A Tragedy of False Premises
Just after the Red Army crossed the Latvian border from the east and the south, the fearsome Soviet proconsul, Andrei Januaryevich (Solzhenitsyn wrote only half-jokingly "Jaguaryevich") Vyshinsky arrived in Riga. Vyshinsky had been the prosecutor at the infamous Moscow trials of 1935-1938. In Riga he played the role that Hitler's first gauleiter, Seyss-Inquart, played in Vienna. Vyshinsky implemented the sovietization of Latvia: the installment of a puppet government, mock elections, the deportation of the president, and finally, outright annexation.
Why did I title this chapter "A tragedy of false premises"?
Many Jews believed that Bolshevism in 1940 would be something different, something more moderate than in 1919, and that the Nazi threat would be fully eliminated with the arrival of the Red Army. Many Latvians believed that the Red regime was essentially Jewish and that only Germany could give them back a free and independent Latvia.
However, it must be realized that before June 17,1940, the Latvian people were more inclined to be vaguely pro-Russian, rather than pro-German. Latvians well remembered 700 years of servitude under German knights and barons, tsarist punitive expeditions in 1906 led by the German barons, the Latvian Riflemen's heroic battles against the kaiser's army in 1915-1917, the fledgling Latvian national armed forces' defensive fight against von der Goltz's Landeswehr and the German mercenaries' Iron Division in the summer and fall of 1919.
Pan-German Nazism was always unpopular in Latvia. Latvian boys would get into fights with young Baltic German Nazi sympathizers, in their black shorts and white socks. Few were sorry to see the Baltic Germans go, when in the fall of 1939 they were officially repatriated by Hitler. With them went some Latvians, who had suddenly discovered German relatives. In a radio speech on October 12,1939, President Ulmanis contemptuously said: "If anyone wants to leave, go ahead. But don't come back."
But when the Russians (and, it seemed to many, Jews) were running the country, many Latvians longed for the flirtation between Stalin and Hitler to end, for it seemed their only hope was in Berlin and Koenigsberg. They could not know what was happening behind the scenes. They recalled that in October 1939 Molotov ridiculed England and France for their intent to annihilate Hitlerism, calling it an attempt to renew the religious wars of the Middle Ages; they saw Britain and the United States helplessly standing by as not only Hitler, but also Stalin occupied one country after another. They could not know that London was formulating the Baku Project ("Military Implications of Hostilities with Russia"), that foresaw supporting uprisings among the peoples of Trans-Caucasia and Soviet Central Asia (see William Stevenson, Intrepid's Last Case, 1983), and that 60,000 British soldiers were prepared to invade Soviet territory from the Middle East. They only sensed that Stalin and Hitler were having differences of opinion over the division of the spoils, and that a conflict was developing between the two totalitarian giants.
During the summer and fall of 1940 the sovietization of Latvia progressed rapidly. In the article published in Soviet Jewish Affairs (vol. 5, no. 1, 1975), Dov Levin writes:
Jews who had taken an active part in the Communist Party, in the Komsomol, and in peripheral organizations during the underground period (some of them only recently freed from prison) were appointed to responsible positions in the Party, in the trade unions, and other organizations, especially in Riga. Particularly noticeable were those who had been active in the spheres of information and journalism (among them K. Berkovits, director of the propaganda section of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party). A well-known Riga physician, Dr. M. Joffe, was appointed to the senior position of people's commissar for health. J. Blumenthal was appointed director of the state bank. Other Jews filled other high civic positions in Riga and the provincial cities....
Even more impressive for the self-esteem of the Jewish community was the comparatively large number of Jews serving in the police force, including the senior ranks. The custom in the armed forces was that Jewish soldiers who were promoted were given duties in the political apparatus. A number of young Jews were admitted to the officers' academy, which at the time was known as the Riga Infantry School.
