Category: Filmas

Over the past centuries, Latvians have moved from their motherland to all corners of the globe.  Some have been deported because they refused to obey regimes.  Others have gone out into the world because they feel that they will have a happier and luckier life elsewhere.  Still others have become refugees during wars and revolutions.  Our compatriots were not welcomed everywhere with open arms, but it was only in the Soviet Union that the ethnicity of Latvians led to the development of a theory which said that each and every Latvian was a spy, a traitor, an enemy, or simply an undesirable person who needed to be shot as soon as possible.  

The documentary “The Station ‘Latvians’, 1937”

Original Title Latvieši – 1937 – Latiši Documentary, 60’, Released 2010

 Director Dzintra Geka
 Production Company Sibīrijas bērni
 Director and producer:  Dzintra Geka
 Screenplay:  Ēriks Lanss
 Camera:  Aivars Lubānietis
 Editing:  Armands Zvirbulis
 Video engineer:  Jānis Kazulis
 Sound editor:  Normunds Deinats
 Text:  Aivars Stranga
 Consultant:  Jānis Riekstiņš
 Assistant to the director:  Baiba Ārenta

Songs from Siberian Latvians have been used as the soundtrack to this film.

According to the 1926 Soviet census, there were 151,410 Latvians living there – 18,346 in and around Leningrad, 10,583 in the Pskov District, 10,167 in Moscow, and 35,069 Latvians in Siberia.  There were at least 372 Latvian colonies with 12,000 farms.  Gaļina Strazdiņa, who lives in Kemerov, says that “soon we will all be gone.  We are neither Latvians nor Russians because we do not speak our own language, we do not speak Latvian.  What can I say about 1937?  I was 14, no, 15.  A Black Bertha came to our village and collected everyone – Latvians, Estonians, Russians, everyone.  No one ever returned.”  The “Latvian Operation” was headed up by Nikolai Yezhov, who issued the relevant instructions on November 30, 1937.  22,360 people were arrested, and 74% were sentenced to death.  Although the focus of the operation was on Latvians, others who were accused of spying on behalf of Latvia were also caught up in the process.  The greatest suffering occurred among innocent people whose only “crime” was that they were Latvians in the Soviet Union.  The central figures in the film are the offspring of those who were repressed, and they were found in Moscow, Kemerov and Latvia.  A train station in the Kemerov District is still called “Latvians.”

 

 

This film is an emotional, figurative and historical study of the memories of people who were deported to Siberia as children on June 14, 1941.  The film represents the sufferings of these victims in contrast to the beautiful landscapes of Siberia.
On June 14, 2009, a film crew, a number of children of Siberia who survived and returned to Latvia, and their children went on a pilgrimage to Siberia to install memorial plaques in memory of the mothers and children who were deported between 1941 and 1949.
One person who took the trip was Gunārs Toms, who became an orphan after his father perished in Vyatlag.  “I have to say that to this very day I have not recovered peace in my soul after what I saw and experienced during a 120-kilometre pilgrimage from the village where my mommy, Alvīne Toma, was arrested, to the “mighty” KGB building in Yeniseysk, where there were interrogation rooms and a dungeon in which people were shot,” he says.  There was the cemetery of the prison.  The former death camp is still surrounded by barbed wire.  And, finally, we put up a memorial plaque in the local museum.”

Continue reading “Piemini Sibīriju”

In the summer of 1929, 160 kilometres beyond the Arctic Circle and on the right bank of the Yenisey River, a group of Russian farmers who had fallen victim to Soviet collectivisation were deposited on the shore from several barges.  Were there hundreds of them?  Perhaps thousands?  Who knows?  They are all buried there.  It is said that nearly all of them died during the winter – the strong men of Siberia, along with their wives and small children.  Even if there was any registration of this tragedy at that time, then nothing is left today.  Those were the days when Stalin’s idea that “if there is a man, there is a problem; if there is no man, then there is no problem” was in full swing.  The first victims of famine, fold and disease were buried not far from the tents and wooden huts in which people lived.  Their graves are long gone, because an entire city, complete with a massive wood processing industry, was built on top of their bones.  This was the first result of industrialisation in Russia’s polar regions.  This is the city of Igarka. Continue reading “…un Igarka, Cerība un Taurenis, 2008”