What Happened from the End of WW2 and On

In my previous post about Latvia and its history, I said that I would discuss what happened historically when the Soviets occupied Latvia in a later blog post. That blog post is now. I will now talk about the history of the situation that I will be further exploring for this project.

After reading a fairly detailed account of what happened here, I have become angrier than ever at what the Soviet Union did in order to obtain and keep Latvia as an occupied state. What the USSR basically did was claim that Latvia breached the Mutual Assistance Treaty, which, "under threats of military intervention, the Baltic states were compelled to sign... which for all intents and purposes meant that they had become military and political dependents of the USSR". Even though there was never a breach and the USSR had no evidence of there being one, they used the lie as leverage to give the Latvians an ultimatum and "demanded within six hours time to admit an unlimited number of Soviet troops to Latvia and to form a new government". Having no other option, and seeing what had been done to Lithuania a few days before when the Red Army invaded it, the Latvians had no other choice but to allow the USSR to effectively take over the nation. There had been agreements with the USSR before, and there were already a ton of soviet soldiers in Latvia since the start of WW2 and with the secret provisions of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, but now the occupation was official.

What I found most interesting and new from this source is what they call "Recent Misrepresentations". Apparently the Soviets believed that they were "protect[ing] a popular revolution in Latvia". Apparently, Russia still has this attitude, allowing it to deny that an occupation ever existed. However, there were no signs of uprisings or popular revolutions within Latvia until after the soviets occupied the region. This also happened with the two other Baltic states, Lithuania and Estonia, which means that Soviets claimed that all three of these places were calling for a revolution and the new elections, which the soviets produced. As my source points out, it seems a little too coincidental that all three nations would have been asking for the same exact thing.

In conclusion, Latvia had no say of what was happening to them. In fact, they were told that what was happening to them actually wasn't. The Soviets lied, cheated, and stole Latvia because they could. They killed tons of Latvians and made many others leave during the early stages of the occupation. The flavor that was left in the mouths of the Latvians was bitter, for obvious reasons, and life during the rest of the soviet occupation was repressive and awful with people always fearing their lives (far from the liberal constitution they lived under prior to the occupation). They were obviously not allowed to show it at the time, but once soviet occupation ended, the true attitude of the Latvians towards the soviets and their occupation appeared. I will be exploring those attitudes in later blogs, but for now I give the reasons why the negative attitudes exist.