Levin further points out a very significant fact:
Almost unlimited opportunities were offered to young Jewish men and women to participate in security and military activities upon the establishment of the militant formation "Workers' Guard." The Guard, set up by a decision of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party on July 2, 1940, was initially intended to serve as a kind of police auxiliary and support force for the government "in its struggle against counterrevolutionary groups." The organization, stationed in Riga and other large cities, was constituted on a military basis and comprised about 10,000 men and women.... Its members included not only Jewish communists and Komsomol members, but also former members of the Bund, the left Poale Zion, and former members of the Zionist Socialist "hakhsharot." The organization's clubs and centers served also to promote ideological activities and social events. In some areas, most of the members were Jews, so their activities were conducted in Yiddish, at least for part of the time.
The conspicuous position of the Jews in the new regime and its political and administrative apparatus caused the Letts to identify the whole of the Jewish community with the hated Soviet regime, which had been imposed upon them by the Red Army.
Stalin and Beria crowned all that with a Machiavellian decree, appointing a Russian Jew, Semion Shustin, as people's commissar (minister) for state security in the Latvian SSR. Many of his assistants, especially in the KGB, were local Jews, who knew both Russian and Latvian.
In May 1941, when the German-Soviet war had not yet started, Shustin ordered the shooting of my schoolmate, the very young son of the MEDFRO pharmaceutical plant owner Fronckevics, for alleged treason. Against which country? On June 26,1941, while preparing to flee from Riga, Shustin took the time to sign order no. 412, the death sentence for 78 Latvians. He used red ink, misspelling the Russian: "Considering the social danger they represent, all must be shot." What, one must ask, is "social danger"?
Is it any wonder that the Latvian leader of the infamous "Arajs group," which shot Jewish civilians in July 1941 to oblige the Germans, was called "Shustin" by the group's members? And is it any wonder that Dov Levin, who interviewed hundreds of people in Israel and abroad researching Jewish communities in 1939-1941 in Eastern European territories taken over by the Soviet Union, encountered numerous difficulties: "Even 40 years later, many of the Jews who played a public role in the short-lived occupation regimes were reticent about revealing their cooperation with the Russian authorities, for fear of being cast as collaborators" (my emphasis; see Newsview, Jerusalem, August 10, 1980).
In my opinion, it is significant that in 1936-1938 Stalin, suffering from a persecution complex, ordered tens of thousands of Latvian Bolsheviks, trustworthy communist party members, to be shot. If he had not done this, a large group of Latvian "Chekists" (KGB agents) led by Jekabs Peterss and Martins Lacis-Sudrabs would have entered Latvia along with the Red Army and proceeded to arrest, interrogate, and shoot then-own "bourgeois" compatriots. As it was, there were no "national cadres" left in the ranks of the KGB, and the dirty work was entrusted to the Jews.
Latvians also worked with the Soviet occupiers during that year, called the "terrible year" (baigais gads). There were those who were naive, there were opportunists, cynics, careerists, toadies. Macabre incidents abounded, among them the following (from the memoirs of J. Kârkliòð). When the Bolshevik regime was established, a Mrs. Davis made the rounds of well-to-do families' summer homes, looking to appropriate choice pieces of furniture before the homes and goods were nationalized. The woman was the wife of the well-known teacher and pathologic anti-Semite Davis, who openly expressed his desire to eliminate the "Jewish scum" and during the Nazi occupation years published a series of pamphlets called the "anti-Semite's Library."
Another side of the complex situation is given by Peggie Benton, a former chief of the visa office in the British consulate in Riga, who recalls in her book Baltic Countdown (London 1984), that the streets were quiet. Not so our office, which spilled a queue of terrified applicants through the Consulate and out onto the path. Stories of Russian anti-Semitism had reached Riga.... With the escape route to the United Kingdom virtually cut, the demand for British visas had eased, but now, in spite of the threat of Arab violence, the unfortunate Jews were determined to use any means of getting to Palestine.
