Marginalia

Do Latvians have a navel?

2009-04-07T10:59:00.003+03:00

Gravely ill and suffering from the economic collapse -- dead broke and feeling somewhat like the Man in the Holocene -- I've not blogged during a period in which Latvia has been featured in the world media as "Europe's sickest country."

I was commissioned to write a brief condensation of the history of Latvia, my work on the first draft falling, par hasard, between two of our most important national holidays -- November 11th and November 18th. The celebration on the 11th -- Bear Slayer's Day -- dates to 1919, when Bermondt-Avalov's forces were driven from the left bank of Rīga by the swelling ranks of Latvian volunteers and British and French warships. November 18th is our national day. In 1918 -- a year before that victory -- the independent Republic of Latvia was proclaimed in the National Theater (then the Second Municipal or Russian Theater). This being the 90th anniversary of that proclamation (of which event there is only a single photo -- a freshly released documentary film on the subject is entitled The Only Photograph), this November was suffused with more patriotism than is usual (this site -- in Latvian, English, and Russian -- has a calendar of events as well as a wealth of articles and links).

I wrote about the meaning of Bear Slayer's Day last autumn. This year, between translating a cantata (Beļskis' and Kulakovs' Vēstules uz bruģa, released on DVD with English subtitles this week -- also a patriotic endeavor), a couple of hefty art books, the program for the Latvian pavilion in Gothenburg, the yearbook of the House of Language and an annual report on corruption -- and condensing several centuries of history and a few more of prehistory into twenty-five pages -- I find time only for tired debates so dismal I won't link to them here. With a host of ideas swooping down into my swirling head, however, I thought I'd sketch a few fleeting half-formed thoughts before they flew away.

I did go to the bridge that spans the Daugava to mark the rainy 20th anniversary of the founding of the Popular Front. The demographics and politics down here being what they are, it was a somewhat sad event, the police shouting at us to get out of the road in Russian (for an instant, the only difference between now and then was the replacement of "comrades" with "ladies and gentlemen," the thickness of the traffic and the lack of Ladas therein). Finally the bridge was closed as several hundred people cradled oil lamps and shielded candles in honor of the occasion. Nearly inaudibly, a choir sang what has become the Latgallian hymn -- "Skaidra volūda."

In Anna Rancāne's poem, set to music by Eugeņs Karūdznīks, language is as clear as water from a spring. The wood sings, stone exults, the corncrake calls, grain ripens, fire crackles, the dog barks -- and the fatherland speaks to us as they do, as clearly as water at its source. Despite its being wildly popular from the Third Awakening of the late 1980s, some still mistake it for a folk song -- its language is as clear as spring water in terms of sound, at least to the Latvian ear (though it is in Latgallian). As Knuts Skujenieks once pointed out to me, no Latvian poet has ever attained the clarity of the dainas and few have even come close. Though many translators have tried their hand at the dainas -- even Jerome Rothenberg -- the goose-flesh they can conjure are as elusive as corncrakes. Rancāne's poem echoes folk songs:

Grieze grieza rudzīšos,
Paipaliņa kārkliņos.
Grieze rudzus briedināja,
Paipaliņa kāsināja.

The corncrake (grīze in Latgallian, grieze in Latvian; the verb griezt means both "to cut" and "to shriek," the bird taking its name from the latter meaning, dainas usually using both senses), is a bird most often heard but not seen, associated with the ripening of rye. Without an understanding of the relations between corncrakes, grain, and even dogs, the sense of the song falters. Latvian speakers can avail themselves of resources like Elina Kūla-Braže's marvelous Putnu dienas, in which 25 of the most notable birds in Latvian folklore fly between God's gardens and Hell (the adventures of the corncrake being especially interesting). As a matter of fact, you can now search and access more than 200 000 dainas from your mobile phone. But -- if you've never seen rye ripening and never heard a corncrake call, you will still be at a loss.

On to the fatherland. "Skaidra volūda" is clearly, at least superficially, as "primordialist" as can be, to use a term scholars of nationalism like Anthony D. Smith, the author of The Ethnic Origins of Nations, would employ; it could be a perfect illustration of the nationalist view in contrast to the perennialist, modernist, and post-modernist takes as summarized here, for example. Smith concludes: "None of these formulations seems to be satisfactory. History is no sweetshop in which its children may 'pick and mix'; but neither is it an unchanging essence or succession of superimposed strata." In the riveting Warwick Debates ("The nation: real or imagined?"), Smith identifies three problems with the modernist theories: their generality, their materialism, and -- "most crucial, since it stems from their commitment to modernism, the idea that nations and nationalisms are the product of modernisation."

What this systematically overlooks is the persistence of ethnic ties and cultural sentiments in many parts of the world, and their continuing significance for large numbers of people. Eric Hobsbawm, indeed, goes so far as to deny any connection between the popular 'Proto-national' communities that he analyses and subsequent political nationalisms.

Introducing an approach he terms "ethno-symbolic," it is here that Smith parts company with his teacher, Ernest Gellner:

This is exactly where I disagree. Modern political nationalisms cannot be understood without reference to these earlier ethnic ties and memories, and, in some cases, to pre-modern ethnic identities and communities. I do not wish to assert that every modern nation must be founded on some antecedent ethnic ties, let alone a definite ethnic community; but many such nations have been and are based on these ties, including the first nations in the West - France, England, Castile, Holland, Sweden - and they acted as models and Pioneers of the idea of the 'nation' for others. And when we dig deeper, we shall find an ethnic component in many national communities since - whether the nation was formed slowly or was the outcome of a more concerted project of 'nation-building'.

Smith's opening statement is entitled "Nations and their pasts." In his response -- "Do nations have navels?" -- Gellner wanders into our part of the world:

There are very, very clear cases of modernism in a sense being true. I mean, take the Estonians. At the beginning of the nineteenth century they didn't even have a name for themselves. They were just referred to as people who lived on the land as opposed to German or Swedish burghers and aristocrats and Russian administrators. They had no ethnonym. They were just a category without any ethnic self-consciousness. Since then they've been brilliantly successful in creating a vibrant culture. This is obviously very much alive in the Ethnographic Museum in Tartu, which has one object for every ten Estonians and there are only a million of them. (The Museum has a collection of 100,000 ethnographic objects). Estonian culture is obviously in no danger although they make a fuss about the Russian minority they've inherited from the Soviet system. It's a very vital and vibrant culture, but, it was created by the kind of modernist process which I then generalise for nationalism and nations in general. And if that kind of account is accepted for some, then the exceptions which are credited to other nations are redundant.

Later in his response, Gellner says that "the Estonians created nationalism ex nihilo in the course of the nineteenth century." Gellner passed away prior to the planned third lecture. Smith offered "Memory and modernity:
reflections on Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism" in his stead. Though it's unavailable at the London School of Economics ASEN site without a password, Tamil nationalists offer it here.

I could quibble here, and say that the issue was not whether the Estonians created nationalism ex nihilo in the nineteenth century, but whether the Estonian nation was created by the Estonian nationalists ex nihilo. And while we would both agree that Estonian nationalism, indeed any nationalism, was modern, where Ernest and I would differ is whether the nations that nationalism creates are wholly modern creations ex nihilo.

[...]

Now here lies the rub. If we pursue the analogy, we recall that God created Adam, fashioning his body and then breathing life into it. Not even the most megalomaniac nationalist has claimed quite that power. They have, of course, seen themselves as awakeners; but the body of the nation merely slumbered, it was not without life. Should we confer on nationalists that divine power, to create ex nihilo?

Of course, Ernest wants to confer that power through nationalism ultimately on modernity, on the growth society, on industrialism and its cultural prerequisites. For Ernest, the genealogy of the nation is located in the requirements of modernity, not the heritage of pre-modern pasts. Ernest is claiming that nations have no parents, no pedigree, except the needs of modern society. Those needs can only be met by a mass, public, literate, specialised and academy-supervised culture, a 'high culture', preferably in a specific language which allows context-free communication. A 'high culture' is the only cement for a modern, mobile, industrial society; and this is the only kind of society open to us today.

For Ernest, the world was irreversibly transformed by a cluster of economic and scientific changes since the seventeenth century. Traditional agro-literate societies were increasingly replaced by growth-oriented, mobile, industrial societies. The rise of high cultures and nations is a consequence of the mobility and anonymity of modern society and of the semantic, non-physical nature of modern work. Today what really matters is not kingship or land or faith, but education into and membership of a high culture community, that is, a nation.

Smith observes that "the Estonians did have a navel after all" -- the Kalevipoeg, as the Finns had the Kalevala.

Both epics traced the descent of the Finns and Estonians to Iron Age culture-communities, and thereby provided these dispossessed and subject peoples with a sense of their dignity through native ancestry and an ancient and heroic ethnic past. In this way, they confirmed the worldwide belief in the virtues of national geneologies. To dismiss this by attributing it to the ubiquitous influence of nationalism again begs the question of why so many people have been mobilised on the basis of this particular belief in the genealogy of nations. Besides, nationalists have usually managed to find some historical antecedents for their nations-to-be, albeit often embellished and exaggerated, and this suggests that there are mechanisms at work which ensure some connection and even continuity between the modern nation and one or more pasts.

Smith goes on to discuss "high" culture, key to Gellner's theory:

In an interesting section of Nations and Nationalism, Ernest contrasts the 'high' culture of modern societies with the 'low' cultures of agro-literate societies. A 'high' culture, as we have seen, is a literate, sophisticated culture, serviced by specialised educational personnel and taught formally in mass, public, standardised and academy-supervised institutions of learning. It is a highly cultivated or 'garden' culture. A 'low' culture, by contrast, is wild, spontaneous, undirected and unsupervised. These are the cultures that readily spring up, unbidden, in societies where the great mass of the population are food-producers servicing the needs of tiny specialised elites - clerisies, aristocracies, merchants and the like - who are almost completely cut off socially and culturally from the peasant masses. In such a society, there is neither need nor room for nations and nationalisms, since the many 'low' cultures of the peasants are local and 'almost invisible'. Thus, in agro-literate societies, in Ernest's words: 'Culture tends to be branded either horizontally (by social caste), or vertically, to define very small local communities'.

Now, for Ernest, all these 'low' cultures are doomed. They are cut off, like so many umbilical cords, because they are simply irrelevant in an impersonal, mobile modern society. If they are remembered at all, it is only through some symbols, in the same way that navels remind us of our origins. Nationalism, Ernest claims, is basically a product of modernity. It is, he says, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low Cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases the totality, of the Population ... it is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared Culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro- groups themselves. That is what really happens.

Nothing could be clearer. The many, old 'low' cultures vanish. They are replaced by a single, new 'high' culture, or 'nation'. This is the true meaning of nationalism.

But there are two problems here, of which Ernest was well aware. Some 'low' cultures are not severed. Instead, they become 'high' cultures. The Finns and the Estonians clearly fall into this category, as do many of the cultures of the other smaller, subject peoples of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The other problem is that certain old elite cultures become 'high' cultures. The literary cultures of the Jews, the Armenians and the Greeks clearly fall under this heading, as do several of the cultures of Western peoples like the Catalans, Scots and French. Awareness of the difficulties posed for modernism by both these problems is an important source of its ambivalence.

How do 'low' cultures become 'high' cultures? Why does Estonian win out over German, Swedish and Russian cultures in Estonia, and Finnish over Swedish and Russian cultures in Finland? Both these cultures were local, popular, largely confined to the peasants, at least at first. Why do these 'Ruritanians' become conscious of their local folk cultures and seek to turn what were 'low' cultures into 'high' ones for the nation-to-be?

Or were they really such 'low' cultures? And is the contrast between 'low' and 'high' cultures as sharp as Ernest alleges? In the case of Estonia, we know of Estonian language religious texts during the Reformation; and certainly by the seventeenth century, with the establishment of the University of Tartu and later Forselius' school system, the basis of a literate Estonian culture emerged a century and a half before the arrival of the Romantic movement in the Baltic states in the mid-nineteenth century.

Nihil ex nihilo is Smith's conclusion. No primordialist he, however -- he stresses the fact that "that pre-modern ethnies are not nations"... but "what they do have, and what they bequeath, albeit selectively, to modern nations, is a fund of myths, symbols, values and shared memories, some distinctive customs and traditions, a general location, and sometimes a proper name. Without these shared memories and traditions, myths and symbols, the basis for creating a nation is tenuous and the task herculean."

So: to paraphrase Rousseau, a nation must have a navel, and if they have not got one, we must start by inventing one. And it is because nations have navels, and because those navels, and the memories and traditions, myths and symbols they represent, mean so much to the people that have them, that we are so unlikely to see the early transcendence of nations and nationalism.

I've quoted Smith at such length (though I do hope readers will read the Warwick Debates and the Memorial Lecture in full!) because anyone familiar with political and historical discourse in Latvia will immediately call to mind many a local specific that sheds light upon, and/or is illuminated by, Smith's ethno-symbolic approach. Gellner's remarks about the Estonians ("They were just referred to as people who lived on the land...") echo Pastor Brasche's response to the Young Latvians, for instance; he called them a Jung-Bauernstand -- a peasant class without a past (see this Wikipedia article about the movement, which has remained curiously intact since I wrote it). Smith again:

What 1 am arguing here is that most modern languages and cultures are not 'invented': they are connected to, and often continuous with, much older cultures which the modernising nationalists adapt and standardise. By Ernest's criteria, many of these older languages and cultures were 'high' cultures. But, even where they were 'low' (or 'lower'), spontaneous, popular cultures, they could become the basis for a subsequent 'high culture'. Ernest hints at this when he speaks of Ruritanians in the metropolis of megalomania who, faced with the problems of labour migration and bureaucracy, soon come to understand the difference between dealing with a co-national, 'one understanding and sympathising with their culture, and someone hostile to it. This very concrete experience taught them to be aware of their culture, and to love it (or, indeed, to wish to be rid of it).' In other words, it is the old 'low' culture to which they cling, or not, as the case may be. And it is the old 'low' culture which, far from being cut off and thrown away, will soon become the modern 'high' taught culture, albeit for several hundred thousands or millions of people.

These processes stand out prominently in Latvian history since Krišjānis Valdemārs -- assimilation and resistance to it, the interplay of continuity and discontinuity, and the creation of a "high culture" on the basis of a "low culture," as well as the exaltation of the "low culture" and its reshaping to meet expectations of what a "national culture" ought to look like (according to this German or that Russian, or diverse ideologues, dreamers and fantasists of our own), not rarely grotesquely.

The photograph is from a gallery at Delfi of events marking Bear Slayer's Day.

Baby, Bathwater, Books

2008-12-18T10:58:00.022+02:00

My parents crossed the ocean to begin their new life in the New World with only four crates. Three of those crates held books. Much of my father's library --which continued to grow even after his death, the last volumes he had subscribed to still arriving -- lines the walls here in Daugavpils now, the core of my own collection.

Latvian publishing was astonishingly continuous; frail pamphlets were published in the d. p. camps even before the war's end. High quality reappeared remarkably quickly -- the monthly Laiks boasted a full color reproduction of a Lūdolfs Liberts painting as the frontispiece of its inaugural issue in April 1946, when nearly all Latvians in the West were still destitute refugees. Helmārs Rudzītis, the publisher, wrote in his preface of how those fleeing the Soviet advance had to abandon their libraries -- "God only knows who is leafing through our beloved books now." Rudzītis observed that the odd book that had been carried westward was held to be almost holy, the words pored over again and again.

Even in those straitened circumstances, Latvians swiftly set about building a publishing industry in exile. Benjamiņš Jēgers' bibliography of Latvian publications published outside Latvia 1940-1960 fills two thick volumes. Books were seen as vital to national survival. The nation had been born in books -- we date the Awakening to the publication of Dziesmiņas latviešu valodai pārtulkotas in 1856, Alunāns' translations of poetry proving that Latvian is more than a tongue for churchmen and peasants (the peasants getting their due as the study of folklore took off).

When the 300th anniversary of the Latvian book was marked in 1885, 3000 books had been published in Latvian -- 85% of them since 1863. From 1585 to 1918 -- 12 500. In independent Latvia, between 1919 and 1929 alone, nearly the number of titles had been issued in a single decade as had been since Petrus Canisius' catechism (the first known Latvian book) appeared in Vilnius in 1585. Between 1919 and 1939, 26 754 titles were published. In terms of titles per capita, Latvia ranked second in Europe, after Denmark.

There were 166 publishing houses when the Soviets invaded in 1940 -- these were reduced to one, the State Publishing House (later Liesma, which was then joined by other state-controlled entities like that of the Academy of Sciences, Zinātne). In addition to being subject to censorship and other restrictions (something that began during Ulmanis' dictatorship), publishing became a vehicle for Russification -- by 1964, 37,5% of the books published in Latvia were in Russian, and half of the titles published in Latvian were translations from Russian.

I remember a prominent diaspora Latvian (who hoped to be received as an elder statesman here) addressing the Writers' Union during the economic... transition I suppose it was, though trying to describe the early 1990s here to anyone who didn't experience them is like trying to explain a wilderness of pain in a parallel universe through which one stumbles in the dark. The would-be statesman basically said -- you're free, so what are you waiting for... write!

This is not the place to contemplate the legacy of the captive mind or the ravages of laissez-faire à l'orientale, though. Latvia had faced devastation before (though life was different in 1920, wasn't it, when academics from as far away as China returned to Rīga to build the University... this Christmas, as a sign of an opposite process, 17 worship services will be held in Latvian in Ireland, from Galway to Limerick).

In 1920, too, there were politicians who wanted to nip support for culture in the bud. They had to face Aspazija in the Constituent Assembly, though. Latvian publishing between the wars depended upon strong state support.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Latvian publishing slowly but steadily revived -- 1387 titles in 1991, 1509 in 1992, 1614 in 1993... of late, around 2500 Latvian titles are published each year. There was no drop after the crisis of 1998. Many of these books are irredeemable trash, to be sure. Then there are publishers like Neputns and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.

The Government's and the Saeima's decision (Parliament practically rubber-stamp by now, though the "Green Peasants" seem to be losing their enthusiasm for the coalition, the "moderate" "Russian party" eagerly angling to replace them) to try to squeeze blood out of a stone by increasing the VAT on books more than fourfold is criminal. It is spit in the face of those who brought this nation into being and those who keep it alive. It is a sadistic crime, as the cash the Government hopes to collect amounts to no more than a pittance, comparatively.

In an open letter to the President, the writer and publisher Inese Zandere writes that children (whose numbers in Latvia have at last begun to rise, if slowly) are being thrown out with the bathwater in which our Government is trying to wash itself. The photo above was taken outside Parliament Thursday morning (by Reinis Oliņš for Apollo, where there is a photo gallery... you can also see how dark it is here at this time of year... that's morning, really). Slogans included "Latvia wants to read in Latvian," "down with the dictatorship of those who do not read," and "a tax on books is a tax on the mind."

Among our neighbors -- VAT on books in Estonia is 5% (0% on approved textbooks -- yes, Latvia's new 21% rate will apply to textbooks also!). Finland -- 8%. Sweden -- 6%. Poland -- zero (it's zero in Britain and Ireland, too).

How dark it is. Gustavs Strenga suggests a simplified crisis plan -- why don't we just arrest those that can read (except those in the coalition and their supporters) and shoot them, or place them in internment camps... before dread March comes and they try to make trouble?

Ikars Kubliņš notes that little demonstrations like yesterday's mean nothing. The ruling clique sips coffee and enjoys the show from the Saeima windows. Kubliņš, like some others of late, is wondering aloud about our pain threshold -- looking at the Greeks or the Thais, it's impossible not to.

But that's another topic I will try to address in the coming days. For today, I simply want to emphasize what darkness emanates from this Saeima -- del no, per li denar, vi si fa ita. (Inferno XXI: 42 -- "No into Yes for money there is changed"). Since some in Government were so offended by being called a "gang," I would like to go further -- this coalition consists of shameless creatures who belong in Malebolge dragging us into eternal night. I say that in the name of everyone I have known who cared as much about books as they did about their crust.

You're free, so what are you waiting for? But we're not free -- and we won't be until we finally free ourselves, for real this time. Baby, bathwater -- cart, horse?

Under the Latvian Yoke

2008-12-12T15:01:00.026+02:00

Under the weather and still struggling with my history text, I haven't had the time or strength to blog in these most blogospherical of days-- but I can't let the latest nails in the coffin of the Latvian nation pass without brief comment.

The Saeima ("the strongest Parliament in Europe" -- so our PM dares to call this completely discredited assembly) was in session for ca. 20 hours, until 4.30 this morning, mostly debating the rescue package upon which IMF and other neighborly help is contingent ("the fiscal restructuring program is one of the most credible that we have seen," Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg said).

The photo is of a newsstand yesterday; the front pages of Latvia's major papers were identical -- obsequies for the Latvian press, 1822-2009. Having done all it could to weaken public television (commercial TV is now suffused with dreck direct from Russia, in Russian -- even fresh films about the glorious Red Army), the Government decided to deliver a few more death blows to Latvian culture: quadrupling the VAT on books and newspapers and slashing the budget for state radio and TV to the point where only skeletons could remain. (Unlike book publishers, the press has since been given a slight reprieve -- VAT will only be doubled, like for baby food... yes, baby food; VAT will also be doubled on medicine).

A capital gains tax? Can't have that until 2010 -- businesses have business plans, you see, and our brilliant minigarchs and biznismeny have already worked things out through next year. Publishers don't have business plans, it seems -- not in the eyes of the ruling gang (the PM was compared to the leader of a brigade of racketeers last night... our comically inept Min. of Finance Atis Slakteris got compared to Mr. Bean [the Bloomberg interview has mostly disappeared from the 'Net, but the second link at Wiki still works...]; the politesse of our Parliament appears to be slipping...).

No other Parliament in Europe could have passed such a package, PM Godmanis proudly said. Former FM Pabriks agrees, but without the pride -- where else in Europe do you stay up all night to adopt plans you haven't discussed with business, labor, or society at large and end up forcing the poor and the middle class to shoulder the entire burden of a high-flying fake economy you smashed into the ground?

Māris Matrevics has written an article in Diena about how the massive VAT increase on books means quite literally taking an axe to the Latvian language. The realities of publishing in Latvia are simple. Maybe a million and a half potential readers (the rest of the Latvian population doesn't read in Latvian). An average printing of only 1200. I could add a lot of detail to this, for instance on how readership shrank because the people who read books were pauperized -- but the point is that the margins in the book biz are tiny and few are in it for the money.

The VAT increase, from 5% to 21%, would bring in maybe half a million lats. Only maybe -- because some publishers are certain to go under and book sales are certain to drop. Is it worth snuffing Latvian for half a million? You couldn't tax Maseratis and Hummers instead? (No, but we are doubling the tax on public transportation...)

I'll leave Saprge in her original Latgallian: Dreiž ar latvīšu volūdu byus taipat kai ar latgalīšu volūdu - bez raidiejumu latgaliski radejā i televizejā, bez regularys informacejis latgaliski presē, bez raksteibys vuiceišonuos školā i bez latgalīšu gruomotu skaiteituoju. Kod vysi latvīši byus sovys volūdys analfabeti, navajadzēs ni latvīšu avīžu, ni latvīšu radejis, ni latvīšu televizejis. That is not what this nation-state is supposed to be.

It's time to stop pretending or hoping that this coalition and its shadowy masters aren't intentionally choking off essential communication in this country, whether by absurdist means or more sinister censorship, as in the case of the horizontal time code (Tovarishch Kleckins continues to head the National Radio and Television Council, delighted by the Russian programming).

When I first got here and taught at the University in Rīga (winter 1991/92), a colleague told me she had gotten the impression that the destruction of the education system in Latvia was purposeful. It's easier to manage "democracy" that way.

Some years ago a wag came up with this condensation of Latvian history: "Latvia -- under the German yoke... Latvia -- under the Polish yoke... Latvia -- under the Russian yoke... Latvia -- under the Latvian yoke..."

