Borderlands (V)

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.

Borderlands (IV)

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.

Borderlands (III)

Well, today is the day -- the Republic of Latvia and the Russian Federation in the persons of Kalvītis and Fradkov have signed the Border Agreement. Opinions vary (my previous posts about the issue are here and here), but all I have to say today is that this is a day to think about the abrenieši -- the people who lived in the area severed from Latvia, and their descendants, who are real people losing something real today... something they built, a physical place, now lost in rhetoric and legally yet further from Europe (whatever that is), a place that was raped, "cleansed," and basically decimated by Russia (Soviet Russia, the USSR). At All About Latvia, Aleks offers a translation of the notes of a spy.

RIA-Novosti, at least, is getting friendlier.

The image is of the town seal.

Borderlands (II)

The Saeima, Latvia's parliament, voted 69:26 on Thursday to authorize the coalition government led by Prime Minister Aigars Kalvītis to sign the Border Agreement with Russia (hyperlinks to some of the nitty-gritty, background, and commentary can be found in my previous post on the subject). Ben Nimmo of Deutsche Presse-Agentur, one of the better foreign correspondents in Rīga, writes about the vote (and the protest pictured at left) in an article entitled "Nationalists left in the cold as Latvia warms to Russia," available in English here. The address to the Saeima given by Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Latvia's President, at the outset of the dramatic debate that began ten days ago, can be found in English translation here. Over at All About Latvia, Aleks writes:

"Most Latvians, I believe, don’t care about Abrene. There’s enough poverty to go around without this piece of land that is a bit larger than 1,000 ha. From a legal standpoint, the issue here is much larger: is the present-day Latvia a so-called Second Republic, or is it a continuation of the Republic of Latvia formed in 1918?"

Callous as the first sentence cited may sound, Aleks' belief is borne out by surveys -- a 2005 poll showed that 53,9% of Latvia's residents would be prepared to "give up" Abrene (here and henceforth I am using the term to refer to the six civil parishes annexed by Russia in 1944 and not to the entire district, most of which is still in Latvia -- nowadays this is the most common usage; "give up" is meant in the legal sense, of course, since the area has long been de facto part of Russia), whilst only 22,9% would object. As Anita Daukšte recently noted in Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze, 47% of People's Party voters want Abrene returned, but only 34% of those who vote for the "Fatherlanders" do. The People's Party is the party of the Prime Minister and is eager to sign Abrene away -- Fatherland and Freedom is the furthest to the right one can go and still get into parliament (the men demonstrating outside the Saeima in the photo, half-naked in -17° cold, are further to the right, but they are the young far right and received only 13 469 votes, or 1,48% of ballots cast, in the last election). The paradox Daukšte points to isn't surprising, though: the Fatherlanders' voters don't want the region returned because it was ethnically cleansed. It's not the territory many Latvians don't want to see given back (even in an ideal world where it might be) -- it's the people who live there now they wouldn't want to see (and one must note that most surveys about these issues are of everybody in Latvia -- non-citizens included). Not only ethnic Latvians but also many of the ethnic Russians who lived in Abrene, and formed a majority of the population there (many of them actually Russified Latvians, ethnically, to be precise -- and almost all of them Latvian nationals), were driven out after the war.

The grand debate in the Saeima and on the airwaves (Latvia's premier political talk show, What's happening in Latvia?, for instance, produced an extra-long extravaganza that dug up politicians I haven't seen in years, in addition to august and wry historians, the awe-inspiringly brilliant Ineta Ziemele [now a judge at the ECHR in Strasbourg, speaking via Skype], and the rather comically earnest Raivis Dzintars, leader of the half-naked young men) was bound to be more emotional than it was rational. By weight, I'd even guess that Domburs' TV show (during which the call-in polls -- which are, of course, the opposite of scientific -- showed overwhelming opposition to signing the Border Agreement now) contained more substance than the parliament's marathon speechfest, especially from Ziemele. Speeches in the Saeima were limited to a Warholian fifteen minutes (my prize goes to the distinguished Uldis Grava, who described the Russian Ambassador, Viktor Kalyuzhny, as slavering with delight at what the legislators were doing -- Kalyuzhny has indeed been drooling his venom with even more frequency than usual; a man who has repeatedly noted that he sees no difference between the EU and the USSR, His Excellency gave a wide-ranging interview in the latest issue of Republika magazine, riding his favorite hobby-horses [Latvia was not occupied, how can we talk about occupation when there were no concentration camps /and there was no barbed wire!/ and the intelligentsia flowered... factories were built and not shut as they are under Brussels, etc.])

