Economic Strategies and Immigration in the Soviet Union’s Western Borderlands: Lithuania, Latvia and Belorussia in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

The article looks at Soviet territorial planning from the perspective of Lithuania, Latvia and Belorussia, the western frontier republics of the USSR. It explores why the impact of Soviet long-term territorial planning on economic and social development and ethnic composition was more significant in Soviet Lithuania than in neighbouring Latvia and suggests two reasons for this. First, the purge of Latvian leaders in 1959 stopped the preparation of strategies oriented to the republic’s interests. Second, the ‘bourgeois’ intellectual legacy developed back in the 1930s was brought into play at the end of the 1950s and used in support of national communist ideas in Soviet Lithuania.