
We also know that a significant number of those identified as ‘Russian’ in Latvian and Soviet official statistics and elsewhere may have in fact been jews (23) because of how ‘nationality’ was determined (by mother tongue/self-report so if you were a jewish but primarily spoke Russian then you were falsely classed as ‘Russian’). (24)
Aasland provides an example of how: ‘several thousand Jews registered as Russians’ ‘accounted in part for a drop in the total Jewish population by 1935’. (25)
We also know that Soviet officialdom (including the security apparatus) under Stalin was heavily jewish till at least 1940 (26) – with the direct evidence of Stalin’s official appointment/logbook suggesting that those Soviet officials working with the Soviet dictator directly were between 75-90 percent jewish during the period of 1930 to 1939, while 10 percent of middle-to-high ranking bureaucrats in Soviet ‘economic management’ were jewish in 1939 and more than 50 percent of jews were white-collar workers in the Soviet Union - (27) and we have little reason to suppose Latvia’s communist party was different.
The fact ethnic Latvians were almost exclusively murdered by Stalin’s heavily jewish NKVD during the so-called ‘Latvian Operation’ of 1937 during the Great Purge – I can only find one jew from Latvia who was killed named Isaak Rubin while the rest were all Latvians (largely from peasant families) – while jews from Latvia seem to have largely been untouched rather smacks of what Purs has politely termed ‘ethnic targeting’. (28)
Now coming back to the Latvian communist party; after the occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union on 17th June 1940 following the Maslenki incident, which was an unprovoked Soviet attack that killed five and kidnapped thirty-seven Latvians from a border post near the town of Maslenki and was the official pretext/excuse for the Soviet occupation.
After this was complete the Soviet Union began to enact a planned purge of Latvian society on the Soviet model – modern Latvian assertions that this was a deliberate genocide of Latvians are both correct (it was) and incorrect (it needs to be put into the context of similar purges enacted by Stalin’s Soviet Union across the geographic, political and ethnic spectrum) – (29) but it wasn’t till after the ‘election’ of the ‘People’s Parliaments’ – which were hand-picked by the Soviet authorities – in July 1940 that the real terror began. (30)
The Soviet security forces began with the former leaders of Latvia – especially Latvian nationalists – with - for example - the Latvian politician Margers Skujenieks – who was an ardent nationalist – being hauled off to the infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow where he was tried and executed on 12th July 1941. (31)
Another example is Arveds Bergs – a real estate and newspaper mogul in Latvia – who was also a radical nationalist and whom was arrested and charged by the NKVD for his role in the military field execution of communists as Latvia’s Minister of the Interior in 1920. Bergs was promptly convicted in a show trial using the forced confessions from other arrested Latvian government officials and was sent into the gulag system before being shot by the NKVD on 19th December 1941. (32)
To give a sense of scale; between August 1940 and June 1941 there were more than 200 political arrests per month in Latvia with October 1940 holding the record of 507. (33)
All told more than 7,000 Latvians were arrested for political crimes and roughly 1,500 executed in this period by Stalin’s NKVD. (34)
In addition, 850 (non-jewish Latvian) officers from the Latvian military were also arrested and deported during this time. (35) Nearly all of these men were either executed by the NKVD or died in Stalin’s gulags and prisons. (36)
However, the worst was yet to come with the mass deportation of Latvians which was scheduled to begin in all the Baltic States in June 1941 after being approved in May 1941 by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. (37)
Although often thought to pre-date the invasion in 1940; these deportations are actually now thought to have been drawn up in January 1941 and have been misdated by accident. (38) We also know that the impetus for the deportations came both from below (the Latvian communist party) and above (Stalin and his closest advisors). (39)
In June 1941 in Latvia some 5,000 people were arrested for deportation with 10,000 family members also arrested for deportation (40) (or 15,424 people to be precise) (41) of which 1,771 were jews. (42)
Thus circa 11.5% of the deportees were jewish.
Traditionally this number had been claimed to be 5,000 jews out of a total of 20,000 people deported by the NKVD from Latvia (i.e., 25% of the deportees were alleged to be jewish), (43) but - as stated - scholarly research has significantly contradicted this claim and clarified the number based on archival work.
These numbers are often used to claim that jews were significantly ‘persecuted’ by Stalin’s NKVD in Latvia with the World Jewish Congress asserting that:
‘Under Stalin, Jews, who formed only five percent of the population, constituted 12% of the deportees.’ (44)
While Misiunas and Taagepera claim that even 1,000 Latvian jews being deported would be greater than a higher percentage than the country as a whole: 1 percent versus 0.8 percent respectively. (45)
The problem with the World Jewish Congress’ as well as Misiunas and Taagepera’s claim is that – similarly to the same claim made about jews being ‘disproportionate victims’ of Bela Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 – (46) is that the claim treats the population as a whole as if they were equally liable to being targeted by the Soviet security forces, which simply isn’t true and gives a false picture of the Soviet repressive measures in Latvia emphasizing jewish suffering in order to distract from significant jewish participation in - and responsibility for - inflicting that suffering on jews and non-jews alike.