Though much poetry was quoted from the podium during this grand debate, the fifteen-minute limit (slightly exceeded by Visvaldis Lācis, the sometimes impolitic rightist Soviet apologists love to hate) prevented true grandeur. The longest speech ever given in a Latvian parliament lasted several hours, and it, too, was laden with allegory -- in fact it, too, was about land. That was long ago, in a very different land. Perhaps explaining a bit of the historical Latvian relationship to land will illuminate this for those who visit my blog but don't grok what Aleks calls "not your usual Eastern European country." Latvian peasants had lost their land twice -- once in the Middle Ages, when Letts were gradually reduced to a peasant class (as opposed to a nation, which took so very long to come into being) by the invading Germans, and once again when the serfs were freed. Their freedom, in Latvian, is called "birds' freedom" -- the equivalent of that line in the Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster song made famous by Janis Joplin: "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose..." In fact, another song (sung to a Joan Baez tune in exile) contained the words: "Land, land, what is land if you have no freedom -- freedom, freedom, what is freedom if you have no land?"

Though a middle class came into being and many Letts purchased or repurchased what had been stolen twice, in the 19th C, the problem of the landless was... a burning one, as we saw in 1905. This problem was solved by the constituent assembly and parliamentary Latvia, and the radical land reform can be seen as essential to the interbellum Republic (the article I am linking to includes comparisons between the land reforms undertaken in Central and Eastern Europe, which is why I chose it). Those early emotional debates I mention invoked the Dark Knight, finally defeated after six centuries as oppressor. Though the economic success of the land reform is indeed debatable, to put it mildly -- politically and socially, the redistribution brought stability. Latvians got land, one of the principal demands of the revolution -- the Bolsheviks, so very attractive prior to their brief rule in part of Latvia, lost their support, except in isolated pockets of Latgallia; working for the state didn't seem very different from working for the noblemen to most.

I'm painting with a broad brush, of course (and I realize that the situation of Latvian peasants wasn't and isn't unique). The thing is, though, that the rocks with crosses cut into them, liminary stones, stayed important during the occupation -- so did the documents some people hid on their person, praying that one day they would see their property restored. Many did see that -- one couple, both partners centigenarians, returned to their farm in Courland to work it. When the right wing speaks of Abrene, quoting poets like Andrejs Eglītis:

Turiet savu zemi ciet!
Zeme taisās projām iet,
Prom ar šūpuļiem un mājām,
Prom ar svešu ļaužu kājām.
Turiet savu zemi ciet!
Zeme taisās projām iet.

(A crude gloss: "Cling to your land! / Your land is preparing to leave you, / To steal your cradle and your home / And take it away on foreigners' feet. / Hold fast to your land! / Your land is ready to leave you.")

...when lines like those are cited here, they resonate. The hideous irony, of course, is that the blame for the near-death of agrarian Latvia can be laid at the door of neoliberalism as practiced here as much as the Soviets are to be blamed; interestingly, Kalyuzhny shares a cry with the Lettish far right when he notes that the sugar factories of Latvia weren't closed by those, er, to him non-Russian non-occupiers -- they were closed because of the economic realities of a globalized world, as interpreted by bureaucrats, speculators, and oligarchs in a kleptocracy with historical pretensions.

My late mother and my elderly mother-in-law and anybody from the Ulmanis generation could recall the admonition of the dictator -- put three spoonfulls of sugar in each coffee or tea, one for each of the factories.

Raivis and his half-naked men remind me of throwbacks to the 1930s. The trouble is that I'm not sure what "the élite" reminds me of -- well, okay, I am: of that segment of the bourgeoisie that did not give a rat's ass about this nation at the cradle of the nation-state, and was summarily shunted aside by a suddenly empowered people. Many of the elected politicians who dare to speak of principles whilst playing with democracy for their own or some shadowy benefit do nothing but enlarge our already bloated cynicism. One of the most popular takes on the Abrene question in these past weeks has been to recall the intransigence of the arch-nationalists during the Third Awakening (as Daukšte does). This makes little sense, because the situation is drastically different -- as RIA-Novosti recently reported: "Estonia’s prime minister said Tuesday that his country does not need any border agreements with Russia." We're in the EU and NATO, and this Agreement is only necessary for economic reasons -- if that, considering that Latvia's economy is growing at "breakneck speed."

There ought to come a time when our government begins to think a bit more about how necks get broken.

The photograph is from Latvijas Avīze -- more pictures of the half-naked young men are available at their site.