When the famed theater director Alvis Hermanis refused to attend the ceremony where he was to receive the Order of Three Stars a year ago, he noted that he didn't doubt that Latvia would one day be as rich as Western Europe, sooner rather than later. But we've gone morally bankrupt in the meantime, ruining the window of opportunity we've had. Accepting the Diena annual award, Hermanis observed that nothing is left of Latvia other than the Latvian language... or what's left of it.

It seems the regime is hell-bent on killing that, too -- it's not part of their business project, and can even hinder it. In the meantime, the underbelly Matrevics alludes to swells. Without books, we will end up with nothing but a degraded, degrading Russo-Anglo-Latvian pidgin tongue spoken by functionally illiterate mankurts. Many already don't know what free speech is -- simply because they have nothing to say.

The folklorist Janīna Kursīte said last night that dark deeds are done in the dark. She and others in the Civic Union began to sing ("Bēdu manu, lielu bēdu...") to keep the Government from pushing the administrative reform through at three in the morning. The Singing Revolution brought down the Soviet Union here -- but singing won't be enough to bring down the remarkable array of gravediggers running this country today, I'm afraid. They lie to our faces, and nothing matters to them but power and lucre.

Rainis, speaking on the tenth anniversary of independence, in 1928: "Latvieši, sargājiet demokrātisko valsts iekārtu, jo līdz ar to bojā ies neatkarīgā nacionālā valsts!" ("Latvians, guard your democratic system, for if you lose it the independent nation-state will also be lost.") Six years later Ulmanis destroyed our democracy -- and six years after that, Rainis' prophecy came true. The Fatherlanders and other "patriotic" scoundrels helping to murder our nation can twist and shout and whine about Russkies all they like -- Latvians are actually experts at killing themselves.

Photo: Kristians Putniņš, Diena.

Pieveriet savas pākstis!

2008-11-23T21:20:00.012+02:00

The image at left -- of the "father of the dainas" as he appears on the LVL 100 banknote, altered -- is from Latvijas Avīze. Like other media here, the paper is discussing the latest antics of the ruling gang (oops Government) and its security services -- attempts to muzzle an academic and a musician for rumor-mongering with regard to the grave economic situation and its possible effects on our national currency. Today's Diena headline was "A joke or criticism of the Government can land you in jail" -- the Ventspils lecturer actually ended up in the cooler for a couple of days.

Juris Kaža has started a new blog -- Free Speech Emergency in Latvia. Aleks at All About Latvia has two posts -- "Devaluation Pronouncements" and "D-word can cost you." Veiko Spolītis provides a brief history of the Government's official pronouncements. Edward Hugh's Latvia Economy Watch continues to offer in-depth articles on the crisis.

Prémio Dardos

2008-11-23T12:14:00.005+02:00

J. Otto Pohl of Otto's Random Thoughts has awarded Marginalia the Prémio Dardos or "Best Blog Darts Thinker Award." Snowed under with work (and actual snow, today) -- I'm late with a condensed history of Latvia because I keep revising it -- I wasn't even able to finish a post on the 90th anniversary of Latvia's proclamation of independence (soon, soon). But the Dardos rules ask for acceptance (I accept -- thanks, Otto) and for passing Darts along to 15 others. Otto is parceling his out slowly, so I will do the same.

I now have 42 blogs in my "Blogs of Note" list at right (the list both shrinks and expands, but subtly and almost imperceptibly so) and all are worth checking out for one reason or another, whether they're primarily personal like at the end of the world (formerly Allergic to Whiskey) or collective efforts at unseemly provocation like Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War. Speaking of the unseemly, I removed both La Russophobe and Da Russophile from my list a while back -- I try to link to diverse views, but the level of bile in the blogosphere is such that I will no longer list sites venomously employing supposedly cutesy disinformative devices like the term "eSStonia" or veering into barely concealed nacionālā naida kurināšana.

Here are five blogs deserving of Darts:

A Step At A Time -- David McDuff's site has long been an indispensable compendium of information on "the world’s present troubles as a continuation of the old common struggle with tyranny and oppression." David's take is unique, and the blog not rarely includes original translations of news you would only find elsewhere with great difficulty.

Ukrainiana -- "Political Ukraine laid bare. For those who care." Taras' Moscowcentrism-free explorations of the vortices of Ukrainian politics are... dizzying.

Blue, Black and White Alert -- An extremely well written blog by an Estonian-American living in Estonia. Comes complete with acerbic wit laced with the Yuleland pragmatism of Fenno-Ogres and crypto-Baltic black humor.

Veiko Spolītis' Baltic -- If Taras' political Ukraine is dizzying, Veiko's political Latvia is... depressing, but not devoid of hope: "The choice is simple - to reform the post-Soviet education, political and economic structures or to become a murky dependency relying on the Russian oil and mineral resources transit commissions."

Neeka's Backlog -- The blogosphere's gold standard for blending the personal and political. With exceptional photographs, too.

As Time Goes By

2008-10-24T09:47:00.010+03:00

Rick: "If it's December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?" Sam: "What? My watch stopped." Flying to Stockholm from Rīga in 1993 was flying from one world to another, from the Wild East to -- civilization, overfed? Back then, the New York Times had dubbed the Latvian capital "the Casablanca of the North."

You arrive in Sweden before you leave, because of the time zone. If it's September '93 in Rīga, it's also '39; an Ulmanis becomes President on the strength of his surname in a country where the historical clock had stopped in 1940 (it didn't really stop, of course, except in some country of the mind). The early 1990s were a time of "fundamental things" for me -- of long summers in Semigallia, without plumbing, without electricity, without the Web (I had a huge manual typewriter that had doubtless served various organs of repression; Vonnegut, ever so popular here, wasn't fiction -- the twin lightning bolts of the SS a common character, shift).

My mother, visiting from Canada, brought her mother's list of the serial numbers of the typewriters they'd lost in the war ("That they are brown and soft, /And liable to melt as snow") -- grandmother ran a secretarial school in a building that by the 'Nineties held a pritons, a den of iniquity. "We lived in the street of parades" -- Bear Slayer's Street, the cobblestones come as ballast from Sweden, still there, the name restored (what names weren't restored -- Vadoņa, Aizsargu [the Great Leader and his Guard]). My repatriation to a country of the mind. Mother said that Latvijas Radio couldn't replicate the sound of the ice breaking in the Daugava until somebody realized that amplifying the sound of salt being rubbed against a table resembled it. "Alchemical broth." A kiss is just a kiss. For heat, you go to the forest. Fire rites. Fundamental things.

When I got here, no one had ever heard of Mark Rothko -- even the few surviving Jews were astounded by the lucrative fame of their son. Today the highest habitable point in town is the Rothko Bar (that tall hotel used to have a radiation readout rather than a clock above the door). I haven't been up there yet. Fama, in of itself ("no picture is made to endure nor to live with / but it is made to sell and sell quickly") -- you will be assimilated, as they say. A "Latvian artist" who never knew Latvia. Is the Pale a country of the mind, too? Desperately seeking some connection to the city of his birth, point to what might be ice floes -- surely his childhood memories meant something, the river's city (which turns its back upon the river, really, the levee hiding the flow). After a winter here ("null winters do sear such and more") the breaking of the ice begins to mean something. Under the lucre, actual riches -- a Matisse for every pot, and then. Nowadays almost no one remembers Vīdzirkste. His crossing paths with the erstwhile Marcus Rothkowitz in New York is as likely as Lenin and Rainis meeting up at the Cabaret Voltaire. Swiss artists all, no?

Back in '93, as a short-lived international secretary of the Writers' Union, I was in Sweden for the opening of the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators on Gotland. Fifteen years later, that Centre has a filius philosophorum -- the House of Language in Ventspils. What time is it in Gothenburg? I have no watch (the last one I had was stolen in a Warsaw train station while I slept), and if you try to call me, my phone is either turned off or I find myself outside of the zone (I'm transferring the number from the Castle to myself). Keeping time, time, time /In a sort of Runic rhyme... Ventspils -- Andra, Ieva, Iveta -- organized the focus on Latvia at the Göteborg Book Fair, and look how far we've come!

My first worry was -- pop, wir sind modern, aber nicht verwestlicht? I hadn't been out of the country for years. The more "Western" Latvia gets, the harder it is to perceive the difference between a functional society and this gorgeously dysfunctional one. But look how far we've come! I spent two summers in Sweden as a child, at Ladvik, and my little nationalist soul was severely disturbed by the fact that most Swedes had never heard of Lettland. On a clear day you can see across the water, but the Iron Curtain came between.

I had a terrific time -- I saw people I haven't seen in more than three decades (Gods, I's old), like Juris Rozītis. To place what exile was, read Juris' thesis. The photo above (by Ilmārs Znotiņš) is of the Latvian pavilion at the fair, which attracted over a hundred thousand visitors and more than a thousand journalists (it is, by any measure, one of the largest cultural events in Northern Europe). One of the highlights was an exhibition of books in Latvian published in Sweden after the war. I have many of them, from Papa (here an echo of an obscure poem by Uldis -- never mind). How we misunderestimate the exodus?

Existentially, we are no better off, Gunilla Forsén said when I asked her how it was to live in what was, comparatively, at least, Paradise -- back then, in the 'Nineties. One doesn't understand what Paradise is until one talks to students. What was the difference between eking out an existence here and the sort of opportunity every Swede has? How much of that comes down to national wealth, quite simply?

What of it comes down to rights, rights we were almost always denied? Lars Peter Fredén, the first Western diplomat to be stationed in Latvia, even before the occupation was brought to an end, spoke at Gothenburg of realizing how Swedes are barely acquainted with tragedy. When the Estonia sank, more died a tragic death than had since the 1700s -- can one ever bridge that gap, Latvians losing perhaps a third of the population in the First World War and a similar swathe in the Second?

Johan Öberg, who moderated one of the panels I was on, brought up a fun fact -- Rīga was once the largest city in Sweden. In Latvian, we still use the phrase "like in the Swedish era" -- when we're doing well, it's kā zviedru laikos. One can parse the hard reality -- it wasn't necessarily as pretty as we paint it -- but one need only look at schooling to realize why the phrase persists; among the concrete attempts to extend peasants' rights, Swedish rule meant bulding schools, and forcing the Baltic barons to provide the means for universal education. When the Russians came, these reforms were rolled back.

Here we are, here we are. 2008. How does the Swedish right to cross private property actually work in Latvia? Me live by lake, me build wall -- and fuck you. Swedes still read -- do we?

The Latvian pavilion was a cardboard reflection of the new National Library, finally being built.

Pēteris pameta pili

2008-10-16T22:37:00.005+03:00

After more than two years of translating, writing, and editing for the President of Latvia (two Presidents: Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga and her successor), I left the Castle today. I will still do work for the Chancery on contract, but I am no longer an employee. Now I can say what I really think! Just kidding...

The Populist Firing Squad

2008-09-06T11:50:00.006+03:00

This week, exploiting public outrage at the brutal murder of a girl by her father, Gaidis Bērziņš and Mareks Segliņš, Latvia's Minister of Justice and Interior Minister, mused publically about restoring the death penalty in Latvia, Segliņš suggesting that we could possibly hold a referendum on the matter.

Arguments on whether or not there should be a death penalty are one thing (as you might guess, I am strongly opposed). The core of the sly imbecility here, however, is another matter entirely—capital punishment is outlawed in Europe (except in Belarus, which is “the last outpost of tyranny,” and Kazakhstan, which is mostly in Central Asia). Abolitionism is not just fundamental to the EU, it is also a basic principle and a principal priority of the Council of Europe, to which we’ve belonged for over thirteen years. The CoE is a much larger and broader structure than the EU is, with 47 members. Even Russia, that beacon of brutality, has instituted a moratorium on capital punishment. The European Convention on Human Rights requires its complete abolition, even for crimes committed in wartime.

The idea of reinstating the death penalty is thus completely out of the question. These politicians (one a law professor!), speaking as cabinet ministers and not as private individuals, have deliberately chosen to inflame Latvians’ baser instincts and disregard reality. The world-view of Jānis Šmits, the proudly intolerant human rights guru quoted in the Deutsche Presse-Agentur article—that tolerance is “a new secular paradigm” artificially forced upon us by Europe—is part and parcel of this. Trawling the scuzzy bottoms of Latvian Internet fora, what’s striking is how unutterably uneducated in civics Letts are (one study showed that we are about as enlightened as Bulgarians in this regard). The typical reactions often include the mantra “Brussels is telling us what to do.” For most, Europe is still elsewhere… and that is, of course, a self-fulfilling belief. Many people don’t see Latvia as part of this legal system and a contributor to it— which Latvia is, legal scholars like Ziemele, Levits and Ušacka being significant at a European level—but instead think and act like boorish, brain-dead dwarfs in some dispossessed chukhnya.

And the wardens of this chukhnya, our ever so sparkling political elite, continue to lead us off into a politics that recalls the title of Ferlinghetti’s book of verse, Unfair Arguments with Existence. Let’s all indulge in a national debate about something that’s totally impossible! But why not? It works in everything else in our politics—instead of working constructively to integrate Russophones, we get the "nationalist" tirades of the bigots Dobelis and Tabūns. In place of badly needed education reform, we prefer to traipse about mouthing piffle about our imminent “knowledge-based society.” Nary an opportunity goes by in which we don’t tell the world about our “shared democratic values”—our lack thereof nearly fully externalized by now (we’d be Scandinavia if it wasn’t for them Russkies!).

Messrs. Segliņš and Bērziņš choose to pander to tumsonība ("obscurantism," benighted ignorance). Since there’s not an election coming up, this desire must run really deep. What’s especially revolting to me is the waste of time. We’ll soon have had two decades of independence, but it seems that we’ve become “more European” mainly by replacing our Žiguļi with BMWs—second-hand for the pilchard-eaters, nice and shiny for the elite. We haven’t even learned to drive, what with the fewest cars and most road accidents per capita in Europe.

The photograph of a 1913 execution in Mexico is from the Library of Congress.

Latvia and Georgia

2008-08-17T12:09:00.017+03:00

In the deluge of press on the war in the Caucasus and its background, not a few articles refer to Baltic and Central/Eastern European sympathy for Georgia, now and then with understanding (of varying depth, usually shallow) and sometimes with dismissive patter about "American puppets" suffering from "Russophobia." As I've often suggested before, for instance in my review of Edward Lucas' The New Cold War, a phobia is a "persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous" (American Heritage); there is nothing irrational or abnormal about the Baltic fear of our huge, imperialistic neighbor. There is no avoiding it -- geographically, historically, culturally, politically and economically, we are on the frontier.

In the map that serves as the frontispiece of Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, (which I purchased, oddly enough, in Damascus), the line dividing "Western civilization" from "the Orthodox world" runs through Ukraine but to the east of Latvia. In reality, despite our Euro-Atlantic integration -- that line should run through Latvia, too. Latgallia, the comparatively impoverished eastern region in which I live, was the only part of the country to vote against joining the EU. On New Year's Eve, not a few fireworks go off at 11 P.M. -- midnight Moscow time. Cable TV and radio broadcasts are almost entirely in Russian. Euronews is Yevronoose, but most of those watching get their information from Russia's state-controlled TV. Sipping some of what was on offer the other night, as Russia's "triumphant" invasion continued, I had to pull the plug. As Andrei Illarionov writes in his "Thirteen Conclusions about the War": "The degree of manipulation of public opinion, and the speed with which the society was brought to mass hysteria, are clear evidence of the regime’s 'achievements', and pose an undeniable and unprecedented danger to the Russian society."

Stretched similes abound, to 1938 and 1968 -- some worth reading -- but most of the reactions that try to address the Baltic and Polish response lack meat. Even in terms of rather recent history -- how quickly we forget! At New Kosova Report, which has published some interesting articles on why Ossetia and Kosovo should not be equated, I came across this article from Time, 28 January 1991.

Shaking their fists defiantly, protesters last week massed at the government house in Tbilisi, capital of the Georgian republic, chanting, "Lithuania! Lithuania! Lithuania!" For this fiercely independent nation of 5.4 million in the Caucasus, the troubles in the Baltics far to the north seemed alarmingly near. Georgians had already felt the Kremlin's determination to keep the union intact, when Soviet paratroopers armed with sharpened spades brutally dispersed a nationalist demonstration in April 1989, killing 20 people. Just as the Baltic states showed support in that hour of crisis, Georgians embraced the tragedy in Vilnius last week as if it were their own.

The photograph in this post is of a work by Jūlijs Straume, an artist renowned for his textiles; I thought I would avoid the photos of carnage one can find everywhere these days. Long resident in Georgia and an avid researcher in Georgian traditions, he was also the first Latvian envoy to the short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia, proclaimed in the same year the Baltic states declared their independence. The Baltics, with all our tragedy, had better luck -- like Belarus, which also declared its independence ninety years ago, Georgia was crushed before it could enjoy the two decades of nation-building we did. Twenty years, sullied by our own descent into authoritarianism and blighted by the shadows of the approaching war, might not seem like much -- but our parents and grandparents remembered being free. The maps I grew up with in America almost always bore the note that the United States and most Western countries did not recognize the annexation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania by the USSR. The fervent hope that we would regain our independence seemed to be an absurd dream to many even at the fall of the Berlin Wall. The maps had no such note for Georgia, Belarus, or Ukraine -- though Georgia did have some success in achieving diplomatic recognition for its doomed Republic, fate and Stalin dictated otherwise.

But the emotional intimacy some of us feel isn't merely rooted in our republics having been born at the same time -- as close relatives in that our politics were Western, the black sheep joining the Bolsheviks -- or even in the relations between the popular fronts that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union that Lt. Col. Putin calls a catastrophe. The intimacy comes not only of the Russian subjugation we suffered -- it springs from the knowledge that subjugation wrought, which can indeed color our views but also gives us insight others lack. Even now, as Georgia is raped, one Jean Matouck can write of a Russia "which is recovering and which obviously has no desire other to develop and enrich itself with dignity [sic]."

Another Time article, from 1993, recalls Foreign Minister Kozyrev's rants about the "near abroad," that twilight zone to which the Kremlin -- and not a few European politicians -- would have confined us... and to which M. Matouck would condemn Ukraine and Georgia by denying them Euro-Atlantic integration. That use of the word "dignity" recalls Hitler's rants about the humiliation of Versailles. Bullies are not dignified, as a rule, and Matouck's contention that Russia "had every indication of becoming powerful again without being aggressive" unless provoked exhibits a stunning ignorance of Russian thinking, not to mention a blithe disregard for the right of free nations to chart a course not hobbled by deference to the wounded pride of the prison house of nations.

I am not arguing against prudence -- I'm arguing for it. I don't doubt that Misha poked the bear; Saakashvili is not my idea of an urbane diplomat. Nonetheless, anyone paying any attention to the relations between the Baltic states and Russia must know that Russia can perceive most anything not in line with its incessantly refried falsifications of history and its increasingly fascistic imperial ambitions as a "provocation." Its current Ambassador to NATO talked about invading Estonia in response to the removal of an offensive statue to a cemetery, after all. No need to poke the bear -- let the statues the occupiers erected stay where they are, I say.

And yet -- the ground beneath these symbols can recall The Night of the Living Dead. It is all well and good to let bygones be bygones -- but not by denying our history or betraying our friends. The Western European refrains that paint us as stuck in the mud of the war don't take the zombies into account. "Europe has moved on." Indeed it has -- but Russia has not. Its Stalinist mythology underpins the foundation of the empire it is trying to restore, the pilings sunk in soil soaked with 19th C concepts. One needn't poke the bear -- but one mustn't pretend it is a tame creature.

Writing about another victim of Russian aggression, Chechnya, nearly a decade ago, Mel Huang contrasted the views of secondary school graduates from Estonian-language and Russian-language schools, observing that "the comments from the Russian-speaking graduates seem horrific and brutal, but if one watches Russian TV, one sees that this very much represents normal public opinion in the country." One can say the same today -- and one would have to include the local Russian-language media in Latvia, which inspires demonstrations like this one, by Russophones in Rīga supporting the Kremlin.

A few years ago I watched a documentary about the art of Jūlijs Straume. People like Nino Yakubidze, who heads the Georgian Association in Latvia, have worked hard to develop relations between Rīga and Tbilisi, where there is a Latvian Association. Cooperation between NGOs, scholarships, art, books about the ties between Georgians and Latvians... but these days Nino Yakubidze has to talk about death and Russian disinformation instead.

Latvia Strongly Supports Georgia

2008-08-14T21:46:00.006+03:00

The strong statement on Russia's invasion of Georgia by the heads of state of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland has been followed by a vote in the Saeima, Latvia's Parliament. The Saeima voted this evening for a very harsh resolution condemning Russia for its aggression against Georgia -- a resolution with teeth (thanks primarily to Sandra Kalniete, one of the leaders of the Popular Front in the Singing Revolution, a writer and diplomat with extensive EU experience). Among other things, it calls upon our Government to continue to push for Georgian NATO accession, to ask that the EU reevaluate the EU-Russian partnership (including visa restrictions), and to ask NATO to strengthen security and security guarantees for Russia's neighbors. It also asks for clarity in future EU expansion, so that those countries implementing reforms know the score (and urges visa liberalization for candidate countries).

SC (Harmony Center), the ostensibly "moderate" coterie of pro-Moscow MPs, walked out and did not participate in the debates, leaving a handful of PCTVL radicals who have vowed to defend Abkhazian and Ossetian interests as the only MPs opposed, making inane arguments ("in the current economy we must think of our own people first" rather than antagonize innocent Moscow) whilst amendments giving the resolution its teeth passed with large majorities.

Considering the fact that the parties in power and New Era rarely agree on anything, the unity in this special session was remarkable (despite some sniping). The vote was 64-4 with 1 abstention. Bravo!

The photograph is from the demonstration in support of Georgia that took place in Latvia's capital on Monday -- more photos are available at Apollo, whence I filched this one.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

2008-08-04T08:35:00.005+03:00

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the first translation of Russian literature I ever read. Skipping lunch, I hoarded my allowance to acquire the rest of Solzhenitsyn's oeuvre in English, at a dismal chain bookstore in an aging suburban shopping mall. The bearded, long-haired clerk, a Trot stranded among the Harlequins, tried to disabuse me of my anti-Communist convictions. Aleksandr Isayevich's disdain for materialism was what most attracted me in adolescence. Looking back -- and one can't do that, unfortunately, without choking on the anachronistic vagaries of his Slavophilia, touched upon in the New York Times obituary -- I know I'll have to go back and reread him. The older English translation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita captured me back then, too, and again later, in the much finer Latvian translation by the poet Ojārs Vācietis... but rereading it not so long ago, I was struck by how many levels in that novel opened only upon living here, or after catching the merest fading shadow of the collapsed imperium. To be transported to "Matryona's House" from middle class American suburbia by literary magic was wondrous. It must read so very differently in a hovel in the hamlet of Slutišķi, called "Latvia's Siberia" because used as a Siberian backdrop in a soap opera... or in any nearby backwater, filtered through the dark, dense foliage of the stories here, innumerable individual histoires, lives direct or overheard, the tangible sense of tragedy hovering over abandoned farmsteads and unmarked graves, the trenches of the First World War still visible in the forest -- the place colored by the reading, the reading to be colored by place. To listen to those who suffered is often to hear

Gradually it became clear to me that the line separating good from evil runs not between states, not between classes, and not between parties -- it runs through the heart of each and every one of us, and through all human hearts. This line is not stationary. It shifts and moves with the passing of the years. Even in hearts enveloped in evil, it maintains a small bridgehead of good. And even the most virtuous heart harbors an uprooted corner of evil.

R.I.P., Aleksandr Isayevich.

The photograph of Solzhenitsyn as an inmate is from a biographical sketch at Vēsture sauc.

The Hottest Day of the Year

2008-08-03T10:01:00.008+03:00

A partial solar eclipse on Lammas was followed by the hottest day of the year on Saturday (not that this part of the world gets to resemble the Sahara -- the mercury reached 28° C in Rīga... but we find that insufferable).

Yesterday was also the day our citizens were given the chance to vote to amend the Satversme, Latvia's Constitution, to allow the people to sack the Saeima, our Parliament.

