Oliver Moody 11-13 minutes 10/2/2022
Over his long career as an archaeologist, Janis Asaris has learned German, Russian, English and even a smattering of Swedish to help him understand the monuments that litter his country like detritus left behind by the ebb and flow of empires.
Now his job is to help earmark them for destruction. Sitting in the medieval palazzo that houses Latvia’s national cultural heritage office, Asaris leafs through a folder setting out the stone-and-concrete traces of Soviet occupation: nearly 300 plaques, statues, and assorted memorials at 162 sites.
His team’s work is meticulous. Ninety of the artefacts have been recorded with 3D scanners, seven of them probed with ground-penetrating radar in case they harbour concealed graves, and 69 condemned to be pulled down and then either smashed up or stowed away in a museum.
After yesterday’s general election, Latvia is at a turning point. For the three decades since the Baltic state wrested its independence from the USSR, its Latvian-speaking majority has lived in an itchy co-existence with a large Russian-speaking minority that has its own nurseries, its own schools, its own television channels and its own ways of life.
President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has brought these tensions to a head. The war has stirred up a maelstrom of conflicting emotions and painful memories in Latvia, and put rocket boosters under the government’s campaign to assimilate the local Russian population whether they like it or not.
The Russian language is being phased out of the education system; it may be banned from the workplace and even from public spaces. Anyone who declares support for the Russian state’s war crimes can be stripped of their Latvian citizenship. Political leaders have proposed deporting any Latvian who acquires a Russian passport.
The most divisive measure of all, however, has been a law mandating the demolition of monuments that glorify the Nazi or Soviet regimes, the most visible of which was a 79-metre column commemorating the Red Army’s defeat of the Wehrmacht dominating the western skyline of Riga, the Latvian capital.
Most Russians in Latvia prized the Victory Monument as a symbol of their identity and a rallying point for vast demonstrations every May 9, when Moscow marks the capitulation of the Third Reich. To many ethnic Latvians, however, it was an upsetting and ever-present reminder of nearly half a century of Soviet oppression. Their newspapers and politicians have taken to calling it the Occupation Monument, or even the Rapist’s Memorial.
Now it is simply a glaring hole in the landscape. The column was toppled at the end of last month, the bronze statues at its foot dismantled, the deep foundations picked apart with industrial machinery. The ruins are the physical embodiment of the government’s blunt message to Latvia’s Russians: these are our values, our language, our understanding of history. If you don’t like them, you can go somewhere else.
“This is Latvia. This is a free, liberal-democratic country,” Artis Pabriks, the defence minister, told The Times. “There is no place for totalitarian views in the public sphere. And there is no way we would ever again give up our freedom. It’s very simple. This monument is against the fundamental values of a free democratic country. That’s the point. And if somebody’s upset by our freedom, by our language, by our democracy, well, maybe they should choose another place to live.”
With a handful of polling stations yet to report their results, it appears clear that a serious shift has taken place in Latvia’s political landscape. Harmony, the moderate party of the Russian diaspora, had won the past three general elections on the trot, sometimes by a country mile. This time it was annihilated, as the centre ground between the twin poles of Latvian and Russian identity crumbled away into an abyss. With a little less than 5 per cent of the vote, Harmony seems likely to fall out of the parliament altogether.
Its place will be taken by For Stability, a populist start-up that marries anti-vaxxer pseudoscience with resentful Russian nationalism. Its leader, Aleksey Roslikov, was kicked out of Harmony three years ago and now campaigns with Russian-language TikTok videos vowing vengeance against those responsible for the “Covid genocide” and the destruction of the Soviet memorial. In one recent clip Roslikov claimed that Latvian schoolchildren were being forced to take questionnaires testing their loyalty to the “regime”, adding: “Friends, this is a hell that must be stopped.”
Relative to its small size, Latvia has a greater density of “Russian” inhabitants than any other country outside Russia and Belarus. They make up anything between a quarter and a third of its 1.9 million people, depending on whether you choose to include ethnic Russians, people who speak Russian as their mother tongue, and people with other forms of Russian heritage.
They are a heterogenous bunch. Some of the families have been living in Latvia for centuries, especially around Daugavpils, the second city. Many others settled in the area with the Soviet occupation, and particularly with the armed forces, whose Baltic military district was headquartered in Riga until the fall of the USSR. A third group are relatively new arrivals, ranging from exiled independent journalists and opposition activists to members of the oligarchic class in pricey beach houses clustered around the Jurmala coastal resort.
