Imagining the nation: Campaign posters of the first postcommunist elections in Latvia

East European Politics and Societies

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 131-137

  Stukuls, Daina ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0041857967     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325497011001004     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. The definition of political culture employed here is that of William Gamson, who suggests that political culture is "the meaning systems that are culturally available for taking, writing, and thinking about political objects: the myths and metaphors, the language and idea elements, the frames, ideologies, values, and condensing symbols." For a more detailed discussion of the concept, see his "Political Discourse and Collective Action," in Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sydney Tarrow, eds., International Social Movement Research, Volume 1, From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research Across Cultures (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1988), 220.
2. "Kopa ar Latvijas kristigo demodratu [sic] savienibu par Latvijas atjaunosanu." Political leaflet published by the LKDS Support Group in Canada, 1993. All translations appearing in this article are my own.
3. Campaign pamphlet published by the Latvia's Unity party (LVP), 1993.
4. David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 4.
5. Of the twenty-three groups vying for seats in the 100-member Saeima, only five were political parties. The rest were coalitions of candidates assembled soley for the purpose of standing for election. Most unsuccessful coalitions disbanded after the elections. Notably, even the parties were not parties in the traditional sense: they did not have mechanisms by which the public could join; nor did they actively recruit new members. Arguably, however, there would not have been much public enthusiasm about joining a party, as party membership was still perceived negatively after the Soviet experience; in addition, the voting public was not familiar enough with most parties to feel loyalty or connectedness to them.
6. During the interwar period, Latvians made up just over 70 percent of the population. The remainder was, for the most part, Russian, German, Jewish, and Lithuanian, the vast majority of whom were citizens of Latvia. During the Soviet period, a combination of factors, including war losses, political refugee migrations, political deportations, and the in-migration of tens of thousands of Russian workers and thousands of Soviet Army retirees, led to a significant decline in the percentage of Latvians residing in Latvia. The 1989 Soviet census measured the figure at 52 percent. More recent counts suggest that the figure is 54 percent. Many nationalists suggest that it was the Soviets' intention to dilute and essentially "Russify" the population; therefore, they classify Soviet-era immigrants as "colonists," making them ineligible for citizen benefits under international law. Others feel that disenfranchisement or selective enfranchisement is necessary in order to insure that Latvia is never voluntarily voted back into a renewed Soviet Union by its non-Latvian populace. Hence, while human rights norms would eliminate the possibility of forcing the Soviet-era immigrant population to return to their homelands, the nationalists see the possibility of recreating the favorable interwar population balance by permitting only those descended from interwar Latvian citizens (regardless of ethnicity) to acquire citizenship in the new state.
7. The contrast between restoration and renewal may be illustrated by the former's elevation of the ideal of recreating the First Republic of Latvia (1918-1941) and the latter's platform for the creation of the Second Republic of Latvia.
8. Victoria Bonnell, "The Representation of Women in Early Soviet Political Art," The Russian Review 50 (1991): 270.
9. Edgars Dunsdorfs, Karla Ulmana dzive (Riga: Izdevnieciba "Zinatne", 1992).