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CHAPTER 6 The Latvian Family Experience with Sovietization 1945–1990 ——————————————————————————————————— Maija Runcis Introduction According to Soviet propaganda, the care of children and mothers and families was always one of the most important tasks of the Soviet state.1 As we know from previous research on Soviet family and gender politics, the Soviet state challenged existing “traditional” gender norms. The official explanation of this policy was that it liberated women from patriarchal oppression , but in practice it was reduced to the regulation of motherhood and the stimulation of women’s involvement in productive work. Mothers, especially working mothers, were idealized as rhetorical heroines. At the same time, the propaganda construction of masculinity was almost untouched . The proletarian man was “muscular,” “productive,” “combative,” and “heroic” (Goven, 2002, p. 7). The Communist Party struggled to find a way to integrate women into the proletarian vision of equality between men and women, and the way to do it was through work, which also impacted family life. The entry of women into the workforce was “inextricably associated” with their liberation from traditional patriarchal family roles (ibid.). Women became more socially and economically independent from men, which in turn reduced men’s authority in the family, since they could no longer be the only breadwinner and the unconditional head of the household. This kind of politicization of motherhood neglected the role of the father and his traditional power within the family by handing it to the state (Bureychak, 2010). Soviet propaganda differentiated women from men by stressing women’s identity both as mothers and working heroes, while fathers were made almost invisible. In reality women ended up with the double burden of work outside the home combined with uncompensated domestic labor and responsibility for child raising (Lapidus, 2003). In this chapter I explore how Soviet normative policies concerning gender and family applied to Latvian citizens under Soviet rule. Using archival documents, magazines, and life stories, I am looking at discourses of Sovietization in order to gain insight into everyday family life and women’s strategies within the family. My research question to the sources is the following : How did women meet the challenges in the new family ideology, and how did they experience the societal changes affecting their lives? These questions are important, since Latvia was occupied and the communist government did not have much legitimacy within society. However, Sovietization in postwar Latvia sought to replace Latvian “bourgeois” society with the proletarian state.2 Nationalism became a crime against Soviet ideology, and “nationalists” were declared to be “enemies of the people” (Bureychak, 2010; see also Weiner, 1999). To Latvians, who had experienced national independence for only two decades, this was hard to accept. Latvia in between Foreign Powers and Independence In the following short exposition, I will try to give a picture of the Latvian struggle for independence and the political and social “map” before World War II. Throughout modern history, Latvia has been populated by large ethnic minority groups, such as the Baltic Germans until 1940 and Russians from the tsarist era to the present. It was governed by an upper class of the old Baltic Germans, which left no room for the emergence of an individual Latvian upper class. As Latvia’s landowning class, the Baltic Germans remained extremely influential until the end of the nineteenth century (Plakans, 1995, p. 189). The end of the nineteenth century marks the beginning of a very rapid modernization of the entire region. This development changed the situation and gave the Latvian inhabitants new possibilities to get a better education and raise their social status. Latvia got its independence after the destruction of World War I, the 1917 revolution and the Latvian War of Independence, which lasted from 1918 to 1920. The manors, possessions, and power of the Baltic Germans and Russians were swept away, and the land was distributed to Latvian farmers (Balodis, 1990, p. 197). Independent Latvia was ruled first as a democracy and after 1934 as a nationalist dictatorship, when the leader of the Farmers Party, Karlis Ulmanis, launched a coup d’état, and all socialist parties and extreme right-wing organizations were forbidden (ibid., p. 200). In 1940 the Soviet Red Army entered Latvia and declared it a republic of the Soviet Union. Shortly thereafter Nazis invaded and occupied the country from 1941 to 1944. Soviet rule was re-established in October 1944, accompanied by industrialization and collectivization and the nationalizaAnd They Lived Happily Ever After 124 [3.16.212.99] Project...

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