Lilita Zalkalns

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Back to the motherland

In the mid-1950s Latvian émigrés shared a remarkable experience: they were the targets of a KGB operated repatriation campaign, which not only envisioned their repatriation to the Soviet Latvian homeland, but also anticipated the destruction of their émigré society as they knew it. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze this repatriation campaign and the émigré Latvian reactions to it. By looking at the activities of the Committee For Return to the Motherland in East Berlin, the contents of the repatriation newspaper Par atgriešanos Dzimtenē (For Return to the Motherland), and the reactions to the campaign in contemporary émigré press, this study shows how highly developed strategies and tactics were implemented in order to elicit certain behaviors from émigrés, and how émigrés advanced their own counter-strategies to offset the effects of the campaign. This thesis concludes that in spite of Soviet superiority in organization and resources, a small and internally divided community could withstand the concerted efforts of Soviet propaganda if the group’s unified sense of mission was sufficiently strong.