As Time Goes By

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.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

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.

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

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.

W(h)ither the Nation? (IV)

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.

"The Genocide Loophole"

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)

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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 Nearest Outpost of Tyranny

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?

A Letter

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.