The First Sunday in December

Whilst Russians stream to the polls to elect Putin's rubber-stamp Duma (including Russian citizens in Rīga and Daugavpils, where there are long lines at the Embassy and Consulate), Latvia marks Remembrance Day for the Victims of Genocide Against the Latvian People by the Totalitarian Communist Régime. Today's day of mourning is devoted to those Latvians who were murdered in the Soviet Union, repression reaching a peak in the winter of 1937/38.

As many as 200 000 Latvians lived in the USSR after World War One -- primarily settlers from the 19th C and refugees from the First World War. There were numerous Latvian schools, newspapers, and cultural institutions. Seventy years ago, at least 70 000 were "liquidated." Repression actually began much earlier in Leningrad, and some who were deported remained incarcerated decades later.

The photograph by Ojārs Lūsis shows one of the first illegal demonstrations marking the horrors of Stalinism -- the laying of flowers at the Freedom Monument in Rīga on 23 August 1987 (the date the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was concluded, its secret protocol providing for the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states). About 200 participants were arrested. In June that year, the deportations were marked with black flags (Alfrēds Rubiks, the hardliner who today heads one of the parties in the popular pro-Russian Harmony Center list, shouted that people with black-and-white television sets would think they were seeing the Latvian flag, then forbidden). An article on the repression of Latvians in Russia is here, in Latvian. In English, here is a fascinating article about one of the remaining Latvian communities in Siberia today.