Download or read book The Case for Latvia written by Jukka Rislakki and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we know about Latvia and the Latvians? A Baltic (not Balkan) nation that emerged from fifty years under the Soviet Union - interrupted by a brief but brutal Nazi-German occupation and a devastating war - now a member of the European Union and NATO. Yes, but what else? Relentless accusations keep appearing, especially in Russian media, often repeated in the West: "Latvian soldiers single-handedly saved Lenin's revolution in 1917", "Latvians killed Tsar Nikolai II and the Royal family", "Latvia was a thoroughly anti-Semitic country and Latvians started killing Jews even before the Germans arrived in 1941", "Nazi revival is rampant in today's Latvia", "The Russian minority is persecuted in Latvia. . ." True, false or in-between? The Finnish journalist and author Jukka Rislakki examines charges like these and provides an outline of Latvia's recent history while attempting to separate documented historical fact from misinformation and deliberate disinformation. His analysis helps to explain why the Baltic States (population 7 million) consistently top the enemy lists in public opinion polls of Russia (143 million). His knowledge of the Baltic languages allows him to make use of local sources and up-to-date historical research. He is a former Baltic States correspondent for Finland's largest daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and the author of several books on Finnish and Latvian history. As a neutral, experienced and often critical observer, Rislakki is uniquely qualified for the task of separating truth from fiction.

Download or read book The Case for Latvia written by Jukka Rislakki and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Case for Latvia Disinformation Campaigns Against a Small Nation written by Jukka Rislakki and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The best book written on Latvia by a foreigner: incisive, well-informed, and persuasive" Edward Lucas, The Economist What do we know about Latvia and the Latvians? A Baltic (not Balkan) nation that emerged from fifty years under the Soviet Union – interrupted by a brief but brutal Nazi-German occupation and a devastating war – now a member of the European Union and NATO. Yes, but what else? Relentless accusations keep appearing, especially in Russian media, often repeated in the West: “Latvian soldiers single-handedly saved Lenin’s revolution in 1917”, “Latvians killed Tsar Nikolai II and the Royal family”, “Latvia was a thoroughly anti-Semitic country and Latvians started killing Jews even before the Germans arrived in 1941”, “Nazi revival is rampant in today's Latvia”, “The Russian minority is persecuted in Latvia. . .” True, false or in-between? The Finnish journalist and author Jukka Rislakki examines charges like these and provides an outline of Latvia's recent history while attempting to separate documented historical fact from misinformation and deliberate disinformation. His analysis helps to explain why the Baltic States (population 7 million) consistently top the enemy lists in public opinion polls of Russia (143 million). His knowledge of the Baltic languages allows him to make use of local sources and up-to-date historical research. He is a former Baltic States correspondent for Finland's largest daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and the author of several books on Finnish and Latvian history. As a neutral, experienced and often critical observer, Rislakki is uniquely qualified for the task of separating truth from fiction.

