Contents

Latvian national awakening

Three national revival movements in Lativa

Part of a series on the
History of Latvia
Ancient Latvia Kunda culture Narva culture Corded Ware culture Amber Road / Aesti Baltic Finns (Livonians, Vends) Balts Latgalians Curonians Selonians Semigallians
Middle Ages Principality of Jersika Principality of Koknese Tālava Livonian Crusade Livonian Brothers of the Sword Livonian Order Archbishopric of Riga Bishopric of Courland Terra Mariana Baltic Germans
Early modern period Livonian War Kingdom of Livonia Duchy of Livonia Inflanty Voivodeship Swedish Livonia Polish–Swedish Wars (1600–1629) Second Northern War Great Northern War Duchy of Courland and Semigallia Couronian colonization
National Awakening Governorate of Livonia Courland Governorate Vitebsk Governorate The First Latvian National Awakening New Current
Modern Latvia Latvian Riflemen German occupation United Baltic Duchy Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic War of Independence 1934 Latvian coup d'état 1940 Soviet occupation Nazi occupation The Holocaust in Latvia 1944 Soviet re-occupation Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic Popular Front of Latvia Singing Revolution Restoration of Independence 2008 Latvian financial crisis
Chronology
Latvia portal
v t e

The Latvian National Awakening (Latvian: latviešu [or latvju] tautas atmoda) refers to three distinct but ideologically related national revival movements:^[1]

• the First Awakening refers to the national revival led by the Young Latvians from the 1850s to the 1880s
• the Second Awakening or "New Current" was the movement that led to the proclamation of Latvian independence in 1918^[2]
• the Third Awakening was the movement that led to the restoration of Latvia's independence in the "Singing Revolution" of 1987–1991^[3]

Although the term "Awakening" was introduced by the Young Latvians, its application was influenced by the nationalist ideologue Ernests Blanks and later by the academician Jānis Stradiņš.^[4] Stradiņš was the first person to use the term "Third Awakening" (at the expanded plenum of the Writers' Union of the Latvian SSR in June 1988), opposing those who had begun to call the national revival in the period of glasnost the Second Awakening (the first being that of the Young Latvians).

Blanks sought to distinguish between the New Current (in Latvian: Jaunā strāva) — a broad and radical socio-economic, political, and cultural movement that lasted from the late 1880s until the 1905 Revolution, led by Rainis and influenced by Marxism — from the more nationalistic direction taken in 1903 by Ernests Rolavs and Miķelis Valters; to Blanks, the 1890s "could be stricken completely from the history of national thought." He saw Rolavs' and Valters' nationalist Latvian Social Democratic Union (in Latvian: Sociāldemokratu savienība; sometimes abbreviated SDS) — a radical socialist group critical of the cosmopolitanism of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party (Latvijas sociāldemokrātiskā strādnieku partija; LSDSP) — as the direct ideological descendants of the Young Latvians. It was the SDS (and especially Valters) that first began to formulate demands for Latvia's political autonomy^[5]

Stradiņš based his view of the national revival in the 1980s on Blanks, considering the Second Awakening similarly: He viewed the organization of the Latvian riflemen, the activities of the Latvian émigrés in Switzerland, the Latvian refugees' relief committee in Russia, the proclamation of independence and the battles for independence as coming under the heading of the Second Awakening. Less frequently, some have seen the New Current and the 1905 Revolution — and sometimes even the Khrushchev Thaw — as National Awakenings.^[6]

• Ernests Blanks: Latvju tautas ceļš uz neatkarīgu valsti. Västerås: Ziemeļblāzma, 1970.
• Jānis Stradiņš: Trešā atmoda. Rīga: Zinātne, 1992.