The price of free lunches: Making the frontier Latvian in the interwar years

Abstract

Throughout 1919 and 1920 the national ministries of the newly independent Latvia, particularly the Ministry of Interior and the Army identified the Socialist left as the primary threat to the new state’s existence. The lessons of 1917 and the war for independence (fought first against Latvian Bolsheviks and then against German adventurists) seemed to be that the Soviet state with its share of Latvian leaders provided an alternate or ‘revolutionary’ state to the ‘nationalising’ state model of Latvian nationalists (Brubaker 1996: 47, 55-78). Latvia ’s Social Democratic Workers Party was suspect to the Latvian nationalists at the levers of the new state because it was unclear which vision it supported. During the first elections to parish and municipal councils, the Ministry of the Interior carefully tracked the election of ‘untrustworthy’ elements of the political left. Only after the military front moved eastward into territory that was the home to few Latvians did government suspicion fall on minority communities. The election of representatives from minority political parties to the Constituent Assembly and their demands for guaranteed minority rights (both within the Assembly and in the League of Nations) pushed the central state to re-prioritize potential enemies and threats.