Trouble in the Sticks

The rulers of Russia did their best last week to trample out flickering embers of independence in four more "Soviet Republics" embedded in the Communist Empire. Police Chief Lavrenty Beria's purgers "reorganized" and "consolidated" the government of 1) the Baltic Republic of Latvia, enslaved by the Red army in 1940, lost, and recaptured in 1944; 2) the Moldavian Soviet Republic, part of which was snatched from Rumania; 3) the Caucasian Mountain Republic of Armenia; 4) Azerbaijan, which hugs the Caspian Sea near the northern border of Iran. In all four "republics" the pattern was the same; a drastic tightening up of Soviet internal security, evidence perhaps that the death of Stalin encouraged the suppressed nationalities of the Soviet Union to hope for more freedom.

"Bourgeois nationalism," as the Communists call such local patriotism, has long been the Soviet Union's most nagging domestic headache. Ukrainians and Georgians, Armenians and Kazakhs, Tartars, Yakuts and Kirghiz--all have their separate histories, their languages, culture and pride; all have been conquered by the more numerous Great Russians whose rulers made Moscow their capital. The Bolshevik Revolution theoretically gave regional autonomy to the subject nationalities, but, in practice, Communist policy has intensified Great Russian chauvinism and liquidated local liberties in the name of Sovietization.

When the nationalities resisted, they were slaughtered like cattle, but the results were often different from what the Kremlin intended. In 1941 millions of Ukrainians and a host of Chechens and Tartars deserted Soviet ranks and welcomed the German invaders. Retribution came in 1945, when Stalin sent Nikita Khrushchev, the Hammer of the Ukraine, to wipe out whole villages of dissident Ukrainian peasants (TIME, Jan. 12). Chechens and Tartars were "resettled" beyond the Urals.

Republic 15. In effect, World War II added half a dozen sovereign nations, from Lithuania to Albania, to the roster of suppressed nationalities. But the worst fate of all befell the three Baltic Republics: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. They were "accepted into the U.S.S.R." as Republics Nos. 14, 15 and 16.

The size of West Virginia and as populous (2,056,000), Latvia is flat and forested, drained into the Baltic by the sprawling Western Dvina River, which brings wheat, dairy products and lumber down to the capital city of Riga (pop. 393,000). Over the centuries, the hardy Latvian peasants have been trampled underfoot by Viking raiders, Teutonic knights and Hansa merchantmen, Swedes, Poles, Germans and Great Russians. They have known only 22 years of national independence (from 1918 until 1940, when the Red army marched in), but the U.S. still technically recognizes their nonexistent sovereignty. Said President Roosevelt in 1941: "The U.S. will never recognize the annexation of Latvia and the other Baltic states."

Puppet Purge. Since 1944, when the comrades returned in the wake of the defeated Nazis, the Latvians have known two purges: at war's end, when thousands of "undesirables" went to the wall, and in 1949, when 50,000 peasants who opposed collectivization were shipped to labor camps in the Soviet Arctic. Last week they faced a third, this time in the puppet Soviet government. Six Latvian ministers, appointed with Stalin's approval, were replaced by two Russians, apparently nominated by Beria. All police and security agencies were merged into a single Ministry of Internal Affairs, responsible to Beria. The new boss: Nikolai Kusmich Kovalchuk, once a lieutenant general in the Russian secret police.

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