The Past Reflecting on the Present or the Present Reflecting on the Past. My Contemporary View

The Past Reflecting on the Present or the Present Reflecting on the Past. My Contemporary View

Aija Priedīte This article should be regarded as a communication link between two, for the Latvian identity, very important research papers and their readers – Lilita Zalkalns’ Back to the Motherland: Repatriation and Latvian Émigrés 1955–1958 and Eva Eglāja-Kristsone’s The Iron Cutters: The Contacts between the Soviet Latvian and the Western Exile Writers. The first paper focuses on the second Soviet repatriation program and a very short time period, the years 1955–1958, but the research work puts the repatriation episode in a much wider context in regard to both time and studied theories and practices. The second paper is chronologically a follow-up of the first one and deals with the newer, very refined, Latvian KGB strategies employed until 1991 to discredit the Latvian exile in the West, involving the cultural and scientific elite of both Soviet Latvia and the Western exile. The readers might regard both papers as history, stories about the past – but no, they show that totalitarian powers have not changed their propaganda, the use of fake news approach / strategies over the years. Secondly, both papers deal with mental and political problems – cooperation and collaboration with the Occupation institutions – which still have not been addressed and analyzed publicly in Latvia.