History in Diena: Aivars Goris, the Communist Party's Culture Overseer, Looks Back
Diena's history column recalls a 1996 interview with Aivars Goris, who for 20 years headed the culture department of the Latvian Communist Party Central Committee. He admitted some mistakes but refused to express remorse for his work.
The Latvian daily Diena, in its history column, recalls an interview with Aivars Goris published in the magazine SestDiena on 19 October 1996. Goris was born in 1931 and retired in 1992. During the Soviet occupation he spent 20 years leading the culture department of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party (LKP), so writers and other creative professionals remember him as the official overseer of culture. His name is said to mean little to younger generations.
Assessments and admissions
The interviewer, Vita Pētersone, noted that contemporaries associate Goris with censorship, party guidelines and harsh speeches at meetings. She described him as a convinced communist with forty years of party membership who nevertheless considered the poets Ojārs Vācietis and Imants Ziedonis close to him.
Goris said he did not regret his life and would not sprinkle ashes on his head: he acted on the convictions of the time, and time, history and society should judge. He did concede that some of his judgments were hasty and subjective. He said he had admitted at an LKP Central Committee plenary that he had unjustifiably criticised the writers Vizma Belševica and Imants Auziņš, and had apologised publicly.
Jānis Škapars (1927–2023), editor of the newspaper Literatūra un Māksla and later a politician, called Goris a hero and victim of his era.
On communism and artistic freedom
Goris said that ideas of social justice will persist, but the communism model implemented in the Soviet Union has compromised itself. He claimed he tried, within limits, to deviate from categorical directives. He described cultural oversight as any ruling power's effort to steer public opinion in the direction it prefers, differing only in whether the methods are brutal or refined.
He denied there was total suppression of art, noting that artists such as Ojārs Ābols and Džemma Skulme were able to develop, while complaints about such support travelled to Moscow. Goris also revealed that he kept a drawer full of denunciation letters that creative workers had written about one another. The memoirs he promised in the interview were never published.
