User talk:Stephen.r

This article needs a broader base of sources. Only two are listed: Bernard Press's _The Murder of the Jews in Latvia_ and the anonymous history of Latvia published last year in Russia. Press, a Holocaust survivor, is so rabidly anti-Latvian that he puts photos in his book from other parts of Europe and passes them off as taken in Riga--for example, a photo of a synagogue burning in Berlin in 1939 is presented as a synagogue burning in Riga in 1941 (the Nazis did burn the synagogues in Riga, but this isn't one of them). His direct eye-witness experiences are valuable source material, but his interpretations are ridiculously partisan. (His life was saved by a Latvian family, who risked their own lives to do it, but not even that sweetens the anti-Latvian venom that pours constantly from his pen).

The anonymous Russian book is apparently the Kremlin's response to a History of Latvia published in Riga. It seeme to have been hastily compiled by people not eager to have their names associated with it, and consists almost entirely of retreads of old KGB propaganda. After the suppression of the Berklavs movement in the Latvian CP in 1958, there was a great outpouring of pseudo-history sponsored by the KGB. This stuff is still circulating; it resurfaced in an article in _The Nation_ in 2005, and infects even the otherwise praiseworthy books of Latvian historians such as Modris Eksteins (_Walking Since Daybreak_) and most recently Valdis Lumans' generally admirable _Latvia in World War II_.

I can't fill in the Strods citation, as I have to borrow everything by interlibrary loan these days, and I don't have time to bring more perspective to the article. I hope someone out there can undertake it.

Stephen.r 22:46, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

PS: I presume the writing of H. Strods in question is 'Salaspils koncentrācijas nometne (1941. g. oktobris - 1944. g. septembris)',_Latvijas Okupācijas Muzeja Gadagrāmata 2000_ (Riga: Latvijas Okupācijas Muzejs, 2001), pp. 122-?. I don't have quick access to it, however.