If we refer back to the fact that 48.6 percent of jews were classified as being ‘in trade’ in 1935 – which roughly equates petit bourgeois in Marxist thought which in turn roughly equates the famous kulaks that Stalin repeatedly persecuted (and whom were also disproportionately jewish) – (47) and just assume that the 28.7 percent ‘in industry’ were all industrial workers (and thus members of the urban proletariat which Lenin and Stalin’s Marxism lionized as the ‘revolutionary class’) rather than white collar workers/managers/owners of industry.
Then we can see that jewish victims are in fact significantly underrepresented among the victims with 45,431 jews identified as being ‘petit bourgeois’ and thus ‘capitalist oppressors’ (and de facto enemies of the Soviet state) but yet only 1,771 (i.e. 3.9 percent) of these individuals were deported, while 13,653 Latvians (i.e. 96.1 percent) were deported even though far fewer of them were identified by the 1935 Latvian census as ‘petit bourgeois’ compared to the jews although at much higher levels in terms of being ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘reactionaries’ (i.e., conservatives and nationalists). (48)
We can thus immediately see what Purs has observed in that the NKVD was targeting was nationalists and members of Latvia’s old order not jews and that there was quite probably ‘ethnic targeting’ involved in this state of affairs. (49)
Despite attempts to downplay jewish involvement – also ironically by Purs – by vague and unsubstantiated pooh-poohing using phrases like ‘supposed jewish involvement’ when we read what is stated carefully it reads rather differently.
For example:
‘The Nazi propaganda machine deftly exploited the deportations to craft a narrative of Soviet occupation and repression that falsely identified the bulk of the Jewish population of Latvia with the Soviet perpetrators. For Nazi policy, this approach encouraged and justified the Holocaust of Latvia’s Jews and was one of many reasons why some Latvians actively participated in these state sanctioned mass murders. The hallmark of this approach was the publication of Baigais Gads in 1941, which unfortunately continues to set some of the canonical framework of general Latvian memory of the first year of Soviet occupation (this canon includes the term Baigais gads, sadistic tortures such as nail pulling, gruesome photographs of corpses in states of decay, and supposed Jewish involvement).’ (50)
Notice that Purs states ‘that falsely identified the bulk of the Jewish population of Latvia with the Soviet perpetrators’ which is a polite way of saying what Orlando Figes said of the Bolshevik Revolution:
‘Not many Jews were Bolsheviks, but many of the leading Bolsheviks were Jews.’ (51)
Basically, what Purs is doing is admitting that the NKVD and the local Latvian communist party had a significant jewish element to them – we’ve already documented how disproportionately jewish the leadership of the NKVD, the Soviet bureaucracy and the Soviet Union itself was – but using false equivalence of stating that because relatively few Soviet and Latvian jews were involved compared to the total Soviet and Latvian jewish population. Then it obviates the jews as a whole from responsibility and the reality of significant and disproportionate jewish responsibility for the crimes and atrocities during the Soviet occupation of Latvia and jewish involvement becomes ‘supposed’ to imply it isn’t of significant note (and shouldn’t be mentioned let alone discussed).
However significant jewish responsibility there was since – besides the significantly and dare I say ridiculously jewish Soviet slice of the responsibility that we’ve already discussed – we know that jews were actually the preferred recruits of the Soviet invaders to populate their new bureaucracy, security services, police, administrations, party functionaries and military leaders because jews spoke Russian at much higher levels than Latvians in 1940 (52) and which was still the case as late as 1989. (53)
Indeed, the literature is filled with quiet admissions that jews were extremely prominent and disproportionately represented in the new Soviet government of Latvia between 1940-1941.
Bernhard Press – for example – writes it was:
‘No wonder that Jews could now be found in many places where they had not been before, for example, in the police force.’ (54)
He also admits that:
‘Jews who profited from the change of system. They now had access to all the places whose doors had previously been closed to them, especially the civil service.’ (55)
Even while desperately claiming – which as we have seen is quite false – that ‘the victims of the new regime included most of the Jews’ (56) and the ‘victims of the NKVD included numerous jews’. (57)
While the World Jewish Congress grudgingly admits that:
‘Many Jewish youngsters joined the Komsomol and other Communist Party and Soviet state organizations, including the Workers Guard—a sort of armed auxiliary police force.’ (58)
We even know some of the names of those jews who volunteered to work for Stalin’s Soviet Union and engaged in atrocities against the Latvian people such as:
Izaks Bucinskis (A leader of the ‘Worker's Guard’ and the ‘People's Militia’ in Riga) (59)
Abrams Genkins (The Chief Political Commissar attached to a Soviet Latvian Artillery Detachment) (60)
Cipe Gutmanis (A member of the new Soviet Government’s Housing Department) (61)
As Kovalevskis, Noritis and Goppers wrote the year after the events we are describing:
‘The organizing and management of new security institutions was entrusted to the Jews and hardened criminals.’ (62)
As we’ve seen this wasn’t ‘anti-Semitic hyperbole’ or ‘anti-Semitic propaganda’ at all but rather simply: the truth.