In the spring of 1938 Peggie Benton was in Vienna and witnessed the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany. In Latvia in 1940,
for the second time we had seen a country invaded and disrupted, and the suffering that this brought. But whereas in Vienna the Jews had born the brunt of the German annexation and the tenure of daily life continued more or less the same, in Latvia there was a total downgrading of the environment. For most people it was the end of the pleasant life they had struggled to build up and the death of their hopes.
The effect of the two takeovers might be compared with that of a man attacking a meadow with a scythe, or one flattening it with a bulldozer.
Latvian Jews soon came to feel the effect of this bulldozer, and not just in the nationalization of industrial and commercial enterprises, which affected all inhabitants. All noncommunist Jewish organizations were banned, all "reactionary" Jewish books in public libraries, reading rooms, and clubs were confiscated, all Jewish schools had to change from Hebrew to Yiddish, and Max Schatz-Anin's newspaper Kamfand journal Ufboj carried out a vicious and slanderous campaign against rabbis and the Jewish faith. If such blasphemy had appeared in gentile papers, it would have been immediately labeled blatant anti-Semitism. Zionists, especially those active in the rightist Betar organization, were arrested and deported starting in the summer and fall of 1940, The famous historian Simon Dubnov, whose eightieth birthday, September 18, 1940, was celebrated by Jewish communities overseas, pursued his academic work at home, in almost total isolation.
Dov Levin writes:
On the night of June 13-14, 1941, there began a mass deportation of undesirable elements from Soviet Latvia. From that night on, thousands of Jews, whose attitude to the new regime was considered to be hostile or, at least, reserved, were arrested and herded into goods trains bound for the Soviet interior.
Historians estimate the number of Jewish deportees from Latvia to be 5-6,000. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23,1939, and the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, the Baltic countries, Bessarabia and Rumanian Bukovina, some 1,900,000 Jews came under Soviet control. Of these, about 400,000 were deported to Siberia and central Asia (L. Unger and C. Jelen, U Express, Paris 1985).
Among those deported were former deputies of the Saeima, including the representative of the Jewish Bund, Noah Maisel, also industrialists, rabbis, teachers, merchants, doctors, and completely apolitical people, who had been denounced by ill-wishers. My parents' best friends were H. Berlin and his wife, who with their two children—boys about my age—lived at 26 Terbatas Street in Riga. The Berlin family was not rich, they owned no land, no houses, no businesses. The head of the family was a small-time textile salesman. However, he had good taste, and invested his modest savings in antique furniture, carpets, and tapestries, so the family's apartment looked quite luxurious. Apparently someone out of envy notified the authorities. The Berlin family was deported to Siberia. The parents died there of starvation; the fate of the boys is unknown.
Levin continues:
The day after the outbreak of the war (June 23,1941), some 250 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, some of them communists, were arrested and deported from Riga to Siberia. Some of them were accompanied by their Latvian-born wives.
This group included the historian Herbert Rosenkranz, an emigrant from Austria, and the philosopher J. A. Wohlgemuth, who was born in Berlin.
Many of the deportees were sent to the Solikamsk, Vyatka, and Vorkuta camps. Some of the women, children, and others were taken to Narym and Novosibirsk. I know that many of these Jewish victims of Bolshevism continued friendly relations with the Latvian deportees in the taiga and tundra, for they shared the same fate and had a common enemy. Red fascism.
The Memorial Hall of the Jewish communities of Latvia and Estonia is located not far from Tel Aviv, at the kibbutz Shfayim. The wall of the conference room is covered with memorial plaques inscribed with the names of prominent Jews and where they died—Rumbula. Bikemieki, the Riga ghetto, Bergen-Belsen, and also Petchora, Vorkuta, and Solikamsk.
Unfortunately, in those terrible days when 16,000 men, women, and children were torn from their midst, Latvians in Latvia noticed only that the perpetrators were not just Russians and Latvians, but also Jews—"again those Jews!" And this stuck in their memory.