GalleryGreat Changes
Nineteen years ago the Latvian people overthrew the tyrannical rule of the bourgeoisie and proclaimed the Soviet system. Restoration of the Soviet system* in Latvia in 1940 was a natural historical development, prepared by the entire course of Latvia's social and economic history.
The people themselves achieved this restoration through their long, hard struggle under the leadership of the working class headed by the Communist Party.
For twenty years power had been held by a plutocratic clique which had shamelessly bartered away the interests of the country and its people. Foreign monopolies seized Latvia's economy and turned it into an agrarian and raw materials appendage of the capitalist countries. No wonder industrial output in bourgeois Latvia never reached even the 1913 level.
After the new system was established in 1940 the Latvian people, now masters of their own country, energetically set about building a new life. In each step they took they had the selfless aid and support of the other Soviet peoples.
The history of the past nineteen years is a history of the great changes that have taken place in Latvia, the rapid development of the country's economy and culture, the rise in the living standards of the working people.
Within the family of Soviet peoples, where friendship and unity are unbreakable to a degree hitherto unknown to history, the Latvian people have been able to display their creative gifts and inexhaustible energy and have achieved remarkable results.
It took a tremendous amount of effort to restore what had been destroyed in the war, industrialise the country, and turn the small farms into large agricultural units. Difficulties were innumerable, but the Latvian people determinedly overcame them all.
The high rate of socialist development enabled Latvia to achieve in a comparatively short time a level of production no branch of Latvian capitalist economy had ever reached, even in the best years.
Such a rapid rate of development would have been impossible without the industrial might of the Soviet Union to rely on or the generous assistance of the fraternal Soviet peoples.
* In March, 1917, following on the February democratic anti-tsarist revolution in Russia, Soviets were set up in various parts of Latvia. The influence of the Bolsheviks grew apace in the following months, and, following the 1917 October Socialist Revolution, the demand for the establishment of work-ing class power in Latvia became widespread, despite the presence of German imperialist troops, who then occupied much of Latvia. In November 1918 the Germans installed a bourgeois government under Ulmannis, but the Latvian people refused to recognise it.
In December 1918 they established their own provisional government which was recognised by the Soviet Government set up in Petrograd after the October 1917 Revolution. In 1919 the German troops were forced back. Riga was freed, and on January 13th, 1919, with most of the country cleared of German troops, the First All-Latvian Congress of Soviets was held, and a Latvian Soviet Government established. Following the intervention by a number of Western powers against the Soviet Union, interventionist troops also invaded Latvia. On May 22nd, 1919, Riga was captured and placed under the civil and military control of the interventionists. By January, 1920, after many bitter battles, the revolutionary movement in Latvia was crushed and bourgeois rule established with foreign assistance. The Latvian people overthrew this provisional bourgeois rule in 1940, re-established their Soviet system, and were admitted into the U.S.S.R.—Editor.
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.
