PREFACE

A century and a half ago at the University of Dorpat in the Russian Empire’s Baltic province of Livland, a student attached a calling card declaring himself a Latvian to the door of his room. After centuries of serfdom, Latvians had come to be considered a peasant class rather than a distinct nationality. “To be educated and Latvian is impossible; an educated Latvian is an unthing,” a local German newspaper would soon opine. Education had meant assimilation. The rebellious student was Krišjānis Valdemārs, who would become the spiritual father of what Latvians call the Awakening. Dorpat is now Tartu in Estonia, a country that proclaimed itself an independent republic in 1918. In that same year – only 60 years after Valdemārs completed his studies there – Latvia and its other neighboring Baltic state of Lithuania also declared their independence. 

In modernist theory, nations tend to be seen as recent creations. Asking whether “nations have navels,” Ernest Gellner used the Estonians as an example of a nation that came out of nowhere, like Adam at the Creation. Unlike Lithuania – the largest country in Europe in the 14th century – neither Estonia nor Latvia had ever existed as sovereign states prior to 1918. In his critique of Benedict Anderson’s well-known take on nations as “imagined communities,” Gellner’s student Anthony D. Smith, who rightly pointed out that the Estonians did indeed have a navel – the Kalevipoeg, their national epic – emphasized that Anderson’s formulation does not mean that nations are fabricated or unreal. Great works of art and architecture are "no less real and tangible for all the imagination of their creators and spectators down the ages” – but “nations and nationalisms are also the products of preexisting traditions and heritages which have coalesced over the generations.” [1]

Latvia’s small size (it’s slightly smaller than the Republic of Ireland and a little larger than Croatia, but has fewer than 2.3 million inhabitants) and its comparatively short existence as an independent nation-state make the processes scholars of nationalism like Smith and Gellner debate stand out. On the one hand, the birth of the nation was imaginative – one major figure from the Awakening compared its creation to writing a poem. As Andrejs Plakāns observed in his brief history, “Latvians” is “an ethnolinguistic term that does not become relevant until the nineteenth century.” [2] On the other hand, the titular nation has deep roots, evident in the language and in the ancient folklore that was so important to the early nationalists and remains vital today. The land has also long been a zone of contact for Baltic, Finnic, Slavic, Scandinavian and Germanic peoples, a crossroads coveted by great powers, and a mosaic of diverse cultures like those of the Jews and the Roma. The Latvian state that finally emerged after the First World War was necessarily both national and multinational at its inception.   

Read more on:

Prehistory / Early History
Foreign Rule
The First Awakening
The New Current and the Revolution of 1905
The Independence
The Occupation
The Restoration of Independence

Sources:

[1] Nations and Nationalism 2 (3), 1996, pp. 357-370. The Warwick Debates are available online at the London School of Economics Gellner Resource Page, http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/gellner/Warwick0.html
[2] Andrejs Plakans: The Latvians: A Short History. In Studies of Nationalities, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 1995.
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] Andris Šnē: “Senlatvijas valstiskums: vai viens no mītiem?” Diena, February 9, 2003.
[6] Daina Bleiere, Ilgvars Butulis, Inesis Feldmanis, Aivars Stranga, Antonijs Zunda: Latvijas vēsture: 20. gadsimts. Riga: Jumava, 2005.
[7] Jānis Peniķis: “Latvijas īsais gadsimts.” Diena, August 1, 2002.
…
Arnolds Spekke: History of Latvia: An Outline. Stockholm: M. Goppers/Zelta Ābele, 1951.
Agnis Balodis: Latvijas un latviešu tautas vēsture. Riga: Kabata, 1991.
Viktors Hausmanis, ed.: Latviešu rakstniecība biogrāfijās. Riga: LZA, 1992.
Arveds Švābe: Latvijas vēsture 1800-1914. Uppsala: Daugava, 1958.
Arveds Švābe, ed.: Latvju enciklopēdija. Stockholm: Trīs Zvaigznes, 1952-1953.
Alfred Bilmanis: A History of Latvia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951.
Ernests Blanks: Latvju tautas ceļš uz neatkarīgu valsti. Västerås: Ziemeļbāzma, 1970.
Uldis Ģērmanis: Latviešu tautas piedzīvojumi. Ann Arbor: Ceļinieks, 1974.
Arturs Priedītis: Latvijas kultūras vēsture. Daugavpils: A.K.A., 2000.
James A. Brundage, The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961

© Text: Pēteris Cedriņš, 2009

History of Latvia: A Brief Survey.pdf (11.48 MB)

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