The powers that be mostly urged people to stay home rather than vote for or against these changes -- a technique that is not exactly redolent of democratic convictions. Summer in Latvia is short and sweet, not conducive to traipsing to polling stations -- many people head for the countryside on the limited number of balmy weekends. Still, with 995 of 998 precincts reporting, 608 202 persons voted in favor of the amendments, 18 831 against.

That means, however, that the "servants of the people," as our Members of Parliament so love to describe themselves, can relax and return to misrule unhindered -- for the referendum to be valid, at least half of Latvia's eligible voters would need to vote in favor of the changes. The 40,14% garnered is insufficient.

Veiko Spolītis looks at some politicians' views on the referendum here.

"I rode into the hamlet on a white horse..."

2008-07-29T12:11:00.006+03:00

So bragged Vasiliy Kononov, the convicted war criminal whose appeal to the European Court of Human Rights was successful. Vilhelm Konnander has written about the recent decision at Global Voices, where I've responded (primarily with extracts from the dissents; the judgment [4:3] and the dissents are available as a .doc file here and are very much worth reading).

The Kononov case has dragged on for years. Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze has a retrospective that includes fresh commentary from judges and prosecutors (in Latvian).

From what I wrote at soc.culture.baltics some years ago:

First, a brief précis of Kononov's crimes. He was the commander and organizer of a group of eighteen Red Partisans in a brigade called the "Little Boat" in the territory of occupied Latvia and Belarus. He organized and planned a mission of revenge at Mazo Batu sādža (the hamlet of Mazie Bati) near Ludza in May 1944, in response to a German military unit's destruction of a Red Partisan group commanded by Chugunov in February. Dressed in German uniforms, Kononov's group entered the hamlet on 27 May, when its inhabitants were preparing to celebrate the Pentecost. They divided into smaller groups and broke into the houses. One Modest Krupnikov begged them not to shoot him in front of his young son. They ordered Krupnikov to run into the woods and shot him there, gravely wounding him and leaving him to bleed to death. His cries for help were heard into the night, but the inhabitants were too afraid to give him aid. Another group broke into the home of Meikul Krupnik. Krupnik was in the sauna. They dragged him and another man from the sauna to the house, stole weapons, shot the men and Krupnik's mother, then torched the house. Krupnik's pregnant wife attempted to flee. They threw her into the burning house, where she was burned to death together with the two men and Krupnik's mother. They visited two other houses, robbing and killing. In total, they murdered nine civilians, burning six of them (including three women, one of whom was pregnant).

[The information in the above summary is from the rejection of Kononov's appeal by the Senate of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Latvia, 28 September 2004.]

I hope Latvia will appeal the flawed ECHR decision to the Grand Chamber, as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recommended.

Wolf One-Eye

2008-06-22T10:28:00.003+03:00

As this blog has a number of Lithuanian readers of late, I thought I'd post a poster for a Latvian literary event that will be taking place in Vilnius on Wednesday the 25th. I won't be able to make it -- but I highly recommend Wolf One-Eye by Juris Kronbergs. I saw a performance of the piece in Rīga a few years ago. If you're in Vilnius -- don't miss it!

W(h)ither the Nation? (IV)

2008-05-18T15:01:00.022+03:00

I can't call an end to my hiatus yet, but I thought I'd post a slightly altered version of something I wrote for a "political demolition derby" elsewhere. Ambersun said, with regard to Dr. Miķelis Valters (pictured at left):

You also fail to state here, as you do elsewhere, that Mikelis Valters was a “Socialist Revolutionary.” This would add to an understanding of the language chosen and thinking behind.

[The language in question is that of the Satversme, Latvia's Constitution -- it states that the "sovereign power of the State of Latvia is vested in the people of Latvia," not the Latvian people. This isn't trivial -- it's the basis for the political nation, as opposed to the ethnic nation. My response to Ambersun follows.]

Would it? Perhaps so. But what would it add, exactly? I have written about Valters' politics here [at that forum] in the past (and the stubs on Valters and the Latvian эсеры at Wiki were begun by me -- see, for example, "Latvian Social Democratic Union").

Valters, of Liepāja, was exiled to Dvinsk (!) in 1897 as a member of the New Current, whence he fled to Switzerland and studied law (and wrote poetry). Active in SDS in exile (whence the first demands for a democratic Latvian nation-state, published in the West), he penned lengthy, eloquent polemics about the Latvia he envisioned and argued against both the denationalized, pro-Russian Left and the reactionary, pro-Russian Latvian bourgeoisie.

There are a few strains of thought in Valters' national socialism (and yes, that's what it was, though the term is obviously now sullied by later associations...). In his own words, however: Mūsu politiskā programma ir pirmā kārtā personas stiprināšanas programma. Valdības nomācošam virzienam viņa stāda pretim citu: atsvabināšanu. Kādam tam jābūt, zīmējoties uz atsevišķu cilvēku, par to nav domu starpības, bet neskaidrāki ir uzskati, zīmējoties uz tautas personu. ("Patvaldību nost, Krieviju nost!" Proletārietis, 1903). [Roughly: "Our political programme is first of all that of strengthening the person. In opposition to oppression by government, it offers another direction: liberation. What that must be like, with regard to the individual, isn't in dispute -- but views with regard to the national entity are less clear."]

Arnis (Runcis') book on the Latvian political awakening (first published on the eve of Ulmanis' coup [1934] and reprinted in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1971) summarizes Valters' thoughts quite well, with extracts from his writings. There's a lengthy polemic against Andrievs Niedra, for example, also printed in Proletārietis in 1904. In response to Niedra calling the national socialists traitors to the fatherland, Valters explains that a fatherland is a state, consisting of land, people, and government. This last component must reflect the will of the people. Valters writes that we can see what the fatherland of Niedra and those who side with oppressors is -- tie ir svešinieki, svešais kaŗa pulks, kas nāk laupīdams mūsu zemē, svešie ierēdņi, pātaga un kulaks. Mūsu tēvu zeme ir cilvēki, mūsu tauta. (Valters' emphasis on "[m]ūsu.") [Roughly: "they are strangers, a foreign military that comes to raid our land, alien functionaries, the whip and the kulak. Our fatherland is the people, our people /or 'nation'/"].

Throughout these writings, Valters consistently emphasizes citizenship, especially active participation by the citizens in government. "Tauta" can have a variety of meanings, from народ to nation. Ethnicity, tautība, is inferior already in the 1905 resolution of the SDS -- the right of self-determination belongs to the citizens of the state, regardless of their gender, religion, or ethnicity [or "nationality"] (6. punkts).

I would like to point out that the reactionary period -- the First Falling Asleep that followed the First Awakening, from the late 1880s -- is often referred to as the "tautiskais laikmets," [very roughly -- "the ethnic period"] and the bourgeois Latvians Valters opposed inherit the name "tautībnieki" [ethnicists] from the Lettophiles of the Awakening, but in a derogatory sense. Even with regard to the song festivals -- Valters looks back upon Festivals I, II and III (held in 1873, 1880, and 1888) as involving the masses (tautas masas); by IV (1895), the angle of emphasis on Latvian culture had become mere butaforija [a mere prop]. The middle classes were for the most part content in the Russian Empire, for material reasons.

Essentially, what Valters and Rolavs did was transform the cultural awakening that began in the 1850s but had petered out by the 1880s, into a political awakening, which is the subject of Arnis' book. This took place in a narrow circle of people, in exile -- one couldn't publish such things in the Baltic provinces, and as far as I know, not many issues were smuggled in or disseminated.

Valters did not look upon the Russian Empire as a state in his sense of what a state must be, and he didn't see the Tsar's subjects as citizens. He was well-educated, and I think the "Latvijas" ["of Latvia"] is more a reflection of his legal training and his study of Western Europe than it is of his socialism. You can say that he was an SR, true -- but he and Rolavs were clearly nationalists from the very beginning (their views also diverged after a time, btw), and time is important here; Valters was in the Farmers' Union, Ulmanis' party, when he was a member of the provisional government (Rolavs was dead -- murdered by the powers that be).

This is not at all surprising -- it's a direct consequence of their understanding of Latvia and democracy. Both looked carefully at Switzerland (which, as you know, consists of ethnically German, French, and Italian people, and others, who are politically Swiss). Rolavs even tried to envision an overhauled Russia as a giant Switzerland, and he contrasted France to the Confederation as undemocratic, because of its centralization.

Both men were highly critical of the mainstream Left -- the New Current and the Social Democrats. They both write of Latvia's intellectual poverty -- Rolavs observes that our culture is only half a century old [sic!], and notes that we had only 16 students in 1856. They see the jaunstrāvnieki as providing bad translations of alien and inapplicable German (and, later, Russian) Marxist thought, copying what the half-educated only superficially understood until they became blind to how ludicrous they were. Valters also attacks the deracinated Jewish cosmopolitan, btw, as a supporter of empire (one sees this throughout Eastern Europe), and criticizes the New Current as composed of the deluded sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie.

So, if you are suggesting that being an SR made him less of a nationalist, you couldn't be more wrong -- nationalism suffuses his work. He rails against the Latvian bourgeoisie both grande and petite, for example, observing that building a border between Russia and Latvia even in thought was a threat to their material interests; that not teaching Russian in the schools would have led to material losses for them, and that the mass movement (Social Democracy) that they bred made them more Russian than the Russians.

He placed his faith in the Latvian farmer, seen as the next recipient of the democracy that had broken down feudalism in the cities. Valters came from the working class, but in his notes on his intellectual development -- which primarily concern philosophy and poetry, not politics -- he writes of how the excitement of youth brought different Latvians together... how learning took him from the "alcoholic proletariat" of the lower class suburbs of Liepāja ("[t]e sabiedrības vai tautības jēdziens neeksistēja" [roughly: "neither the notion of community nor nationality existed here"]) to the Ancient Greeks and Kant, overcoming seemingly insurmountable differences in background with the sons of vain Semigallian landowners. (In Trimdas rakstnieki, 1. sēj., ed. Pēteris Ērmanis. Kempten [Allgäu]: Viļa Štāla Apgāds, 1947).

You [Ambersun] are incessantly raving about Russians, your "overwhelming, crushing, and nation-destroying” "problem" (and you do so in a slippery way -- I would note that 50 000 is far fewer than 14%, that not a few of the people who go to the Victory Monument are not Russians, and that many people go there without anti-Latvian sentiments in mind, which sentiments anyway come in different colors and degrees). The most overwhelming, crushing, and nation-destroying problem the Republic faces is posed by Latvians, Ambersun. As has been pointed out to you time and again, the "Russian parties" aren't in government and have had almost no influence at all upon Latvia for the last seventeen years. Further, re the percentage [of minorities in Latvia as part of the population], as I already suggested -- non-citizens don't count; the percentage of minorities as a portion of the electorate is not as dramatically different as raw demographics would make it seem. Hanging out a few auseklīši [eight-pointed stars that have come to symbolize "Latvianism"] and playing ethnopolitical games to get the vote doesn't obscure the mercenary instincts of the Latvian (latviešu! -- ethnic Latvian!) elite.

Yes, Valters changed -- he was always changing, actually, though not illogically so. As [the historian Aivars] Stranga writes in the Jumava history, many notable figures who had stood at the cradle of Latvia's democracy surrendered to the wave of anti-democratic sentiment and themselves helped to strengthen it, Kārlis Skalbe and Miķelis Valters among them. Later, Valters changed yet again, demanding the restoration of democracy -- he called his friend Ulmanis and the Ulmanist cabal the "gravediggers" of the Latvian state.

Though at least a couple of our esteemed forum participants apparently live in a dream world shot through with nightmare rather than in Europe, whatever wisdom can be gleaned from the study of Latvia's coming into being must be tempered with today's realities, in which the great questions that concerned Valters and our other founding fathers -- land reform and class struggle, for instance -- are quite simply irrelevant. The establishment of the nation-state is a fait accompli, too, and that was doubtless the most difficult task they accomplished.

A sense of "nationness" [Ambersun's word] in a Europe that just concluded the Lisbon Treaty, giving the EU a president (heh -- two, even) and, supposedly, a common foreign policy, is obviously different, too. Some things from that earlier era remain valid -- the emphasis on governance, for example, and on the need for our representatives to be responsible to the people. One can stew in national romanticism all one likes, and become roadkill, but most Europeans snigger at the Kennedy formulation -- people ask what the country can do for them, not the other way around. Government is seen as a service provider, primarily.

Hiatus

2008-05-13T16:09:00.003+03:00

Sorry for not posting lately. I am submerged in a bunch of unwieldy translation projects, and in the evenings I enjoy the spring (Castalian, of course, as at left).

About 17 pages of the Penetralium are being published in England this week. They won't be available virtually, at least for a while, but you can send your checks to 10th Muse and get them physically if you so desire (shameless plug).

For free political demolition derby, you can visit my comrade Aleks.

The Sad Saga of the Strawberry Cake

2008-04-18T14:16:00.015+03:00

Last fall's Case of the Mysterious Briefcase, which led to the resignation of the man who'd once been the world's first Green Prime Minister, Indulis Emsis, couldn't exhaust the Green Peasants' flair for black comedy, it seems. One of yesterday's headlines was MINISTER TO REIMBURSE STATE FOR STRAWBERRY CAKE.

The Minister in question is the Special Assignments Minister for Electronic Government Affairs, Ina Gudele. She didn't use the taxpayers' money to pay for her birthday gift, a hammock (a fact she's apparently proud of). She did use the taxpayers' money to rent the space in which her birthday party was held, buy the wine with which it was celebrated, and obtain the by now notorious strawberry cake.

The Green Peasants' leaders quickly gathered to insist that she retain her Cabinet post -- she's "responsible only morally," according to them. The cake, of course, is the symbolic tip of the iceberg our ship of state long ago struck -- as Laila Pakalniņa points out in her editorial, the PM was probably not thinking about the Green Peasants when he didn't ask for Ina Gudele's resignation... or at least not as much as he thought about his fellow party member Ainārs Šlesers of Latvia's First Party, who has mishandled far more funds than a cake costs but remains the Minister of Transport, presiding over some of the world's most expensive bad roads and a post office that is all but bankrupt. How can one take action on a cake when we are building what might end up being the world's most expensive bridge?

Meanwhile, people have started signing up for yet another referendum, a ballot initiative to raise the minimum pension to subsistence level. This type of populism is unworkable -- there isn't any money for such an increase (what with the cake budget...). The sentiments, however, are perfectly understandable, like those of one Anatols on the front page of Diena yesterday. His 107 LVL monthly pension is now 118 LVL (ca. 167 EUR). He says it's possible to survive as it was during the war, when everyone was starving and lice-ridden. Or as they did after the war, when his father promised him a kilogram of candy if he didn't join the Young Pioneers -- he never got the candy because there was no candy available. Or like in his childhood, when he got two hot potatoes and felt so very happy. But not now, and not here. Anatols went to every demonstration for Latvia's freedom, from the very first protests called by Helsinki-86. Anatols is tired of waiting.

Anatols no doubt knows that the salary of a Cabinet Minister in 2009 is to be 4512 LVL (ca. 6420 EUR) a month -- and still it is difficult for Ina Gudele to get her own strawberry cake.

Update: Gudele is resigning after all.

"The Genocide Loophole"

2008-04-14T13:24:00.008+03:00

Henry Alminas at the soc.culture.baltics newsgroup drew my attention to Jonah Goldberg's recent article in the National Review. It begins: "Last week, Russia’s lower house of parliament passed a resolution insisting that Josef Stalin’s man-made 1932-33 famine — called the Holodomor in Ukrainian — wasn’t genocide." In view of some of the debates in the comments at this blog, like those that followed "Прибой," I thought I would highlight Goldberg's piece.

Today, Mao and Stalin aren’t in Hitler’s class of evil because Hitler wasn’t a “modernizer,” he was a racist. Note how the Russians have no problem copping to the charge of mass murder but recoil at suggestions it was racially motivated.

It’s a wrongheaded distinction. Murder is murder, whether the motive is bigotry or the pursuit of allegedly enlightened social planning.

It’s also a false distinction. Racial genocide is often rationalized as a form of progress by those responsible. Under the Holodomor, Ukrainian culture was systematically erased by the Russian Soviets, who saw it as expendable. No doubt the Sudanese janjaweed in Darfur and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Tibet believe they are “modernizers,” too.

Read the entire article here.

The mask is from the Occupation Museum. "Such masks were tied on to protect the face from frostbite when working outdoors in temperatures as low as -40°C (-40°F). The mask was made for the political prisoner Kārlis Ārgalis in the Amur region in the 1950s."

W(h)ither the Nation? (III)

2008-04-12T12:36:00.010+03:00

As the diabolus and fouteur de merde in me expected, I've received a lot of responses to the last installment in this series of musings, some privately. Not surprisingly, parts of the last post rubbed some of my more rightist friends the wrong way.

Snork, Vidas, and Giustino, among others, also provided ample reason for further ruminations in their comments, so here are some scattered thoughts.

Vidas wrote: The Baltics are not healthy thriving democracies. We are not success stories yet. That work needs to be done before the Baltic experience is applied to places on other continents. The Baltic experience isn't finished - and its not really a success story yet.

I certainly agree that we're a work in progress (and as the first epistle suggested -- there are days when the Castle of Light seems out of sight, not only a few decades' climb ahead, and nights when it seems we're stumbling in the opposite direction [Denk' ich an Lettland in der Nacht...]) -- but the Baltic experience won't ever be finished, at least not till we're extinct. Pace Fukuyama, but I don't see history ending anytime soon.

In the meantime -- we can't exist in a no-man's-land, jiving to provisional measures as though we weren't in the here and now; that was part of my point in asking how long can one be in transition in the post. Later, in the comments, I said that we are part of the world, and part of the global economy, and part of the European Union... and it's time we realized it. The Baltic experience is applied to places on other continents. We were strong supporters of the American invasion of Iraq, which is not in Europe. We have troops in Afghanistan, which is not in Europe. We have voices in the UN, where we vote on measures that affect people in East Timor and the ice packs at the poles.

We are, no matter how you slice it, playing in the big leagues -- and we play on a team, the one led by liberal democracies. We're not great players, to be sure -- but we can't and don't sit on the sidelines. We're full members of the EU and NATO -- according to their standards, we are democracies that are at least healthy enough to have met the entrance requirements. Are we thriving? Nope.

When I wrote it's time we realized it, I was thinking of something somewhat tangential -- of the moment of silence for the victims of the massive terrorist attack in Madrid. LTV showed how it was observed in various European capitals -- cars coming to a halt... okay, I'm sure a lot of cars just kept going even in civilized Europe. But -- in Rīga? Nobody noticed, except perhaps LTV. We don't feel like we're part of Europe. That lack of feeling (or is it lack of communion?) exists elsewhere, to some extent -- I remember signs at Victoria Station saying "Trains to Europe," for example. But we aren't islands, and we're definitely not islands with strong parliamentary traditions that cradled liberalism. Tallinn feels closer to "Europe" than Latvia does -- 'cause it is... always was, whether one looks at the watching of Finnish TV during the occupation or the behavior of Estonians at the time of our liberation ninety years ago. Lithuania has its vaunted ties to Central Europe -- how real those are, I sometimes wonder. (Andrius makes me wonder even more.) In Latvia, one often still hears phrases like "he's in Europe." The bus companies advertise "buses to Europe." Europe is elsewhere.

In my post, I included this parenthetical remark on our (current) independence and should have underscored it: (And I am not trying to detract from what we do have to show for it -- I just wouldn't paint the overall picture in bright colors.) I really mean that. Really, really. Because we do have a lot to show for our independence. Latvia slipped slightly in the RSF Press Freedom Index, for instance -- to 12th place -- but all three Baltic states are very highly ranked. We rank higher than beacons and bastions of democracy like the USA and the UK. Does that matter? You'd better believe it does! I spend a lot of time being critical -- because I think that's crucial -- but if we are talking about human rights... with all of our problems, Russia (ranked 144th, below Yemen) and China, which occupies Tibet (ranked 163rd, just above Burma/Myanmar) are night to our day.

I feel compelled to retell one of my favorite stories -- true story, told by someone close to me, A. A is asked by an Australian about her hard labor in the colder climes of Soviet Russia, and because it's an in-depth question gets a rather detached, clinical earful about how A ended up in the Gulag, how this house was confiscated, what the camps were like, in detail. Australian pauses. "Why didn't you call a lawyer [solicitor]?"

I find, talking to people from countries that haven't suffered what this one has, that many people just can't grok what totalitarianism was and is. If you talk about the abrogation of personal freedom in the occupied Baltics, you're liable to hear comparisons to the Patriot Act. And then there are the willfully blind, like your compatriot Andrius, who refuse to recognize the differences between flawed democracy and wholesale oppression. There's little you can do for them. One of the most popular throwaways here, even among some friends I otherwise respect, is that "democracy is bogus." This is where the critique comes in -- I am quite willing to acknowledge that the experience has not been happy so far... it was even unhappier in Russia in the 1990s. One cannot expect people who've seen their social fabric torn apart to be gung-ho about this here and now -- I intended to hint at that with those potatoes and salt. The solution, though, is better democracy -- not a return to hell. Even the great democracies, the ones we vote with, often without question, are entering a period of intense self-doubt. I have no truck with the doubters on basic principles. Certainly, it's easier for me than it is for people who are having trouble surviving to be so arrogant, and I fully recognize that. But I think it insane to abandon our democratic values for some quasi-Belarusian or Cuban comfort. I think it perverse to try to go back to our cages. We're free, and the element that prefers the prison to figuring out how to act at this time is the same element that served as dead weight for decades.

A week ago I read the IHT on the bus. Had a great article. Closing line: "They tend to be very individualistic," she said. "They think they survived communist efforts to collectivize them, so they will survive this. They don't realize the European Union and the global market are even harder." Yeah, they are. Acting out under the monkey bars of a sick nostalgia won't make them easier or softer. The Luddites lost.

The video is of the Prayer at the Sea, 1989.

Referendum, ra, ra!

2008-04-11T09:42:00.010+03:00

The head of the Central Election Commission (CVK) reports that ca. 213 000 persons signed in favor of amendments to the Satversme, Latvia's Constitution, that would make it possible for the people to initiate the dissolution of Parliament. That's far more than the number needed -- 149 064, a tenth of those eligible to vote in the last parliamentary elections. There may be some duplicates from those who provided notarized signatures prior to the month-long collection by CVK, but signatures collected abroad haven't been tallied yet.

In short -- we ("the people"), and the trade unions sponsoring this signature drive, have won... or, it proves that at least 213 000 people haven't yet surrendered to nihilistic apathy, our national beast. The process ahead is tortuous, as Veiko says, and I won't describe it here -- but the success of this first stage should inject some more well-deserved fear into the marrow of our darkling political elite. What many care about most is their seats, of course, and they'll continue to shudder a little.

I must say, though, that the proposed changes are risky. As experts in the law and politics have pointed out, rallying the people to "throw the bums out" will probably always be pretty easy. The next time we choose from our 60-odd parties in a flurry of kompromat, slick advertising and shady financing, assuming that the people are given this power, it's possible that someone can fund a "throw the bums out" campaign the next day. In this country, smaller than many a city, "political technologies" can be employed like shots in the dark, from guns without serial numbers.

Still, I signed... because I trust our people -- our nation -- a lot more than I trust our so-called elite. When the Government threatens us with "chaos" -- the only response can be that the Government has long been dragging us into a half-light oozing lies and sinister lucre. As Laila Pakalniņa suggested, we -- the people -- could at least have an instrument with which to respond in extremity.

Photo: Reinis Oliņš, Diena.

Rain, referendum, can sit on the ground now...

2008-04-10T16:20:00.011+03:00

Returned through the driving rain from the dreadfully Soviet Palace of Culture in the Химпосёлок, where we went to sign for a referendum on changing the Satversme, Latvia's Constitution, to permit the people to initiate a vote on dismissing the Saeima, our Parliament. Veiko has details and updates here. The last day to sign. People are standing in long lines in the rain. It's also Anitas, my mother-in-law's name's-day. Balzams.

