Latviešu karavīru un bēgļu atgriešanās dzimtenē no Polijas un Lietuvas 1919.-1921. gadā

ENAs a result of World War I and the subsequent developments and processes a very large proportion of the Latvian nation had left the territory of Latvia. Thus, in 1919-1921 the government and the supreme commanders of the Latvian Army had to deal with the issue of organised repatriation o f Latvian soldiers not only from the territories that had been controlled and in the course of the Civil War abandoned by the Soviet Russia or the Russian White Troops (including the transportation of the Latvian Imanta Regiment and Troicka Battalion from Siberia and the Far East in 1920, mass-scale return of the Red Army Latvian Soviet Division and other military units in late 1920 and early 1921, repatriation of the Latvians who had served in the White Troops through Estonia, Turkey, the Balkans and Poland) and France (soldiers of Latvian origin from the former Russian Expedition Troops in 1919), but also from Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and, to a lesser degree, from Germany, where they had come for the most part as soldiers of the Red Army. In 1919, most of the Latvians stationed in Estonia and Lithuania were prisoners of war, just as in Poland in 1919-1920, while in Germany after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from the suburbs of Warsaw in the summer of 1920 Latvians found themselves interned in East Prussia as Red Army soldiers. In 1919-1921 and later, Latvia welcomed home also thousands of civilian refugees, mostly from the east, where the events of World War I had taken them to. A considerable part of the refugees who had been stationed in Russia and Ukraine returned to Latvia through Turkey and South European countries and for most of them the road led through Poland. The civilian Latvian refugees from other European countries, where they had come to during the war or even before it, likewise came home through Poland.The goal o f the present paper is to analyse the captivity of Latvian soldiers and refugees in Poland and their repatriation with the main focus on refugees and a general insight into the other category of Latvian soldiers in Poland: the interned soldiers of the Russian White Troops as well as into the return of the Latvian-origin prisoners of war from Lithuania, whose difficult relations with Poland as well as the fact of these two states being neighbours of Latvia complicated not only Latvia's foreign policy in general but also the return o f Latvian prisoners from or through these states. In 1919-1920, altogether several thousand citizens o f Latvia, the majority of them in the capacity of prisoners of war, were held in captivity or interned by the Polish Army and had to endure very harsh conditions. In fact, they managed to survive only due to the relatively good bilateral relations between Latvia and Poland, as a result o f which since 1919 Polish authorities treated Latvians comparatively well and granted them the opportunity to return home. First of all, the fate o f Latvians in Polish captivity vividly echoes the military-political situation in the East European region in 1918-1920 in general, a significant element of which that left a direct impact on the history of the state and nation of Latvia, was the war between Poland and Soviet Russia notable for extreme cruelty from both sides and disregard for human lives, that among other expressions was reflected also in the attitude towards prisoners of war from the part o f all nations at war in the region (not only Poles and Russians, although these two surprise with particularly harsh treatment).Second, analysis of the experience of Latvian refugees allows writing another complicated, though thanks to external circumstances comparatively not a particularly dramatic page in the overall tragic history of the Latvian refugees after World War I. Moreover, Latvians constituted a very considerable proportion of the Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity and the majority of them had been members of the Latvian Red Riflemen units that had taken part in military action against Poles in the spring and summer of 1920. In Lithuania the number of Latvian-origin prisoners of war was relatively small because the Lithuanian Army had been involved in warfare against the Red Army only until late 1919 (in direct military action only until September) and to a lesser degree than the Estonian, Latvian and Polish troops. Yet in Lithuania, too, there were several hundreds of Latvian-origin prisoners of war, who nevertheless enjoyed better conditions than their compatriots in Polish POW camps. From the two countries and particularly through them a considerable number of Latvian civilian refugees, as well as military refugees from Southern Russia and Europe returned home to Latvia.