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The Latvian Legacy
| Article
# : |
11882 |
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Section : |
Culture
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
6,181 Words |
| Author
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Ojars Kalnins
Ojars Kalnins is public relations director of the American
Latvian Association. |
On September 15, 1986, in the Latvian village of Jurmala along the Baltic Sea, U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock made history when he told a crowd of Latvians, "We Americans have a special interest in Latvia, since many of your relatives and descendants are now Americans and have made a distinctive contribution to our society."
For an independent-minded people who have been living under Soviet occupation since 1940, Matlock's words carried special significance. It was not so much what he said but how he had said it: he had spoken in fluent Latvian, in a land where predominantly Russian-speaking Soviet authorities view both Latvian nationalism and Latvians living in the United States as a thorn in the side of the multinational Soviet Empire.
Matlock's presence at the controversial 1986 U.S. Soviet conference in occupied Latvia, and his later remarks that the U.S. government "has never recognized and will not recognize the legality of the forcible incorporation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia into the Soviet Union" had been brought about, in part, by Latvians living in America.
Throughout their history Latvians have been caught in a vise between conflicting major powers. Apart from a twenty-two-year period between the world wars, they have spent the last eight centuries under foreign rule. And yet they have not only endured as a people and culture, but emerged on numerous occasions to exert an influence far exceeding their relatively small numbers. For Latvians, preservation of their cultural heritage is an act of national pride and political
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