Abstract
Those who have visited the Riga-based Museum of the Occupation of Latvia before its recent renovation will recall the message that this central organ of the Latvian grand narrative of national victimhood communicated in a clear, if old-fashioned, way: that both the Nazis and the Soviets (and especially the latter, given their 46-year-long presence on Latvian soil), had gotten the better of the Latvians in an interplay of totalitarian repression. Not unlike the House of Terror in Budapest, this museum externalizes agency and responsibility, telling a story of collective endurance. The intellectual origins of this narrative lay in the Latvian exile community in the United States, especially in the person of the University of Wisconsin history professor, Paulis Lazda. Born in Latvia before the German invasion, Lazda fled with his parents from the Red Army and lived in refugee camps in Germany before reaching the U.S.A. in 1950. He became one of many politically active expats who eventually co-determined the cultural, social, and political transitions in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism in 1989. The history of the political role that these exiles played in the cultural Cold War waged by the United States against its Soviet foe is complex and ambivalent. Around the time when the Lazdas began their perilous journey westwards, the Research and Analysis Branch of the US WW2 intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Security (OSS, predecessor of the CIA), and the exiled intellectuals and academics working in it, expressed suspicion of anti-communist groups, such as, for example, the Latvian Freedom Committee, the composition of which appeared at the time to have been drawn from former Waffen-SS formations. This, however, was before the Cold War had turned the global constellations of alliances and antagonisms upside down. Less than a decade later, the CIA financed and mentored an organization with exactly the same name. This new Latvian Freedom Committee (LFC), renamed from the Latvian Consultative Panel, was one of many organizations of Eastern European refugees, coordinated by a CIA front named the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), and from 1954 the Free Europe Committee (FEC), which strived to pool the anti-communist energy of several hundred-thousand new Americans from Eastern Europe. The composition of the two namesakes was, in fact, not wholly dissimilar. Indeed, one of the leaders of the American LFC (who took over in 1964, after the death of its president, the anti-Nazi, Vilis Masens) was a former Latvian officer, major Vilis Hāzners, who had been recruited by the CIA in the early 1950s, but was then, in the late 1970s, charged with having selected Jews for execution in the Dwinsk ghetto in Riga as an SS-Sturmbannführer in 1941. Although Hāzners was in the end acquitted and thus escaped deportation, his case represented a startling exposure of a former Nazi henchman working for the CIA’s anti-communist agenda (as discussed in more detail by Ieva Zake, in American Latvians: Politics of a Refugee Community, Transaction, 2010, as well as in Anti-Communist Minorities in the
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