ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Migration and Totalitarian Regimebut also seeing the new system. These narratives also used terms suchas freedom of movement, non-stop surveillance, and so on to describethese meetings. In the community of Latvian exiles, the evaluationof the Soviet period was (and still is) strongly negative. At the sametime, two mutually intolerant groups existed until the 1990s—onewas against any visits and contacts with Soviet Latvia, while the othergroup felt the need to communicate with relatives and especially theworld of art in occupied Latvia. The Soviet occupation and its aftereffectsserved as an explanation for all negative things in Latvia. Anexample from Skaidrite’s narrative: When I returned from Latvia, somefriends of mine didn’t speak to me for two years because I had visited thecommunists.Skaidrite, born in Riga, was one of the first to visit Soviet Latvia.The first ship docked in 1961. She remembers the welcome: Yes, it wasthe very first ship. And the most important thing is that they welcomed uswith roses and television. There were a lot of people from the mass media.But my first impression when we drove through Riga was that there werered patches everywhere. It was in honour of Gagarin. Red Riga was a bigshock for me. In this very short example we can observe the Soviet attituderegarding the external image of the state, which was marked bythe mass media, flowers, and flags. This welcome was shown on TVthroughout the Soviet Union and the world as evidence of the hospitalityof the Soviet Union towards foreigners. But the pompous welcomethat resembled a demonstration and “Red Riga” shocked our narrator.We also found out that the dialogue with the West was unilateral.Immediately after her arrival, Skaidrite had to pledge an oath that shewould be quiet about living conditions in Sweden; Soviet people didn’thave to know anything about the capitalist system.The next event in Skaidrite’s story also represents the dual natureof the Soviet Union as well as the relationship between the continuationof the regime—even in the 1960s—and personal life and freedom:I had to live in one particular hotel that was especially for foreigners.One evening I stayed at my relatives’ because we went to the theatre and Icouldn’t get back to that hotel. And they were following me and they sawthat I was not at the hotel. So in the middle of the night there was a knock atthe door—they wanted me to go with them. But I had fortitude, and I told218