My primary motivation for meeting with Janis Rozkalns was to ask him “why?” Rozkalns received Latvia’s highest honor, the Order of the Three Stars, for running one of the Soviet Union’s largest anti-communist groups during the 70s and 80s. Why did he resist the Soviet occupation? Why did he illegally print and distribute religious anti-communist pamphlets, when doing so was nearly guaranteed to land him in a Siberian Gulag? Why did he immediately join up with the human rights group, Helsinki-86, upon his release from a Soviet prison camp?
“Responsibility,” he answered when he sat down to talk to me in …read more
Source: Victims of Communism