TheNew Current (Latvian:Jaunā strāva) in thehistory of Latvia was a broadleftist social and political movement that followedthe First Latvian National Awakening (led by theYoung Latvians from the 1850s to the 1880s) and culminated in the1905 Revolution. Participants in the movement were calledjaunstrāvnieki. The best-known representatives of the new current werePauls Dauge,Jānis Jansons-Brauns,Jānis Pliekšāns,Fricis Roziņš,Pēteris Stučka,Miķelis Valters andElza Rozenberga.[1]
The beginning of the New Current is usually given as 1886, when the movement's newspaper,Dienas Lapa ("The Page of the Day"), was founded byPēteris Bisenieks, who ran theRiga Latvian Craftsmen's Credit Union.Pēteris Stučka, who later headed the LatvianBolsheviks, became the editor ofDienas Lapa in 1888. From 1891 to 1896, the paper was edited by Bisenieks andRainis (thepen name ofJānis Pliekšāns). Rainis, who became Latvia's foremost dramatist and the literary figure "inseparably linked to the birth of the independent Latvian nation and the struggle for freedom" [Aivars Stranga], was also the leading figure in the New Current. Under Rainis and Stučka—the latter was again editor in 1896-97 --Dienas Lapa turned tosocialism; shut down by the Ministry of the Interior in 1897, the paper took a moderate turn under the editorship of the philosopher and publicistPēteris Zālīte (formerly an editor ofMājas Viesis—see theYoung Latvians article) between 1899 and 1903; despite its moderation under Zālīte, the paper was again shut down by the censors, re-emerging in 1905 as theSocial Democratic newspaper before its permanent closure.[2]
The historianArveds Švābe describes the New Current as "connected to the political awakening of the Latvian working class, its first organizations, and the propagandization of socialist ideas.".[3] Most historians point to what the painter Apsīšu Jēkabs called "the beginning of a cleft between the Latvian farmer and his farm hand" in the 1870s,[4] and by 1897 there were 591 656 landless peasants in what is now Latvia (compared to 418 028 smallholders and their dependents).
Their partial urbanization led to a growing proletariat, fertile ground for the ideas of western European socialism, and this coincided with a loss of momentum for the Young Latvians, whose ideas had been enfeebled bynational romanticism as a gulf grew between thebourgeoisie and the poor, the leadingnationalists of the era having been arrested and exiled. Rainis smuggled GermanMarxist literature into Latvia in two pieces of luggage in 1893: the work ofKarl Marx,Friedrich Engels, andKarl Kautsky. This "luggage with the dangerous contents," as the historian Uldis Ģērmanis called it, was the seed of theLatvian Social Democratic Party.[5]