Download or read book The Horror of Himmler s Death Squads written by Norman Ridley and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2024-09-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Second World War, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were occupied on three separate occasions – twice by the Soviet Union and once by Nazi Germany. The signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 allowed the Soviets to dominate the Baltic states without fear of German reprisals, causing many in the German-Baltic populations to flee to Poland. Soviet rule of the Baltics was brutal with the purging of political elites and deportation of many tens of thousands in a bid to turn them into vassal states. Consequently, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, many Balts saw it as a liberation from Soviet cruelties. The reality was, however, that it turned out to be the beginning of something much worse. During their occupation of Poland prior to Barbarossa the Nazis had decimated the Polish political elites, and the Jews there had been herded into ghettos in preparation for deportation to the east where they would serve as slave labour in the Nazi economy after the conquest of the Soviet Union. Similar policies were to be adopted in the Baltics when Heinrich Himmler's murder squads, the Einsatzgruppen, were allowed to move into the newly-occupied territories. Operating behind the advancing German forces Einsatzgruppen A, B, C, and D – four special mobile killing units, each made up of about a thousand men from the security police and the German intelligence service – proved to be more than willing to carry out Himmler's orders. He had called for the removal of every vestige of opposition to Nazi rule, which primarily meant complete elimination of the ‘inferior’ races who were unfit for work and the ghettoization of others in preparation for their economic exploitation. On foreign soil, away from scrutiny and free of all constraint, the Einsatzgruppen discovered that through the mass shootings of communists, Jews and gypsies it was possible to accelerate the pace of the Holocaust, slaughtering men, women and children in their tens of thousands. The Einsatzgruppen were assisted by local ‘volunteers’ who helped to identify victims as well as kill them; in places whole Jewish communities were swiftly eliminated. Many of the killers and victims had known one another as neighbors and colleagues. This massive slaughter of civilians convinced Heydrich and Himmler that complete extermination of Jews was within their grasp and before very long, in the death camps, new industrial methods of killing would be devised.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Latvia written by Aldis Purs and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latvia is located on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. After a brief period of independence between the two World Wars, Latvia was annexed by the USSR in 1940. It reestablished its independence in 1991 following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Although the last Russian troops left in 1994. Latvia continues to revamp its economy for eventual integration into various Western European political and economic institutions. Since May 2004 Latvia is a member of the European Union. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Latvia contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Latvia.

Download or read book Russian speakers in post Soviet Latvia written by Ammon Cheskin and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-18 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction -- Discourse, memory, and identity -- Latvian state and nation-building -- Russian-language media and identity formation -- Examining Russian-speaking identity from below -- The "democratisation of history" and generational change -- The primacy of politics? Political discourse and identity formation -- The Russian Federation and Russian-speaking identity in Latvia -- A bright future?

Download or read book Baltic Facades written by Aldis Purs and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are often grouped together as the Baltic States, but these three Eastern European countries, tied together historically, are quite different. Although each is struggling to find its place within Europe and fighting to preserve its own identity, the idea of the Baltic States is a façade. In this book, Aldis Purs dispels the myth of a single, coherent Baltic identity, presenting a radical new view of the region. Baltic Façades illuminates the uniqueness of these three countries and locates them within the larger context of European history, also revealing the similarities they share with the rest of the continent. He also examines the anxiety the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania feel about their own identities and how others see them. Giving equal weight to developments in politics, economics, and social and cultural trends, he places contemporary events in a longer perspective than traditional Cold War-inspired views of the region, tracing the countries under Soviet rule after the end of World War II through their declarations of independence in the early 1990s and their admission to the European Union in 2004. Baltic Façades is an enlightening look at these three separate, though related, Eastern European countries.

Download or read book The Holocaust Genocide Template in Eastern Europe written by Ljiljana Radonić and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe discusses the “memory wars” in the course of the post-Communist re-narration of history since 1989 and the current authoritarian backlash. The book focuses specifically on how “mnemonic warriors” employ the “Holocaust template” and the concept of genocide in tendentious ways to justify radical policies and externalize the culpability for their international isolation and worsening social and economic circumstances domestically. The chapters analyze three dimensions: 1) the competing narratives of the “universalization of the Holocaust” as the negative icon of our era, on the one hand, and the “double genocide” paradigm, on the other, which focuses on “our own” national suffering under – allegedly “equally” evil – Nazism and Communism; 2) the juxtaposition of post-Communist Eastern Europe and Russia, reflected primarily in the struggle of the Baltic states and Ukraine to challenge Russian propaganda, a struggle that runs the risk of employing similarly distorting and propagandistic tropes; and 3) the post-Yugoslav rhetoric portraying one’s own group as “the new Jews” and one’s opponents in the wars of the 1990s as (akin to) “Nazis”. Surveying major battle sites in this “memory war”: memorial museums, monuments, film and the war over definitions and terminology in relevant public discourse, The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe will be of great interest to scholars of genocide, the Holocaust, historical memory and revisionism, and Eastern European Politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

