Rebuilding Post-War Britain by Emily Gilbert

Author:Emily Gilbert [Gilbert, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, British, Modern
ISBN: 9781473860599
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2017-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

‘We got disorientated for quite a long time’ – The 1950s

‘The lifting of labour controls on 1 January 1951 marked a watershed for the Latvian community. The EVWs now had more choice in finding work and the small communities in hostels and camps began to break up. Furthermore, many thousands who were dissatisfied with their prospects in Britain and realised that there could be no early return home to Latvia, further emigrated in the early 1950s, principally to Canada. Of the 14,000 or so Latvian EVWs and their dependants who had arrived in Britain after the war, perhaps about 9,000 remained.’

Jānis Andrups, A History of Latvians in Great Britain

During the 1950s, homeland developments were also pivotal to the evolution of the communities. Not only was the increasing intractability of Soviet rule over the homelands a stimulus for mass re-emigration to the New World, it also gave rise to the settling in of the communities in Britain.

Although Stalin’s death in 1953 and the accession of Khrushchev to power brought some hope that the Soviet Union’s grip on the Baltic nations would ease, events soon conspired to quash any optimism. Among Lithuanians, the end of the Forest Brothers’ campaign to free Lithuania in 1954 was a turning point, while for all East European nationalities in Britain, the brutal crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 emphasised the brutality and tenacity of the Soviet regime.

Developments in the homelands not only threatened the Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian nations, identities and cultures, they also transformed the economy and environment of the three Soviet republics. The influx of Russian immigrant labour to fulfil the manpower requirements of rapid industrial development led to decreases in the indigenous share of the population, most severely in Latvia and Estonia. In Latvia for example, the combination of Russian immigrant labour and the decrease in population, as a result of war, displacement and deportations, brought the ethnic Latvian share of the population down from 75.5 per cent in 1935, to 60 per cent in 1953.

The impact of Soviet industrial expansion on the environment was enormous. Huge Soviet style industrial complexes and towering apartment blocks housing immigrant newcomers were constructed, shadowing clapboard cottages and largely European-designed architecture, built on a human scale. These large-scale imposing structures were metaphors for the Soviet Union’s hegemony over the Baltic nations, and formed part of the homogenisation of the Soviet Republics.

News and rumours about developments in the homeland had far-reaching consequences for the diaspora. John Brown, for example, noted the effects of Soviet consolidation in Eastern Europe on the Latvian exiles of Bedford:

‘As EVWs, Latvians had to work three years as indentured labourers before they were ‘freed’. By this time, the early fifties, political relationships between East and West had deteriorated to a seemingly implacable condition of cold war. Soviet control of Eastern Europe had tightened and for the people of the Baltic States, integral parts of the Soviet Union, hopes for freedom and independence had become hopelessly remote. It was time for the Latvians

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