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In contemporary historical research the concept of “master narrative” has had considerable success in becoming a component in descriptions of modern nation-states. It is widely believed that nation-states generate from within their cultures a dominant interpretation of their long-term history, bordering on the mythical or at least containing mythical elements. In time, the interpretation takes on hegemonic characteristics because it is reiterated over generations, appears in the textbooks of primary and secondary schools, and speads widely throughout popular culture. A “master narrative” is taken to reflect a collectivity’s sense of self—its identity—and often serves as an overall justification for domestic or foreign policies and for conceptually separating “us” from “them,” the members of the national collective from those who do not belong to it.[1] The term “master narrative” is sometimes used interchangably with an analogous phrase—”official history”—the latter suggesting that the “master narrative” has been produced, directly or indirectly, at the behest of the central government in order to legitimise existing power arrangements.[2] Critical assessments of “master narratives” and “official histories” have for a long time taken both to task for not having insufficient distance from Power—meaning State Power—and for subordinating the investigation of a country’s past to the interests of those in power. Other critics tend to be less condemnatory because they recognise that the origins of a society’s understanding of its own past emerges through far more complicated processes than simply on “orders from above.” Also, most historians will admit that the desconstruction of established “master narratives” is not self-justifying but can be a power-play in disguise, aiming to substitute a new “master narrative” for a prevailing one because the new narrative better serves the political purposes of its proponents.

With respect to Latvian-language history writing in the 20th century—the century in which it became a continuous activity—it can be said that various proposed “master narratives” have had little luck in living a long life. Latvia has not been an hospitable context for the development of all-inclusive historical accounts of the kind that frequently characterise the writing of history in nation-states with relatively stable borders, stable governments, a stable population, and institutional continuity among the professional researchers who call themselves historians. At the end of the 19th century, Jānis Krodznieks (1851–1924), who is understood to be the “founder” of modern Latvian historiography, sought to depose what he believed to be the “master narratives” about the Baltic littoral in the history writing of Baltic German scholars.[3] Yet, even as Krodznieks was writing, he was already finding himself in competition with the Marxist-inspired general history of Kārlis Landers (1883–1937), who sought to dethrone both the Baltic German and the early Latvian nationalist historical discourses.[4] In the meantime, a “popular” narrative of the Latvian past, accumulating in the pseudo-historical writings of Latvian nationalist activists, was constructing a long-term story about the centuries-long travails of the Latvian tauta (Engl. nation) that, according to this version, had been blocked from normal historical nation development by the arrival in the 13th century of German merchants and crusaders who in due course established themselves as regional overlords. How firmly any of these competing “master narratives” seized the imagination of the Latvian-speaking population of the Russian Baltic Provinces remains an open question. But they probably were more appealing than those being written by Imperial Russian historians, who conceptualised the Baltic region as a borderland and tied its story to that of the rise of the Russian state.[5]

The “competition of narratives” before World War I was temporarily rendered moot by the founding of the Latvian state in 1918 and the gradual entrenchment of a self-referential national historical narrative with the Latvian tauta as the central actor.[6] Historical developments over the centuries were evaluated in terms of how they affected Latvians, and judgements were made about other peoples in terms how helpful they had been in the emergence of Latvians as a distinct and self-conscious people. As it happened, the interwar Latvian historians—numbering no more than perhaps a dozen—were opening themes that elsewhere in Western history writing became popular some 30 years later: the focus on Latvians was certainly “history from below” (in the Baltic context), and because details of their everyday lives in the past were now at center stage, it was also “social history” and Alltagsgeschichte simultaneously. This thrust was was inevitable if one was to highlight the bottom layer of Baltic society—the peasant estate, Bauernstand—to which most Latvians had either belonged for centuries or from which they had become in recent decades only one or two generation removed. The new master narrative that struggled to emerge from these “national” studies meant to link centuries of subordination to the 19th-century “National Awakening” and eventually to the appearance of the Latvian state in 1918, the latter—a relatively recent event—being portrayed as the culmination toward which long-term historical change was pointing. In these reconceptualisations, Latvian academic history moved closer to the “popular” version of the same story, since both were tauta-centred.

The two interwar decades turned out to be too short for a “national narrative” to be consolidated. Two occupations—the Soviet (1940–1941) and the Nazi-German (1941–1944)—rendered impossible for a half-decade any written version of Latvian history that was not Communist Party-approved during the first and did not fit with Nazi ideology during the second.

