Culture Wars: Latgalian Identity Between Soviet and Latvian Colonial Imaginaries (1958–1959)

Abstract By analyzing articles published in the official publication of the Latvian SSR Union of Writers, this article examines how Latgalian identity and culture were constructed by the Soviet Latvian intelligentsia before, during, and after the 1958 Latgale Culture Week in Riga. Interwar-era narratives that had identified Latgale as the Latvian internal Other were endemic to the center-periphery relations in Soviet Latvia during the Khrushchev Thaw. Consequently, politicized representations of Latgale in the late 1950s deferred to the same discursive frames that had contributed to the formation of Latvian national imaginaries of Latgale as underdeveloped, backward, and fundamentally Other. By situating the Culture Week in a colonial setting and critically examining the historical entanglement of Latgale in multiple structures of power – Soviet and Latvian – this article shows that performances of Latgalian identity during the Culture Week became a tool for both nationally minded members of the Latvian Communist Party (LCP) and Russophile Soviet state-builders to consolidate power and project an image of national unity at a time of growing political strife in the LCP.