Thunderstorm. Can sit on the ground now. Couldn't make it to the pro-Tibet demo in Rīga. Lithuania's PM has announced that he won't attend the opening of the Olympics. Latvia's Parliament refused to consider a resolution supporting Tibet today -- 28 in favor of putting this on the agenda, 24 against, 31 abstaining. Those against led by the usual culprits, but joined by right-wingers who are in the parliamentary support group and the China group. Šmits and Ozoliņš, for example -- two of Latvia's most prominent homophobes, of the zoological strain. Šmits was human rights guru -- human rights don't apply to gays or Tibetans though, I guess. And Tabūns, of course -- Russophobe of the loudest mouth. Всё нормально.

Photo: AFI. They stamp your passport when you sign. That's not such a nice thing if your employer thinks signing is an invocation of chaos.

A Couple of Epistles (W[h]ither the Nation? II)

2008-04-07T11:33:00.008+03:00

Extracts from two obliquely related missives I wrote today, slightly altered, posted here as part of what I hope will be a response to Giustino's question about the national malaise.

I

According to the Lettish Europhobes at nato.lv, a study showed that ca. 37% of Lithuanians think independence since 1991 has been the worst period in the entire history of Lithuania. Whatever one thinks of surveys, lies, damned lies, etc. -- I don't think Andrius [a Lithuanian in Ireland devoted to singing the praises of the USSR] is a ghostie, primarily because I've met innumerable people who think like him, more or less.

In Latvia, too, there are people who simply detest the direction we've taken (or is it the lack of direction). Most of these people wouldn't take the radical tack Andrius takes -- it'd usually be more like "yes the deportations were awful and so was __ and __... but now we have nothing." And one can easily step into their shoes -- health care is catastrophic, education is in the pits, the scientific base was destroyed, manufacturing is dead, prices are astronomical, corruption is rampant, etc., etc.

Direct experience does affect the view in a very deep way; I have only a very slight familiarity with not being able to make ends meet, but it only takes a few months for psychological devastation to set in. A little more time, and you learn to live with it. A teacher here said "in 1992 we ate potatoes and cream, in 1993, potatoes and oil, in 1994, potatoes and salt..." Meanwhile, you'd see the odd Maserati streaking down the street. You know who sat in it. I will never forget being on the beach at Majori, a purple topless jeep roaring down the water line for sheer pleasure -- make them sunbathers jump. Meanwhile, PM Birkavs was dissing the pilchard-eaters (his term). If anyone will decide anything, it'll be the elite. Who loves the elite? Does this elite deserve love? And "time, time, time, in a sort of Runic rhyme" -- how long can one be in transition? To what? The noble ideals of the Singing Revolution included an understanding of "we don't do this for ourselves as much as we do it for our children" -- but some of the people forced by this economy (and even more so -- by this society) to seek sustenance in the Emerald Isle or elsewhere have grown up in independent Latvia. We already passed the mark of how long democracy lasted (1920-1934)... soon we'll pass the mark of our entire period of independence between the wars. What do we have to show for it? (And I am not trying to detract from what we do have to show for it -- I just wouldn't paint the overall picture in bright colors.)

When I was in Rīga on Friday, I had a meeting with a millionaire. He's a hardworking guy who produces real value and does a lot of things because of what they are -- substance, not easy money. His impression of where we are, the state of the nation? That people who work hard and have capabilities and talents, like himself, are totally screwed, pushed to the edges of the stage. Screwed by people with no conception of real value. We live in a credit bubble blown by thieving abstractionists who could care less about this country. And this is not a ne'er-do-well or a whiner -- he's a successful workaholic with assets galore.

II

(In response to remarks on how the Baltics and Tibet are apples and bathtubs.)

What we need is a principled foreign policy -- not only because of what we can do for Tibet, but because of what the lack of decent policies does to us. In Rīga some years ago, the Dalai Lama remarked that independence without a spiritual component is hollow. In my view, to turn around and ignore the strivings of others after basing our own strivings on principles we supposedly hold calls our grasp of these principles into question. It's crying "let me go, let me go" to a captor and the world, all the while appealing to moral right... and then, as soon as we are let go, pretending that the girl down the street isn't being gripped by a rapist -- her situation is different, we don't have the strength or resources to stand up for what's right, etc., etc. ...those are excuses, and bad ones.

Part of the reason we lack strength is that we don't adhere to the principles we espouse. That's what makes the "oh you are just American lackeys" litany one hears so often so painful -- it's close to the mark. What we really don't have the strength for is Realpolitik. There are also real benefits to taking a moral stand -- Denmark's determination re the caricatures, for example, resulted in a boycott by the Arab world... but admiration for Denmark in the West actually caused a rise in Danish exports. We seem never to pursue many of our actual strengths -- ecology, devotion to liberty, the sympathies that exist between small nations. C (whatever happened to him?) had the right idea with his stork branding, basically -- besides our environment (Latvia is mostly forest) we could become known for our decency. That would mean taking a risk and taking the lead, though -- something we can't seem to do in anything. Oh my, Edward Lucas wrote an article, so PM Godmanis has suddenly discovered that Latvia has things in common with Tibet... or is it that Angela Merkel spoke?

The main effect is on us. One of the roots of apathy and nihilism here is that most people realize that we're dissembling about everything. High-minded speeches about freedom ring hollow if they're so selectively conditional -- Adamkus and VVF could wax eloquent about liberating Iraq, but couldn't muster clear condemnations of other criminal regimes. We suck up to lovely democracies like those in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Lithuania bends over for lucre with regard to Kosovo, too -- see Ruslanas at Lituanica.

I took the photograph of the neighbors' house a few years ago.

W(h)ither the Nation?

2008-04-01T12:39:00.007+03:00

Returning to this question -- keeps coming up, even from left field. "Think about Tibet as Latvia, with very tall mountains," Professor Donald S. Lopez writes at openDemocracy.

The song above was an anthem of the national revival in the 19th C. The concept of the Castle of Light -- of an enlightened people. To prove to the Baltic Germans and the Russian Empire -- and to ourselves -- that we, too, are a nation (and a Kulturvolk), with a right to a seat at the table of nations.

The project of building a National Library takes that name.

The video below is of Ieva Akurātere singing what became one of the anthems of the Third Awakening.

Прибой

2008-03-25T08:48:00.006+02:00

Flags with black tassels hang in heavy snow today, fifty-nine years after Operation Прибой -- "the Surf." The document at left is a report by Major General Spasenko, dated 31 March 1949, on the success of the operation: from 25 March to 30 March 1949, 30 629 families were deported from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- a total of 90 844 persons, comprising 24 630 men, 40 688 women, and 25 526 children.

This map shows the approximate percentages of the population deported from Latvia by locality -- the darkest areas are civil parishes that lost more than 10% of their inhabitants, the red areas 6-10%. The yellow areas lost less than 2%. Roughly, the areas that lost a higher share were the most Latvian areas, ethnically -- it's not possible to determine the proportions of deportees in relation to the total population by ethnicity in 1949 (as can be done with regard to the 1941 deportations) because there was no census during the period of drastic Russification (there is no data between the census taken during the German occupation, in 1943, and the census of 1959).

In sheer numbers, however, 41 084 ethnic Latvians, 772 Russians, 4 Germans, and 1114 others were deported in 1949. By the census of 1959, ethnic Latvians made up only 62% of the population. The percentage of ethnic Russians had meanwhile risen to 26,6% (556 400 ethnic Russians in 1959; there were 207 003 ethnic Russians in Latvia in 1943, about eight out of ten of them in the eastern region of Latgallia -- mostly yellow on the map).

The 1949 deportations ostensibly targeted "kulaks and nationalist families." One was a member of a "nationalist family" if a relative had resisted the occupation, for example. Kulaks -- "the rural bourgeoisie" -- were defined using prewar statistics, despite the fact that many people had lost their land or livestock in the intervening decade. Some supposed kulaks possessed no land at all. Complaints from the Gulag were met with a standard NKVD response: "you (your mother or your father) possessed a kulak farm in 1939."

In hundreds of cases, children were deported alone, without their families. When they reached sixteen years of age, they were assigned the status of deportees.

The status of those not defined as kulaks was shifted retroactively with no charges being brought -- in the summer of 1949, special sessions simply declared their permanent resettlement and the confiscation of their property, without trial.

From 1955, people were allowed to return to Latvia, but incrementally -- Jānis Riekstiņš, Senior Researcher at Latvia's National Archives, compares the process to chopping off the tail of a dog, piece by piece. About 12% of the deportees had perished. Those who returned were required to sign documents agreeing not to return to their place of residence.

Latvia's relative birthrate, which had been ca. 75% prior to the occupation, had fallen to 40-45% in 1946 and never recovered.

The map is from this site, which includes facsimiles of other documents and information on ongoing research (in Latvian).

The Rite of Spring

2008-03-21T12:16:00.017+02:00

I did not grok Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (performed here by Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Dance Theater) until I experienced Latvia’s spring in primitive austerity, in the early 1990s. Our dachas have no plumbing and no electricity. Before becoming a slave to cyberspace, subject to the elements more directly than I was ever before or since, I understood more of what the season means here – after stewing in boreal darkness all winter (something I still can’t deal with very well – it’s very dark here for a very long time), the augurs of spring take on an explicitly magical quality, whether that is the feeble sun gaining enough strength to warm the cheek again or returning to an angle where it strikes the wall with a shaft of light for the first time in months, longer each day, palpably so, birdsong again as snows alternate with thaws, the blades of the tulips, the crocus, and then the erotic fury of flowering trees and lilacs and blossoming roses as we climb toward what is still the main holiday here, summer solstice (even Līgo night already tinged with the knowledge that the days are getting shorter).

These coming months are so lovely that they can even seem illusory (Alberts Bels’ story in which the trees haul up their green sails in summer, whilst humans raise their illusions?), like the mystical twilight of woodlands in June, something I first saw in Sweden – the pale woods of puberty making sense of childhood dances in which the girls joined hands and the boys passed beneath the arches of their arms: Caur sidraba birzi gāju, ne zariņu nenolauzu – "Through a silver bosk I went, without breaking off a single twig."

I’ve begun translating a book about Latvia’s woodlands by Imants Ziedonis, one of our finest poets, and his son Rimants Ziedonis, a remarkable writer in his own right – the book is a guide to our forests, suffused with history and mythology (nearly half of Latvia is forested).

Over coffee, I skimmed the news and read Timothy Garton Ash’s commentary about Tibet in the Guardian. Many of the comments to Ash’s sober piece could act as emetics, but the one that struck me this morning included this tidbit: "Do not limit Tibetans to Tibet. Minorities in reality have been all over China. Stop talking about Tibet needing its own place. Migration is a natural process for every single ethnicity in the world. I personally enjoy being a Mongolian out in the U.S. We are nomads. So are Tibetans. Even the Tibetans and Mongols out here in the West need our identities. So the world is our home, but we will never ever lose the feeling of our own ethnicity, no matter what language we speak, what food we eat, what religion we decide to follow." (Italics mine.)

That is a sublime condensation of a take on ethnos – or is it really nationality? – that not a few people actually hold to, or have found. Perhaps we'll all be metrosexuals in the next life?

Identity is indeed complex, and few places on earth are ethnically homogeneous. But the idiotic pretense that there are not basic bonds between peoples and their languages, lands, beliefs, cultures and even cuisines is especially illuminating when taken to the extreme this commentator takes it to. A gutted identity would then act as a marker – why and how? Wherefore?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, ecology and nationalism in Latvia long ago joined hands. Politically and culturally, land was the major mover – the tens of thousands of landless Latvians, casualties of Tsarist policies, were the Bolshevik base -- whilst the agrarian reform brought about by Social Democrats and the Farmers’ Union was the basis for Latvia’s stability between the wars. After centuries of dispossession, a large swathe of the population got something to call its own. Whether this was economically brilliant or not is actually secondary; the redistributed lands were returned to those who owned them prior to 1940 in the early 1990s.

Rimants Ziedonis wrote re SIA Latviya & Co. long ago – he railed against the Russian-dominated consumerist nightmare that is dragging us into a tawdry globalist Europe, in essence. When Alvis Hermanis, our foremost genius of the theater, refuses to accept this country’s highest decoration, the Order of Three Stars, we should take heed: "Everything has been turned upside down at an ethical level. I do not doubt that Latvia will reach the standard of living of 'old' Europe sooner or later – but does that mean we have to lose all of those spiritual goods along the way? I think that this is very, very dangerous."

Alvis Hermanis declared the Republic of Latvia to be morally bankrupt. I’ll try to be more kind and say that we’re on the verge of bankrupcy. This is mostly because the political elite lives in a world of its own.

The Tibet Support Group (founded by MP Juris Sinka, who died in Lhasa -- a rightist with moral stature that dwarfs that of most of the MPs in this Parliament) is still collecting signatures for its letter to China... does it really take so long to get those of your own caucus among "the hundred wise ones" in that spiffy room to sign?

Where is our land now? Who owns it? How does one make the leap from a command economy into the ravages of an insane globalization -- one that is obviously amok in the West? Why should one apply what is a failure in the West to our country? How can one possibly preserve moral values if neoliberalism has been essentially murderous? Why does "reentering Europe" seem to entail dropping most everything that is ours?

Another take is to pretend that one cannot discuss these things because Latvians were so downtrodden and deprived that one can’t (morally) object to so-called "Western civilization," as in consumerism, filthy lucre, and vacuum cleaners for all.

And so again to the spring – this just isn’t so. There is no objective reason for Latvia’s repetition of the mistakes made in the "free world." The real core of the Third Awakening was not about getting plasma TVs and Humvees. It was about freedom in its deepest sense, which is what Latvian nationalism in a deeper sense has always looked to – Miķelis Valters mostly gets into Kant and Hegel, not kickshaws. The fundament of the Republic was rural. It remains so – and this applies even to the city.

Gary Peach for AP: "Maija Krumina [sic], who lives in a village near Valmiera in northern Latvia, said rural residents have switched to survival mode. Many have stopped going to stores and instead are relying on their own livestock for milk, eggs and pork. What they don't consume, they sell to one another. "

Back in the early 1990s, a few students would supply the entire dormitory with food – the students would take up a collection, getting bus tickets for those with relatives who actually produced food. Real food from real people – unimaginable these days, isn’t it?

Words always covered everything, lovingly, precisely, poetically – which words have we lost? How do you diddle the clitoris of spring?

The pic is by Nikolai Roerich, a set design for Stravinsky's Весна священная; Roerich is intimately tied to Riga, and one of the most beautiful places in Latvia is the Roerich room at the National Museum of Art. For information on the ties between Tibet and Latvia, see "Tibeta – tās problēmas vēsturiskā izcelšanās, rezonanse starptautiskajā sabiedrībā un Latvijas – Tibetas saikne.”

Baltic (Dis?) Unity

2008-03-07T09:19:00.014+02:00

All three Baltic states become nonagenarians this year -- of course, actual independence did not immediately follow the formal births of our republics in 1918; wars of independence did... and more than half a century of our young countries' lives was spent under occupation. We fly each others' flags on our independence days, and Latvia's and Estonia's Presidents were joined by Poland's President in Vilnius on 16 February, another sign of how different Central/Northern, formerly "Eastern" Europe is today, considering how terrible Polish-Lithuanian relations were between the wars. December saw the borders between us effectively disappear. Ruslanas at Lituanica and Giustino at Itching for Eestimaa have radically different takes on Baltic unity or the lack thereof. I was recently interviewed by Lithuanian National Radio and Bernardinai.lt on the subject; my view is closer to Ruslanas'. An excerpt from the English version of the interview with Milda Bagdonaitė:

As President Zatlers said at the ceremonies in Vilnius, we feel very close to Lithuanians – almost as if your successes and difficulties were our own. Emotionally, I think we are very positive towards each other. We call you brāļu tauta, our brother people. We joke about each other, of course – but we do so as brothers and sisters, I hope!
This is especially true with regard to Lithuanians – Estonians are not “Balts” in terms of language or culture, of course, though there is considerable overlap in Latvia. Linguists joke that Latvian is bad Lithuanian spoken with an Estonian accent. Just as there is considerable Finno-Ugric influence in Latvia, and many points in common in our histories (e.g., the centuries of German domination – but the Latvian Association in Rīga, which was the cradle of Latvian nationalism, was actually founded as a committee to help Estonians suffering from famine, and the Estonians’ Võidupüha – their Victory Day – is our Heroes’ Remembrance Day, marking the defeat of the Germans by both Estonians and Latvians at Cēsis in 1919).

Baltic Unity Day for Lithuanians and Latvians, in the narrower sense of “the Balts” and excluding our northern cousins, marks a far earlier date – the victory at the Battle of Saule – Saulės mūšis – on 22 September 1236. Being between (and we are between in oh so many ways!), Latvians can and should celebrate both of these anniversaries. I do.

Rainis, Latvia's greatest writer and a leader of the Social Democrats, was among those who backed a joint Lithuanian-Latvian Republic. Felikss Cielēns, another Social Democratic leader, argued against it on the basis that the Lithuanian level of literacy and education was comparatively low at the time. Rainis responded on 8 October 1916 (my translation):

He ["T." -- Traubergs?] ought to know that the Latvian nation is a democratic nation; that the nationalities question is a question for the nation and so a question for social democracy. If we want -- or, more precisely, if I want (since I'm the only person wanting, so far) to join with the Lithuanians to work together for national autonomy together, then I want this as a social democrat, standing on the foundation of social democracy, i.e. the foundation of the nation; not as a cosmopolitan fantasist but as an international realist. T. and you don't want Latvians to be mixed with the dark Lithuanians to arrive at an average literacy rate of 52%. Neither do I. But both our nations are one, by blood. Even a poor and foolish brother is still a brother. And a joint Latvian-Lithuanian nation would truly be incomparably stronger than us alone. Do you also want to push away half a million Latgalians,because they're uneducated? If we only count the educated, how many will there be? A couple of thousand. We'll educate the Lithuanians! I want a great politics, a whole nation, not a handful of intellectuals whose works evaporate in speeches. Here I must compliment your beloved wife: her instinct in favor of the Lithuanians has determined a better course than that mind of yours that I hold in such high regard. Our comrades the social democrats have forgotten how to think with their hearts, but where the heart doesn't help thinking, the mind alone becomes minuscule, and all its thoughts and determinations are merely trivial. So our official party has descended to bureaucracy and betrayal -- but we want a great politics: to make the Latvian nation greater, to gather our brothers; we want to liberate both branches of our nation, and then to join in the great struggle for the freedom of all nations.

Rainis was a brilliant poet but a dismal politician (and the situation has changed dramatically, of course -- it was Lithuania that led the Baltic independence movement) -- and yet I think that the sort of idealism expressed by Ruslanas is one of our major deficits today. The photograph above (filched from the Jēkabpils Municipal Library) is of the Baltic Way, when two million people joined hands to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that led to the occupation.

Asked what areas we can cooperate in, I responded:

The main thing I would emphasize in answer to this is that we must insist upon looking history in the face, and often we can do that together. Russia has not faced its history. If there is a vital reason for Baltic unity, that’s it – all three of our countries are still treated as the “near abroad,” and even NATO and EU membership did not change that. All three of us are still subjected to a campaign of disinformation and a propaganda war sponsored by the Kremlin and receiving a ready ear in certain circles in “the West.”
Patriotism is never a substitute for history. If we insist that others look history in the face, wrinkles included – then we have to look at our wrinkles also. Balts are not angels, and Russians are not demonic. We should be frank about our authoritarian regimes between the wars, and we should look closely at the complexities in our histories, including collaboration, xenophobia, and the darker corners of our nationalism.

Disunity -- such as Latvia's Parliament's dragging its feet when it came to supporting Estonia against Russian pressure last year -- is partly a failure to realize that idealism and practicality need to go together. People turned out to support Estonia in Vilnius and Rīga (as in the photo below, taken in Liv Square in Latvia's capital -- it's from Kojinshugi, who wrote what I still consider one of the best summaries of what happened last spring).

Dithyrambs for Dictators

2008-02-25T09:40:00.007+02:00

There's a cute Facebook group called Dictators Who Kiss Children in Front of Cameras. Jānis Bērziņš at Reveries has a verbal gold watch for Fidel.

In that spirit, I invite you to view an argument about every Latvian's favorite dictator, Kārlis Ulmanis (the photo above -- why does a democracy erect a monument to a dictator in the center of its capital? -- is by Gatis Dieziņš [AFI]). An excerpt:

Some remarks on my supposed “obsession” with Ulmanis. The Republic of Latvia has a short history—fourteen years as a democracy, six as a dictatorship, and not yet seventeen since the restoration of democracy. The occupation, though it did involve numerous Latvians, was not the work of Latvians. Since I live in the Republic, it is naturally important to me to consider how and why the system failed in 1934—at the hands of Latvians.

As Felikss says, “the spirit of Ulmanis still lives.” So does the spirit of Salazar in Portugal, say—he also did a lot of great things. I would note that neither Estonia nor Lithuania are as obsessed with their dictators as we are with ours (of course, theirs were actually less dictatorial, preserving some forms the Ulmanists would have seen as less “modern” than ours—Päts did introduce a new constitution, for example, a promise Ulmanis did not keep).

“The spirit of Ulmanis” definitely does live, mixed with the spirit of Soviet totalitarianism. We could see it in Kalvītis as the “guarantor of stability,” in Joachim Siegerist’s campaign based upon the return of the relics of the Vadonis to Latvia, in Ziedonis Čevers’ Saimnieks, in Repše as Saulvedis, in Šķēle’s suggestion that we need a man like Pinochet, in the belief that the Satversme can be changed lickety-split if it’s inconvenient to those in power, and—most importantly—in the disdain for, and ignorance of, democratic norms. A large part of the population will keep waiting for the man on the white horse, and as long as they’re waiting we’ll stew in nihilistic apathy and watch Estonia overtake Portugal.

More here.

The Worker and the Rose

2008-02-11T10:01:00.000+02:00

I woke up this morning to learn that there is no working class. The tree I photographed in Bread Street has perhaps learned that “Europe is based on an ironic denial of Eurocentric identity” – irony itself is a European value (up there with Christianity, which is still okay though "nationalism" is dubious) according to The Future of Europe, a fascinating concoction of insights mixed with McViews that I came across whilst looking at Atis Lejiņš’s output at politika.lv of late (he’s one of the authors -- the pamphlet is also available in English).

Veiko Spolītis spares me the need of giving you some snapshots of the latest interpenetrations in Latvian politics – his excellent blog, Baltic, presents the most recent leaping and scurrying of our blessed political elite, and his remark about “gravedigger” Jānis Dinēvičs’ urgings to drop the "Workers'" from the name of the venerable Latvian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (LSDSP) and get rid of the red rose, replacing it with a supposedly more authentic and somehow more "European" red carnation, led me to look at those sociķi again. There's a lot to look at lately, primarily because Atis Lejiņš has thrown in his lot with them. Born in Latvia during the War, Lejiņš became known among Western Latvians for his personal expedition to Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion -- his noble aim was to try to rescue captive Balts from the Mujahideen, on the grounds that they had been pressed into service by the occupying Russians. Once Latvia regained its freedom, Lejiņš founded the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, a respected think tank.

I admire Lejiņš and find his position worthy of attention -- Latvia, a country where the Left was extremely influential, is now pretty much bereft of a national Left ("national" is the key word here -- according to Dainis Īvāns, Harmony Center was trying to usurp LSDSP's place in the European Left, leading to a burst of activity on the part of the party -- Harmony Center is far more "Russian" than it is leftist, and the "Russianness" of the Left is a big reason it's weak). Lejiņš has announced that at age seventeen, he decided to devote himself to destroying the Soviet Empire. That was premature, but the Empire did fall -- and he's now decided that his new mission in life will be the revival of the Left in Latvia.

The idea appeals to me, in principle. I daresay that I've always been strongly attracted to LSDSP -- in principle. Uldis Bērziņš used to wander the libraries and taverns trying to get every writer to join -- his vision was idealistic and based in the continuity of the party, which has always had its wings and severed wings. I was twelve years old when Vilnis Zaļkalns and other exile sociķi in Sweden inspired my little brain to reassess the right-wing historiography I'd been fed by the Latvian community in Chicago. "Capitalism with a human face" in laissez-faire Latvia would be nice, very nice.

The trouble is that the traditional party -- which has a rather controversial history, too, some sociķi having eagerly collaborated with the Soviet invaders at first -- was addled by the addition of disreputable "post-Communists."

Dinēvičs is right in a sense -- the worker as the Left once conceived of him (and her) is probably not just dead but past his or her burial date. But the party always included the "progressive intelligentsia" and farmhands, too, as the article (in Latvian) on Dinēvičs' proposal says -- what the article doesn't really talk about is how doctrinaire the party was, clinging to the Erfurt Program (the Menders wing [or "the Muscovites"] took over the party between the wars, with "Western" social democrats like Cielēns distancing themselves and acknowledging the failures of their approach; though it was the largest party and got the largest share of the vote, LSDSP almost always avoided actually governing -- to do that would have required compromise and the dilution of its dogma).

As to the rose -- Dinēvičs is wrong. It's used by many a Western European social democratic party and group, from France to the UK (where "Labour" remains in the name). Can you get to "New Labour" when you have to cross such a cesspool (it's appropriate that Dinēvičs is accused of helping the scandalous "garbage interests" in Rīga [one thinks of the truck at the end of Once Upon a Time in America, and of Dinēvičs having presided over the collapse of Latavio, restored Latvia's first airline -- a few of its pilots ending up in prison in the Punjab]), or leap to a "new" democratic Left when the old one, cleft and crushed (both by the rightist regime in Latvia and by the Soviets -- even "the Muscovite" Menders, along with other LSDSP members, was persecuted during the occupation), seems to have survived in name only? A rose is a rose is...

Edward Lucas' The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West

2008-01-31T17:56:00.000+02:00

I think of Edward Lucas and Vladimir Socor as the best major journalists writing about Eastern Europe in English (my apologies to those who would wish the term away; though Estonia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic have dragged themselves out of the swamp in most respects, and though I think Larry Wolff's book -- Edward Said sent to l'Europe orientale -- is a must read for anyone interested in this part of the world... I still find the fading division of the old Cold War meaningful much of the time).

Another book with Lucas' title, by a different journalist, came out last year -- Mark MacKinnon's The New Cold War. It has a different subtitle: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union. Unless my attention drifted, I don't think Lucas mentions MacKinnon's book in his. I haven't read MacKinnon's, but it seems to me that Bloomsbury and Lucas could have noticed this (the earlier book was released last April) and found a different title. From the reviews, one can gather that they cover some of the same ground, albeit with a somewhat different focus.

Mart Laar, the former Prime Minister of Estonia (and a historian), hopes that Lucas' book "will be a wakeup call for Western civilisation." Richard Pipes, David Satter, Anne Applebaum, and Vladimir Bukovsky offer blurbs on the dust-jacket of the UK edition -- stellar endorsements from a constellation that would tell even the most bewildered navigator which political waters Lucas sails in.

This is, unfortunately, a choppy book. Don't get me wrong -- I do recommend the book, and I do hope Western civili[s/z]ation wakes up.

Many Latvians, like our brethren to the south and cousins to the north, are well nigh obsessive Russia watchers. Many a brother and sister in the mammoth country to the east would replace "Russia watchers" with a heavily loaded and often perversely bent, catchall term -- "Russophobes." The first definition of "phobia" in American Heritage is of a "persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous."

Baltic "Russophobia" might be persistent, but it is neither abnormal nor irrational -- it is, in short, not a phobia but a rational wariness that is sometimes suffused with fear and can often include irrational elements, as simply as a little girl left alone with known serial rapists might sometimes get the willies. Being neighbors, we can't avoid Russia, and Lucas makes it quite clear in this book that our willies are misunderstood. We live next to a country that tortured us and does not recognize that fact.

Someone I debate with stridently on a regular basis, in his zeal to paint the Russification of occupied Latvia and its residue in bright colors, observed that we are well poised to know Russia; as it is, Russian is still spoken as a first or second language by more people in Latvia than Latvian is, though there are freshly encouraging signs of language shift.

Latvians know Russians because about a third of Latvia's inhabitants are more or less Russian, most Latvians speak Russian, Russian media space is actually contiguous, and the sense and sensibilities of even "truly" Russophobic Letts often resound with Russo-Soviet echoes.

The gentleman I invoke above might praise the possible value of this intimacy (which is, in essence, healthy -- though politics as some alien imaginal animal might insert many a verst between us, Letts and Russkies actually get along so well that inter-ethnic marriage may eventually do what screwed-up, belated, and essentially superficial integration programs cannot), but whenever Latvians sound the warning... it falls upon deaf ears.

At 342 pages (including the copious footnotes and index), Lucas' book seems to be an extension onto paper of what many have read of him and the like-minded online; not a few of the footnotes actually refer to websites, and those of us into Russia-watching are familiar with a lot of the material. As a result, the book came off as more polemical than informative, to me. Anybody not worried about Russia should order this immediately.

I call it choppy because I just don't understand, in places, why and where the weight is placed. I assume that Estonia receives extraordinary emphasis because Lucas knows more about Estonia, as he does. But in the context of the Baltic states -- a skin many an Estonian would wish to shed -- Estonia is actually an aberration, whether as a suburb of Finland or a radiant example of the possible beauties of neoliberalism. Lucas' determination to place it at the front of a front line in a new Cold War does not make sense to me -- Estonia is essentially healthy and therefore ready for this "war," whilst Lithuania and Latvia (especially Latvia!) are not.

The last chapter is the thinnest and, to my mind, weakest: "How to Win the New Cold War: Why the West Must Believe in Itself." Sadly, that nearly religious chapter title reflects the substance of what seems to be part of the marketing strategy for this book, and I'm not sure that the marketing didn't infect the form.

I don't in the least agree with the Exile, (okay okay, eXile or whatever) which ran a typically twisted review of Lucas' work sight unseen... but even I don't find the final concentrated platitudes convincing.

The West should be something we can believe in before we believe in it, and one of the worst things about this book is that Lucas just doesn't seem to see the failures of the ideologies that have been presented as salvation. Correction -- he sees them, and he mentions them, and though Russophiles (grin) can try to accost him tu quoque (which tactics he analyzes most beautifully)... Lucas certainly does not merit the "Russophobe" epithet.

Neither Chechens nor the reign of Borya receive Lucas' blessings, Berezovsky is slammed, and the book is eminently sane. Lucas doesn't even like the idea of moving the Bronze Soldier. Scurrilous attacks published in the Exile and reprinted in the partly non-existent Tiraspol Times make no sense.

I've been more critical than I meant to be, I suppose -- I stayed up into the night to read The New Cold War and marveled at the timing; though this book gets as close as it can to the present, events are unfolding at such a pace that Lucas needs no plug. The latest gas deal with Serbia, the spy scandal in Latvia, the newest episode anent the British Council in Russia, Energy Commissioner Piebalgs' latest remarks on Nord Stream, the obsequies for Nabucco, etc. -- the roots of all of these burning issues are discussed, predicted, and underscored in this book. People who aren't obsessive Russia-watchers will find Lucas' framework useful.

What I found disappointing was the lack of depth, and maybe that's a common affliction in a book by a working journalist (I've read a few lately, including the massive Fisk tome... I'm now reading Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia in Latvian). The New Cold War is very much worth reading, but the distribution of weight struck me as flawed -- if one is going to bring history and even national character in, one should be more careful. It just doesn't do to splice together glosses, and leaps about the nature of the Russophones in Estonia and Latvia, for example, are just too much lightning and elide.

I also couldn't help thinking that Lucas just won't accept how traumatic the 1990s were - even in parts of sainted Estonia. It's not that he evades the subject -- it's just that the demoralization of the countries he rightly calls "ill-governed, tetchy, and intolerant" is based in reality more than it is in belief. One of the very few errors in the book, for example, is in his attempt to explain the exodus to the West; it may be that wages are two or three times higher in the destination countries, as he writes, but many of the economic migrants work at minimum wage. In Ireland, that was ten times higher than in Latvia not so long ago. Costs in Latvia not rarely exceed Western European prices these days. Entire civil parishes can seem emptied out -- because they are. If independence in 1918/20 meant a national destiny, questionable as that may have been, it also meant a measure of control that included a radical land reform (upon which Lucas has elsewhere looked askance), which brought social stability -- then the "restoration" of the Republic has meant a dizzying transition from one system to another, and such credit that serfdom is being reestablished... health care is returning to the 19th C, too. Like Lucas, I would underscore individual and personal freedoms. Political freedom, however, is a lot iffier.

The Economist praises the flow of Polish bus drivers to London, etc. -- in theory, that may have sounded good to someone a while back. Some still make ridiculous claims. As a speechwriter and translator for the former President, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, I got to tell Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth about how Letts go get valuable experience in Britain and the British come en masse to savor our culture. The real truth is that most Letts go work numbing, low-wage jobs in which they learn no skills at all, some of them under gangmasters, whilst most British tourists come here for the cheap whores and the booze.

In reality, the human and social effects are not so easily quantifiable -- an empty village with "mushroom orphans" and no visible future is a dead village. A "free" market devastated by foreign eggs is a market with no local eggs, and after dumping it can get pretty eggless. Even if one can point to an Estonia to show that Milton Friedman is divine -- in most of Eastern Europe, the system is a sick sham, and there is very good reason to be tetchy. Lucas does not entirely evade these issues -- but neither does he get into them. He skirts them.

If the West fails to believe in itself -- it's at least partly 'cause the neoliberal god has failed. Dangling the Demon Russia -- and I do find it demonic, and intensely threatening -- is like waving the terrors of Islamism at the narod, in the end. This book also echoes that; I couldn't help thinking of Martin Amis' arrogance. And though it makes utter sense to separate civil liberties and politics when looking at each, and to inspect how they combine -- I suspect that the capability of winning a new Cold War will depend a lot more on what we are and do, without mirroring devils, than Lucas would like to admit. The way the Russian propaganda machine works is one thing -- but accusations of Western hypocrisy hit so many homes 'cause there's a lot of blatant Western hypocrisy, not just because Kremlin apologists have perfect training in tu quoque.

I interviewed Edward Lucas last May -- here. I would like to thank Bloomsbury for the review copy of the book.

The Nearest Outpost of Tyranny

2008-01-28T09:14:00.000+02:00

I watched Ploshcha (The Square) before dawn today -- Yury Khashchavatski's film about the mass protests in Minsk in March 2006. Ploshcha just won First Prize for Best Documentary at the Trieste Film Festival, and can be downloaded for free -- with English subtitles -- in .avi or .wmv format. It's a wrenching movie, and watching it is a good way to mark Ceauşescu's birthday and Suharto's death. The still above is from the film (the blur is a blizzard the protesters braved -- the video [at least in .avi] is of excellent quality).

Though Belarus is a mere 33 km from where I live, I haven't been there since 1992 -- though I do meet Belarusians now and then (Daugavpils and Vitebsk cooperate closely in the arts). Years ago I had the pleasure to get to know Uladzimir Katkouski online, at a time when many Belarusian intellectuals were looking to Latvia for support, especially for their endangered language. Because many of the English-language Belarus-oriented sites on the 'Net are discontinuous -- like Uladzimir's splendid Pravapis -- I didn't realize that Uladzimir had passed away after a tragic accident. Vieglas smiltis, as we say in Latvian -- "may the sand be light."

Uladzimir published fine articles like Alexandra Goujon's "Language, nationalism and populism in Belarus"; just as politics and language issues in Ukraine ought to be of interest to Balts, so the dire situation in neighboring Belarus should be -- in fact, a group of Belrusians concerned about their language published an open letter in Diena some years ago, asking that Latvians help during Lukashenka's dictatorship. Latvia and Belarus have longstanding ties; Latgallia was long part of Vitebsk guberniya, for example, and part of the belated Latgallian Awakening was centered in that city. I live a few blocks from what was the first Belarusian school in Latvia, now no longer functioning. The plaque on the building preserves the Pahonia and is written in Belarusian, whilst the large Consulate in 18 November Street delighted the homines sovietici of Dźvinsk in 1995, when Lukashenka's Belarus restored its Soviet symbolism, pulling down the "fascist" flag of the Republic (nearly an inverse of the Latvian flag, though the proportions and hues are different). The notices outside the Consulate are in Russian, not Belarusian.

A map of "Ruthénie blanche" from 1918 included Daugavpils (Dünaburg, Дзьвінск), not to mention Vilnius, in the fledgling Belarusian Republic -- or the Republic that never got off the ground. Daugavpils was actually claimed by Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia as well -- so it goes at the crossroads. Then as now, identity in these parts was weak, mutable, and mixed, partly religious rather than ethnic (e.g., Orthodox Latvians were often counted as "Russians" by the Tsarist police). These lands were in flux linguistically also -- some of the Belarusian schools that Rainis worked to establish later used Russian as the language of instruction, even before the occupation. Most of the Belarusians in Latvia today are almost entirely russified.

And now? Marko Hoare in Greater Surbiton, a blog I only recently discovered (via Roland Dodds' But, I am a Liberal!) wrote a superb piece last Thursday called "Are there any fascists left?" Like Timothy Garton Ash's "Bitter lemons: Six questions to the critics of Ukraine's orange revolution", an article I linked to in my musings on Latvia's pro-Americanism, Hoare's insights tickle my spleen. Just as one is constantly subjected to descriptions of the Baltics as "American puppets" by (indecent) "leftists" mixing near-total ignorance of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with full frontal ahistoricism, so one has to endure bubbling sympathetic bromides for Lukashenka's régime, often from these same folk -- after all, if Condi calls Belarus an "outpost of tyranny," it must be paradise (on par with Fidel's Cuba, perhaps). Lukashenka himself has used images of "the ravages of capitalism" in Latvia, from which he "protects" "his people," in his "campaign" ads. Khashchavatski speaks of dispelling myths: "For instance, that the majority of the Belarusians support Lukashenka. We know that it is a myth, and we know absolutely different figures. After all, we hear people in the streets. But a myth created by the Belarusian dictator around his name and supported by many mass media, in fact changes the situation, it makes many people have no faith in future victory. That is why the aim of the elites of our countries, the aim of the intellectuals is to dispel these myths, actually, to say the truth.”

Not that the forms capitalism took in the Wild East haven't been ravaging -- they have been, and part of the reason for that in Latvia is the oiliness of stark juxtaposition. I once called Lattelekom to complain about a thousand-dollar dial-up bill and got called a communist by the gentleman in the service center; since Lattelekom is forced by socialists to grant discounts to pensioners for their basic telephone service, they had to soak their richer clients and the Internet was therefore more expensive than America's. The fact that many telephone companies in America (which are not monopolies, as Lattelekom was at that time) also give discounts for basic service disturbed him -- the fact that there's no sales tax on food or medicine in many a state, or that there can be a reduced sales tax, would be even more disturbing, I'm sure. The trouble is that laissez-faire, flat taxes and free markets are like unto infantile religions for many here.

The thing is, though, that Latvia is free and Belarus isn't. Does maintaining a safety net require totalitarianism? Does admiration for aspects of Cuban health care require one to ignore human rights abuses in Cuba? Is freedom as Antyx describes it?

I've a cornucopia of questions, but the one question that doesn't puzzle me is whether the children of free societies have the right to blithely avert their eyes from tyranny in the name of... of? Are there any leftists left?

The Blue Danube

2008-01-26T17:04:00.001+02:00

Rumor has it that my city's new master plan calls for restoring the Zilā Donava -- The Blue Danube, a saloon that was gutted by fire not long ago. As it was one of the few seedy bars to survive the clumsy gentrification of darkest Dvinsk, and as its character is now a rarity rather than the norm -- bravo! I append a brief, relevant fragment from The Penetralium. Other extracts from my work-in regress may be found here. The work pictured (paper, watercolor, ink) is "Padegs un astrālais" ("Padegs and the Astral") by Kārlis Padegs, 1939.

Vegetable Street (literally the Street of Roots) runs parallel to Bread Street until the latter curves. Vegetable Street is the steepest street in the city, reaching Station Street at an ugly monument built for the Dvintsi, their bronze faces scowling under the red star, across from the Blue Danube, first tavern to greet a visitor to our fair city, the kind of bar that only certain women enter late at night, or long-suffering women accompanying their suicidal husbands for a last drink – what the rite is here: a man, dressed in hideous synthetics (no longer so obvious, since there is a “sekondhends,” a second-hand clothing store, on nearly every corner, erasing the old distinctions in No-Man’s-Land) – such an one, shining with the slime of masculinity, slimed with machismo, brings his draugs his droog his buddy, for early destruction (“no man is safe who drinks before breakfast”) – eight a.m., at the Blue Danube or Uyut (vaguely Gemütlichkeit) or the nameless bar next to the ragpickers’ – the scene is the same: a bottle of Agdam, a sort of faux port that is really grain neutral spirits and color, sugar, a trace of grapes – my buddy – the man with whom I am entering the grave – my buddy and I: Agdam, half-liter jars of bad beer (once, mine had maggots at the bottom of the glass), and a thick, hexagonally patterned tumbler of vodka, two three hundred grams of vodka each, and a pair of voblas, a dry, salty fish – the Caspian roach. You talk, the benches scraping against the floor, sip Agdam, down vodka, and drain your beer, beat the fish against the side of the table to loosen its meat, and then it is morning. And that is manhood, far from the nervous children and neurotic wife, finally far from your buddy’s seeming inability to see what it is you were saying as the fish kept time, far even from yourself. Somehow lately everyone is dying from cirrhosis, or from the brake fluid they drank during prohibition in the eighties. You stagger home to Stropi, where the slaughterhouse is (“please celebrate your wedding at our café”), or Grīva, crossing the river by ice if it is winter. When the thaw comes, the last to cross seem to disappear, or ice fishermen adrift, devoted folks, away from the family each day, warming themselves with grain alcohol, waiting for fish. This is only a man and his bottle, dawn or was it dusk, crib.

And then we came out and saw the stars of hell. In vino veritas, pravda? “And ruthlessly sow the salt of deformation.”

For years now, the Fortress is a place of internal exile. If you are unable to pay the “heating net” or the hot water (only on weekends in summer), and are delinquent for a few months, you are sent to the Fortress – “allocated space” – and live there with men who can no longer afford the aforementioned manhood. They gather by the yellow tanker trucks that sell beer, loll in the grass of the dry moats, torture their families (what is a family) and create hell as easily as I drift into doubt and ambivalence. The poetry of departure. In Hochsommer, the barges still function, bearing ordinary sand from as far as the rapids – this is an unnavigable river beyond Pļaviņas – the formerly proud tugboats lately sinking when they are not moved on time from the summer to the winter dock, the pressure of the ice, the pilots ensconced in the sorry Blue Danube or another nameless place known by a graffito of a crescent and star, where they were about to plow under the shuttered wooden hovels of Viduspoguļanka and build soc-houses, what leader are the buildings named after today, what is built, confused crones bearing sour cream to market, so that yesterday by mid-afternoon, when the hopeful enter despair and pack it up and head for their homesteads, the tables were still laden with cottage cheese and the eyes of those who milked that animal were dark... they look good, things here, from the bars the few foreigners enter, the ones where one beer would buy you seven at Uyut, and there is some fresh happiness in the ulitse Lenina, after all my daughter went to Denmark to study drawing and Sasha is working for that man behind the tinted windows of the Lincoln Navigator… and now is something akin to goldenrod, last night’s mussels in brine, I reacting to my sudden presence after two days dragging my lover into selfsame nightmare, an old and degenerate man rounding our house, peering at the garden, and entering I’s mother’s apartment, my not understanding a word he said as I led him away (how do I know what he wants? Once it was a man whose family squatted here when this house was abandoned during the tail end of the German occupation – he only wanted to see his memory – “my first bath, I had never seen a bathtub before”) … kak cauchemar, why have the Russians taken the French word for nightmare, did they not have them before?

A Letter

2008-01-22T11:19:00.001+02:00

Here you can listen to a song sung by the wives of Alsunga (German exonym: Allschwangen), about 30 km northwest of Kuldīga (Goldingen -- a town I'd like to live in at some point for a year or so, or at least spend more time in; Werner Herzog chose it for a recent film). The people of Alsunga and the neighboring parishes, called suiti, are unusual because Graf Ulrich von Schwerin, the local nobleman, married a Polish aristocrat in the 17th C, converting to Catholicism.

Cuius regio, eius religio; what's now Latvia was fervently Lutheran with the exception of parts of Selonia (across the river from here, where we have our dachas) and the eastern region of Latgallia (where I live -- Latgola in the local dialect/language, this province belonged to Poland for quite some time [as Inflanty, a corruption of Livland] and was thereafter not part of das Baltikum but of Vitebsk guberniya; as a result, Latgallian developed separately, preserving some old forms [and being close to Lithuanian in some ways] but was also subject to more Russification, injured [and/or preserved] by illiteracy, etc. -- I wrote a bit about [fledgling] Latgallian activism here).

...Courland was quite Lutheran, but the Catholic suiti successfully defended their identity and traditions. Interest about them rose 82 years ago, when the composer, photographer, and ethnomusicologist Emilis Melngailis brought some to Rīga to sing (there's a bit on Melngailis here -- it's in Latvian, but there are tracks and photos). They're known for exactly the type of song I linked you to. As one of them put it in an interview, they cannot sing without an opponent. The song is accordingly an attack by the alsundznieces (women of Alsunga) on the jūrkalnieces and gudenieces, (the women from Gudenieki and especially Jūrkalne -- their neighbors).

A quick, crude gloss of the song's lyrics: Let those who need an organ buy an organ, I don't need an organ, don't need. My throat, my voice [dim.] is the organ [+ verb for organ -- I guess there isn't a verb in English?]. I've a wide throat when singing -- it's even wider when I bellow [howl -- but the word for instance is used also as auru laiks... not the time of auras /which it can also mean nowadays but not etymologically/ but the time cats mate]. I howled off the branches of the pine and the crown of the oak. The wives of the suiti sing splendidly; they drink sweet beer. The neighbors do not sing; they drink marsh water. When the jūrkalnieces sang, not a leaf rustled. When the gudenieces sang, the oak dropped its acorns. When the alsundznieces sang -- the oak itself bent, danced [līgojās... inf. līgot -- this is a word central to all things Lettish, so rife with meaning; to dance, to sway, to sing līgo songs, i.e., the songs with that refrain, ļeigū in Latgallia, sung on Līgo eve, that is Johannesnacht/solstice eve /Pound mentions the refrain of the Lithuanians in this regard, in connection with the pre-Christian "authenticity" he sought/]. The word līgava, bride, is from the sway of her hips.

Now that I gave you a discursive version of the history/identity of those suiti -- it turns out there is a bit in English on them, here. I attach a photo from Diena of their massive demo in front of the Cabinet, against splitting the region in the territorial administrative reform that was adopted over the objections of many and will soon be implemented. The signs say "the same fate for the suiti as for the Livs?" and "don't decide in our place" ...and "ēēēēē, Latvija!" (which needs no translation... the "ēēēēē" can be heard at the link in the very first word of this post).

As I mentioned when recounting my adventures at the Ventspils bus station with those seductive teenagers at the crack of dawn -- the character still exists. They themselves call it "of coarse fiber, somewhat impolite" -- to the teens of the villages, even when steeped in technopop, a suitu girl is still of another species.

This was adapted from a letter to Ken Irby. The suitu song and many other free .mp3 files, as well as additional information on folk and ethnographic ensembles in Latvia, can be found at the marvelous folklora.lv site.

Seventeen Years Ago

2008-01-12T13:55:00.000+02:00

Balts are now marking the anniversary of the "January Events" of 1991 in Lithuania and Latvia, when thousands of unarmed civilians defended our fledgling democratic institutions from Soviet aggression. The clip below is from Juris Podnieks' documentary Krustceļš (The Crossroads); the photograph above is from the Support Fund, where there are additional photos and a chronology of events.

Borderlands (VI)

2008-01-10T09:37:00.000+02:00

There is a fresh and bizarre footnote to the loss of the eastern civil parishes of Abrene. Latvia is embroiled in a stunning scandal once again -- the sale of perhaps a hundred passports to wealthy individuals, mostly Russian citizens seeking to take advantage of Latvia's EU and Schengen membership. The Baltic Times has a brief article on the subject here. This latest episode of corruption, which may well involve the highest levels of the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs, was a deal worth at least seven million euros.

In Diena, the filmmaker and pundit Laila Pakalniņa adds fascinating detail -- apparently, no apparatchik noticed that many a millionaire suddenly hailed from Abrene (according to the falsified data on these fictitious citizens). If they had, either the crime would have been discovered -- or the area we've now recognized as merely "magical" wouldn't have been handed to Russia so smoothly, what with its wealth (in reality, it was the poorest part of interbellum Latvia and is now an impoverished Russian backwater, Pytalovo).

But what can one expect in a country with so many prosperous corpses?

My previous post has links to all of my posts on border issues. The photograph of a 1930s Latvian passport is from the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs.

Borderlands (V)

2007-12-20T14:54:00.000+02:00

Though one won't feel the light returning for a while -- it's the nigrum nigrius nigro here now, or Clayton Eshleman's "alchemical broth," pale incandescent snowflakes having long ago replaced the last, even less luminous neon hammers and sickles in what was Red Army Street for half a century -- this winter's solstice (so far muddy, verdigris) will be remembered as the day that many a border disappeared. Over All the Obscene Boundaries, Lawrence Ferlinghetti once titled a book of his poems. Here -- from the Iron Curtain and between the countries held captive behind it -- they truly were obscene. Here is an article with some reflections by Sandra Kalniete.

Latvia signed away a swathe of its territory (in yellow on the map) this week, exchanging the ratification documents of the Border Agreement with Russia -- the last act in a tragedy I tried to chronicle in four parts (I, II, III, IV). Though most of us will be celebrating one of the most palpable aspects of "returning to Europe" -- freedom of movement is as tangible as inflation -- let's take time out to raise a glass in recognition of the sorrow of those who've lost their lands forever. It's a loss for all of us, except for those politicians who haven't a share in the real. A song from the area, sung in Latgallian, can be heard here.

And then -- let's celebrate! I wasn't here until after the worst was over -- my first Soviet visa was issued in the final fizzle of the USSR, obtained in Berlin. What it means to be from a small nation -- the Latvian Consul, who issued a Latvian visa with a number in the low teens that no official ever saw because the Latvian border barely existed, invited me and a friend to celebrate the 18th of November, Latvia's Independence Day, at his villa in Dahlem. The anthem blared from scratchy vinyl. Der Spiegel described the Baltics as hopeless Soviet provinces where deluded dreamers desired to become part of the West. A filthy train, its Rīga car doubtless still staffed by KGB informers, bore us eastward. The change of gauge at Białystok (men lazily kicking the wheels out from under us, arc lamps). The brief transit through Soviet Belarus, still filmic, Jurassic, faceless creatures unscrewing the panels to look for contraband or stowaways and depriving babushki of the money they'd earned abroad.

Belarus is still on the other side. Last year I danced with a girl who had to be gone by midnight, like Cinderella. But the border between Latvia and Lithuania is fairly erased at last, for all practical purposes. Between the wars, border towns like Subate languished, Poland and Lithuania locked in conflict -- even postal relations between the two were as bitter as wormwood.

Lietuva

coming back into this
country I am ignorant of
& tired of being foreign to
everywhere, in a way as in she is in
a way -- back in after the brief curve through Belarus --
the border-guards asking not for passports but whether we have them
-- will be border by November --
remembering Irby, I am a citizen of that state that is a haziness in the air
& long for that color that is the eye of love like a body for its clouds
between cars for a smoke a man gestures at the frozen fields & says vot,
your America, your Plains --

NO RELATION

ate apples fall, ābolu gads, apple year,
till could hardly stomach them --

apple eaten

at dawn down the bright law the Gypsies made
forbids them to sow,
keeps them moving

to youthen this cessant Europe

I have come to stay at the stalk of
where it pushes up still pale from the bloodied ground

here Lith. the earthen smitten,
the generations

come put their mind to it,
as their mind came from it

some stones say are
or aren't, past
oblivion some thing you know
about stone or the hair in the trees that mean you

can't go back, a matter of how much it hurts
not to, lost in the hands

I traveled in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia illegally, without a visa, because the sudden fall of the empire left a breathing space for some.

Then a flood of other memories -- the crying, screaming people removed from buses once their status was noticed. The waiting room for foreigners in the Lviv train station -- packed; "we're all foreigners now." The buses that ran to Warsaw from Daugavpils every Wednesday, full of "Polish riders"; there are almost as many ethnic Poles as there are Latvians in Daugavpils, and Poles would pack the aisle with Soviet goods to sell in the "Russian Market" in Warsaw, just as traders from Warsaw would head for Berlin. They used their earnings to set up some of the first decent businesses here.

Not being able to get to the platform at the station in Daugavpils -- this was a border zone, and one needed a passport to kiss someone departing on a train. Bicycling to Zarasai -- the smell of ink and the cost of a new passport when the pages were filled -- and the other side different how?

At the summer solstice, when Latvians wander from farmstead to farmstead singing and demanding drink, wandering into Lithuania at dawn -- the border guards at least as drunk as we were, urgently calling Vilnius because I then had an American passport with the stamp given to children, a weird tattoo -- citizen of Latvia.

The Kazakh who set himself on fire in Daugavpils because he couldn't get residency and couldn't provide for his family.

The bar that was in neither Latvia nor Lithuania. "The Queen of Between."

Standing in subzero temperatures for hours whilst guards fished for bribes -- have you any alcohol, precious metals, cigarettes?

For me it was merely exotic, often romantic. For most here it was prolonged incarceration, and then an incessantly demeaning process. "Use your American passport -- it's easier." Once I allowed my US PP to expire, I got a slight taste of that -- but I never had to eat it. Show the money, and see the bills rubbed between the fingers to see that the ink doesn't come off. Where are you going, Untermensch, and why.

Let's kiss it goodbye.

The Horizontal Time Code

2007-12-05T14:47:00.000+02:00

After three years and three days at the helm of Latvia's Government, Prime Minister Aigars Kalvītis (left) at long last submitted his resignation. This length of time in office may not seem so long to some in other countries -- but it's actually the longest term ever served in that office in the history of the Republic of Latvia (with the exception of Ulmanis' fourth and last term... but that was lengthened only by a coup less than two months into the "Leader's" fatal administration, which became a dictatorship in 1934). Kalvītis liked to call himself "the guarantor of stability," so let's call it an era... in the hope that it's over.

The symbol of the era, besides the bloated face of the man himself, will probably be etched into historical memory by Lagz diņa žests -- "Lagzdiņš's gesture" (right); MP Jānis Lagzdiņš of Kalvītis' ruling People's Party showed the people what the political élite thinks of them after Parliament chose the new President (originally picked at a secret meeting in the Rīga Zoo), gesturing from the windows at the crowd gathered below (he later explained that the gesture was directed at an old army buddy). We're not a trusting people, and there has been a widening gap between the rulers and the ruled ever since independence was restored (one recalls another "gesture" -- Birkavs' use of reņģēdāji, "eaters of pilchard," to refer to the poor and powerless -- I think of that one often because not a few old women are lined up for the stinking, rotten variety at the market, and it's not for their cats)... but Kalvītis' three years in power have been marked by a nihilistic cynicism unmatched even by the most extreme Latvian standards. Trust in every institution, from the courts to the post office, has collapsed. Easy credit, inflation, and emigration to greener pastures have soared.

The Prime Minister's departure is accompanied by one of the saddest and most revealing scandals ever -- the sudden postponement by LTV, national television, of a documentary about Vladimir Putin, the guarantor of stability next door. "The cassette broke" -- or, to be specific, there was a problem with the horizontal taimkods. Or there was a problem with the translation. Well, the obvious truth will out -- surprise, surprise: the documentary was pulled because it was offensive to the realm of Lt. Col. Putin, and therefore potentially threatening to the successful completion of the very last phase of the Border Agreement (the exchange of documents, tentatively scheduled for December 18th).

Kalvītis' misrule has led to the "moderate" "Russian party," Harmony Center, becoming the most popular grouping in the opinion polls (which doesn't mean that much -- with our sixty-odd parties [none of them with real grass-roots support except perhaps for the aging Fatherlanders /part of Kalvītis' coalition/, who showed their truly patriotic wing who's boss a week ago by rejecting the decent candidate for leadership] -- "popularity" in Latvia is measured in the teens even for the most popular list, if that). Harmony Center has given us Ābrams Kleckins, Chair of the National Radio and Television Council. "There is no propaganda in Russia," quoth Kleckins. According to this august expert in journalism (who trained many of our journalists at the University), pulling the movie wasn't censorship -- after all, there are many Russian voters here, so we ought to avoid influencing Vova's campaign.

We would then become a guberniya, I guess. The trumpets of Russian joy are everywhere these days -- H.E. Ambassador Kalyuzhny, known for his Soviet delight in trying to order a free press around (and for his Stalinist distortions of history), has even been talking about free gas for Latvia!

Aleks at All About Latvia writes more of our betweenness. The trouble is, of course, that you can't be between real democracy and managed democracy. A coalition run from the shadows by shadowy oligarchs, like Kalvītis', prevents us from knowing where our country is going (other than to Ireland).

Kleckins has announced a new "analytical" program for LTV -- like Globuss was in occupied oops I mean Soviet Latvia (wouldn't want to offend the neighbors or lower turnout in flourishing Chechnya, where it was a very democratic 99,5%). The aim would be to reduce the pesky sensationalism of Latvian journalists, it seems. Positivism, anyone? Ulmanis loved Dale Carnegie...

What's positive? Well, we're not in Russia yet. There was an outcry. Kalvītis is leaving. People go sing songs to defend the rule of law, despite the snow. Kalvītis is leaving. Long live Kalvītis! Voter turnout is still very high. (The era is not over.) Kalvītis is leaving. Ardievu, Cūkmen!

The title is taken from an editorial by the filmmaker Laila Pakalniņa. The photos, of unknown provenance, are from this site, devoted to cynical Lettish humor (it's better in Latvian).

The Revolution Devours Its Own Children

2007-12-03T10:07:00.000+02:00

Die Revolution ist wie Saturn, sie frißt ihre eignen Kinder. -- Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod

Among the ca. 70 000 Latvians killed in the Soviet Union seventy years ago were many fervent and prominent Bolsheviks, ranging from the creator of Dalstroy, Eduards Bērziņš, to the "perpetual dissident" Linards Laicens. The author of remarkable love lyrics like Ho-Tai, Laicens, "who could only be in eternal opposition," became a diehard Red in independent Latvia, departing for the Soviet Union after various stints in prison. Uldis Ģērmanis describes his sorry fate with style (and error) in Zili stikli, zaļi ledi (Blue Glass, Green Ice, an account of Ģērmanis' visit to occupied Latvia to research the Riflemen) -- Laicens' ashes were scattered in the unclaimed remains section of the Don cemetery in Moscow. Ģērmanis wonders whether he thought of his earlier "bourgeois" convictions (the author of what may be the first detailed demand for the Republic, Laicens repudiates his "errors" in an essay that can be found in his 1959 collected works -- collected minus his nationalistic writings, of course, though the poet had been "rehabilitated" during the Thaw).

Another victim was Gustavs Klucis, a pioneer of political photo montage and a leader of the Constructivist avant-garde. More of his work can be seen here; additional biographical information in English can be found here. The director Pēteris Krilovs is about to release a film entitled Nepareizais latvietis (The Wrong Latvian). A trailer for the film -- in English -- can be viewed here.

In Latvian, here is a text entitled "Latvieši - Staļina upuri un bendes" -- "Latvians -- Stalin's victims and executioners."

The First Sunday in December

2007-12-02T17:11:00.000+02:00

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.

The Umbrella Revolution

2007-11-13T15:26:00.000+02:00

Giustino demanded an interesting post on Latvian politics -- but I'm just not up to writing one. Our polite little revolution was victorious -- Loskutovs was reinstated and the Government will fall... and there'll be a new Government that'll be a lot like the old Government; "the same crabs but in different sacks." So events in Tblisi are doubtless of far higher dramatic value. The process right now is almost in reverse -- a new Government is being formed from above but bottoms up, without waiting for Kalvītis (the self-proclaimed "guarantor of stability") to go away. The machine can do without that bust of an engineer, because the engine is running smoothly. Here is a pretty senseless argument about tangents, starting with a totally different subject but ending up in the same abysmal puddle. Below is better video of the last demo.

Bear Slayer's Day

2007-11-11T05:15:00.000+02:00

The banner above and below, shown courtesy of the Schwind Collection, is perhaps the only surviving example of a West Russian Volunteer Army flag and is said to have been Bermondt-Avalov's personal standard. Though the Republic of Latvia was proclaimed on 18 November 1918, the declaration of independence was soon followed by war -- there were at one point three governments (Ulmanis' Republic, Niedra's puppet government, and Stučka's Soviet Latvia).

The greatest threat to the young Republic came in the autumn of 1919, when Bermondt-Avalov attempted to use German and Russian forces to overthrow the Latvian and Estonian governments with the intent of restoring the Baltic provinces within a renewed Russian Empire, offering the Germans land and Russian citizenship and restoring the privileges of the Baltic German nobility. The combined threat of Russian reactionaries and feudal Germans united Latvians left and right at last, as the proclamation of 1918 had not.

The West Russian Volunteer Army took the upper left bank in Rīga and shelled the core of the city until it was turned back by the fledgling Latvian Army on 11 November 1919, which we call Lāčplēša diena, Bear Slayer's Day -- it remains the main military holiday, when we remember everyone who fought for a free Latvia in all wars. Later that November, Latvia declared war on Germany. The ranks of the Latvian Army swelled, and Bermondt-Avalov's once proud troops were driven into East Prussia in a disorganized retreat, setting fires and looting whilst harried by the Balts.

Sadly, surveys reflect the ignorance of history the occupation -- and a failure to teach Latvian history as a separate subject since the restoration of the Republic -- wrought; a poll taken last year showed that a mere 8% of those surveyed could explain why we fly our flag today.

Uldis Bērziņš has a remarkable book-length cycle of poems devoted to the "Bermontiāde" and what could truly be called the birth of the nation -- Daugavmala (The Daugava's Edge). I've been working on a translation of that complex text, which is written from various perspectives and at times anachronistic, and present the draft of a section addressed to the Germans here.

EIN LÄNDLICHES RONDEAU

he dreamt of the Kremlin
your lord and master
and of the Caucasus
but you yourself you wanted
only to stay with us
as a farmer then you came
to plant and plow
and smoke your pipe
and watch your children goofing off
but oh how quickly your dream grew dark!
the commander bites his nails
and the soldier bites his nails
but such a bright beginning it had been with bayonets
and helmets yet the end is
taking flight in brackish water in mucous fear he lost his voice
dropping his gun look
Bermondt flees see across the heath his sooty boots are full of blood his feet stink of empty trenches he sways across the Lielupe to cross the soggy roads of Semigallia and damns the rain in Lithuania, fleeing -- with arson under his arm he runs, and a stolen goblet stowed beneath the coach-box -- home, go home, Saxon man!
be gone, Prussian and Swabian! take care that your balls don't drop out, cradle them in your hand to keep them,
for in this country thou shalt neither
thresh nor grind
nor plant a garden
nor carve a single monument
don’t dare look back

snakes grow in our country
this isn’t a land but a pit
to throttle you
from its every hummock
bile and poison ooze
go seek friends in some other country
for I have the heart of a snake

The poem is © Uldis Bērziņš: Daugavmala. Rīga: Nordik, 1999 -- translation mine, permitted; the flag is shown by permission of the Schwind Collection and is for sale (at 7200 USD) here. Aleks points out that there are awesome photos of the Bermontiāde here.

Don't give up!

2007-11-03T17:45:00.000+02:00

The sign above takes the Fatherlanders' old slogan, "Latvian -- don't surrender!" -- and changes a couple of letters to spell "don't sell yourself"... here is some footage of today's events. Click "nākošā" to see the next video. The President made a surprise appearance. When he says he wants to be the people's President, he is interrupted by the chant "prove it!"

For those who find Latvian revolutionary aesthetics odd -- I reminded a friend that they were delightfully weird even in 1905. When 150 000 people gathered at Grīziņkalns to hear the masked man (Jansons-Brauns), expecting fire and brimstone... he lectured on the need to bring art to the workers.

Photo from a gallery by AFI.

The Fourth Awakening?

2007-10-18T11:21:00.000+03:00

An estimated 5000 demonstrators gathered outside the Saeima, Latvia's Parliament, this morning, called upon to defend the rule of law by Diena, the intelligentsia, and many prominent Latvians concerned about the latest twists in the twisted course the Government has taken in the last year. Some have jumped the gun and called it a "Fourth Awakening" -- which is definitely a gross exaggeration -- but the numbers are not bad for 8.15 in the cold rain on a weekday's notice, and so I do hope that the current mood of "people power" at least signals an end to the so-called "Fourth Falling Asleep." There's a new optimism in the air, helped along by the fact that "the usual" crowd of democratic activists emitting clarion calls was joined by such figures as Georgs Andrejevs, a former Foreign Minister, and Ģirts Valdis Kristovskis, a former Defense Minister -- both are now MEPs... and both were elected to the EP from parties in the ruling coalition.

Then there was the announcement by Visvaldis Lācis. 83 years old and a veteran of the Latvian Legion, Lācis was elected to the Saeima from those "Green Rustics" I mentioned a couple of posts ago. The quintessential nationalist maverick, Lācis had a gentleman's agreement with his party -- he would always vote his conscience. With regard to "Latvia's Eliot Ness," he wasn't given that option -- even before Aleksejs Loskutovs, JD, got a hearing, Lācis was pressured into voting to get rid of him. The trouble is that the Green Rustics should have known that Lācis is not to be cowed -- Augusts Brigmanis, the man he accuses of pressuring him, said as much yesterday. I bet that the Rustics regret ever asking him to join their list. Side note -- though Lācis is quite the rightist, the fact that Loskutovs is an ethnic Russian matters not at all in this case. Cracks, cracks in the coalition, and even in the ruling party. Some Fatherlanders, too, are jumping ship.

My prediction -- this coalition's days are numbered, maybe even in single digits. To hope against hope -- may the gods grant that we get a decent Government at long last. Let the people be heard -- the only way to slay the cynicism and nihilism that infects every level of Latvian society is to get the political élite to listen. This won't be easy -- in fact, it's well nigh impossible. We are talking about people who lean out of the Parliament building's windows to give the finger to the electorate. The likeliest response to the current, feeble groundswell of fury is "the same crabs in different sacks," as always. May the groundswell grow!

The photo is from a gallery at Apollo. The sign reads: "All animals are equal, but pigs are more equal than others." The Prime Minister here is often likened to a pig -- Cūkmens is based upon Betmens, "Batman"; cūka means "pig." Orwell's Animal Farm saw its first appearance in the Soviet Union in Avots, a magazine published in occupied Latvia during the Third Awakening.

"Eat fascist death, flaming media pig!"

2007-10-16T18:25:00.000+03:00

Ernests at Diena offers comment on the Government's reaction to the deliciously earthshaking speech by the US Ambassador to Latvia at the University today. The title of the cartoon is "Americans and other Sorosistas." The text: "We will not submit to foreign pressure, imperialist pig! Corruption is an inalienable part of our sovereign democracy!"

Another reaction -- the opposition party New Era is introducing a no confidence motion. Confidence on the part of most Latvians in this Government has long been below zero, and Ambassador Bailey's speech is a sign of just how bad things have gotten -- America rarely criticizes its staunch ally and these words are quite harsh, coming from a diplomat. (Okay, so the speech does contain a stellar example of American "self-criticism": "NOW, PLEASE KNOW, AND YOU ARE HEARING THIS FROM ME, AMERICANS ARE NOT PERFECT IN THESE AREAS AND WE KNOW THAT")...

The title of the post is from Firesign Theatre. Hat tip to Aleksei for the cartoon!

Vair Realism

2007-10-10T15:10:00.000+03:00

The Case of the Mysterious Briefcase, which led to the departure of Indulis Emsis from Parliament a couple of weeks ago, is cause for reflection on what being Green in Latvia means. It's rather anticlimactic, though -- by the time Emsis became the world's first Green Prime Minister in 2004, most saw the Greens (who're married to the Farmers' Union in what is sometimes amusingly translated as the Greens and Rustics, or the Green Peasants) as pathetic opportunists collecting a motley crew of politicians under the sponsorship of Latvia's most famous oligarch, Aivars Lembergs ("transparency is not a striptease"). So you have a Green Party in the pocket of the man with "the Pipe." At the other end of the spectrum, there's Latvia's "Green" MEP, Tatyana Zhdanok, the sole ethnic Russian in the European Parliament and one of the most hated politicians ever to have lived among Latvians -- ķoķa Taņa was a leader of the Interfront, the anti-democratic grouping that opposed Latvia's independence.

As Wikipedia observes, "Emsis' political views are described as rather conservative, unusual for members of Green parties around the world." So, some background -- the very backbone of Latvia's independence movement was environmentalist. VAK, which is now also Friends of the Earth Latvia, was at the heart of it. It was VAK, which has roots stretching back into the dark years of the occupation, that organized the 1988 demonstration in Mežaparks demanding the legalization of the Latvian flag, then forbidden (video below). VAK organized the Prayer for the Sea (photo above), in which nearly a third of a million people on the eastern shores of the Baltic joined hands to protest the turning of "our sister" into a cesspool. VAK led the protests against the building of the metro in Rīga. One of the seminal events in the Awakening took place here in Daugavpils. Dainis Īvāns, the young idealist who would later be leader of the Popular Front, led protests against the building of a dam that would have destroyed what's left of the Daugava Valley (the rest of the Daugava is indeed a chain of reservoirs).

The Green movement was radical -- but it was not a fringe movement. Latvians have always been "close to nature" -- the cities still empty out after the summer solstice, when we celebrate the principal festival of the year with pagan songs. Oaks are practically sacred -- farmers plow around them. Large, old trees and big stones are named, catalogued, and venerated. What VAK struggled against was the destruction of a traditional "ecotopia" by the Soviet Union. Nationalism went hand in hand with environmentalism. The metro would bring further colonization, as would the dam in Daugavpils. VAK confronted Soviet soldiers to place crosses upon the graves in the Zvārde civil parish -- the entire parish had been laid waste by the Russian military. Latvians themselves had been infected by the prevailing lack of culture -- one woman, writing about their attempts to restore some of the landscape, describes taking a bus past the ruined churches of Courland, every passenger in a drunken daze, the countryside devastated.

Not a few VAK activists were founders of the Green Party, which was the first political party formed in occupied Latvia (the Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party, the oldest party in Latvia, had survived abroad). Emsis was one of the founders. In my first winter here, 1991/92, I journeyed to Sabile with another founder, Oļegs Batarevskis -- to Pedvāle (it was nothing then; ruins and choked streams, mansions carved up into flats for transient farmhands, a Soviet landscape of litter and despair). I remember asking Oļegs about their relationship to, for instance, the German Greens -- he answered that Latvians were more realistic; "we don't want to go back to living in caves."

Arvīds Ulme, the "Chieftain" (virsaitis) of VAK, wrote a decade ago that he wanted "to find and bring together those with the divine gift of devotion and ability to give in the name of a bright green beginning. We endeavor first to call together our own ranks, like we did at the start of the Awakening. The same Awakening which we, the Greens, rang in with our audacious black-white-and-black and green-white-and-green marches. The same Awakening which glowed in the maroon-white-and-maroon barricade bonfires and cried out in the joy of new-found freedom. The same Awakening which, before our very eyes, died from a combination of blind faithlessness, KGB-mania, and finally, the money-starved free market economy. Those who rang in and called together the Awakening indeed share responsibility for all that is transpiring today."

The "Chieftain's" mentality is tribal. As to KGB-mania -- he was a KGB informer, as it turns out (to no one's surprise). These days, Greens like Ulme are as likely to be promoting homophobia as they are to be defending the environment. Still, one has to try to look a bit deeper to understand how we got to "blind faithlessness" and the Case of the Mysterious Briefcase. "The money-starved free market economy" has meant, in part, the closing off of public waterfront for the manses of the few. "The first Green politician to lead a country in the history of the world" resigned in ignominy, after playing "should I stay or should I go" long enough to add comedy to his tragedy. The counterculture -- really the essence of the movement -- survives.