Further evidence of this can be seen in the fact after the German invasion of the Soviet Union that began on 22nd June 1941; large numbers of jews actively chose to join the Soviet Union with at least 14,000 jews (i.e., 15 percent of Latvia’s jewish population) now known to have chosen to retreat with the Red army (63) with older estimates being 10,000 to 15,000 (64) or as high as 18,000, (65) while historically other jewish authors – like Mendal Bobe – have claimed that these ‘10,000 jews were sent to gulags’.(66) Precisely because it makes clear the extent of jewish support for Stalin’s Soviet Union and how closely they were identified (and identified themselves) with the Soviet government in Latvia and the crimes and atrocities it committed against its predominately non-jewish Latvian victims in support of Stalin’s vision of world revolution.
Remember only 3.9 percent of the jews were deported by the Soviet Union, but 15 percent of the jewish population retreated with the Red Army to fight the Third Reich on behalf of Stalin (who remember if we are to believe jewish authors was also their recent brutal persecutor).
That puts an entirely different complexion on the situation: doesn’t it?
It then informs us that when Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in his famous ‘Gulag Archipelago’ that:
‘From June 23 on, in Latvia and Estonia, they speeding up the arrests. But the ground was burning under them, and they were forced to leave even faster. They forgot to take whole fortresses with them, like the one at Brest, but they did not forget to shoot down political prisoners in the cells and courtyards of Lvov, Rovno, Tallinn, and many other Western prisons. In the Tartu Prison they shot 192 prisoners and threw their corpses down a well.’ (67)
He is referring to a crazed Soviet response to the German advance - which had occurred just in time to save tens if not hundreds of thousands of Latvians from deportation to the gulags and/or execution by the NKVD - by the heavily jewish Soviet authorities in the Baltic states – including Lithuania and Estonia as well as Latvia – in order to try and round up, deport and/or murder as many non-jews as possible.
Thus, we can see that jews were central and significant to existent and crimes of the Latvian communist party and the Soviet government in Latvia between 1940 and 1941.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-communism-in-lithuania-1918
(2) Benjamin Pinkus, 1988, ‘The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, p. 98
(3) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-communism-in-lithuania-1918
(4) J. Schechtman, 1970, 'The U.S.S.R., Zionism and Israel', p. 113 in Lionel Kochan (Ed.), 1970, 'The Jews in Russia since 1917', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York
(5) Georg von Rauch, 1970, 'Die Geschichte der baltischen Staaten', 1st Edition, W. Kohlhammer: Stuttgart, p. 84; Benjamin Pinkus, 2004, [1984], ‘The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948-1967: A Documented Study’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, p. 23 agrees with von Rauch.
(6) Romuald Misiunas, Rein Taagepera, 1983, ‘The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940-1980’, 1st Edition, University of California Press: Berkeley
(7) Howard Sachar, 2002, ‘Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War’, 1st Edition, Vintage: New York, p. 50
(8) Bernhard Press, 2000, ‘The Murder of the Jews of Latvia, 1941-1945’, 1st Edition, Northwestern University Press: Evanston, p. 20; Benjamin Sieff, 1971, ‘Jews in the Economic Life of Latvia’, pp. 230-240 in Mendel Bobe (Ed.), 1971, ‘The Jews in Latvia’, 1st Edition, Association of Latvian and Estonian Jews in Israel: Tel Aviv; Mendel Bobe, 1971, ‘Four Hundred Years of the Jews in Latvia: A Historical Survey’, pp. 45; 64-65; 72-73 in Bobe, Op. Cit.
(9) Bobe, Op. Cit., p. 53 in Bobe, Op. Cit.; also Ilmars Mezs, 1994, ‘The Ethnic Aspects of Population Change in Latvia After Independence’, Published Master’s Theses: Western Michigan University, p. 64
(10) Bobe, Op. Cit., p. 53 in Bobe, Op. Cit.
(11) Press, Op. Cit., p. 19
(12) Pinkus, ‘The Jews of the Soviet Union’, Op. Cit., p. 200
(13) Max Matayahu Laserson, 1971, ‘The Jews and the Latvian Parliament’, p. 144 in Bobe, Op. Cit.
