ABSTRACT
Back in spring 1944 the leaders of the Soviet partisans fighting the German and Latvian security forces had expressed concern that, near Rüzekne and Daugavpils, armed groups of nationalist partisans were in the process of formation. By the end of 1944 operations by these nationalist partisans were beginning to disrupt the work of the Soviet authorities. At first the party leadership tried to play down the extent of this unrest, but during the winter of 1944-5 there were several incidents which could not be passed over in silence. The authorities’ first response was a propaganda campaign linking the nationalist partisans to German collaborators, but this had little effect; and so in April 1945 the party met to reassess the security situation. This meeting brought to an end nine months of tension between district party secretaries and the security forces, and evolved a twin-track policy for confronting the nationalist partisans. First, the brunt of the so-called ‘antibandit’ struggle would be borne by locally led ‘destroyer battalions’, whose activities would be jointly co-ordinated by the party and the security services. Second, propaganda efforts would concentrate on encouraging defections by the nationalist partisans, making it important to portray them as misguided rather than malign.
