Baby, Bathwater, Books

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

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!

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.

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.

Pēteris pameta pili

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

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

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

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

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

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..."

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

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)

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 Sad Saga of the Strawberry Cake

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"

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.

Referendum, ra, ra!

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.