Back to the motherland : repatriation and Latvian émigrés 1955-1958

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 Dzimtene
(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.