TheLatvian National Awakening (Latvian:latviešu [or latvju] tautas atmoda) refers to three distinct but ideologically relatednational revival movements:[1]
Although the term "Awakening" was introduced by the Young Latvians, its application was influenced by the nationalist ideologueErnests Blanks and later by the academicianJānis Stradiņš.[4] 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 ofglasnost the Second Awakening (the first being that of the Young Latvians).
Blanks sought to distinguish between theNew Current (in Latvian:Jaunā strāva) — a broad and radical socio-economic, political, and cultural movement that lasted from the late 1880s until the1905 Revolution, led byRainis and influenced byMarxism — from the more nationalistic direction taken in 1903 byErnests Rolavs andMiķelis Valters; to Blanks, the 1890s "could be stricken completely from the history of national thought." He saw Rolavs' and Valters' nationalistLatvian Social Democratic Union (in Latvian:Sociāldemokratu savienība; sometimes abbreviated SDS) — a radicalsocialist group critical of thecosmopolitanism of theLatvian 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[5]
Stradiņš based his view of the national revival in the 1980s on Blanks, considering the Second Awakening similarly: He viewed the organization of theLatvian 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 theKhrushchev Thaw — as National Awakenings.[6]