(14) See my articles: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-jewish-role-in-the-hungarian and https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-133-days-of-bela-kun
(15) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-versus-non-jewish-victims
(16) https://www.archiv.org.lv/velesanas1940/index.php?id=201
(17) https://latvians.com/index.php?en/CFBH/AttitudesNationalities/LATVa-04-A-04-General-Information_Demography.ssi; also cf. Frederic Harned, 1975, ‘Latvia and the Latvians’, pp. 94-117 in Zev Katz, Rosemarie Rogers, Frederic Harned (Eds.), 1975, ‘Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities’, 1st Edition, The Free Press: New York
(18) Robert Conquest, 2008, ‘The Great Terror: A Reassessment’, 3rd Edition, Pimlico: London, p. 400
(19) Ibid., p. 272
(20) See: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/nationalities-of-nkvd-purge-officials
(21) Press, Op. Cit., p. 34
(22) Implied by Daina Eglitis, Didzis Berzins, 2018, ‘Mortal threat: Latvian Jews at the Dawn of Nazi Occupation’, Nationalities Papers, Vol. 46, No. 6, p. 1065; also, by Mezs, Op. Cit., p. 67
(23) Aadne Aasland, 1994, ‘Russians in Latvia: Ethnic Identity and Ethnopolitical Change’, Published PhD Theses: University of Glasgow, p. 19
(24) Ibid., pp. 52-53
(25) Ibid., p. 55 (slightly paraphrased)
(26) Bernard Wasserstein, 2012, ‘On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War’, 1st Edition, Profile: London, pp. 19; 64-65; 80-81
(27) Ibid., pp. 19; 65
(28) Aldis Purs, 2010, ‘Soviet in form, local in content: Elite Repression and Mass Terror in the Baltic States, 1940-1953’, p. 29 in Kevin McDermott, Matthew Stibbe (Eds.), 2010, ‘Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe: Elite Purges and Mass Repression’, 1st Edition, Manchester University Press: Manchester
(29) Ibid., p. 22
(30) Ibid., pp. 24-25
(31) Ibid., p. 23
(32) Ibid.
(33) Ibid., p. 25
(34) Ibid.
(35) Ibid., p. 26
(36) Press, Op. Cit., p. 33
(37) Purs, ‘Soviet in form, local in content’, Op. Cit., pp. 26-27 in McDermott, Stibbe, Op. Cit.
(38) Ibid., p. 22
(39) Ibid., pp. 28-29
(40) Ibid., p. 27
(41) Eglitis, Berzins, Op. Cit., p. 1067
(42) Ibid.; cf. Ainars Bambals, Elmars Pelkaus, 2007, ‘Deported June 14, 1941’, 2nd Edition, State Archives of Latvia: Riga
(43) Press, Op. Cit., p. 37; Misiunas, Taagepera, Op. Cit., p. 61
(44) https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/LV
(45) Misiunas, Taagepera, Op. Cit., p. 61, n. 79
(46) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-versus-non-jewish-victims
(47) Wasserstein, Op. Cit., p. 19
(48) Bobe, Op. Cit., p. 53 in Bobe, Op. Cit.
(49) Purs, ‘Soviet in form, local in content’, Op. Cit., pp. 28-29 in McDermott, Stibbe, Op. Cit.
(50) Aldis Purs, 2012, ‘Official and Individual Perceptions: Squaring the History of the Soviet Deportations with the Circle of Testimony in Latvia’, p. 29 in Violeta Davoliute, Tomas Balkelis (Eds.), 2012, ‘Maps of Memory: Trauma, Identity and Exile in Deportation Memoirs from the Baltic States’, 1st Edition, Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore: Vilnius
(51) Orlando Figes, 1997, ‘A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924’, 1st Edition, Pimlico: London, p. 676
(52) Press, Op. Cit., p. 33
(53) Mezs, Op. Cit., p. 44
(54) Press, Op. Cit., p. 34
(55) Ibid., p. 33
(56) Ibid.
(57) Ibid., p. 34
(58) https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/LV
(59) Paula Kovalevskis, Oskars Noritis, Mikelis Goppers, 1942, ‘Latvia: Year of Horror’, 1st Edition, Gyan: New Dehli (Reprint), p. 20
(60) Ibid., p. 15
(61) Ibid., p. 58
(62) Ibid., p. 20
(63) Eglitis, Berzins, Op. Cit., p. 1067
(64) Press, Op. Cit., p. 39
(65) Misiunas, Taagepera, Op. Cit., p. 61
(66) Bobe, Op. Cit., p. 73 in Bobe, Op. Cit.
(67) Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1986, ‘The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation’, 1st Edition, The Harvill Press: London, p. 31