Authors

Discussion

This paper examines the evolution of the Latvian national communists into dissidents during the Brezhnev era through the publication of their 1972 ‘Protest Letter’. This ‘Letter of 17 Latvian communists’ was a tamizdat critique of the Soviet system particularly of the period after the national communists were purge from power in 1959 and subsequent demographic change. The letter was smuggled out of the USSR and printed in the main Swedish daily newspaper where it caused ripples around the World as evidence of what was happening in the Soviet Union, especially in the Latvian émigré community, ahead of the Helsinki Declaration in 1975. Yet, the domestic impact of the letter was almost negligible although the authorities published a rebuttal to it. The case was used to expel its authors from the Communist Party and demonstrates how the national communists morphed into nationalists in opposition to the system when they no longer worked within it.