COURAGE

connecting collections

The Latvian Communist Party Central Committee (LCP CC), its administrative apparatus and its Bureau, were the highest political and administrative institutions in Soviet Latvia. One of its main functions was the ideological control of society, and the monitoring of any activities considered to be anti-communist or anti-Soviet. Its documents contain an extensive amount of information about direct and hidden resistance to the Soviet regime, about the mood and activities of the intelligentsia, especially writers, artists, etc, members of the creative intelligentsia, and about youth activities, etc. These documents also reflect relations between Moscow and Riga on ideological matters, and hidden and open cultural resistance, especially from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s, when Soviet Latvian ideologues tried to adapt Stalinist cultural policies to the new realities of the outside world in connection with the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, the Prague Spring and its suppression in 1968, the  influence of the Western youth movement, etc. The archival documents of the LCP CC contain a vast array of documents of very different kinds, such as the minutes of Party congresses and CC plenary meetings, the minutes of CC Bureau meetings and special meetings on ideological matters, information about the mood, and developments in the cultural sphere, etc.

The Latvian SSR Committee for State Security (KGB, Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti) operated in Latvia under different names (NKVD/NKGB/MGB/KGB) from August 1940 to August 1991. It acted as the secret police, with the aim of suppressing internal dissent against the Soviet regime, using different techniques and a vast web of informers. The organization was liquidated by a decision of the Supreme Council of the Latvian Republic on 24 August 1991.

The Latvian State Archive (LVA) was established in 1961 as the Central State Archive of the October Revolution and Construction of Socialism. In March 1991, the archive acquired its present name. Since 2011, it has been a part of the National Archives of Latvia. The LVA holds archives of the highest administrative institutions and other state institutions of the Latvian SSR and the Republic of Latvia, the Riga and Jūrmala municipalities, personal papers, archives of Latvian emigre organisations, archives of the Latvian Social Democratic Party and the Latvian Communist Party, and documents from the former State Security Committee (KGB) on persecuted people. Most of the documents stored in the archive cover a period starting from 1940, although there are also files from earlier periods of time.