Alfred Valdmanis and the Politics of Survival

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the author of A Cautious Beginning: The Emergence of
Newfoundland’s Supreme Court of Judicature in 1791–92.

Premier Joey Smallwood’s personal appointment of Valdmanis (former
wunderkind of Latvian interwar politics and survivor extraordinaire of
the German and Soviet occupation of his country) as director-general of
economic development for four heady years of a policy of “develop or
perish” is the stuff of legend in Newfoundland. In 1954, Valdmanis was
sentenced to two years in prison for soliciting and pocketing kickbacks
from German industrial firms. Smallwood alerted the RCMP to his
favorite’s alleged peculations and denied any knowledge of what
Valdmanis termed a policy hatched by the premier to benefit the Liberal
Party.

Valdmanis was clever, precociously successful, arrogant, and lucky. But
he was also fawningly subservient to his political masters, whether the
authoritarian nationalist President Karlis Ulmanis in Latvia in the
1930s or Smallwood in the 1950s. Divested of power and influence, he had
few inner resources and collapsed into self-pitying fatalism when
accused of fraud and theft. He accepted the dubious legal advice of his
lawyers, seconded by the Newfoundland government, to accept a plea
bargain so the facts of the case were never established in open court.

If the true story is likely to elude us, Bassler has come as close as
any diligent scholar is likely to come in explaining Valdmanis’s
career in the context of the times, and establishing his subject’s
ability, whether chameleon, quisling, or crook, to survive. In doing so,
he presents a fascinating portrait of a man and an age, whether in
prewar Latvia, or among wartime refugees and their byzantine and bitter
personal rivalries, or in post-Confederation Newfoundland where a
wartime surplus was exhausted, with few long-term benefits, in a few
short years of Smallwood’s governance. This full and even-handed
account is researched from sources in five languages in three countries
and supplemented by 40 interviews. It is an exhaustive, dispassionate,
and fascinating reconstruction that is likely to prove definitive.