From “Exile” to “Diaspora”: The Shift in Self-Identification among Refugee Latvians, 1944–2023

Abstract

The 175,000- Latvians who fled their northeastern European homeland in the final year of World War II (1944–45) eventually resettled in some four continents and twenty different host societies. Their tasks were many, ranging from “freeing” Latvia among the politically minded to building a new life in their host societies. For some ten years after the war, their official status remained uncertain, as did the terms they used to describe themselves. Eventually, the agreed upon frame of reference became trimda (Eng. exile). It was the rare social, cultural, and polit-ical activity that was not discussed within the exile framework, and an impressive cultural superstructure was built upon it from the 1950s to the 1980s. This framework, however, became anachronistic after 1991 and the collapse of the USSR. Western Latvians could no longer claim to be in exile, but relatively few of them showed a willingness to return to the old homeland. Two decades of discussion about identity eventually led the new Latvian government and social-science researchers in Latvia to propose the term diaspora for all Latvians living outside the country’s borders. This term has been generally accepted, even by the still living World War II refugees and their descendants, who now refer to themselves as the vecā trimda (Eng. old exile) component of the diaspora.