Although the term "Awakening" was introduced by the Young Latvians, its application was influenced by the nationalist ideologue
Ernests Blanks and later by the academician
Jānis Stradiņš. Stradiņš was the first person to use the term "Third Awakening" (at the expanded plenum of the Writers' Union of the Latvian SSR in June 1988), opposing those who had begun to call the national revival in the period of
glasnost the Second Awakening (the first being that of the Young Latvians). Blanks sought to distinguish between the
New Current (in Latvian:
Jaunā strāva) — a broad and radical socio-economic, political, and cultural movement that lasted from the late 1880s until the
1905 Revolution, led by
Rainis and influenced by
Marxism — from the more nationalistic direction taken in 1903 by
Ernests Rolavs and
Miķelis Valters; to Blanks, the 1890s "could be stricken completely from the history of national thought." He saw Rolavs' and Valters' nationalist
Latvian Social Democratic Union (in Latvian:
Sociāldemokratu savienība; sometimes abbreviated SDS) — a radical
socialist group critical of the
cosmopolitanism of the
Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party (
Latvijas sociāldemokrātiskā strādnieku partija; LSDSP) — as the direct ideological descendants of the Young Latvians. It was the SDS (and especially Valters) that first began to formulate demands for Latvia's political autonomy Stradiņš based his view of the national revival in the 1980s on Blanks, considering the Second Awakening similarly: He viewed the organization of the
Latvian riflemen, the activities of the Latvian émigrés in Switzerland, the Latvian refugees' relief committee in Russia, the proclamation of independence and the battles for independence as coming under the heading of the Second Awakening. Less frequently, some have seen the New Current and the 1905 Revolution — and sometimes even the
Khrushchev Thaw — as National Awakenings. ==See also==