There have been Green successes -- the scrapping of the Finnish-Latvian Baltic Pulp project, for example. Reality requires realism. The signs of the times -- not many people show up to pray for the sea, and Daugavpils politicians would like to see the dam built after all. Now that cars choke Rīga, a metro would probably be nice. Belarusian biznismeny are yearning for a canal to link our "river of fate" to the Black Sea. Lithuania and Estonia have deposits on bottles -- in Latvia, they're thrown into the woods. Burning the fields is a Soviet "custom" that has spread to Ireland due to Latvian immigration there. In Rīga, a real estate speculator drives two Humvees at the same time...

The Latest Fashions

2007-10-07T16:06:00.000+03:00

Since I feel intense pressure from the gods of cyberspace to post regularly after my hiatus, here's a debate that came of a recent BBC article about my town.

Public Service Announcement

2007-09-23T10:15:00.000+03:00

A couple of weeks ago I sent a friend who has long been involved with democracy movements in Central Asia a link to Craig Murray's blog. Unfortunately, due to the cash and clout of the gentleman at left, Alisher Usmanov, Murray has been muzzled. Jams O'Donnell at The Poor Mouth has a few posts on how and why, linking to Chicken Yoghurt, where there are copious links to more information on Usmanov's assault on free speech.

The following blogs are currently carrying this story (updated at Chicken Yoghurt): Curious Hamster, Pickled Politics, Harry’s Place, Tim Worstall, Dizzy, Iain Dale, Ten Percent, Blairwatch, Davide Simonetti, Earthquake Cove, Turbulent Cleric (who suggests dropping a line to the FA about Mr Usmanov), Mike Power, Jailhouse Lawyer, Suesam, Devil’s Kitchen, The Cartoonist, Falco, Casualty Monitor, Forever Expat, Arseblog, Drink-soaked Trots and another), Pitch Invasion, Wonko’s World, Roll A Monkey, Caroline Hunt, Westminster Wisdom, Chris K, Anorak, Mediawatchwatch, Norfolk Blogger, Chris Paul, Indymedia (with a list of Craig Murray’s articles that are currently unavailable), Obsolete, Tom Watson, Cynical Chatter, Reactionary Snob, Mr Eugenides, Matthew Sinclair, The Select Society, Liberal England, Davblog, Peter Gasston Pitch Perfect, Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe, Lunartalks, Tygerland, The Crossed Pond, Our Kingdom, Big Daddy Merk, Daily Mail Watch, Graeme’s, Random Thoughts, Nosemonkey, Matt Wardman, Politics in the Zeros, Love and Garbage, The Huntsman, Conservative Party Reptile, Ellee Seymour, Sabretache, Not A Sheep, Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, The People’s Republic Of Newport, Life, the Universe & Everything, Arsenal Transfer Rumour Mill, The Green Ribbon, Blood & Treasure, The Last Ditch, Areopagitica, Football in Finland, An Englishman’s Castle, Freeborn John, Eursoc, The Back Four, Rebellion Suck!, Ministry of Truth, ModernityBlog, Beau Bo D’Or, Scots and Independent, The Splund, Bill Cameron, Podnosh, Dodgeblogium, Moving Target, Serious Golmal, Goonerholic, The Spine, Zero Point Nine, Lenin’s Tomb, The Durruti Column, The Bristol Blogger, ArseNews, David Lindsay, Quaequam Blog!, On A Quiet Day…, Kathz’s Blog, England Expects, Theo Spark, Duncan Borrowman, Senn’s Blog, Katykins, Jewcy, Kevin Maguire, Stumbling and Mumbling, Famous for 15 megapixels, Ordovicius, Tom Morris, AOL Fanhouse, Doctor Vee, The Curmudgeonly, The Poor Mouth, 1820, Hangbitch, Crooked Timber, ArseNole, Identity Unknown, Liberty Alone, Amused Cynicism, Clairwil, The Lone Voice, Tampon Teabag, Unoriginalname38, Special/Blown It, The Remittance Man, 18 Doughty Street, Laban Tall, Martin Bright, Spy Blog The Exile, poons, Jangliss, Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From?, Imagined Community, A Pint of Unionist Lite, Poldraw, Disillusioned And Bored, Error Gorilla, Indigo Jo, Swiss Metablog, Kate Garnwen Truemors, Asn14, D-Notice, The Judge, Political Penguin, Miserable Old Fart, Jottings, fridgemagnet, Blah Blah Flowers, J. Arthur MacNumpty, Tony Hatfield, Grendel, Charlie Whitaker, Matt Buck, The Waendel Journal, Marginalized Action Dinosaur, SoccerLens, Toblog, John Brissenden East Lower, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Peter Black AM, Boing Boing, BLTP, Gunnerblog, LFB UK, Liberal Revolution, Wombles, Focus on Sodbury…, Follow The Money, Freedom and Whisky, Melting Man, PoliticalHackUK, Simon Says…, Daily EM, From The Barrel of a Gun, The Fourth Place, The Armchair News Blog, Journalist und Optimist, Bristol Indymedia, Dave Weeden, Up North John, Gizmonaut, Spin and Spinners, Marginalia, Arnique, Heather Yaxley, The Whiskey Priest, On The Beat, Paul Canning, Martin Stabe, Mat Bowles, Pigdogfucker, Rachel North (193).

Unity Day

2007-09-22T05:42:00.000+03:00

Today is Baltic Unity Day, when Latvians and Lithuanians mark the defeat of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword by the Samogitians and Semigallians in the Battle of Saule, 22 September 1236. Equinox greetings to pagans everywhere! Saule means “sun” in both Latvian and Lithuanian (saulė) -- the idea of a "battle near the sun” was surrealistically inspiring to me in boyhood (visions of steeds galloping through solar flares). The heathen victory moved artists and poets from the national romantics of the 19th C to today's "pagan metal" band Skyforger, which has a song about the battle that makes use of the early 20th C poet Vilis Plūdonis' lyrics. Jānis Juškevičs published a detailed military study in 1926, available online in Latvian. "Mārasvalsts (Mary's Land, the statelet of the northern Crusaders) stood at the edge of the abyss, and a small strike would have destroyed it. But our ancestors were incapable of national thought..."

But on to another Terra Mariana, Latgallia -- Mōras zeme, Latgola. At nine this morning Latgallian activists will gather at the entrance to the University of Latvia's main building to demand regional language status for the Latgallian language (considered a dialect by most linguists), led by Mareks Gabrišs of the Latgallian Students' Center. Vysi latgalīši aicinōti jimt piketā akteivu daleibu! I'll hide behind Max Weinreich's formulation as to whether it's a language or not: "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot." The announcement of the picket has provoked 687 comments so far at Delfi, the Internet portal that attracts the most wags and jackbooted sputterers -- that's a lot of comments, a density usually reserved for what gets a bigot's goat. Plenty of bigotry in evidence, as always -- čangaļi vs. čiuļi (the first is the somewhat derogatory term for Latgallians, the second the somewhat derogatory term for non-Latgallian Latvians -- čangalis is often used as nigga is by American blacks).

I've lived in Latgallia since 1992 and my mother grew up here, but I'm not Latgallian -- ditto for my wife, who was born here and whose mother was born here. A fervent čangalis would call us čiuļi, and it's interesting to peruse the 1930s Daugavpils "Latvian" (i.e., čiuļu) paper for some insight into the friction -- Latgallia (impoverished, Catholic, Russified, uneducated and rather drunk) resented the "Balts" (snooty, self-righteous, Germanized, Lutheran, exploitative). One hilarious argument is a complaint about the Ludza teachers' association offering a concert in which songs were sung in "bad" Latvian -- i.e., Latgallian. The teachers pointed out that this supposedly "bad" Latvian was actually Italian! The Latgallian newspaper Drywa once offered this line: "Shall we let the Lutheran wolf devour our lambs?"

Language in Latvia is heavily politicized, and the "Latgallian question" has always been suffused with politics. Long separated from the rest of Latvia (Inflanty, its name a Polish corruption of Livland, was long under Polish rule and then a part of Vitebsk guberniya, not included in the Baltic Provinces), Latgallia was subject to Russification long before the rest of Latvia was and more harshly so. I've some notes on some of this stuff here.

A friend of mine was a major Latgallian activist in the 1980s, but swerved a bit and put it aside when the Black Colonel began to take an interest. As some of the comments at Delfi suggest, Latgallian separatism is seen as dangerous because subtracting the Latgallians from the Latvians increases the weight of the Russians. Russophones are often at least as "pro-Latgallian" as Latgallians (for instance here [RU, LV]), whilst most Latgallians are quite comfortable in Latvian. A survey in Rēzekne showed that most there, in the heart of Latgallia, Latgallians included, don't consider Latgallian a language.

On the other hand, Latvian paranoia about "separatism" is often as absurd as bigotry towards Latgallians is ugly. When not tinged with intolerance, it boils down to this -- "we're so small, we shouldn't be divided against ourselves." The trouble with that formulation is that "ourselves" ought to include our diverse elements. I had the good fortune to study under the late Dr. Jāzeps Lelis for a few weeks -- a great linguist and Latgallian, he noted that Latvians say that Latgallian speech and literary Latgallian (it is indeed standardized) are no more than a dialect of the language spoken in the rest of Latvia. If meant to mean that we are one people and speak the same language, no Latgallian would object. But as soon as Latvians meet this "dialect" cheek to cheek, especially in its printed form, they immediately shout that it is incomprehensible and harmful to national unity.

On Baltic Unity Day, I would suggest a meditation on what unity means, in this sense: sameness and homogenization aren't exact synonyms of unity. I can offer qualified support to the demonstrators in Rīga because I think Latgallian ought to be taught -- dialects are part of the living language and Latgallian is one of our language's roots, and a thick one at that. But the Language Law already stipulates that "the Latvian State ensures the preservation, protection and development of the Latgallian literary language as a historical variant of the Latvian language." Making that work requires constructive labor rather than pickets -- the fact is that almost no qualified Latgallian teachers would be available even if Latgallian were declared an official language tomorrow.

I took the photo in Alejas iela here in Daugavpils (Daugpiļs in Latgallian), the second largest city in Latvia and the largest in Latgallia. It's not snowing yet, but the beauty of autumn fills me with dread?

"The Russian World"

2007-09-02T10:54:00.000+03:00

Jack Shafer at Slate drew my attention to an "unintentionally hilarious" Russian ad supplement to the Washington Post. Shafer writes:

The collapse of the Soviet Union was good news for almost everybody—Russia's citizens, its captured "republics," nations targeted by Soviet missiles, and neighboring states such as Finland, just to get the list rolling.
The only losers were fans of Soviet propaganda...

Right on. As Shafer observes, "beneath the shattered syntax of these laughable pieces beats the bloody red heart of the tone-deaf Soviet propagandist." Perusing the supplement, certain of finding the obligatory dig at the Baltic republics, I discovered an article entitled "When a little paranoia is good for you" by Dmitry Babich. Praising the "concept of Russian world (russkiy mir), ushered into the public sphere by President Vladimir Putin in his State of the Union speech in April," Babich invokes Rīga:

“I am also a Russian-speaker,” a local journalist from Latvia’s Diena newspaper said sourly, mocking Moscow’s attempts to protect Russian speakers in Latvia from discrimination. “Does the Russian government think I need protection?”
Indeed, it does. Because this person, whether he wants it or not, is a part of the Russian world. If his children do not speak the language that can make them feel at home from Kaliningrad to Mongolia, this will be a loss for them. So, a journalist from Diena indeed needs protection - from forgetting. In the same way we need protection against forgetting Latvian music and cinema, which used to be highly popular in Soviet times.

Ah yes, "the Russian world." "Latvian" (read "Soviet") music and cinema remain highly popular -- Laima Vaikule, for instance, still draws crowds from that part of the Russian world known as Brighton Beach. New Wave is enough of a popmuzak event to attract Latvia's President. But note that Vaikule's site is in Russian only. New Wave, though held in the seaside city of Jūrmala (in Latvia, though it sometimes seems like a Moscow suburb), offers Russian and English -- but no Latvian.

Babich's view is so cliché that I won't belabor it much -- the fact is that Russian isn't forgotten so easily. Most Latvians still speak it fluently, and most of Latvia's Russophones still can't hack Latvian (a slight majority now knows some Latvian, but the level of fluency is abominably low for most). Nobody's asking the Russians to forget Russian. They've more of a chance of preserving and cultivating their native tongue than most any linguistic minority anywhere -- state-supported education that is mostly in their chosen language, a thriving Russian-language media, etc. Most of the basic cable channels here in Daugavpils are dubbed into Russian -- I can't even get Euronews except as Yevronoose. Next door is the largest country in the world, stretching from Königsberg to Chukotka. There are 274 million speakers worldwide, Babich proudly states. Oops, by Königsberg I mean Kaliningrad, of course. What happened to the German-speakers there, and the Balts who preceded them? As to Chukotka -- only about half the Chukchi can speak their own language these days... but fewer than 500 of them report speaking no Russian at all. In fact, if you examine studies of endangered languages, not a few of the threatened tongues (not to mention peoples) are in the Russian Empire... oops, I mean Federation (or the prison house of nations, as the venerable Beacon had it).

"The Russian world" was and is a world of linguicide (let's forget those other 'cides for the moment). As to forgetting and "feeling at home" -- Babich forgets to note that many in what Shafer rightly calls the "captured 'republics'" finally didn't feel at home in their own countries. In Belarus, this continues today -- Belapan/RFE:

While crossing the border into Ukraine on August 20, Syamyonau asked Belarusian customs officers to either invite an interpreter to help him fill out the form or give him one in Belarusian. The officers refused to meet Syamyonau's request and complained to the district court over the incident.

My friend Aleks (a Latvian Russophone who has no problem with the language laws) recently told me of a gloomy discussion he had with some Latvian Russians who were saddened by a local boy who hadn't learned Russian. Like Babich, they were concerned that he was missing out on the world that stretches from Sovetsk to, um, the North Pole. The thing is that most of the Latvians I know who don't know Russian learned other languages instead -- Swedish, German, French, Lithuanian, etc. ...and English, of course. Babich forgets that other worlds were mostly closed to those under Russian rule. We live in many a world. How many Russians in Latvia ever touched upon the Latvian world prior to the collapse of the empire?

I learned more Russian in a month in Ventspils than I have in the last several years. Why? Because I was around people speaking good Russian, not the Soviet patois (and occasional trasianka) one often hears here -- and the talk wasn't weighted with chauvinism. Over at the corner store, after years of learning to shop in Russian, I finally asked whether the cashier ever planned to learn the word for milk in Latvian (it being emblazoned in large letters on every carton in the cooler). No -- that would be diskriminatsiya, she said.

"Leonid Krysin, the deputy director of the Russian Language Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, warned that the use of [the] Russian language is waning in former Soviet republics," RFE reports. Krysin on Uzbekistan: "It's very possible that in a few decades, Russian will no longer be spoken there. Or, at least, it will exist, but only as a foreign language that is taught in schools like any other."

Russian retains remarkable prestige in Latvia despite its lack of official status. It is, after all, the mother tongue of more than a third of the population. Babich forgets why this Latvian world is so Russian -- like Miroslav Mitrofanov, a Latvian MP who provided bitter commentary re my post on the imperial behemoth, Babich prefers to ignore the history of Russification and Nazi-Soviet aggression. Not long ago, Polish, Yiddish, and German were major minority languages in Latvia. It's not only Latvian that suffered during the occupation -- with the exception of Polish and Romani (and, to a degree, Belarusian), now renascent in a free Latvia, not only the tongues but also the people who spoke them are gone, murdered, banished, or coercively assimilated. I think it's telling that only the Russian minority schools whined about the education reform on principle -- of course, some in the so-called "Russian community" think teaching Ukrainian or Belarusian is part of a plot to dilute or splinter the "Russian world" Babich is so eager to "protect.".

"Or, at least, it will exist, but only as a foreign language that is taught in schools like any other." Nah -- I accidentally found myself at the unveiling of a new taxi company the other day. Hey, I got a free ride home, even. Ah, the smell of new vehicles and the scent of gratuities! The driver could speak no Latvian at all, though. All of the Letts getting free rides blissfully switched to Russian, myself included. But these taxis will service a hotel that receives guests from the "real" Latvia (i.e., Rīga). But heck, the cabbies know a smattering of English. The boy who learned Italian instead of Russian will use the new international language. It's a Russian world, right now -- or a backwater in a country where the conquerors' tongue is rapidly becoming "like any other."

Naturally, Russian is "just" a language -- one that many Latvians enjoy. A great language. When one can get a drink in Latvian in the boondocks of Latvia -- in a language which has less than 2 million speakers as opposed to those 274 million, and possesses only a shrinking little patch of the world -- language politics will lose yet more of their notorious intensity here. Unless homines sovietici like Babich keep babbling in the retro, of course, and "the Russian world" is really code for empire.

Do we want it or not, indeed.

I took the photograph in my local market -- since the language laws were liberalized at the behest of "Europe," Latvian has begun to disappear from the stalls. But the tomatoes are from the Netherlands.

Hiatus

2007-08-17T11:01:00.000+03:00

I've recently returned from Ventspils, where I spent a deliriously happy month in the delightful House of Language, translating the Latvian poet Uldis Bērziņš and the fine Portuguese writer José Riço Direitinho. Meanwhile Ingūna Liepa, the woman I live with, was at a painters' symposium in Lithuania (that's her drawing above -- more of her work can be seen here). I'd meant to continue blogging whilst there, but a different muse hovered nearby -- history and politics were shunted aside in favor of leaping between five languages and sipping strange libations in diverse company (Uldis makes a remarkable infusion of parsley and vodka...). I'll start posting again soon!

The Fourth of July

2007-07-04T06:40:00.001+03:00

The United States Embassy marked Independence Day in the Wörmann Garden on Sunday (Vērmanītī -- this caused considerable resentment last year, as the entire park was sealed off for the Americans), but the Fourth of July in Latvia is a day of mourning -- on 4 July 1941, the Great Choral Synagogue was burned down, along with other Jewish houses of worship in Rīga, at the order of Franz Walter Stahlecker.

This is the day set aside for remembrance of the genocide against the Jews -- ca. 70 000 Latvian Jews and 20 000 foreign Jews were murdered here during the Nazi phase of the occupation.

At noon a monument to Žanis Lipke and others who rescued Jews will be unveiled at the ruins of the Great Choral Synagogue. According to Uldis Neiburgs, a researcher at the Occupation Museum, ca. 400-450 Jews were hidden from the Nazis by ca. 400 persons. Žanis Lipke, his wife Johanna, his sons and friends saved a total of 55 Jews.

Marģers Vestermanis, founder and director of the Rīga Jewish Community Museum, has observed that Lipke is sometimes called "the Wallenberg of Latvia," but notes that the comparison, though flattering, is imprecise -- Raoul Wallenberg had considerable resources and Swedish diplomatic cover; Žanis Lipke was a dock worker who had nothing but a burning desire to rescue as many people as he possibly could.

Lipke, one of 103 Latvians recognized as Righteous Among Nations, was repeatedly interrogated by the KGB and could not travel to Israel (with which the Soviet Union had no relations); his son Alfrēds, who had helped him hide Jews prior to service in the Latvian Legion, lives in Australia, and Lipke finally obtained permission to visit him in 1977. Once he was in Sydney, the Israeli Ambassador to Australia accompanied him to Tel Aviv, where he was carried through the streets as a hero.

Unrecognized by the Soviets, Lipke hosted those he had saved every Christmas and Jāņi at his small home on Ķīpsala, an island in Rīga, until his death. The International Film Forum Arsenāls has embarked upon a project to reconstruct and restore the property, including the bunker in which Jews were sheltered.

The photograph of Žanis Lipke and his wife Johanna in the 1920s is from Latvijas Avīze. Lipke’s grave was vandalized recently… not out of anti-Semitism but to get at the bronze, which can conveniently be sold very near the cemetery, even nocturnally (just as we have 24-hour pawn shops where you can trade in what you’ve robbed, you can also sell stolen copper and brass all night...). The thieves had no idea of the monument’s significance, it seems—the metal has been recovered and the monument will easily be restored.

Heroes' Remembrance Day

2007-06-22T08:45:00.000+03:00

Tomorrow night, 23 June, Latvia's most important holiday begins -- midsummer, which leads to a slight leap in our dreary birthrate nine months later. Līgo, līgo! (Or, here among the Latgallians -- Ļeigū, ļeigū!). Solstice singing is of the essence, so if you cannot be in Latvia or join Latvians abroad for the celebration, I recommend Radio Oira for authentic folk music and Latgolys Radeja for the sounds of this region -- both are excellent and available online. Don't forget the beer!

Tomorrow is also Võidupüha for our northern neighbors, the Estonians -- Victory Day. The very same victory, which took place in 1919 near the Latvian town of Cēsis (Võnnu in Estonian, Wenden in German), is marked in Latvia today as Varoņu piemiņas diena, Heroes' Remembrance Day. It's not an official holiday, in part because today is also the anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Provoked by Giustino's post on "Latvianization," I decided to read and reread various memoirs and histories about the Battles of Cēsis (they're plural in Latvian because there were actually two) and that turbulent period, from the relevant parts of Edgars Andersons' mammoth history of Latvia 1914-1920 to Uldis Ģērmanis' popular history (or collection of fairy tales, the unkind would say) -- from Balodis, Butulis, Bīlmanis... Klāns, Grimm, von Rauch and Gen. Mārtiņš Peniķis to various letters and documents and reminiscences like those of the great Social Democrat Brūno Kalniņš. Needless to say, I got distracted and dislogotracted (pace George Quasha)... I also ended up meditating upon how different physical books are from a hypertext when it comes to such sensual digging and the weighing of different views. It's not just that their physicality is a spur to the art of memory -- it's a matter of form and depth, lost to most who rely upon Google. Whether in an officer's leatherbound memoirs or that cheaply printed Gedenkbuch published in 1939, Die Baltische Landeswehr, "time picks up the savor of the merely actual" (pace Gerrit Lansing).

I discovered yesterday evening that the copy of Vor den Toren Europas 1918-1920 I inherited from my father still bears the chthonic odor of the basement where he would read into the night, despite his having died more than three decades ago. In Stanley Page's tendentious The Formation of the Baltic States, the errors and ambiguities are lightly underlined in pencil. The Gedenkbuch that collects articles from the Landeswehrverein was printed in Rīga just before the Baltic Germans who authored it were coercively resettled. Old letters that served as bookmarks float to the floor. It isn't just that the Internet when it comes to Latvian history is as poor as a serf of the Fietinghofs (that expression refers to the barons of Alūksne, who treated their animals better than they did the peasantry) -- it's how one dances with books, roving and delving, reshelving, touching the finger to the tongue. Though I adore and am addicted to the Internet -- I would rather my mind resembled a library than looked like cyberspace. "Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season"... but what's drier than the Web? The ink was never even wet. Cyberspace isn't only everywhere -- it's nowhere.

The first photograph, filched from a fine gallery of images that the Estonian Embassy offers online, was taken in the Cēsis Museum of History and Art. It's a telegram published by Līdums, printed in Valka -- Walk in German, the town was once the seat of the Livonian Landtag and became the cradle of Latvian independence during the First World War, when refugees arriving from other parts of Latvia included many of the nationalists' leading intellectuals. The Provisional National Council was formed there on 17 November 1917. Taken by the Germans in February 1918 and by the Bolsheviks in December 1918 (Fabriciuss, a leading Red: "We will not surrender Valka -- we'll build barricades out of bourgeois bodies"), Valka was liberated by the Estonians and Finnish volunteers on Candlemas 1919. In July 1920, the town was divided between Estonia and Latvia by the British Envoy, Col. S.G. Tallents, and so it remains today -- Valga in Estonia, pop. 14 055, and Valka in Latvia, pop. 6547. An interesting article on the peculiarities of the division can be found here.

