Latvia, Our Dream is Coming TrueVilis Lācis, Soviet Booklets, London. 1959.

We admit to being conflicted—we'd much rather use Soviet propaganda as kindling for the backyard grill than preserve it on the Internet. Still, we find ourselves doing the latter because how else can one learn to spot propaganda unless one studies it? Here we find Soviet propaganda as literary art form, masterfully blending truth and fallacy, obliterating boundaries between fact and fiction.

LATVIA, Our Dream Is Coming True is a volume in the Soviet Booklets series The Fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics Today and Tomorrow, published in London in 1959. Written by Vilis Lācis, then a prominent Soviet Latvian political and literary figure — if not cultural icon, it presents the Latvian SSR to an English-speaking audience as a successful product of Soviet rule.

The series promoted the Soviet narrative of rapid economic, cultural, and social progress under socialism, emphasizing industrialization, agricultural advances, education, living standards, and the “friendship of peoples,” often framed around the Seven-Year Plan (1959–1965)lv adopted at the 21st CPSU Congress.

Each booklet focused on one republic. Typical features included:

• optimistic titles emphasizing the present and future — other titles in the series include “Wonderful Present – Marvellous Future,” “A Majestic and Impressive Programme,” and “A Whole Republic a Construction Site”;
• illustrations, photographs, and maps; and
• written by high-ranking republic officials or prominent figures, giving the publications an official imprimatur.

Mass deportation order signed March 17, 1949 by Vilis Lācis (top signature, В.Лацис)1

Like the other volumes in the series, the booklet contrasts the alleged poverty and backwardness of pre-Soviet Latvia with the industrial, agricultural, educational, and cultural achievements attributed to Soviet socialism. Its statistics, photographs, descriptions, and predictions are therefore best read not as a contemporary account of Latvia, but as Soviet state propaganda intended for an international audience. Nevertheless, the booklet is useful source for documenting how the Soviet Union portrayed Latvia — and its own nationalities policy at the height of the Cold War.

Vilis Lācis was a well-known popular Latvian writer; the movie of his book, Zvejnieku dēls — The Fisherman's Son, released in 1939, premiered in January 1940, was by all accounts an artistic and popular success. As Soviet puppet, on July 31, 1940, he penned the order deporting the commander of Latvian forces, General Balodis, along with all family members. Almost a decade later, now as Председатель Совета Министров Латвийской ССР (Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Latvian SSR) — and along with Ivan Bastin, Manager of Affairs of the Council of Ministers of the Latvian SSR — Lācis signed the order on March 17, 1949 for the mass deportations of March 25th, in which 42,133 Latvians — more than two thirds of them women and children — were sent to Siberia, a virtual death sentence. Unlike prior and subsequent deportations, Latvians were prohibited from ever returning home even after serving out their sentences.

Lācis tells of increases in the numbers of schools and “quickly” eradicating illiteracy under the Soviets and fails to mention the Latvian literacy rate was the highest in Europe. Of course, at the time that was literacy in Latvian — not very pertinent to Soviet Russification.

Lācis tells of vast increases in industrial production and fails to mention Latvia being used as a mere assembly station: visual and verbal imagery conjure an economic force to rival Western Europe, whereas Latvia was largely a Mexico assembling piece-parts into an endless line of Volkswagen Things — and when the Soviet Union finally collapsed and parts stopped arriving, Latvia's vaunted “industry” dissolved, ultimately leaving wastelands of abandoned factory shells — some looted to the walls as soon as the USSR fell, others painfully sinking into mounting debt and, ultimately, fading into oblivion.

Lācis tells of the returning Latvian Australian emigré who is informed, as he receives his new Soviet passport, “You may live wherever you wish and work at whatever suits you,” proving anti-Soviet press a “pack of lies.” As Lācis parades his poster boy, he fails to mention Latvians who needed written approval and “escorts” to visit their own relatives, who carried papers indicating where they can, and cannot, go, who would be arrested on sight at their ancestral home, long since confiscated and converted into a kolkhoz — who sigh guilty relief when agents come for their neighbor, not for them.

Our intent is not to disprove Lācis point by point. Rather, in presenting the Soviet “view,” one which Russia vehemently still clings to, we can better inform our understanding of the Kremlin through the recognition and understanding of its propaganda.