Download or read book Nation Building in the Baltic States written by Gundar J. King and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The product of more than twenty years of research, first-person observations, discussions, and policy analyses, Nation-Building in the Baltic States: Transforming Governance, Social Welfare, and Security in Northern Europe explores the characteristics of the Baltic states as positioned in the northeast corridor in terms of military strife and polity development such as democratization. It details governments' efforts to abet transparency and trust by way of developing new public and private institutions for advancements like innovation and private wealth creation. The book examines the effects of various factors of economic and social adjustments in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The authors explore the opportunities and problems that have shaped the region’s progress in the process of rebuilding democratic institutions and nation states after regaining their independence. They then describe the region’s progress in laying the critical internal foundation necessary for maintaining their political independence. The book also reviews the progress made in strengthening what the authors believe are key social functions of government in what the EU describes as its social market system: the provision of social welfare services that meets the needs of all. The book concludes with a realistic picture of future hurdles for this region, looking at lingering challenges and regional instabilities, policy mistakes not to be made again, and recommendations for national planning and resource management. Going beyond a massive, single explanation of recent Baltic developments, the book provides a broad picture of development of social and political trends and insights with separate evaluations of issues in the process of national transformation. It provides a foundation examining the forces that will shape the future of the Baltic states.

Download or read book Information Wars in the Baltic States written by Janis Chakars and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-26 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume, featuring accomplished scholars, is about the information wars in the Baltic states, a battle that pits Russia against the West with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as sites of contention for great power politics. Chapters address responses from titular populations, local Russian speakers, national governments, activists, journalists, and NATO, as well as the impact of Russian foreign policy on media.

Download or read book A Concise History of the Baltic States written by Andrejs Plakans and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 611 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Baltic region is frequently neglected in broader histories of Europe and its international significance can be obscured by separate treatments of the various Baltic states. With this wide-ranging survey, Andrejs Plakans presents an integrated history of three Baltic peoples - Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians - and draws out the common threads to show how it has been shaped by their location in a strategically desirable corner of Europe. Subordinated in turn by Baltic German landholders, the Polish nobility and gentry, and then by Russian and Soviet administrators, the three nations have nevertheless kept their distinctive identities - significantly retaining three separate languages in an ethnically diverse region. The book traces the countries' evolution from their ninth-century tribal beginnings to their present status as three thriving and separate nation states, focusing particularly on the region's complex twentieth-century history, which culminated in the eventual re-establishment of national sovereignty after 1991.

Download or read book The Forest Brotherhood written by Dan Kaszeta and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A common view is that the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945. But fighting continued for over a decade in the Baltic states. Stuck between two totalitarian regimes-Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Reich-the populations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been subjected to a brutal Soviet occupation in 1940, Nazi invasion in 1941, and Soviet re-occupation in 1944, falsely branded as "liberation." Variously labelled "freedom fighters" or "Nazi bandits" by historians, the Baltic partisans who would become known as the Forest Brothers fought a long campaign against occupation that eventually failed under the might of the USSR. Much of this history of armed resistance, which was also a front in the intelligence war between East and West, is little known outside the region. Treachery, betrayal, heroism and lost futures all play a role in this fascinating tale, as Dan Kaszeta explores themes of independence, nationalism, Baltic identity, the fluidity of boundaries in Eastern Europe, and the comparative weight of Nazi and Soviet oppression. Drawing on extensive archival material rarely seen outside the Baltic states, The Forest Brotherhood unpacks the forgotten story of this resistance movement, and reveals its continuing impact on today's world.

Download or read book Journal of Soviet and Post Soviet Politics and Society written by Julie Fedor and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian war in Ukraine has been accompanied, fuelled, and legitimized by a Russian information war campaign that is unprecedented in its scope and nature. This Russian state-media propaganda campaign has been surprisingly successful in disguising and distorting the nature of the war and shaping the way it is perceived and understood, both in Russia and beyond. This special inaugural issue of JSPPS sets out to launch an interdisciplinary discussion on the Russian information warfare being waged in parallel with the military war in Ukraine.The JOURNAL OF SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET POLITICS AND SOCIETY (JSPPS) is a new bi-annual journal about to be launched as a companion journal to the Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (SPPS) book series (founded 2004 and edited by Andreas Umland, Dr. phil., PhD).

