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Paper short abstract:

The paper will examine the activities and environment of the Latvian Soviet ethnographers during the field work in the first decades after the WWII facing the gap between the Soviet simulacrum and reality. The sources of the research are the diaries of ethnographers and members of the expeditions.

Paper long abstract:

After the Second World War and Latvia's occupation by USSR, ethnography, like other sciences, entered the system of the Academy of Sciences. By changing institutional affiliation and at the same time working and learning (there were no professional ethnographers in Latvia), ethnographers were subject to strict rules of procedure for plans and reports. The five-year and annual plans also included fieldwork and monographs prepared on their basis, which would prove the dominance of the Soviet regime over the previous ones. Since 1947, in the expeditions carried out in the territory of Latvia, one of the requirements was to keep fieldwork diaries, in which the things seen during the day must be recorded. Life in the countryside – the hard work of the collective farmers, the empty houses left by the deported residents, the struggle of the representatives of the Soviet power and the national partisans, hunger and poverty – differed significantly from the narrative of the Soviet power and made it difficult to achieve the goal set in the work plan of the ethnographers. Observations reflected in the diaries often were not put to the worksheets to be submitted to the Repository of Ethnographic Materials. Documentation of material culture objects came to the fore.