THE TATRA PROJECT TEAM is a small group of professionals who share an interest in the history and welfare of Eastern European peoples coping with what years of Soviet repression did to their lives. We have a simple structure: a director and an advisory group. Our common interest is in the work we do.
The family as a human and religious institution is drifting. But the tasks that the family still fulfils — rearing and forming children, helping form personal identity, and being a refuge when life beats up on us — can give the contemporary family a religious and social charter. They can also be the bases for a soundly spiritual parish life and ministry.
IN 1939, RIGHT BEFORE THE START OF World War II, Stalin and Hitler signed a mutual non-aggression pact and, in secret protocols, also agreed to divide Eastern Europe between them. Stalin got the Baltic Republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. He immediately began pressuring the three democratic republics to allow him to station Soviet troops on their soil, followed that with a series of ultimata designed to force these countries, outnumbered 100 to 1 to yield to his demands, and in quick order occupied the Baltic Republics.
THE BALTICS BECAME INDEPENDENT REPUBLICS following the collapse of Czarist Russia and the national independence movements associated with the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, subject to Czarist rule since the end of the 18th Century but much against their national wills, maintained their independence until the late 1930s
THE TATRA PROJECT has drawn on the resources of our partnering documentary film company, Domedia Productions, for the interviews filmed for Red Terror on the Amber Coast filmed in Lithuania.
Red Terror is a picture made by Americans for Americans. We worked on the picture believing that most Americans know very little about the daily life of ordinary people in the republics of the Soviet Union. We made Red Terror to describe what it was like for ordinary people to live under that planned, daily, unrelenting terror and fear of the KGB and it’s predecessors that dated all the way back to Lenin. Following their state policy the KGB went about making sure that every family, every household, everyone, everywhere knew from their own awful experiences that that KGB—the Committee for State Security—was everywhere, all the time.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2000 filmmaker Ken Gumbert and writer Dave O’Rourke went to Eastern Europe shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union – Ken to Czechoslovakia, Dave to Lithuania and the Baltics. We were there to observe and record what we saw. Ken was already at work on Saving Grace about the Soviet seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in 1948 when Dave, by accident, wandered into the unlocked KGB prison in Vilnius. What we saw led to our production of Red Terror on the Amber Coast, and setting up the Tatra Project to support our work.
The places and settings in which we choose our lives are worth describing. Remembering where and when, for instance, you decided start a book may say something about it. I use that example purposefully. But this is not about a book. This is about the decision to make a documentary about the KGB occupation of the Baltics.
