Trade

Latvian industries produce many goods for export. In capitalist times Latvia exported wood, butter, flax and bacon, and imported industrial goods.

Today the republic's chief exports are industrial goods of various kinds, including intricate machinery and precision instruments.

Trade relations with the People's Democracies are being extended. Telephone stations and apparatus, radio sets, lubricating equipment, electrical instruments, plastics, bicycles, hydrometric instruments, diesel engines and automobile electrical equipment are some of the goods that Latvia exports to these countries.

From Poland it imports cable; from Rumania and Bulgaria it gets fruit pulp for jams and jellies; Mongolia provides wool, China—starch for the Latvian food industry, soya bean, sunflower seed for her oil factories, and consumer goods, including fabrics.

Latvia exports many goods to the capitalist countries. Lumber goes to Britain, Western Germany and Iceland, sugar to Finland, cement to Costa Rica and Iceland, drugs to Finland, Iran, Afghanistan and the United Arab Republic, and sprats to Australia and Britain.

Latvian industrial establishments displayed their goods at twelve inter-national exhibitions and fairs in 1958; and Latvian industrial exhibits won seventeen prizes at the Brussels Fair.

The ice-free ports of Liepaja and Ventspils, and the port of Riga, which is open for ten or eleven months of the year, are important to the entire Soviet Union. From there ships depart for countries of Western and Northern Europe and the Atlantic Ocean.

Between January and April these ports handle goods from many countries brought by ships which cannot put in at Leningrad, Tallinn or Arkhangelsk during those months.

Jan Eglitis has been pilot at the port of Riga for many years. Every morning his launch puts out to meet ships from many countries, Britain, France, Liberia, Iceland, the United Arab Republic, Costa Rica, Portugal and Poland, among them. His life story is bound up with the history of the port.

As coal was being unloaded from a British ship some twenty years ago the winch broke and a basket fell, killing a man with whom Jan had been friends from childhood. The man was buried with the aid of money collected among the stevedores.

The next morning Jan brought the man's 14-year-old son Karl to the port to find work. Together with the other stevedores he carried baskets of stone and coke on his shoulders, or pushed wheelbarrows up swaying gangplanks as the ships were loaded.

What a contrast the port offers today! Locomotive whistles mingle with the clank of tractors and the rumble of lorries and loading mechanisms. Grabs can load an ocean-going steamer in seven hours.

Cranes tower above the port. Karl operates one of them. With ease they lift crates containing motor vehicles and industrial equipment and heavy bales of cotton and flax, and help to unload hundreds of tons of coal, coke and metal and to load Urals ore destined for France, coke for Denmark and machinery for Poland.

"Latvia—Our Dream is Coming True" was published by Soviet Booklets, London, England, in December, 1959,
as part of the series "THE FIFTEEN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS OF TODAY AND TOMMORROW."
We do not endorse the Soviet account of historical events or their circumstances contained therein as factual.
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