“Hostilities took place almost continuously on the territory of Latvia, the most devastating being the Polish-Swedish War (1600-1629), as well as the Great Northern War (1700-1721). In accordance with laws and decrees issued by the authorities, all social classes of the Latvian population were required to fulfil military duties and participate in wars. Regarding the Latvians, who made up the largest class in Livonia – the peasantry – historical sources state: “There is not a single peasant who is not a good marksman.”

“A new exhibition has been created at the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia – “Latvia and Latvian soldiers in the 17th-18th centuries.” LETA, 3 December 2008

There are many different types of Latvians. There are average, grey, young, exiled and all sorts of other Latvians. There are Latvians who are more Latvian than the Latvians themselves, and Latvians who exist but do not call themselves Latvians because they belong either to the world, to Europe, or to some other equally difficult-to-define community. There are Latvians who are the “real” ones – those who have lived here all along and “understand” Latvia – and there are the “unreal” ones, who ran away, long ago or recently, who “do not feel” either their nation or its history; or vice versa, the “real” ones were in exile, while the “unreal” ones stayed in Latvia.

There are many different types of Latvians, and there are historical Latvians. Who are the historical Latvians – those who lived in the territory of Latvia a hundred, two hundred, three hundred or perhaps more years ago, those who were “Latvian soldiers”, “Latvian peasants”, “Latvian serfs”? Or are there many and varied Latvians? In the past era, when nationalism offered easy answers to complex questions, today's nation could be easily equated with a nation of the not-so-distant and more distant past. In reality, this equation is the formula for the emergence and existence of nationalism – “we” today are the same “we” who fought many bloody battles and performed dazzling feats in the past, because our ancestors are “us”. Conversely, now that the idea of national unity, the nation, and even the nation-state itself is experiencing a crisis, the question – are “we” today also the “we” of the past – becomes complicated. If it is difficult to self-define today, is it even possible to clearly define Latvians in the past, and, for example, can one find Latvians in the Middle Ages?

There was a time when nations considered themselves to be unchanging throughout the centuries. Modern history was born in the 19th century, at the same time as the nation and nationalism were born. For historians standing by the cradle of historical science, it became a mission to study the history of their own people or nation. It seemed to them that their nations had existed for ages. The patriarchs of history cannot be blamed for blindness, because we too are blind to what has just happened, but one thing is clear: the people and the nation, as felt by the person of the 19th and 20th centuries, was not an ancient phenomenon. Of course, ethnic communities existed in the Middle Ages that could be called peoples, but they were certainly not the same “peoples” that formed their nation-states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Today it is clear that Caesar's Gauls or Charlemagne's Franks were not French, and the Saxons or any other ancient Germanic tribes were not Germans. The 19th and 20th centuries were a time of “creating” nations of a sort, where national identities were rather constructed using the dreams of the past, as the people or nation itself was more akin to a dream.

The tradition of Latvian national history has also experienced the placing of equals signs between the Latgalians, Selonians, Livonians, Curonians, and Latvians. Back then, in the 1930s, at the culmination of national history, although no serious Latvian historian had supposedly drawn such a clear equals sign, the ideology of the Ulmanis regime, using history as its foundation, built a direct bridge between the Latvians of the present and the “Latvians” of the 13th century. Admittedly, no serious research on the origin of the Latvians was produced in the 1930s. This might be because, by academically researching Latvian genesis, it would have been necessary to admit that there were no “Latvians” at all in the 13th century, and that referring to them as the direct ancestors of “free Latvia” is quite questionable. The desire to make the leaders of the Curonians, Latgalians, and Selonians into Latvian kings is, like any romanticism, a disease that has been outgrown in good time, and today one would not find a historian who would claim such a thing.

Since in the late 1930s, when the research of the ancient history of Latvia was the focus of the authorities and enjoyed an abundance of resources, government support, and opportunities, a theory of the origin of Latvians was not created; this had to be done by the historians who came after. Since history in Latvia after 1940 no longer enjoyed such great attention from the authorities, all the theories that emerged in this period lack pretentiousness and also precise, broad explanation. The theory of the origin of Latvians is as unpretentious as possible, and expressed in plain text, it is as follows: by becoming part of Livonia, the “small peoples” gradually merged over the 14th-15th centuries to form the Latvian nation. How simple. Of course, the creators of this theory too, for example, Indriķis Šterns, inspired by post-war Western European historical research, justifiably ask whether a concept such as a nation exists at all in the Middle Ages. Despite his doubts, Šterns nevertheless raises the question: “When did the small peoples of the 13th-century Latvian territory begin to perceive themselves as a single ethnic unit, as Latvians?”, wondering at what point in the Middle Ages the Latvians emerged. Undoubtedly, the Middle Ages – the 14th-15th centuries – are the time when Latvians began to form as a nation and the Latvian language was formed, but is that the moment when we can already say – the Latvians “perceived” themselves as an “ethnic unit”? Did the Latvians even perceive themselves as an “ethnic unit” at all until the national awakening of the 19th century?

The ever-helpful archaeology cannot provide an answer to the question of whether and when the Latvians, who could be called a nation, were formed, because a skull, however much physical anthropologists might try to measure it, does not show changes in human mentality, nor do various brooches, rings, or combs show it. History is also powerless, because written sources do not allow us to trace the evolution of Curonians, Selonians, Latgalians, and also Livonians into “Latvians”. The Latvian language appears in writing only around 1530, but the 14th and 15th-century sources, which were all created by local “Germans”, do not mention “Latvians”, and the word “Latvians” does not appear in medieval sources at all. There is only the Low German “undutsch”, which later grew into the High German “Undeutsche” – a concept used to describe those who were not German, i.e., the locals, whoever they might be. Even in 16th-century historiography, “Latvians” are not yet discernible.

Written sources also do not allow us to test the theory put forward by Latvian linguists regarding the origin of the Latvian language and its spread. According to the theory, in the 14th–15th centuries, the Latvian language, as a modification of the Latgalian language, moved from Vidzeme further south, and later also westward, to Kurzeme. However, the appearance of the Latvian language on the horizon in the mid-16th century in the account books of the Riga Blackheads brotherhood and later in printed form at the end of the 16th century is not proof of the existence of the Latvians as a nation. There is probably no clear answer to this Latvian riddle. Historical Latvians in the 15th century and Latvians in the 17th century are perhaps not a reality, but rather a dream that feeds our Latvian-ness. Perhaps it should remain so – let us call them Latvians, despite the fact that they were different, other, and perhaps they did not know the Latvians at all.
Article first published in the January 2009 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks