It must be emphasised here: what is an intellectual dead end for some is a long-awaited liberation for others. Looking honestly at Latvian society, we must admit that deep historically and culturally determined contradictions exist within it. The depths of Latvian society have always been swayed by two powerful currents, or, to use late 19th-century terminology, two movements. Intellectuals of that time referred to them as the "old" and "new" movements. In the context of modern Latvia, using such terms would of course be an anachronism, so I propose naming them with words more appropriate to recent historical contexts.

At the end of the 1980s, when Latvian society enthusiastically united to dismantle the Soviet Union, these two currents were clearly visible. One of them was romantically idealistic, with circles of the creative intelligentsia at its forefront. For them, the Soviet Union was unacceptable for moral and ethical reasons. The second current, perhaps even stronger than the first, yet at the same time much more vaguely defined, externally represented the consumer society that had formed in the 1960s, which grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s and was spearheaded by circles associated with the nomenklatura of the Communist Party of Latvia and the Komsomol. For this current, the Soviet Union was unacceptable due to its economic (primarily private property and consumption) restrictions. The power of both currents proved too great, and they swept everything away in their path. (...)