In order that the workers should not be needlessly absent from their jobs a public holiday had been chosen for election day. Normally this would have been a Sunday, but Sundays had been abolished, their place being taken by one day off in six, an improvement, as the radio pointed out, on the Almighty’s one day in seven.
Before the Russians could get down to the real business of taking over the country foreign witnesses must be removed, so the new government announced that as Latvia wished to form part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics it would no longer require independent diplomatic relations, and all associated privileges would be withdrawn on August 1st. In other words, foreign diplomats who stayed on after the deadline would be without protection. This information was passed on to London and we waited confidently for instructions to leave.
With only a fortnight to go before the expiry date the furniture vans were busy once more as the Legations packed up for their return home. Harold Hobson had already left to be Consul in Havana. MacKillop had gone to Stockholm, and still there was no word about our future movements. With the Germans occupying the whole of North-west Europe, and Italy and France blocking the Mediterranean, our choice of escape routes was narrowing. We could go to Stockholm or Helsinki but would have to remain, as did Miggs in Sweden, for the rest of the war, and both Legations were already fully staffed.
If we were to return home our choice lay between two long and circuitous routes. The first was through Moscow, Odessa and thence in a series of hops to Damascus, Basra, Bombay, Durban and home round the Cape. The second was by the Trans-Siberian Railway through Manchukuo, Dairen, Japan and Canada. Each would require a variety of transit visas so, with the Legations closing all round us, we decided to ignore the lack of orders from home and collect every visa we could possibly use.
Our opposite numbers were extremely helpful, sometimes digging deep into crates for the visa stamps which had already been packed—all but the French, whose visa staff appeared to be Petainistes to a man. Very unwillingly they consented to stamp in our passports the Syrian visas which would allow us to pass through Damascus.
‘What do we owe?’ I asked.
‘Unfortunately we cannot make a charge,’ replied the official ungraciously. I pushed four full fees into the Croix Rouge box still standing on the counter. As we were leaving the office one of the doors in the passage opened a crack and Malgrat’s face appeared.
‘The de Roemer boy was seen in a ditch on the retreat to Bordeaux,’ he whispered. ‘He had been cycling along beside the troops and his bicycle was damaged, the front wheel I think. I thought you’d like to know.’
‘Have you heard nothing more?’ I asked. He shook his head and the door closed softly.
Greatly relieved to have acquired all the visas we might need, including the American and the Japanese, we telegraphed to London asking them to reply with the single words ‘Trans-Siberian’ or ‘the Cape’.
Unaware of the true reasons for the restraint shown so far by the Russians, the man in the street had come to think that his apprehensions might have been exaggerated. The correct behaviour of the Red Army and the friendliness of the soldiers had furthered this impression. With the eager blindness of wishful thinking the simpler people had persuaded themselves that life under the Russians would be quite tolerable. Those who thought differently wisely refrained from airing their views. The newspapers described the marvels of the Soviet Union, which stretched from Germany to Japan; sheep with wool down to their ankles in Azerbaijan, grapes like drops of blood in the Caucasus; perpetual summer on the Black Sea, millions of silk worms in Daghestan.
On July 21st the puppet governments of the three Baltic States applied to join the Soviet Union.
On the same day, in all three States, land was nationalized and farmers learnt to their dismay that each would be allowed the use of a maximum of thirty acres—a completely unviable unit. This land, which now belonged to the State, could not be bought or sold. The nationalization was described as a measure to end the sufferings of the peasantry at the hands of capitalists and parasites, and to put an end to the starvation which the people had endured. The rural population was divided into three classes: kulaks, who had formerly owned more than seventy-five acres, against whom a merciless campaign was advocated; owners of medium-sized farms who, it was announced, would be tolerated on probation, and landless peasants.
On July 23rd all banks, industrial enterprises, mines and means of transport were nationalized too, and the legal infrastructure was ready for the far more drastic ‘reforms’ to come. It was unlikely that the few foreign diplomats still remaining in Riga, absorbed as they were in the business of moving out, took much account of these measures, but the future of the Baltic States was clearly grim.
With only two more days to go before the deadline we telegraphed again to London begging for instructions, though it was clearly too late for us to get away before our privileges were withdrawn. Following an appeal to the Russian authorities we were given grudging permission to stay until August 25th, at our own risk.
Chapter 17
On July 22nd President Ulmanis was carried off to Moscow and his place was taken by a Russian appointee. ‘Latvia is dead,’ said Lotte.
We now no longer had a single foreign colleague in Riga. On the first morning of our isolation, as we left home, two heavily built characters stepped out from beneath the plane trees and followed us, twenty paces behind, until we reached the Raina Boulevard. As we went into the Consulate, they settled down on a bench in the gardens opposite. There was no attempt to disguise their surveillance. Not bad tradecraft, but no tradecraft at all. We wondered whether they would stay on all day or be relieved by another pair, since we now usually worked until ten or eleven at night.
The walk along the Canal to the office had ceased to be a pleasure. The parks, no longer refreshed by the firemen’s hoses, looked parched and dusty, and on the trees the leaves were beginning to wither.
The very sound patterns of the city had changed. Each morning at 5 a.m. squadrons of Russian ‘planes, flying low, roared over the house tops, adding to this unwelcome awakening a feeling of dread. Troops marched constantly through the streets, some singing in wonderful deep-throated voices the Red Army marching songs—an echo of the German troops in Vienna who had so often woken us to the sound of ‘Heute gehort uns Deutschland, Morgen die ganze Welt’.
Loudspeakers had been fitted to the lamp posts at strategic points in the streets. All day long they blared out Communist propaganda varied by monotonous repetitions of the Internationale.
One morning we walked through the harbour and along the quays to the office, followed by our shadows, who may even have appreciated a little change of itinerary. A Russian cruiser and some gun boats were tied up alongside, the sailors all lined up on deck and doing P.T. The flags on the few Latvian ships had been replaced by red ones. When shipping was nationalized on July 23rd all Latvian vessels had been recalled to their home ports but only a few had returned. This the Russians tried to remedy by putting pressure on the owners and threatening the relatives of the crews. Failure to return was categorized as sabotage, punishable by twenty-five years forced labour.
On August 5th the Supreme Soviet granted the ‘requests’ of the puppet governments of the Baltic States, and Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania became respectively the 14th, 15th and 16th Socialist Republics of the Soviet Union. Each delegate spoke in his own language, lip service to the myth that Lenin’s proposal of self-determination for subject peoples had been realized. After the 1918 Revolution it had seemed that Russia proper would consist of an area of about two-thirds of the former Tsarist empire, in which roughly half the population spoke Russian. The other language groups were to be granted autonomy within a loose federation. The western borderlands, Finland, the Baltic States and Poland had, between the wars, achieved real independence. Now, they too had lost their freedom.
Until this moment the Russians considered that they had handled
the Latvians with kid gloves. But the brief honeymoon was over. Latvia must be brought into line with the Soviet Union of which it now formed a part. The clocks were put back to accord with Moscow time, three hours behind GMT. Latvian currency would be withdrawn. From now on it was forbidden to lay flowers on the National War Memorial. Traditional Latvian dress was no longer to be worn.
Official looting began in earnest. Whole warehouses were emptied; chemists’ shops and hospitals stripped bare. Machinery of all sorts was seized. Livestock, fodder, food grains and timber were carried off to Russia. All the more modern railway trucks and carriages were taken in exchange for decrepit Russian rolling stock on a tonnage ratio, that is to say three Baltic 17-ton cars were exchanged for one Soviet 50-ton unit. These trucks were far too large for Latvian traffic.
As in Russia, at that time, trade unions were abolished. Communist dogma maintained that in a Socialist community the relations between workers and management were not, as in a capitalist state, the relations between buyers and sellers of labour. The obligations and rights of workers in a Socialist State were predetermined by a working contract, so there was no longer any need for workers’ organizations, which were merely a survival from former class struggles. The Latvian workers were now effectively shackled.
Under the new regime, the funds to which workers and their employers had formerly contributed had been nationalized, and no one would be entitled to draw the benefits for which they had saved.
It had been the custom for men to down tools and clean up so that they were ready to leave the factory when the hooter went. This life style came abruptly to an end and workers were forbidden on pain of fines and even more unpleasant measures, to leave their benches until time was up. Latvians were clean people. That in itself was fair enough, but if they were to indulge in a good wash on factory premises, it must be in their own time, and as long as the soap lasted.
Ironically, an order for cleanliness in factories was the subject of one of the endless compulsory meetings called by the People’s Commissar for Light Industry and advertised in the Russkaya Gazeta. These meetings were described as ‘social events’ but were compulsory, even though the theme of many did not apply to the up-to-date conditions hitherto obtaining in Latvian factories. Those who failed to turn up were listed as politically unreliable.
The most hated innovation was the Labour Book, a system used in the Soviet Union. Each book contained a worker’s complete record and was as vital to him as his internal passport. Any misdemeanours were noted, and a man could not move to a new job without producing a signed permission from his former employer or supervising commissar, who could withhold consent without giving any reason.
Strikes for any cause whatever were forbidden.
It is not surprising that the processions organized to celebrate the entry of Latvia into the Soviet Union lacked enthusiasm. This time the demonstrators were marched along under escort and the processions were thickly seeded with AGITPROP men from Russia. Some of the marchers bore sheets of plywood daubed with portraits of Communist leaders. Others had nailed bunches of flowers to scrawled placards. Four men were carrying an oleograph of Stalin in a brass frame mounted on poles, which had probably been looted from some church. A few of the marchers were singing, reading the words from scraps of paper. To liven up this rather dreary demonstration, the procession was interspersed with military bands.
My reading sessions with Our Friend had been extended to include the Russkaya Gazeta which, unlike Pravda and Izvestia, contained all the local news. This made our work more interesting, since besides our usual scanning for items of industrial and military interest from all over the Soviet Union, we were able to look for news which might intimately concern us.