Download or read book The Soft Power of the Russian Language written by Arto Mustajoki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-12 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring Russian as a pluricentric language, this book provides a panoramic view of its use within and outside the nation and discusses the connections between language, politics, ideologies, and cultural contacts. Russian is widely used across the former Soviet republics and in the diaspora, but speakers outside Russia deviate from the metropolis in their use of the language and their attitudes towards it. Using country case studies from across the former Soviet Union and beyond, the contributors analyze the unifying role of the Russian language for developing transnational connections and show its value in the knowledge economy. They demonstrate that centrifugal developments of Russian and its pluricentricity are grounded in the language and education policies of their host countries, as well as the goals and functions of cultural institutions, such as schools, media, travel agencies, and others created by émigrés for their co-ethnics. This book also reveals the tensions between Russia’s attempts to homogenize the 'Russian world' and the divergence of regional versions of Russian reflecting cultural hybridity of the diaspora. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will prove useful to researchers of Russian and post-Soviet politics, Russian studies, Russian language and culture, linguistics, and immigration studies. Those studying multilingualism and heritage language teaching may also find it interesting.

Download or read book Border Visions written by Jakub Kazecki and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-06-13 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last several decades, the boundaries of languages and national and ethnic identities have been shifting, altering the notion of borders around the world. Borderland areas, such as East and West Europe, the US/Mexican frontera, and the Middle East, serve as places of cultural transfer and exchange, as well as arenas of violent conflict and segregation. As communities around the world merge across national borders, new multi-ethnic and multicultural countries have become ever more common. Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film offers an overview of global cinema that addresses borders as spaces of hybridity and change. In this collection of essays, contributors examine how cinema portrays conceptions of borderlands informed by knowledge, politics, art, memory, and lived experience, and how these constructions contribute to a changing global community. These essays analyze a variety of international feature films and documentaries that focus on the lives, cultures, and politics of borderlands. The essays discuss the ways in which conflicts and their resolutions occur in borderlands and how they are portrayed on film. The volume pays special attention to contemporary Europe, where the topic of shifting border identities is one of the main driving forces in the processes of European unification. Among the filmmakers whose work is discussed in this volume are Fatih Akin, Montxo Armendàriz, Cary Fukunaga, Christoph Hochhäusler, Holger Jancke, Emir Kusturica, Laila Pakalnina, Alex Rivera, Larissa Shepitko, Andrea Staka, Elia Suleiman, and István Szabó. A significant contribution to the dialogue on global cinema, Border Visions will be of interest to students and scholars of film, but also to scholars in border studies, gender studies, sociology, and political science.

Download or read book Among the Living and the Dead A Tale of Exile and Homecoming written by Inara Verzemnieks and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A BookPage Best Book of the Year "This exquisitely written book shows how recovery can come generations later through rebuilding connections—to people, the natural world, the past." —Robin Shulman, Washington Post "It’s long been assumed of the region where my grandmother was born…that at some point each year the dead will come home," Inara Verzemnieks writes in this exquisite story of war, exile, and reconnection. Her grandmother’s stories recalled one true home: the family farm left behind in Latvia, where, during WWII, her grandmother Livija and her grandmother’s sister, Ausma, were separated. They would not see each other again for more than 50 years. Raised by her grandparents in Washington State, Inara grew up among expatriates, scattering smuggled Latvian sand over the coffins of the dead, singing folk songs about a land she had never visited. When Inara discovers the scarf Livija wore when she left home, in a box of her grandmother’s belongings, this tangible remnant of the past points the way back to the remote village where her family broke apart. There it is said the suspend their exile once a year for a pilgrimage through forests and fields to the homes they left behind. Coming to know Ausma and the trauma of her exile to Siberia under Stalin, Inara pieces together Livija’s survival through years as a refugee. Weaving these two parts of the family story together in spellbinding, lyrical prose, she gives us a profound and cathartic account of loss, survival, resilience, and love.

Download or read book European Studies written by Menno Spiering and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: