by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
The political atmosphere in Riga, and indeed all over Europe, was souring in the late 1930s. In Latvia, an increasingly assertive and parochial Latvian nationalism had brought Kārlis Ulmanis to power. Ulmanis, an agricultural expert by profession, had been a nationalist activist in the 1905 Revolution and after independence had headed the conservative Farmers’ Party. ‘Our micro Mussolini’, as Misha always called him, took dictatorial powers by a coup in 1934, abolishing the parliament and all political parties, including his own, giving privileges to a paramilitary home guard, Aizsargi, and pursuing economic and cultural policies of Latvianisation. Arpad Sr, an anglophile liberal, strongly disliked the Ulmanis regime, but Arpad Jr evidently had some sympathy with it, which may have been the cause of the tensions between them that Misha remembered.
Misha, sharing the political views of the older Arpad, was nevertheless annoyed by his (dismissive? contemptuous?) treatment of the younger one. Although he was Misha’s elder by two years, Misha, who had always been the stronger and the cleverer, developed a protective attitude towards his older brother. In the 1990s, he remembered that ‘when OB [the older brother, i.e. Arpad] was ill: it was disturbing, seemed unfair (why should he be [ill]?); also I felt that I could have an easier time coping with it—being stronger’. Arpad’s unspecified illness, and whether or not he should be kept in school, was one of the bones of contention between the parents as well. Olga later felt guilty because,
obedient to my husband, I let it happen that you [Arpad] overtaxed your strength in school … I was until then an obedient wife. Then I freed myself from him … but for you it was too late. You had to live with the damage to your health for many years.
The autonomy of the German school system in Latvia was under threat under the Ulmanis regime, along with the extensive German cultural and sporting network that had been set up. But there was worse to come. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 put Latvia and the other Baltic states in the Soviet zone of influence. In 1940, this would result in Soviet occupation of the Baltic states and their incorporation into the Soviet Union, but the writing was already on the wall in October 1939 when Ulmanis was forced to accept the stationing of Soviet troops in Latvia. Most of the Riga Germans didn’t want to stay under those circumstances, and indeed Hitler’s regime officially called them ‘home to the Reich’, offering them assistance in resettling (mainly in the western part of Poland, which had gone to Germany under the Nazi–Soviet Pact). Almost sixty thousand Baltic Germans left Latvia in 1939–40. These were tumultuous times for Riga’s German classical gymnasium, many of whose pupils were preparing to depart at the beginning of the 1939–40 school year. The gymnasium seems to have kept functioning, but Misha’s German sports club, the place where he had just learnt comradeship, was closed down in 1939.
To top off a miserable year, Misha managed to get himself expelled from the gymnasium for rudeness to a teacher. Exactly how this happened is not entirely clear. Misha’s favourite teacher, Herr Kupfer, had retired by this time, and no doubt his successors lacked Kupfer’s special appreciation of Misha and gave him less latitude. The problem arose with a new teacher in physics, where Misha had always felt himself supreme, knowing more than what was taught in class and therefore not always bothering to attend. According to his brother Arpad’s version, the incident that led to Misha’s expulsion was that the physics teacher gave the wrong explanation for something, Misha corrected him, the teacher stuck to his version, and Misha made the gesture of screwing a hole in the side of his head, meaning ‘He’s crazy’. Misha’s version omitted the gesture and emphasised the teacher’s unreasonableness in being unable to accept correction. In his diary at the time, his sense of being hard done by was slightly tempered by the recognition that he didn’t handle such things well:
It was because of my straightforwardness, because of my absolute inability to think up something untrue to say. It wasn’t that I was such an angel that I wouldn’t lie for ethical reasons. But I was so untalented at it, that it just didn’t occur to me to make a ‘scene’. In this case the possible scene was so obvious, and would have been completely convincing, so everyone called me the biggest idiot in world history … Obviously this teacher held, perhaps unconsciously, to the principle that it’s how things look that matters most, not wisdom. That the clever man can be in a bar and not get beaten up while the stupid one gets clobbered even in church. Back then for the first time it was darkly borne in on me that one doesn’t get far with honesty. With my brain I seem to understand this, but I still haven’t really grasped it and probably never will …
He was basically right in that gloomy prophesy. Even though he was going to have to pick up some basic skills of tactical evasion and selective truth-telling in the next few years, he never learnt to apologise, particularly when he was sure he was in the right, and he didn’t internalise automatic respect for authority either. The outcome of this bit of tactless disrespect was that Misha had to leave the German gymnasium and spend his last school year in the Latvian city gymnasium, a place so ‘bleak’ and ‘spiritually dead’ that he had to force himself to get up and go to school in the morning. After a while, he evidently stopped forcing himself and dropped out as a full-time student, graduating from high school as an external student in the autumn of 1940.
It was just at this time that Misha’s German friends from school and the sports club started leaving with their families for Germany. ‘Aus!’ (‘Out!’) is the one-word entry in Misha’s diary for 11 November 1939. That ‘Out!’ is explained a few pages later in an undated entry:
When the news came that we, that is the local Germans, will be going to the Reich, it was quite clear to me: I’m going too! I just have to get this through at home. I hope I can manage to convince them both. Actually I have had the plan for a long time to go to Germany after finishing secondary school and make my life there.
The political aspect of such a move seems not to have occurred to him. Sometime in the late 1930s, when he was still singing, he had gone with a choir to Germany and later remembered watching crowds streaming to one of the Nazi rallies and thinking how stupid they were. It was not the (no doubt ephemeral) Nazi regime in Germany that appealed to him but the centuries of German culture to which, like many German speakers in Eastern Europe, he felt himself heir. The Ulmanis regime had been bad enough, but with the prospect of Soviet occupation imminent, Latvia was about to be drawn downwards, from Misha’s point of view, into eastern backwardness and chaos, which made it more than ever a place to leave. Jan remembers feeling the same way, and thinks the third brother, Arpad, may have too. But, unusually in a family where the mother generally ruled the roost, their father put his foot down. Nobody was going to go to Germany, he ruled. He ‘wasn’t going to give up his sons for cannon-fodder for Adolf’, and that was that. The family stayed in Riga.
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Riga under the Soviets
State Electrotechnical Factory (VEF), Riga, Wikimedia Commons photo.
AS Misha was finishing school, the Soviets were moving towards occupying Latvia and overthrowing the Ulmanis government. They had the green light to do this on the basis of the secret treaties attached to the non-aggression pact signed by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in August 1939. Soviet troops marched into Riga in the middle of June 1940 and remained for a little over a year. In this period, Latvia and the other Baltic states were formally incorporated into the Soviet Union, but since the Germans threw the Soviets out in July 1941 and occupied the Baltic states themselves, Misha didn’t have long to enjoy his new Soviet citizenship. It was a dangerous time for a young man to approach his eighteenth birthday (which Misha celebrated on 10 January 1940), but Latvian military call-up age was twenty-one, so he avoided that; and his stint working on a farm in the summer of 1940— probably the result of a labour draft of schoolchildren by the Ulmanis government to help with the harvest—provoked only the diary comment that agricultural work might build up stamina b
ut was really dull. The Soviets didn’t get round to conscripting him in the six months that he was, in theory, eligible for military service.
Misha was scarcely a committed follower of politics at this point, but he had started reading newspapers, ‘not religiously, but with a certain interest: there was turmoil in the world’. Evidently his newspaper reading was international, which suggests that his father was still able to subscribe to foreign newspapers in the last Ulmanis years, though the Soviets surely soon put a stop to this bourgeois habit. Misha found the Latvian press to be ‘laudatory towards our micro-Mussolini but rather objective on world events’, somewhere on the comparative scale between the ideologically charged German press and the English, with its scrupulous separation of news and opinion.
He also observed Latvia’s war preparations, as displayed in military parades, with his usual eye for technological detail, and found them slightly comic:
The air force had about 20 planes, bombers and fighters; all of them bi-planes, of frame plus canvas construction. Top speed of bombers about 100 miles per hour; of the fighters about 110 miles per hour. The motors of the tanks tended to stall; so as to be prepared for the case that the motor refused to re-start, every tank had a heavy hook front and back, and carried a heavy chain. It so happened that this refusal to re-start happened during one of these parades; so the chain was hooked between that stalled and a non-stalled tank, and the functioning tank started to move, but the stalled did not; the pull evidently was too strong for the armor plate; hook plus a chunk of tank armor moved; tank with hole in armor stayed put. Cannon was horse-drawn.
The entry of Soviet military forces into Riga was a low-key affair:
After a few days of confusing newspaper articles the Russian tanks rolled in, a thousand or more of them; Russian two-motor bombers, made of metal, flew low over Riga. Ulmanis said over the radio: You stay in your place, I will stay in my place (meaning of ‘place’: post); that was the last heard from and of him. The planes continued over-flights, not only on that rolling-in day, but now and then for some further days.
The Finns, receiving a similar ultimatum to those delivered to the Baltic states requiring the resignation of their governments and the entry of Soviet forces, resisted and managed to embarrass the Soviets significantly by their stubbornness in the Winter War of 1940–41. But the small Baltic states were more easily intimidated. Kārlis Ulmanis accepted the Soviet ultimatum without offering even symbolic resistance, let alone military, and resigned on 16 June. Perhaps as a reward, he was subsequently allowed to work for a year in Southern Russia at his original profession of agricultural specialist before being arrested a month after the German invasion. But the political and diplomatic manoeuvring took place out of sight of Latvia’s inhabitants. As Misha later wrote, after reading a scholarly study of the diplomacy,
all the activities taking place there had no impact, and were essentially unknown. What was known was that the Soviet military bases were generated, later that the [Soviet] army was on its way to Riga, and that [Soviet] planes were flying overhead. That diplomatic life seems so disconnected, self-contained, void of content, arbitrary, unreal. Then, suddenly, there are the tanks.
In Riga, the first impact of Soviet occupation as Misha observed it was comparatively mild: ‘some arrests took place, but not in such numbers as to be perceived as really alarming’. What astonished him was the new kind of public discourse in the newspapers. The moment the Soviets took charge,
the papers flipped over; objective reporting was gone; everything which had been white turned black, and vice versa … Very soon every-day life set in. What remained: weird, extraordinary, against previous experience: the writing in the newspapers. It was known, clearly understood, that it was transparently disconnected from truth; it was irreal, surreal—but did not let up.
Misha concluded that the Soviets lived in a fantasy world.
The Soviet occupation turned out to be something like a working gap year between school and university for Misha. Whether the gap was a matter of choice, general chaos, late graduation on his part or a labour draft is unclear. His friend Andrejs Bičevskis, born in the same year and graduating from high school around the same time, remembered that the Soviets had some kind of work assignment system that would have landed him (Bičevskis) in a labouring job in a glass factory if he hadn’t pulled strings to have himself reassigned to clerical work in a government ministry. In the end, he said, he never had to take up this assignment because in the autumn of 1941 (with Latvia under German rule) he went to university instead. Misha’s job may have enabled him to fulfil a work requirement, but it was far too good to have been the result of random assignment (he probably got it through his connections as a radio amateur), and Misha found it fascinating. The job was at VEF, (Valsts Elektrotechniskā Fabrika), which was the high-tech pride of Latvian industry.
VEF, established in Riga as a state enterprise soon after the First World War and housed in a remarkable Art Deco building designed by German architect Peter Behrens, was at the cutting edge of independent Latvia’s attempts to re-establish an industrial base after the wartime destruction and removal of the old one. It made radio receivers, audio amplifiers, telephone equipment and such, and had acquired a worldwide reputation by the 1930s. The Minox subminiature camera, then the smallest in the world, was invented here. After the Second World War, VEF, once again Soviet, would manufacture the extremely popular Spidola transistor radios for the Soviet market. Misha had long been fascinated by radio technology, and his adolescent diaries are dotted with entries (impenetrable to me) on the subject. He kept up the hands-on tinkering, even in later life, as a theoretical physicist, when he had a side occupation as an inventor and ‘gadgeteer’. He loved working at VEF and retained an identification with it for the rest of his life. One of my fond memories from the 1990s is of Misha sitting opposite me in the reading room of the Riga state archives, transformed into a historian and totally immersed in the VEF files. He had come along to help me with any documents in Latvian, but as it turned out, postwar Latvia had become enough of a colonial outpost for its political documents to be all in Russian. So Misha took the opportunity to do some independent research into VEF’s technical history, bringing an expertise that no historian is ever going to match, and told me many things about it that I only half understood. I have forgotten the details, and this makes me angry with myself because now Misha is gone and with him all that knowledge.
Misha had already been working at VEF for a few months before the Soviets took over. They knew its value and immediately declared it to be an industrial enterprise of ‘all-Union’ significance—that is, subordinate to the central Soviet industrial ministry, not local authorities, and financed on the central Soviet budget. An abrupt transition to Soviet-style management and work practices followed, introduced by engineers who, though ethnically Latvian, had just been sent from Moscow. Misha was most unfavourably impressed. The first task, in Soviet eyes, was to speed up production ruthlessly to meet high output targets, just as was done in the Soviet Union. If that produced high reject rates—Misha used the Russian term for spoiled production, brak, since it was such a typical Soviet phenomenon—so be it. All Soviet factories had high reject rates.
After the Russians had been there some time, it must have been around December 1940, or perhaps January 1941, the verdict of the Moscow engineers was: What a waste! With that beautiful production facility you could build twice as many radios per month! [It was already running two shifts.] You simply should run the conveyor belt in the assembly line faster; look at the leisurely pace [at which] these women do their soldering! OK, so you object; but 20% faster you simply will have to; that is an order (the number 20% may be inaccurate). So it was. I do not know how long the re-scheduling and reorganization took, but by March the walls of the assembly shop already were lined with non-functioning radios.
After a while, the plant ran out of space to store the rejects. The whole staff of the research and development
labs, including Misha, were mobilised to investigate the faults and clear the shelves. It turned out that because of the speed-up of the conveyer belt, one particular solder joint tended to be defective. This wasn’t hard to fix, but there were other more subtle problems that took more time. Despite the R&D people working two shifts, the number of rejects kept piling up. So the new Soviet management turned to another typically Soviet administrative practice: threats and intimidation.
About that time, March or April, a Meeting of the Whole VEF Collective was called, with the program: there will be some speeches by the (Latvian!) Moscow engineers, then there will be beer and dancing. So we went there, all the several thousand. Indeed, it started with the Moscow engineer, talking in Latvian. So, what did he have to say? ‘We all know that the production has deteriorated. The high quality of the VEF radios is very well known, throughout the Union. Unfortunately, as we also know, recently brak production has arisen. (Full agreement by the audience.) We must stop that. We must find the culprits, the saboteurs, and we must get rid of them.’ (Full disagreement by the audience; a faint chill.) The foreman of one of the sub-assembly shops, the one where the chassis and other hardware was produced, whom I had seen many a time, and whom I had considered to be highly competent, both technically and in interaction with the workers, asked to say a few words, which was granted: ‘We know that there is brak production. In order to get rid of it, rather than to look for culprits, it might be more useful to look for the reasons for this faulty production. Once these reasons have been found and delineated it will be possible to address and rectify them.’ (Enthusiastic applause by the audience.) Back comes the Moscow engineer: ‘Perhaps this shop foreman is one of the saboteurs? Was he not a member of the Aizsargi [the nationalist and anti-Soviet home guard]? or perhaps he still is in a counterrevolutionary cell?’ (Total, chilled silence by the audience.) End of meeting; no beer, no dancing.
