New trend
The New Current (Latvian: Jaunā strāva ; members: jaunstrāvnieki ) was a broad left-wing, later social-democratic, political movement in Latvia in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, which culminated in the revolution of 1905 . She shaped the history of Latvia after the first national awakening led by the young Latvians (Lat. Atmoda ).
The beginning of the New Current is usually seen in 1886 , when Pēteris Bisenieks , who ran the credit company for Latvian craftsmen, founded the movement's newspaper, Dienas Lapa (Tag [e]), in Riga . Pēteris Stučka , who later became the leader of the Latvian Bolsheviks , became its editor in 1888. From 1891 to 1896 the sheet was published jointly by Bisenieks and Jānis Pliekšāns (later known under the stage name Rainis ). Under Pliekšāns and Stučka (again editor from 1896 to 1897) Dienas Lapa was a newspaper with socialist positions and therefore temporarily banned by the Ministry of the Interior in 1897. After that, the newspaper took a more moderate direction again with the philosopher and publisher Pēteris Zālīte (formerly the editor of Mājas Viesis ) as editor. Nevertheless, it was again banned by the censors in 1903 and allowed again as a social democratic newspaper in 1905 , before it ceased its publication permanently.
The historian Arveds Švābe describes the New Current as “connected with the political awakening of the Latvian working class , its first organizations and the spread of socialist ideas”. Many historians point to what the painter Apsīšu Jēkabs called "the breaking of a rift between the Latvian peasant and his servant" in the 1870s. As early as 1897, there were only 418,028 smallholders and dependent 591,656 landless farm workers on today's Latvian territory . Their flight from the countryside led to a growing proletariat , which was a fertile breeding ground for the socialist ideas coming from Western Europe. At the same time the movement of the Jungletten lost momentum.
In 1893, Jānis Pliekšāns and Rainis smuggled two pieces of luggage by Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky from Zurich to Riga. This "baggage with its dangerous contents", as the historian Uldis Ģērmanis called it, was the seed of the Latvian Social Democratic Labor Party .
swell
- Arnold's Spekke: History of Latvia: An Outline. Stockholm: M. Goppers / Zelta Ābele, 1951.
- Arveds Švābe: Latvijas vēsture 1800-1914 . Uppsala: Daugava, 1958.
- Arveds Švābe, ed .: Latvju enciklopēdija . Stockholm: Trīs Zvaigznes, 1952–1953.