Latvia

LATVIA. - Baltic republic, which proclaimed itself independent from the Russian Empire on 18 Nov. 1918 and was annexed, as a federated republic, to the U.S.S.R. on 4 Aug. 1940. In 1945 a part of the Jaunlatgale district (1160 sq km with 30 thousand inhabitants) was detached from it and passed to the R.S.F.S.R. (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic). In this way Latvia today extends over 64,630 sq km, remaining nonetheless the largest (but not the most populous) of the three Baltic republics joined to the U.S.S.R.

I. GEOGRAPHY

The territory, which forms part of the great Sarmatian plain (maximum height 314 m.), is flat and well cultivated and has a coastal perimeter of about 500 km., curved by the wide Gulf of Riga. The climate is continental in character, only slightly mitigated along the coast.

The population, which was 2 million inhabitants on the eve of the last war, was estimated at 1.8 million in 1945 owing to the losses suffered as a result of wartime actions and to the forced exodus of the German minority and of those deported for political reasons to the U.S.S.R. Alongside the 75.5% of Latvians there were, before the war, 12% Russians, 3.2% Germans, 2.5% Poles, 4.8% Jews, etc. Only one city, Riga, the capital, exceeded 100,000 inhabitants (385,000 in 1935), and one exceeded 50,000, Liepaja (57).

Agriculture (to which more than 2/3 of the population devotes itself), forestry (27% of the area of Latvia is covered with woods) and livestock raising form the bases of the national economy. The first provides cereals (insufficient for domestic consumption) and above all flax, a State monopoly; the second a good production of timber; the third (cattle) supplies, among other things, a flourishing butter industry. The underground resources are modest (peat). Industry allowed a limited export (cellulose, paper and matches), but the trade balance closed, before the war, with a more or less considerable deficit. Latvia's insertion into the Soviet economy has certainly decisively changed its characteristics, but nothing precise is known.

Giuseppe Caraci

(property of Enc. Catt.)

II. HISTORY

The Baltic branch of the Indo-European peoples came to settle on the shores of the Baltic Sea and in the adjacent territories during the first migratory waves of the Indo-Europeans, already from the beginning and the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C. In the historical records the Balts appear, in the works of Roman writers, especially in Tacitus's Germania, under the name Aesti.

The strong demographic growth and the great expansion of the Slavs from the 6th century A.D. onward forced the various Baltic tribes, then residing in the basins of the middle Dnieper and to its north and east, to move toward the northwest, pushing some Finnic tribes, for example the Livs, toward the north. From the end of the 8th century the influx of the Vikings (Varangians) brought to the western Balts (for example, the Curonians) threats of a political character, to which they often responded by attacking the Swedish and Danish coasts.

These vast movements of peoples brought about political crystallization, that is, the creation of ethno-political units capable of defending themselves in similar situations. From about the 8th century the appearance of Latvian state-regional units based on dialect groups is dated, arranged in the basins of the country's four main rivers (Venta, Lielupe, Daugava, Gauja). These units resisted the pressure of their neighbors until the 13th century, that is, until the Saxon attack. Their politico-juridical functioning can be deduced, among other things, from the nomenclature adopted in the historical records, for example, from the famous treaty of 28 Dec. 1230 between the papal legate Baldwin of Alna and the king of the Curonians Lammechinus.

The Christianization of the Balts occurred very late and was carried out by the German-Saxons. The cause of the delay was their geographical situation, which constitutes a kind of wedge between the regions of the Latin and Greek Churches, as well as their centuries-long resistance against the eastern Slavs and the Vikings. The Holy See had particular designs upon this "new vineyard of the Lord" (a phrase used in the bull of Innocent III), and its project of Terra Mariana would have been an ideal solution (cf. the bull of Pope Honorius III, 19 Feb. 1225: Ubi spiritus Dei est debet esse libertas, and that of Gregory IX Praefata terra, quae iuris et proprietatis beati Patri esse dinoscitur). The conquering forces of the Teutonic Order, the only one among the knightly Orders of this their classic age that succeeded in creating a powerful political State in Prussia and in Livonia (which then embraced Latvia and Estonia), prevailed, and so in place of spiritual freedom came the dominium, which was followed as its shadow by the servitus. The feudal period in Livonia, only formally linked to the Holy Roman Germanic Empire, is characterized by the incessant struggles among the Order, the cities and the bishops, secular sovereigns. Here too it was the Order that decided matters. It, which during these centuries was unus inter pares in the international political game, had to collapse before the disproportionately increased forces of Lithuania-Poland and of Muscovy, which was about to become Russia. This happened in 1561, shortly after the beginning of the so-called Livonian War (invasion of Ivan IV).

Livonia at the beginning of this century was also one of the fields of the expansion of the Reformation. This expansion occurred with a greater development of struggles and agitations among the burghers of the cities than among the landowners, with an impassive unconcern for the rural, "non-German" people. Matters flared up again with the arrival of the Counter-Reformation with A. Possevino, P. Skarga and others after the peace with the Muscovites in 1582.

The political fortunes of the eastern coast of the Baltic from the 16th century onward can be summarized as follows: Lithuanian-Polish Livonia (1561-1621); the Duchy of Courland (1561-1795); Swedish Livonia (Estonia; 1561); Livonia (1621 until 1710; respectively 1721); Russian Livonia (1710; respectively 1721-1918); Russian Courland (1795-1918); Estonia and Latvia again independent (1918-40); Bolshevik occupation (1940-41); German occupation (1941-44/45); Bolshevik occupation from 1944-45.

Foreign conquest brought as its first effect the destruction and denationalization of the local aristocracy and the framing of an entire people into a single social class (G. Merkel in 1798). Meanwhile during the times of the Order taxes were not overbearing: they were reduced to the classic tithe, as well as to certain services in the form of labor, which however in times of war could degenerate into heavy burdens. The hardest period for the Latvians begins toward the end of the 15th century, to assume in the following century the juridically harsh and morally degrading form of the adscriptio glebae with the then fashionable nuances of servitude according to the ius romanum. Economically this process corresponds to the formation of large landed estates on the ancient foundations of medieval fiefs. With the arrival of the Russians after the Northern War the peasant was still more degraded, and the records of these centuries are often depressing.

New times for the Latvian peasant come with the era of the French Revolution and the intensification of agriculture. Personal freedom, called "bird's freedom," was granted in Estonia in 1816, in Courland in 1818, in Livonia in 1819, and the freedom to purchase, for large sums, the very land that centuries earlier had belonged to the Latvians, in the second half of the 19th century, in the era of the Latvian national revival. The agrarian law of free Latvia of 16 Sept. 1920 annihilated the social privileges of the former conquerors and gave in private ownership plots of land to about one fifth of the entire population, previously laborers.

During the last years of the second Bolshevik occupation another agrarian reform has been decreed whose purpose is the destruction of the class of small and medium landowners. The subsequent collectivization should be the conclusion of the undertaking to reduce, with the well-known Bolshevik terror, the Latvian peasant to the level of the Russian one and to impose upon him the psychology of the human herd of the eastern type.

Today about 10% of the Latvian population has emigrated, attempting to escape Bolshevik oppression; these people are now scattering throughout the entire world, yet forming strong national nuclei in their present countries of residence (England, United States, Canada, Australia, etc.). In the homeland, behind the iron curtain, the terror is strong because of passive and active resistance, and because of the strategic and military plans of the Bolsheviks. The more or less mass deportations of elements hostile to communism, especially of peasants, have intensified in recent times.

Arnoldo Spekke

III. LITERATURE

The Latvian people, having had politically to submit for a long time to foreign dominations, records in its past literary development a secular split between popular literature and learned literature.

Latvian popular poetry is among the most original and individual of the European continent. They are short lyrics, born together with song, that is, with melody, which treat with passionate love the life of the family and the vicissitudes of man from the cradle to the grave, making almost complete abstraction of the surrounding political events; they display a very fine observation and description of nature and its changing aspects; they abound in moral precepts. Their metrical form is individual, evidently archaic too in its apparent simplicity; its origin, despite many attempts, has not yet been clarified. In their content these songs still today reflect many prehistoric and pre-Christian concepts and visions, which may suggest an attempt to reconstruct the Baltic Olympus. The number of so-called dainas is enormous for a people of the current demographic size, and this number (of several hundred thousand) suggests a greater geographical and numerical extent of the Latvians centuries ago. The first literary notices about the dainas are from the 16th century, the first printed essay from the first half of the 17th century. Their thesaurus has, from 1897 onward, consisted of six large volumes (edited by Kr. Barons); to these many other later volumes must be added. The collection of fairy tales is also rich.

The beginnings of written Latvian literature go back to the 16th century; they are works of a religious-confessional character (Catholic and Protestant). The classic period of the development of Latvian religious literature falls in the 17th century (the Postils of Mancelis, the Poems of Fureccerus, the translation of the Bible by E. Glück). In this and in the following 18th century significant studies on the Latvian language are to be recorded (G. Stenders).

With the beginning of the 19th century come the first attempts at a truly national literature, as well as the first periodicals in the Latvian language (1822). From the middle of the century, at the time of the Latvian revival, literature had by then reached such maturity as to be able to create an overall vision of this decisive epoch, for example the historical novel of the Kaudzites brothers. The lyric is also in full flower, with classicizing themes (N. Alunans) or with mythological-patriotic outpourings (Auseklis).

On the eve of the First World War various literary currents were already developed in Latvia. The most prominent names are: the playwright R. Blaumanis, the poet and narrator F. Poruks, the symbolist F. Rainis, the lyric poet Aspazija, etc.

The years of independent Latvia can count many works of value, partly already translated into foreign languages. The dominant figure is E. Virza, poet and essayist; the novels of F. Grins are strong and vivid, the lyrics and poetic tales of K. Skalbe deeply national; the number of poets is considerable and among them the delicate poetesses E. Stereste and V. Strelerte. Most Latvian writers are now abroad, following the Russian occupation of the national territory.

IV. ART

Among the oldest testimonies of Latvian artistic activity are to be placed the illustrations of the Evangelary, formerly in Moscow, the work of the Latvian Iurgis (1270), whose character, however, does not depart from that of the contemporary Russian painting of the school of Novgorod. Thus the manifestations of the popular art of the following centuries are also to be related to the art of the neighboring regions, when artists who had come from Germany and Sweden were also active in Latvia.

Then in the 19th century some Latvian artists, such as the painters K. Huns (1830-77), J. Fedders (1838-1909), J. Roze (1823-77), brought the pictorial culture of Latvia closer to that of the other European regions, while the architects Pēkšens and Baumanis were building noble edifices.

Toward the end of the 19th century, with the reawakening of national consciousness, other Latvian artists also carried on intense activity. Among these the painters A. Alkanis (1864-97), A. Baumanis (1866-1904), I. Rozentāls (1866-1916), T. Udris (1868-1915), A. Romana (1878-1911), P. Kalve (1882-1913). At that time V. Matveja (1877-1914) imitated the particular chromatic and draughtsmanly intonations of ancient Byzantine painting.

Among contemporary artists particular remembrance is due to the architect P. Kundzins, who reworked ancient popular forms and built the church of Allazi.