To the Communist Party, the interwar Republic meant domination of the “Latvian working people” by a “bourgeois clique” and after 1934 by a “fascist dictatorship”; Nazi propaganda foresaw Latvians—a racially somewhat inferior population—either being expelled from the Baltic region or Germanised if continuing to live there. The imperfectly formulated “master narrrative” of the interwar decades, however, lived on in the work of a handful of Latvian historians who in 1944–1945 fled Latvia and after the late 1940s came to settle in such new homelands as Sweden, the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Canada.[7] In exile, no organisation of Latvian historians existed, however, and individual professionals were on their own. Some of those who had been trained as historians in the late 1930s entered other lines of work and continued to write Latvian history in their spare time. Given their very small number, their efforts hardly constituted a “master narrative” in the normal sense, i.e. an agreed-upon version accepted by hundreds of professionals, the consensus view of an entire field. Generally, the first generation of Latvian émigré historians (with some exceptions) continued to have weak institutional anchors in their new homelands; those who did, did not seek to launch a new narrative but continued to work within the general framework of interwar national history.[8] In the course of time, the first and second exile generations had to yield the stage to younger professional historians of Latvian background whose approaches to the Latvian past were influenced far more by interests and research directions in the Western historical professions than by the formulations of their senior Latvian colleagues.

In the meantime, during the decades of the Cold War the historians of the Latvian SSR produced several successive editions of Party-approved “master narratives,” of which the most recent (1986) replaced an earlier Stalinist-era version.[9] Ironically, this last work appeared just at the start of the internal upheavals that eventually destroyed the USSR and returned state sovereignty to Latvia, so that for all intents and purposes the 1986 “master narrative” of the Soviet era was stillborn. Latvia entered a new phase of its history without a “master narrative” other than the rather sketchy variant on offer from the émigré Latvian historians. Convinced that a “master narrative” was needed, however, the researchers of the post-1991 Latvian Intitute of History and the Faculty of History (both entities eventually at the University of Latvia) set out to create one dealing with the history of of the Latvian tauta (people) and state during the 19th and 20th centuries. As of this writing, three volumes have been produced by this effort but the intended series remains unconcluded.[10] The intent of the series was to lay out the interpretation of the past that Latvian historians could produce after being freed of ideological contraints. Unfortunately, during the first decade after renewed independence, the reading public remained deeply suspicious of the entire historical profession in Latvia. Pre-1991 historical writings had for decades formed a kind of easily recognised congealed orthodoxy that demanded repeated demonstrations of loyalty from researchers and from several generations of secondary school pupils and university students. The suspicion was extended to all manner of official-sounding and official-looking historical publications, even though they were being produced in the total absence of a “Party line.”

Unsurprisingly, the further development of the Latvian historical profession during the past two decades has not brought into prominence a new commanding version of Latvian history in the long term—i.e. no “master narrative.” Nearly every component of previous “master narratives”—especially of the Marxist-Leninist variant but also of the interwar era and of the writings of the émigré historians—has been evaluated, reexamined, deconstructed and if necesary disagreed with.[11] The period since 1991 has thus been an era of contestation, but not—it should be noted—of ringing condemnation of earlier Latvian historical writing. Some descriptions of short streches of the Latvian past have been accepted, possibly becoming candidates for a later “master narrative,” if one appears. Some have been closely reexamined (Kārlis Ulmanis’ authoritarian rule, for example) and new interpretations offered, while entirely new research domains have been opened and as of this writing are in the process of gaining currency.[12] New versions of monographs published in the Soviet decades have been produced, with their empirically-based sections preserved and the Soviet-era theoretical framework discarded. Headway has been made in new fields of historical work—oral history, the workings of historical memory, cultural history—but the products of these still remain discrete and unmerged into an all encompassing long-term story. The role of Baltic Germans and other minority populations of historic Latvian geographic space is seldom treated any longer as involving “outsiders”, but is described respectfully or at least without the assumption that non-Latvians in the Baltic littoral were always oppressors.

This process of change in the historical profession has not been accompanied, however, by a diminution in the sharpness of contrasting viewpoints. This is especially so in the realm of media-generated historical narratives in which collisions continue between the perception in the Russophone and Lettophone populations of the country, especially with respect to World War II and the decades following it.[13] There also remains a fairly substantial cleavage between the careful and fine-grained investigations of academic history and the overall mega-visions often preferred by a Latvian-using general readership. The latter has continued to insist that there is already a usable long-term narrative in place—as exemplified by such perennialy popular works as Uldis Ģērmanis’ Latviešu tautas piedzīvojumi (The Adventures of the Latvian People)[14]—and has repeatedly charged that the painstaking investigations of academic historians are too specialised and too hesitant to assist in the “patriotic” education of young Latvians. Finally, due to severe resource shortages, research areas falling outside the time frame of about 1850 to 2014 remain short of specialists and funded projects, which ultimately means that very long stretches of Latvian history will remain unrevised, unsupplemented and unprepared to be included into a new “master narrative” if and when one comes into being. Though one can find consensus about this or that phenomenon in the Latvian past, an overall generally accepted interpretation—a “master narrative” in the usual sense—is therefore as of this writing not close to having formed itself.