How to tell historical stories of the lived experience of totalitarianism in Soviet Latvia ‘Then’ from a 21st Century ‘Now’ standpoint?

Hunt, Vincent (2025) How to tell historical stories of the lived experience of totalitarianism in Soviet Latvia ‘Then’ from a 21st Century ‘Now’ standpoint? Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis makes a substantial intervention to the field of documentary journalism by proposing a new theoretical framework for writing about the past as well as new empirical thinking about approaches to historical journalism. In a critical analysis of the researcher’s published monograph Up Against the Wall – the KGB and Latvia (Helion, 2019), the thesis reflects on the researcher’s many years of professional practice in documentary journalism fieldwork and combines this instinctive discovery-driven approach with theoretical analysis from multiple academic disciplines, such as oral history, memory studies, lived experience, history and subjectivity, as well as theory relating to narrative, photography and translation. The main theoretical contribution to knowledge is a proposed method of writing about the past from a ‘Now’ perspective using eyewitness testimony which is termed Historical Discovery Journalism. This thesis identifies how, based on the proximity of primary sources to the actual events, and contextualised using reliable and verified published secondary sources, Historical Discovery Journalism can assemble multi-layered and detail-rich perspectives on ‘what happened in the past’. New empirical thinking drawn from the methodology of this model is a second contribution to knowledge, identifying two discovery techniques which have been employed in this method. One involves a pro-active approach to data gathering and the second a change in the positionality of the narrator to become actively involved in the telling of ‘life-stories’ rather than a dispassionate observer. Theoretical constructions such as David Manning White’s 1950 gatekeeping filter have been adapted for Soviet Latvia 1940-49, resulting in a further contribution of a period-specific Latvian Gatekeeping Filter for evaluating the political, social and geographic breadth of the datapool used in the narrative. The thesis argues that this technique of re-visiting the past and its adaptions in research and storytelling methods has the potential to challenge existing assumptions about the past and through a dynamic process of ‘new discovery’ cause history to be re-considered. This has the potential to be applied to future studies of periods of political upheaval and totalitarianism.