Guests Beyond the Iron Curtain: Cross-Border Visits of Latvian Folklorists during the Cold War
Guests Beyond the Iron Curtain: Cross-Border Visits of Latvian Folklorists during the Cold War

Summary/Abstract: This article examines cross-border encounters of Latvian folklorists during the Cold War, when the Iron Curtain separated exile communities in the West from scholars in Soviet-occupied Latvia. The work of research institutions in Riga, including the Andrejs Upīts’s Institute of Language and Literature at the Latvian SSR Academy of Sciences and its various departments, among them the Folklore Department, was largely shaped by the ideological framework of the Soviet regime. Geopolitical circumstances determined isolation from the West and minimal academic information exchange beyond the borders of the socialist bloc countries. Folklorists in the occupied Latvia worked while being aware of the surveillance of the State Security Committee (KGB). At the same time, the KGB’s subsidiary body, the Committee for Cultural Relations with Compatriots Abroad, enabled a certain level of interaction between folklorists in Western exile and the Latvian SSR. Some individuals with a keen interest, including Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Imants Freibergs, and Austris Grasis, visited Riga. In the 1980s, guests from the other side of the Iron Curtain, folklorists Elza Kokare and Jadviga Darbiniece, were permitted to attend Stockholm and participate in the Conference on Baltic Studies in Scandinavia. These episodes reveal both the risks and possibilities of intellectual life under Soviet occupation.

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