The Unknown War: The Latvian National Partisans' Fight Against the Soviet Occupiers 1944 - 1956

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Thousands of studies and document collections have been devoted to the Second World War and the principal crimes of the mid-twentieth century. By contrast, the fate of the Central and Eastern European countries and peoples-- among those the Baltics enslaved by the communist totalitarian victors, and the war against the Red occupiers that followed the war (1944-1956), has not been adequately studied and is not sufficiently known in the victorious Western countries. One reason for the Western democratic nations failure to recognize the Baltic countries twelve-year war against the Soviet occupying forces is that in the victors version of the history of the Second World War, initially spread from 1943 to 1946, the role of totalitarian communism in the liberation of Europe from the Nazis was and still is given a Soviet slant. A second determining cause is the inaccessibility for researchers of Russian archives, both for materials on the Second World War and those related to the arrogance of the Soviet power in the postwar years, which confirms the inability our neighboring country to investigate their victory and also makes them unable to imagine that they erred terribly in the twentieth century. A third factor is the current-day official Russian historians feudal attempts to Stalinize and imperialize the history of Russia, in spite of the fact that the age of imperialism is over.

Armed resistance took place in the first twelve years of the occupation (1944-1956), expanding into an international national partisan war. Some 100,000 men took part, of whom approximately half, with the support of the majority of the Baltic peoples, fought against the occupying power s superior military forces; an estimated 10,000 were killed in battle. Just as in Lithuania, the Latvian national partisans were organized into regional divisions, district regiments, and parish companies, often with shoulder stripes and cap insignias. The aim of the partisan war was to liberate the Baltic countries from the totalitarian communist occupation, to save the Baltic nations democratic form of government and their European culture.

The Unknown War: The Latvian National Partisans' Fight Against the Soviet Occupiers 1944 - 1956 Review

This is a great addition to the historical literature of the part of Europe that Timothy Snyder called the Bloodlands. It consists mainly of photographs, with detailed captions, of people and documents from the guerilla war that Latvians fought against the Soviets from the end of World War II until 1956. Many of these records came from the archives of the security agencies and secret police of Soviet-occupied Latvia, which were opened when the country regained independence in 1991, and yielded a well-organized chronology of the anti-Soviet armed resistance. Other records were kept, secretly, by the fighters' families through the Soviet period and first saw the light of day in connection with the project that led to this book.

If you don't have a Kindle, this could be a worthwhile book to download using the Mac or PC Kindle applications. Since only a tenth or so of the 351 pages are text only, the Kindle application's "find" function can be used to locate family or location names, like an index.

The overall tone of the book is, as can be expected, fairly nationalistic. But it serves as a rare English-language, primary-source counterweight to some of the pro-Moscow historical writings that have tried to argue that the Baltic States were happy to be annexed to Stalin's imperium.

The book is divided into one long chapter for each of the historical regions of the country, with an introduction to each chapter by a different Latvian historian, as well as introductory comments by Oj'ars Stef'ans (himself a former partisan) and Aleksandrs Kirsteins, a former parliamentary deputy who served as an organizer and editor. The foreword by emeritus history professor Heinrihs Strods presupposes some familiarity with the history of the region and its controversies, but that's what we have Wikipedia for.

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