For instance, it was proposed to settle one million Russians in Latvia, increasing the population by fifty per cent. Armed forces personnel and functionaries were pouring into Riga and accommodation had to be found for them, so a drastic reorganization of the housing situation would be required. The Gazeta announced that the Russian housing norm of nine square metres per head was to be introduced into the Baltic States.
‘Just a moment,’ I said to Our Friend. ‘I must tell my husband.’
Kenneth looked up with a sigh from the coding book, but he was at once alert. ‘Every room, including kitchens, bathroom, halls, passages and larders will be included in the total space to be divided,’ I explained. He was scribbling on the back of an envelope.
‘That will mean thirteen people in our flat,’ he said.
‘Requisitioning starts today,’ I added. ‘And our official privileges ceased ten days ago.’
‘It’s time we thought of moving.’
On arriving home we found Lotte in tears.
‘Is your old mother worse?’ we asked.
‘Oh she’s all right. She’ll be gone. The doctor says she won’t live long enough to suffer as we shall.’ Her face brightened at this comforting thought, but quickly clouded. ‘It’s my life savings. The Russians have stolen all but a thousand Lats (about £50). Nationalized, they call it. All my life I’ve worked for nothing.’ I held her hand while she cried quietly.
The country was now being flooded with worthless roubles which the new arrivals could exchange at a very favourable rate against the Lat. Official assurances to the contrary, the Latvian currency was being rapidly devalued. In their panic, people rushed to buy whatever they could find, without pausing to consider what they could do with it. The Russian immigrants, astonished by the abundance even in the now sadly depleted shops, competed for the most unlikely articles.
In an attempt to check the headlong spending, which had already served its purpose in reducing almost to nil the consumer goods available, a regulation was introduced condemning ‘speculation’, which could be taken to mean almost any kind of purchase. Speculators were tried and, when convicted, given sentences of from five to ten years’ imprisonment. Judges who refused to pass sentence for a petty offence were attacked in the press and frequently dismissed.
There was talk of introducing the death penalty, as in Russia, for those convicted of speculation. But in spite of penalties, present or future, the buying fever did not abate.
The State Pawn Shop had played an important part in Riga life. Apart from its conventional function it had assumed the role of a reputable antique shop and one went there to buy Russian silver ikons and all the relics of a generation of emigrés. It had also served as a completely trustworthy valuation agency. Before selling a piece of jewellery, or even having it repaired, one would take it to the pawn shop for a certificated description and valuation, which was never disputed. The Russkaya Gazela now announced that any item in the pawn shop worth more than three hundred Lats, or fifteen pounds, would be confiscated. With all but a residue of its stock seized and the death penalty hovering over any unapproved form of buying and selling this wonderful old institution was doomed.
Chapter 18
The requisitioning parties had now reached the top of our road. Since we no longer enjoyed Consular protection we should be evicted like everyone else. Many families, nervous about the happenings in Riga, had stayed on at the Strand. If a flat was empty, the troops merely broke down the front door and made a rapid job of throwing books and ornaments out of the window. If an owner returned in time, he could collect what remained of his treasures from the street below.
Unless we took immediate action our home would go the same way as the rest, so we decided to sell up. Office funds were running low since the banks, now nationalized, could no longer change cheques, so the money from our sale would be useful, and later we would be credited with it in London.
Work in the Passport Control Office was more demanding than ever, and we would not be able to return home during office hours. Lotte could not be expected to cope with buyers on her own, so we put an advertisement on the office door. ‘Entire contents of No. 14/4 Ausekla iela for sale on August 14th at 7.30 p.m.’ Speed was essential and there
was no time to haggle with individual buyers.
Tom Brimelow [Later, Lord Brimelow, Head of the Foreign Office.], the Vice-Consul left in charge, meanwhile, having packed up the Hobson’s furniture and sent it to Stockholm for eventual transport to Havana, had settled into their almost empty flat in the Elizabetes iela, and invited us to share it with him. The troops were only a couple of blocks away from us now, but with luck we should conclude our sale in time.
On the Wednesday evening, when we came back from the office, the queue outside our front door stretched right down the stairs and out into the street, and we had some difficulty in persuading people that we were not queue-bashers as we struggled to reach our flat. As Lotte opened the front door the crowd forced its way in with us. Lotte had been well coached and confined herself to the duties of a security officer, standing squarely by the front door to see that nothing was stolen. We each took a different room and all through the long evening repeated over and over again, ‘No. I’m sorry, but we can’t sell things separately. Everything or nothing.’
Round about ten o’clock a young couple, hoping to get married shortly, walked in with a roll of notes.
‘May we have your things? We shall treasure them. Perhaps this will help you a little to bear their loss. We will come and fetch them tomorrow—a little at a time if, you don’t mind.’
We sat round the dining room table with Lotte for the last time and drank hot tea with strawberry jam in the old Russian way which she loved. We were tired and shaken and Lotte dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her apron.
Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes Page 13