LATVIA, Our Dream is Coming Trueby Vilis Lācis

VILIS LACIS is well-known as one of the Soviet Union's leading novelists and statesmen.

He was born in 1904 in the village of Rinuji, not far from Riga. His father was a port worker.

His parents moved to Barnaul, in the Altai, in 1917 when the Germans occupied Latvia, and the young 14-year-old Vilis was soon seeing his poems, sketches and satirical articles published in the local press.

It was during this period that he worked as a messenger boy for a local newspaper. Later he became secretary of a village Soviet.

In 1921 Lacis returned with his parents to his native Latvia where he worked in succession as docker, fisherman, ship's stoker and lumberjack, and again as docker.

In 1928 he was elected to the leadership of the dockers' trade union, and in the same year joined the Communist Party.

In 1933 he got a job as librarian in Riga, and then began to devote more time to writing. When the capitalist regime was ended in 1940, Lacis became Minister of Internal Affairs in the new Government.

From 1941 to 1945 he directed the Latvian partisan movement against the nazis, and then from 1945 until 1959 he was Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Latvian S.S.R.

As a writer, Vilis Lacis had a number of stories published in the 1930's, but his first major work was A Fisherman's Son, which he wrote between 1933 and 1934. This novel was reprinted many times, translated into a number of languages, made into a film, and also formed the subject of a play.

His next important novel was Storm, which was written between 1946 and 1948. This work deals with the struggles of the Latvian people over several decades, covering the period under the Ulmannis dictatorship, the restoration of Soviet power in 1940, the struggles against the nazis, victory and the first period of post-war reconstruction.

In 1951 he wrote To New Shores, a novel dealing with peasant life.

A Stalin prize winner for two of his novels, Vilis Lacis has also written a number of plays.