Confused? Okay, a bit of background. The telegram Līdums published is an announcement of the proclamation of the independence of the Republic of Latvia, which took place on 18 November 1918. Estonia, which had not suffered in the First World War to the degree Latvia had (Latvia had lost 37% of its population, for example), had declared the Republic of Estonia independent on 24 February -- German troops entered Tallinn the next day, however. After Germany's defeat in November, Estonia was invaded by the Bolsheviks, and so the Estonian War of Independence began. As the Wikipedia article says: "By the end of February 1919, the Red Army had been expelled from all of the territory of Estonia. Estonian troops also advanced into northern Latvia."

The situation in Latvia was far more complex (isn't it always?). The Estonians, with the support of the British, were able to repel the Bolsheviks at the gates of Tallinn. Latvia in 1919, however, had three governments. By May, Kārlis Ulmanis' provisional government was confined to a ship, the steamer Saratov, anchored off Liepāja under British protection. The poet, fabulist and polemicist Kārlis Skalbe called it "the Republic on the Water." Most of Latvia was in the hands of Pēteris Stučka's Bolsheviks. The Baltic German Landeswehr and the Iron Division installed a puppet government under the pastor and writer Andrievs Niedra. General Rüdiger von der Goltz had a grand dream -- destroying the Reds, restoring the old feudal order, and starting World War One all over again, with the help of a monarchist Russia and its loyal Germans. His "last battle against England," attended by bizarre castles in the darkling clouds like the United Baltic Duchy, ended in a rout.

Tossing open books upon the tables, bed, and window-sills, it strikes me again how little we have that's written sine ira et studio. But then that's juicy -- Wikipedia's fabled NPOV will give you no sense of those camps in that time. Books do, from the Fraktur to the futurism of the early Bolsheviks. The thin paper during the wars, the nods of approval from the authorities overseeing the displaced persons camps (DPs were called dieva putniņi by Letts -- "the little birds of god"). My parents sailed to America with only four crates of belongings -- three contained my father's books. These and the volumes he collected in exile until his death in 1976 sailed back to the fatherland he never saw free again (after my mother's death four and a half years ago). Most were printed abroad, when historiography in Latvia was the drone of Stalin's helpers. Balodis' history, originally written in Swedish, was published by a theater during the Awakening here. Spekke's Outline, still the most elegant overview of Latvian history in English, has just been reissued by Jumava. Habent sua fata libelli, it was written in Italian in Rome 1940-43, after the Russians seized our Embassy; the English edition first appeared in Stockholm in 1951, all of this work done by desperate men and women relying upon the offices of such friends as Alfred C. Bossom, MP, Chairman of the Anglo-Baltic Society in London, for funds. The pages of my edition are brittle, dark yellow. Paper little better than newsprint. People without a country, attempting to rescue its history.

The wheel could not be turned back, so many writing of the barons and the reactionaries say -- no, it couldn't be and wasn't, but do we still think of this wheel as rolling towards progress, leaving a line? To General von der Goltz, most every Latvian was a Bolshevik (just as every Balt is a "Fascist" to many a Russian today) -- the center-right American-educated Ulmanis, who would later be dictator, was a "half-Bolshevik." The Reverend Niedra would end up the pastor of a German congregation in East Prussia, now Kaliningrad oblast', writing his Memoirs of a Traitor to the Nation -- a painful position for a man who was essentially a Latvian patriot (he did return to Rīga to die, during the Nazi phase of the occupation). Stučka would end up giving birth to that fabulous animal called Soviet law (Vishinsky: "I do not believe in abstract justice").

Spekke includes reviews of his Outline in his memoirs (memoirs that studiously avoid a discussion of Ulmanis' dictatorship, when he was the Ambassador to Fascist Italy) -- a Swedish reviewer (praising his book vs. Bīlmanis', published at about the same time) observed that it wasn't the Latvians who defeated the Bolsheviks. If we look at the victory that we celebrate today, that would seem to be quite true. Major General Ernst Põdder defeated the Germans, local and imperial, with 5990 infantrymen, 1430 of them Latvians (N.B., there are other figures, but I'm the furthest thing from a military historian there is, and such detail is outside my purview), 22 cannon and 2 armored trains. Many of the Latvians were lightly armed barefoot schoolboys. General Balodis stood aside -- he was in the precarious position of remaining loyal to Ulmanis whilst under the command of the Landeswehr. Ulmanis' primary co-conspirator in the 1934 Putsch, he had Colonel Jansons' ultimatum (threatening to consider his troops, the core of the infant Latvian National Army, allies of the Germans) excised from history books and cancelled Heroes' Remembrance Day.

The second photograph in this post is of the Victory Monument in Cēsis. To some of the Latvians who mark this day (our flag seems solitary here in Dvinsk), this is the day when the bad dreams of the Baltic German nobility were finally defeated. Seven hundred years of slavery came to a bloody end. Such oversimplifications! The Latvian Institute: "This victory is traditionally regarded as the triumph of the idea of an independent Latvian state over the principles of power embodied by the Germans in the Baltic." In reality, von der Goltz and his minions did not give up -- they would regroup, and the worst elements of the Russian Empire and the Baltic German nobility would beseige Rīga. They would be defeated on Bear Slayer's Day, 11 November 1919 -- and by then it really was the Latvian people doing the fighting, left and right. The nation was finally born.

How was it possible for the Germans and Russian Whites to regroup? Well, the third photograph is of the Estonian School in Jugla, a Rīga suburb, where the Strazdumuiža Truce was signed. The Estonians, with British and Latvian help, routed the Germans today, eighty-eight years ago. This wasn't in the interests of the Entente, however. Essentially, the Allies (and especially the Americans) were not interested in the Wilsonian self-determination of peoples -- they were interested in using the Baltics and the Baltic Germans to defeat the Bolsheviks and restore stability, i.e., the Tsarist Empire. Though the Estonians could have captured Rīga, they were prevented from doing so by the British, French, and Americans.

The Latvian schoolboys, some of them still barefoot, entered Rīga, led by the principal officers riding their pale horses. The Saratov soon sailed for the capital. The Landeswehr was placed under the command of the man who would become Alexander of Tunis. The barefoot boys initiated no terror in a city that had suffered both the Red and the White horrors, bodies left to rot in the streets for a sign. When the church-bells rang in November, the sweet dreams of the idealists came true, and even if they soon soured -- what we remember today was glorious then.

Suhkrutükk commented chez Justin: "Baltic solidarity is a very new thing. It's mainly with the roots going to [the 1980s]." But that is pure bullshit. The cradle of Latvian nationalism, what we call Māmuļa, was born of the organization, let's call it an early NGO, that provided Estonian famine victims with relief, in 1868 -- Palīdzības biedrība priekš trūkumu ciezdamiem igauņiem: "The Society to Aid Estonians Suffering from Destitution." The contract between the Estonians and the Latvians in our wars of liberation was the enduring one.

With the Lithuanians, we have a Baltic Unity Day -- the anniversary of the Battle of Saule. Today and tomorrow are, or ought to be, the time we mark the historic intimacy of Letts and Esths, not a few of whom were in the same country for a very long time -- Livonia. Here you can watch a video of a demonstration in support of Estonia, 8 May 2007. It would be sad and shabby to leave our ties to the far right, methinks. It didn't start out that way, and it isn't that way. But sometimes, clearing the books off the bed, I think we leave our entire history to the right. Maybe even our entire being. 'Tis tragic.

The old photograph of the Victory Monument is from the collection of Jānis Bahmanis. Like most monuments in Latvia and Estonia, the column was destroyed by the Russians -- who now complain about the supposed desecration of their monuments, which doesn't take place. The Cēsis monument has since been re-erected.

The Seventeenth of June

2007-06-17T15:03:00.001+03:00

Only three days after we marked the June 1941 deportations, the flags again fly with black tassels attached -- today we observe the 67th anniversary of the occupation of the Republic of Latvia by the USSR. At dawn on this day in 1940, Russian troops and tanks invaded from all three sides, reaching Rīga around noon (pictured). Andrei Vishinsky, already infamous for his cruelty during Stalin's Great Purge, arrived the next day to coordinate repression, rigged elections, and the eventual illegal incorporation of Latvia into the Soviet Union.

A Time magazine article published a week after Vishinsky's death in New York in 1954 includes his reply to Roosevelt, who had asked him at Yalta if he'd ever been abroad: "Not often. And the first time I left Russia, a funny thing happened. I went to Latvia. One morning there I woke up -- and I was back in Russia."

Russia's denial of its history has taken a new turn of late -- the historian Heinrihs Strods was denied a Russian visa a week ago, just as the Chair of the History Department at the University of Latvia, Aivars Stranga, was refused a visa last year. Almost simultaneously, the representative of Russia at the Commission of the Historians of Latvia, the Armenian historian Aleksandr Chubariyan (who heads Moscow's Institute of General History), has resigned from the Commission, perhaps because he edited Natalia Lebedeva's study of the occupation of Lithuania, which led to his fall from favor in the new old Russia ("Chubariyan has to pay for Lebedeva's sins" in acknowledging the occupation of the Baltic states, the Latvian historian Irēne Šneidere observed).

Russian archives, though partially opened in the 1990s, have been increasingly difficult to access -- it seems that those who don't accept Stalinist historiography are finding access more difficult still, if not impossible. As Heinrihs Strods remarked, "I must have dug too deeply."

The Fourteenth of June

2007-06-14T11:19:00.000+03:00

Latvia marks the 66th anniversary of the 14 June 1941 mass deportation today. 11 598 Latvians, 1789 Jews, 761 Russians, 42 Germans and 238 others were deported. A virtual exhibition including a structural analysis and life stories is available here.

The photograph of last year's memorial service in Daugavpils is from Latgales Laiks.

Edward Lucas -- An Interview

2007-05-27T05:25:00.000+03:00

The third subject of my interview series is the esteemed British journalist Edward Lucas, the central and east European correspondent of The Economist.

You amaze some people in the Baltics because you seem to have a much deeper understanding of the situation here than most foreign journalists do. Do you think that's so? If so, how did that come about?

I have been covering the CEE region pretty much continuously since 1987.

I can't judge my level of understanding but I think I probably do have an advantage in being able to compare eg Moldova and Estonia. Fairly few journalists know Russian, German and Polish which are all useful languages.

You're highly opinionated, it seems to me. How do you balance that with "objectivity"? As I asked Aleksejs -- "do you believe in objectivity"?

The Economist is a "viewspaper" so we try to explain what is going on, not just describe it. I have the luxury of a weekly column where I can opine in a way that I would not do in the Europe section.

Though you obviously sympathize with the Baltic states (at least I think you do), you seem to have little sympathy for nationalists.... okay, okay, this is a leading question and "nationalism" has a definition that is funky, at best? Let me rephrase this! What is "Baltic nationalism" to you?

I sympathise with all sides to differing degrees. I think ethno-centric nationalism is not likely to make the Baltic states safe, free and prosperous. But as an outsider I have to be cautious in telling people what they "ought" to think.

How is Estonia different from Latvia (and/or Lithuania)?

Estonia is smaller, more Nordic, more protestant, more reserved but also more innovative than its counterparts.

You know a lot about all of Eastern and Central Europe. How are the Baltics similar to the satellites, and how are they different, in your view? Then and now?

Soviet rule has left a distinctive legacy in the Baltic but this is fading over time. It is much more visible in, say, Moldova or Ukraine

You're now writing what you yourself call "rants" for The Daily Mail -- what's the difference between a rant and an analysis? Why rant?

I have been writing for the Daily Mail and other papers for years. It is a way of reaching a different audience. And it helps pay for my children's education.

You've suggested that moving the Bronze "Soldier-Liberator" was a bad idea. Why?

The soldier was a policing/public order problem. Moving it created a national-security problem. That was a big practical minus for a modest symbolic plus.

If you still think it was a bad idea, why and how can you so vociferously defend Estonia afterwards?

The Estonian government made a questionable decision. Russia's response was outrageous. Countries have the right to make mistakes.

A timid young journalist friend of mine was amazed by your blog, and even by its very existence -- to him, a journalist must avoid such things. What would you say to that?

The Economist pays me to have authoritative views. If I was working for Reuters it would be different.

What can we look forward to in the next decade? Will you stay in journalism? What can we hope for from Edward Lucas?

Russia will get scarier. So long as I can, I will keep writing about the region.

Knowing what you do -- what can the Baltics hope for?

For the first time since 1993, I no longer feel confident that the Baltic states will survive: the potentially lethal combination is Russian money and western weakness.

Borderlands (IV)

2007-05-17T23:25:00.000+03:00

Protesti pie Saeimas pret Abrenes iztirgošanu 2007.05.17. from Kursis LV on Vimeo

A protest against the ratification of the Border Agreement at the Saeima, Latvia's Parliament, this morning, organized by the far-right "Visu Latvijai!" ("All for Latvia!") party. The Border Agreement was ratified (70:25) despite the fact that its constitutionality is being challenged in the Constitutional Court -- the President has said she will sign it into law, which means that the Satversme, Latvia's Constitution, may have to be amended. If a referendum to amend it fails, Latvia will be stuck with an unconstitutional Agreement, because Russia will almost certainly have ratified it and international law would require the consent of both countries to renounce it. My previous posts on the issue are here -- I, II, III.

Aleksejs Tapiņš -- An Interview

2007-05-16T16:25:00.000+03:00

This is the second of a series of interviews inspired by the series at Siberian Light. My victim this time is Aleksejs Tapiņš, who runs the most prominent English-language Latvian blog, All About Latvia.

Unlike with Pēters Jānis Vecrumba, who has his history at his site, we don't know much about you. Tell us who you are.

I'm a 30-year-old Latvian citizen, a product of a mixed marriage
between a Russian woman and a Latvian man. I came to the U.S. to study
back in 1997. Graduated. Got married. Went to do some graduate work at
Michigan State University in 2001. Graduated. Got divorced. The
marriage resulted in a beautiful son, so I moved closer to her and my
son in the state of Indiana, where I currently live. Until very
recently, I worked at a local newspaper as a reporter.

Aleksej, when we spoke on Skype, my Transylvanian friend said that you sounded very American. One of the interesting things about you is that you now have three identities -- Latvian, Russian, American. How do you deal with that?

It's a constant fight. Depending where I am or what the question is,
each of these identities rears its head.

I consider myself a Latvian, but not in a sense of pure ethnicity. I
think you, Peteris, use the word Lett to describe the ethnicity. My
father is a Latvian, but I've never learned any folk songs when
growing up. Since my family life has been dominated by my Russian
mother, it's the Russian language that became my native language. I
consider myself a Latvian in the sense that I love my country and I
want life there to improve.

The Russian identity appears to be separated from Russia proper. I've
been to Russia twice in my entire life, both times on schools trips as
the Soviet Union was falling apart. My Russian identity may show
itself through the language or the accent, battling with my Latvian
identity for world domination.

The American identity shows up when it comes to solving problems and
identifying solutions to those problems.

Why do you blog?

I started blogging in March 2003. At that time, there were very few
sites devoted to Latvia in English. And I was tired of explaining to
people that Latvia was not part of Russia. You have to understand that
in 2003, Latvia was not a member of the European Union or Nato.

Since then, of course, motivation for blogging has evolved. At one
point, it's become a search for my own identity. Who am I? Am I
Russian/Latvian/American? I tried answering my own questions in hopes
to show what some Russian-speaking people in Latvia may be going
through.

Now, the main goal is to inform English-speaking people about what's
going on in Latvia through my eyes, but, once I arrive to Latvia after
10 years, it will become an eye-witness account of Latvian life.

You're "coming home" soon. Does it feel like you're coming home?

I'm feeling the whole spectrum of emotions: from anticipation to fear.
This period will be the longest period I will spend in Latvia since I
left the country in 1997. It's exciting and frightening at the same
time. I realize that things have changed; places have changed; people
have changed. And in a way, home the way I remember will remain only
in my memory. However, I feel a strong connection to the country. So
in a way, yes, it is like coming home.

When you write about Estonia, you obviously support Estonia. Is there any conflict with your "Russian side"?

No, none really. Even if I don't consider that it was mostly
Russian-speaking teens looting, I would condemn any kind of
hooliganism, especially in a country like Estonia. I don't care about
the causes, I don't care about the motivation. It doesn't justify the
public disorder we've seen a couple of weeks ago.

What became visible more and more is how the Russian government
operates the propaganda machine; how hearsay is presented as facts;
how wrong key elements of previous stories get repeated again and
again; how most journalists from Russia absolutely have no integrity
to stand on.

So, no. No conflict with my Russian side. I only had a couple of
typical heated arguments with some of my Russian speaking friends, who
don't get it. But that's nothing new.

You're a journalist. Do you believe in objectivity?

Absolutely. I believe in objectivity. I believe all voices are
important in the marketplace of ideas. Of course, some ideas get there
through twisted or exaggerated facts.

I also believe in a thing called truth. For example, if someone had
said the earth was flat, but the other person said the earth was
round, the latter view would get most coverage because it's the truth
based on evidence. Now there are some things we cannot know, but it
doesn't hurt to question. So objectivity to me doesn't mean pure
stenography; it means analysis and presentation of evidence to the
reader.

With Estonia one can know beyond the shadow of a doubt that majority
of those young people on the streets of Tallinn were ethnic Russians:
the police numbers suggest that. One can hear them chanting "Russia,
Russia" on the streets of Estonian capital. And one can draw the
conclusions of their allegiance. No pretext of discriminated Russian
minorities, no public relations shtick can cover that truth.

What are your hopes and fears with regard to Latvian-Russian relations, within Latvia?

The hope is that Russia will treat its neighbors not as a sphere of
influence through natural resources or propaganda, but rather as an
equal partner. That will include Latvia. And I also hope that Latvian
politicians will be able to stand up to Russia. In other words, I hope
for peaceful co-existence, pipe-dream though it may be.

What can we expect from All About Latvia this year?

Plans are many, but there's never enough time and resources. Either at
the end of this year, or probably in the beginning of the next year,
I'm hoping to start a weekly podcast with news about Latvia with some
guests and music.

I'm also planning to start a Russian-language blog on livejournal.com
to debunk the myths about Latvia in the Russian press both inside and
outside of Latvia, but that's really like putting a stick into the
beehive. So for now, it's just an idea.

Since I'm moving from Midwestern United States to Latvia, I hope
readers, who continue to visit the blog, will find more revealing
reportages about life in Latvia.

Welcome home, Aleks!

The Fifteenth of May

2007-05-14T07:22:00.000+03:00

The first fortnight of the merry month of May is rife with red-letter days. Having blogged about May Day, the Fourth of May, Europe Day and Victory Day, I may as well end this bout of calendrical focus by writing about the Fifteenth of May.

Seventy-three years ago, slightly over six years before Stalin destroyed our Republic, the gentleman in the waxwork pictured at left destroyed our democracy.

Kārlis Ulmanis is a figure Latvia has not yet come to terms with. He still has his hagiographers. In 2003 a statue of him was unveiled in Rīga, paid for with contributions from admirers -- not a few of the donors were Western Latvians, especially Australian Latvians. Raivis Dzintars' young radicals and nostalgic elderly people gather there for a candlelight vigil to celebrate the 1934 coup. I'm with those who wonder why a democracy needs to erect a monument to a dictator, but the nostalgia of those who remember "the Latvia of 15 May" is understandable -- he is styled as a "benevolent dictator," and by comparison to Hitler, Stalin, Antonescu, et al., he certainly was; he didn't snuff anybody, and that's a rather admirable characteristic. His earlier career, which included study and dairy farming in the United States, was positively noteworthy -- as the first Prime Minister of Latvia, from 1918, his faith in the Republic and strength of resolve were peerless; not too many people could so determinedly run a state without a territory (for a while, he governed from a ship, the Saratov).

Nonetheless, as the great poet Knuts Skujenieks pointed out not long ago ago, his dictatorship was a prelude to Soviet totalitarianism -- the Vadonis ("the leader") was the nation, though he never received the nation's consent. Even local government was dependent upon him. Even bus schedules were censored (to remove Slavicized toponyms). Classic plays that depicted the evils of peasants had to be reworked before being staged -- the peasant was to be exalted. "A Latvian Latvia" was supplemented with the slogan "in Latvia, the sun shines upon everyone."

There are a multitude of takes and sidelights -- this one, for instance. It's skewed. From the most recent book on Latvian history available in English (this is not a plug -- though I'm one of the translators, I'm not too fond of the book) --

p. 151: “the coup of 15 May was not a preventative action but an illegal act consciously directed against Latvian democracy.” See also p. 149: “Ulmanis informed the President of what happened [on 16 May 1934]; according to the Satversme, Kviesis was to defend democracy with all his powers. Without the slightest formal protest, he accepted the coup and betrayed democracy. Nothing threatened Latvia at the time that could have justified killing democracy. Neither a political nor an economic crisis encouraged the coup; to the contrary—the approaching end of the economic crisis would have prevented Ulmanis from accusing democracy of weakness.”

p. 153: “Latvia in the time of Ulmanis was characterized by a distinctly anti-democratic government. The May 15th régime was the most authoritarian in the Baltics and possibly in all of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, it was virtually the only dictatorship in Europe that retained no formal elected representation whatsoever.” p. 159: “The idea of the unity of the people was closely allied with an idea of leadership opposed to parliamentary democracy—an idea of leadership practiced by Ulmanis in making decisions as a dictator with practically unlimited powers. Official propaganda attempted to portray him as a leader given to the Latvian people by God himself. [...] The praise and flattery accorded him very quickly developed into an exaggerated and ridiculous cult of personality—the Vadonis was dubbed ‘the greatest statesman in Europe’; he was ‘the Great Sower’ and the ‘Double Genius’. This worship of Ulmanis was interwoven with an uncritical assessment of authoritarian rule devoid of any objectivity. Latvia’s monolithic press usually lauded even the least achievement with the words, ‘we’re headed straight up’.”

For people who grew up under Ulmanis, criticism of the Vadonis is often seen as heresy (unless they came of Social Democratic "stock," perhaps...). I've made at least three elders cry, and the reason is simple -- no matter how noxious "the Latvia of 15 May" was, what came after was incomparably worse. I highly recommend this study of minority policy for some insight -- "The Price of Free Lunches: Making the Frontier Latvian in the Interwar Years." The difference between free lunches and Siberia is vast, and most Latvians understand the difference most intimately.

The political scientist Jānis Peniķis asks, rhetorically, what it means "to be ready for democracy." Were we? Are we? One of the most interesting things about that period is that nothing indicates that democracy was failing in 1934. On the other hand, other than a Social Democrat firing his pistol into the ceiling of his villa whilst being arrested on 15 May, there was never any real opposition to Ulmanis' dictatorship.

To today -- where are we in time? 1993/1939 -- these transposed digits were well nigh mystical, Guntis Ulmanis becoming President on the strength of his surname. We restored the Republic of 18 November 1918 -- but the elder generation remembers only the May 15th régime. 54% of those surveyed in Latvia yearn for "a strong hand." That's not as bad as it is in Russia -- but it ain't pretty. Other stats explain why -- people feel powerless, basically. We choose between indifference and the lesser evil. This country, or imagined community (pace Benedict Anderson) being small (tiny, my Transylvanian friend would say -- if you open the newspaper in one Baltic state, it shades a neighbor), we all "know everybody." The standard line is "they're all thieves (robbers, bandits, good-for-nothings...) -- you vote for your good-for-nothing, I'll vote for mine."

Only 44% of the population feels that it's possible to influence anything by protesting. Is it 1934 again? Nah, 'cause we're comfortably ensconced in various structures of elastic strength -- no strong hand is rising to try to clean out the Augean stables.

I take some small solace in the number of people turning out to sign for the referendum.

I'll close with the words of Bļodnieks, the last PM before Ulmanis' last election to the post he sullied so. In The Undefeated Nation, Bļodnieks includes a chapter entitled “Unjustified Coup d’État.” He writes how the events of 15 May “filled me and all other true democrats with deep indignation.” Bļodnieks said “that never and under no condition would I renounce the ideals I had formed in my youth and for which I had shed my blood--my determination to go with the people and work for the people, to defend its right to shape its government and life in freedom. I also stressed that any dictatorship, in its essence, was alien and irreconcilable to the Latvian people and the sense of justice and legality and should therefore be inacceptable and combatible.”