The Keys ep38 The Popular Front of Latvia
The Popular Front of Latvia. The key to the Awakening that turned history on its head.
The Popular Front was so large that you could say the whole nation was the Front. The scale of the organisation is best illustrated by its rapidly expanding membership. When registration began on 6 September 1988, 5,000 signed up. After a month, 110,000 had joined. Fast forward a year later, and there were already 250,000 members. Within a year, one-tenth of the Latvian population had joined a single organisation. In the general election of 1990, over 900,000 people voted for the Popular Front and it won almost 60% of seats in the Parliament.
Whose idea was it to form the Popular Front? How did the organisation become so large? What were the points of contention among its members that nearly tore the Front apart? What is left of the Popular Front today?
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