Most are Latvian nationals but there are about 130,000 quasi-stateless “non-citizens”, who occupy a no man’s land between the two nationalities, and another 50,000 or so who hold Russian passports and residency permits. Many grow up speaking only Russian and only really get to grips with the Latvian language as adults, if at all.
Their politics and their feelings about modern Russia are diverse. For many years Putin’s state media apparatus carpet-bombed the Russians in Latvia with television and internet propaganda until Riga banned all 80 Russia-based broadcasters in the first months of the war.
The Kremlin’s courtship of the diaspora has had only mixed success. Atavistic sympathy for Russia is widespread but many were horrified by the attack on Ukraine. “It’s like suddenly discovering that your father is a serial killer,” said Boris Cilevic, 66, a Latvian Russian MP and one of the founders of Harmony. A survey conducted in July found only 12 per cent of Latvia’s Russian speakers declared support for the invasion of Ukraine and 40 per cent condemned it, with the rest either explicitly neutral or declining to answer.
However, tacit approval of the Putin regime may be somewhat more common than the raw numbers suggest: some politicians from the diaspora suggest their fellow Russians have developed a characteristic knack of telling opinion pollsters what they think they are expected to say, rather than what they truly believe.
The community is now more torn than ever between the rival nationalisms of Latvia and Russia. Cilevic’s Harmony party, historically the closest thing to a political bridge between the Latvian majority and the Russian minority, has been all but obliterated in a matter of months.
Latvian voters spurn it because of its mostly Russian support base, while growing numbers of Russians shun it for its swift censure of Putin’s attack on Ukraine and perceived failure to defend their culture.
Miroslav Mitrofanov, 55, the joint leader of the Kremlin-friendly Latvian Russian Union (LKS) party, said Russian speakers were either turning to more radical leaders or giving up on politics altogether. “It’s a question of our existence,” he said. “What we tell our voters is that the only way to survive is to save our Russian identity. If we fail and receive poor results, the ruling parties will conclude that Russian identity is not important. Our main competitor is apathy.”
It is hard to overstate how much anger and sadness the conflict over the Soviet memorial column has elicited on both sides of Latvia’s ethnic and linguistic divide. Huddling under an umbrella in the torrential rain outside a Ukrainian borscht restaurant, Jurgis Klotins, 37, a parliamentary candidate for the right-wing National Alliance party, said the monument had been a visual reminder of his country’s suffering, as offensive and upsetting as a giant swastika would be in the parts of western Europe that were occupied by Nazi Germany.
Klotins was one of the city councillors who voted through the demolition. “In Latvia, the Red Army were an occupying force,” he said. “They committed war crimes against Latvian citizens: rape, torture, imprisonment without any justification. It’s not like the historical memories in France or the Netherlands or other countries that were liberated by the western powers.”
For Klotins, Pabriks and many other ethnic Latvian political leaders, the war in Ukraine is a moment of absolute moral clarity. Either you subscribe to the state’s core tenets — faith in western liberal democracy, the primacy of the Latvian language, unequivocal condemnation of the Soviet past, all-out opposition to Putin — or you have no meaningful place in Latvian society. As much as anything, the toppling of the Soviet column was intended to drive this lesson home. “It was a very powerful symbolic act,” Klotins said. “My hope is that it was a strong and convincing message to the ethnic Russians in Latvia.”
For the overwhelming majority of Latvia’s Russians, however, it is instead a source of bitter resentment. One recent poll found that more than four out of five of them opposed it. Many have fathers, grandfathers or great-grandfathers who fought with the Red Army as it drove Nazi Germany’s forces out of the Baltic in 1944. Some of Cilevic’s forebears were liberated from the Riga ghetto by Soviet troops. “For me, it’s an existential issue,” he said. “The defeat of Nazism is personal. It saved the lives of my ancestors. When the monument was taken down, it was like being punched in the chest. This is a really dangerous time.”
The decisive question is now which feelings will prevail in the diaspora: sadness and resignation, or anger and recrudescent ethnic Russian chauvinism. Cilevic is betting on the former. He believes most Russian speakers will either reluctantly comply with the integration measures or leave, resulting in a brain drain that Latvia’s already declining population can ill afford.
However, Mitrofanov, the co-leader of the more stridently pro-Russian LKS party, said there was still a strong will to resist. He argued that the assimilation drive — and above all the sense of flagrant injustice following the felling of the Riga monument — would foster ever more anger and resentment. “It’s a very deep pain, which will not be healed for centuries,” he said. “If there will be any possibility of revenge, these people will take revenge.”
Source: The Times
