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Long Road in the Dunes: Latvia and the Soviet Historical Narrative investigates the creation, dissemination, and reception of an official national historical narrative for Soviet Latvia from 1940 to 1991. Looking at an interdisciplinary range of sources, including textbooks, guidebooks, literature, film, fine arts, museums, and monuments, the work traces official attempts to deal with tensions between competing themes of class and nation in the Latvian national narrative. The work further investigates how these tensions, combined with external pressures, lead to weakness in the narrative that precipitated its ultimate failure to take hold in the Latvian consciousness. More broadly, the work addresses the interplay between politics and narrative creation by examining why the historical narrative was the first Soviet institution to collapse, presaging the fall of the Soviet Union itself.

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Anna Shabalov graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude with a B.A. in History. She is now attending Yale Law School and plans to graduate in 2013.

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