The Latvian National Awakening () refers to three distinct but ideologically related national revival movements: * 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 * the Third Awakening was the movement that led to the restoration of

Latvia Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is one of the three Baltic states, along with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. It borders Russia to the east and Belarus to t ...

's independence in the " Singing Revolution" of 1987–1991

Application of the term

Although the term "Awakening" was introduced by the Young Latvians, its application was influenced by the nationalist ideologue

Ernests Blanks Ernests Blanks ( in Braslava parish, Braslava, Valmiera County, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire – 31 January 1972 in Palma, Majorca, Palma, Majorca, Spain), publicist, the first to publicly advocate for Latvia's independence in 1917. Er ...

and later by the academician Jānis Stradiņš. 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 Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...

— 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 Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...

group critical of the

cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all human beings are members of a single community. Its adherents are known as cosmopolitan or cosmopolite. Cosmopolitanism is both prescriptive and aspirational, believing humans can and should be " world citizen ...

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 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.Jānis Stradiņš: Trešā atmoda. Rīga: Zinātne, 1992.

Application of the term

References

See also