Authors
Michael Loader1; 1 University of Glasgow, UK Discussion
An analysis of the career of Soviet Latvian statesman Arvīds Pelše can provide great insight into high politics and patronage in both in a Soviet Republic, in this case Latvia, and in the Politburo at the centre of Soviet political power. Pelše’s extraordinary career was filled with uncertainty and numerous brushes with death and political oblivion. The son of wealthy peasants, Pelše participated as a youth in the Russian Revolution in 1917. He concealed his upbringing and rose through the political ranks, working with the Soviet secret police in the 1920s, assisting in the collectivisation of agriculture in Kazakhstan in the 1930s before paradoxically fleeing to Moscow to survive the Great Terror possibly by denouncing other Latvians. After Latvia was annexed by the USSR, he championed all things Russian as the Agitprop Secretary from 1940 to 1959. Pelše later emerged victorious from his struggle with national communists for control of the Latvian Party leadership. Politically well connected (he was a protégé of the chief Soviet ideologue Mikhail Suslov) Pelše prospered as the First Secretary of the Latvian Communist Party, and from 1966, he received a seat on the Politburo as the Party’s chief disciplinarian, a post he held for the last 17 years of his life. The paper will explore how this consummate apparatchik expertly played the Soviet political game to ultimately become only the second ever Balt to reach the Politburo. 
