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The Amazingly Slow Death of Populist Latvijans

By © E. Antons Benjamiņš, 2017

A definition of ‘communism’ begins from the premise that it ‘is the state of Nature-born human being from the time human beings began until now.

5 Of Founding Events That Newer Were

(Part I)

Having successfully denied the Moravian Brethren their place in the history of the Latvian nation, the German oriented Lutheran clergy imagined that it would create “God’s nation” (the dream of the Moravian Brethren) by a tour de force, i.e., by making itself the nation’s religion. Such a creation was easily imagined, because as part of Imperial Russia, the Lutheran Church (following the tradition of ancient Christianity of which the Russian Orthodox Church has morphed into a perverse—i.e. Catholic—descentant) was imbedded in the structure of Russian government. The status of Lutherans as part of the nation’s body politic, though no longer de jure, was maintained in Latvia as de facto practice* until the end of WW2.

*De facto practice—most academic texts that deal with the history of Latvija, especially religious history, shy away from certain facts. Thus, the link (above) avoids mentioning the ukaz/decree issued in 1743 by tsarina Elizabeth. The ukaz was canceled only in 1817 by tsar Nicholas I, which means that oppression remained in effect for 74 years and sabotaged the Herrnhuter movement in Latvija beyond repair. Not surprisingly, the movement morphed into an underground movement known as “The Silent March” (Klusais gājiens), which in turn encouraged the advent of “The New Current” (Jaunā strāva), a blend of German and Russian Marxist elements, in which the Livonians became a bridge between the West and the East.

To cite Latvian pastors at a conference in St. Petersburg in 1916 (from above link, written by Dr. Kristbergs, published by Princeton Theological Seminary, 1996):

“The evangelical [i.e. Lutheran] church is in an undesirable state among the Latvians. The leading influence in the church was and remains German. The German spirit constantly attempts to exert its will on Latvian national sensibilities but, being foreign to Latvians, has not assimilated the Latvian spirit in itself, but rather has created and, indeed, still creates conflicts...The greatest present evil in our church affairs is the repression of the [Latvian] national spirit.”

The following is an additional observation by Dr. Kristbergs regarding the integration of the Lutheran Church into the Latvijan nation state:

“This is a particular form of integration of the Latvian Lutheran church with the nation-state. The “leader” form of autocratic government which characterized the secular regime was imposed on the church resulting in a high degree of hierarchical authority vested in the person and office of archbishop. It represents, in the context of the democratization of the church, a significant departure from the tradition the of democratic and congregational principles of ecclesial governance practiced by Moravians and which, to a large extent, the Latvian Lutheran church had adopted.”

Whether the Latvian Lutheran church had indeed adopted “democratic and congregational principles” in actual practice is qustionable. Even so, Dr. Kristberg’s observation allows events, before and after 1916, to be evaluated more critically. In effect, our attention may now turn to the events of the long neglected and repressed history of the Finnish Revolutionary Movement, the Finnish Civil War (1918) that repressed it, and the Mannerheim regime that secured the country for the bourgeois from the time of the Winter War (1939-1940) to this day. The Latvian bourgeoise played a similar role in the repression of its Populists cum pagans than the Finnish bourgeoise played against its people.

During the 1905 Revolution, which radicalized many Latvijan intellectuals and students and was violently suppressed by the forces of the tsar and barrons, Latvian peasants not only destroyed many Lutheran churches, but killed 32—mostly Baltic German—pastors. The violence is attributable to the tsarist Lutheran clergy’s (albeit representing German barons and merchants) repression of the Herrnhuter Christian movement in previous two centuries. Violence of the revolutionaries was not directed against the Herrnhuters as such, though the movement did not go unscathed: it lost prestige and members when people turned away from the idea that love, Christianity, or God could be of help to them. Many educated Latvians (there were more then than there are today) turned to atheism, substituted Marxist ideology for faith in a transcendent purpose, and joined the Bolsheviks.

The neglect to examine the reasons for the failure of the 1905 Revolution by intellectual elites is as much a cause for the short comings of the 1917 Revolution as anything else imaginable. In effect, the Communist leadership (headed by Lenin) overidentified with the ideology of city bred Marx and believed its main support was from factory workers. In so far as the leaders of the Revolution did not understand that the deeper roots of the Revolution were not in worker dissatisfaction or exploitation, but in the attempt to change the countryside into a cityscape, and the removal of the human populace from ‘brutal’ countryside to ‘irresistable’ cities (by making them, as Populists of the woods called them, “dens of sin”). When the organizers of the 1905 Revolution mistakenly identified workers as ‘city-zen’ rather than ‘pa-gan’ populists, they played into the hands of the bourgeois, the heirs of former princes, barons, and an assortment of retired military and government officials, not to mention wealthy merchants.

In a few words: while city elites dream of skyskrapers and empires, and raise city-zens to leech the countryside bare, the Populist leftovers of the countryside learn to be human by television, lose their minds, and are happy to know that it does not take much practice to learn how to plant potatoes on the day the supermarket shelves become empty. For them the worst is that the forests have been cut and there will be few if any fagots to burn and keep warm when winter comes, and there are few woods to hide in when the dogs of war come shit on them for the third time in a century.