ABSTRACT
In September of 1986 a delegation of American Latvian emigre activists arrived in the small resort town of Jurmala on the Baltic shore not far from the capital of Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, Riga, to participate in the so-called Jurmala Dialogues. The arguments in support of the cultural contacts with Soviet Latvia appeared in the American Latvian community already in the 1960s and flourished throughout the 1970s. The American Latvian community had many reasons to believe that the Soviet goal was to use the cultural contacts for propaganda purposes, as well as to weaken the United States and destroy it from within. The emigres knew that a trip to Soviet Latvia, sponsored by the Latvian Committee for Cultural Relations (LCCR), required one's agreement to silence oneself as an anti-Soviet activist. In the 1960s, the Soviet government decided to demonstrate the multi-ethnic nature of its empire and encouraged exchanges with representatives of ethnic republics, such as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic.
