25/7/07

This stay in Riga was ill-judged, and almost certainly wasted: an unnecessary interruption and distraction to the article you should now be planning in your mind (interesting how the nearer you come to writing it the further you travel away from it in your mind: an apparently self-frustrating process, but apparently also a necessary one). But there were one or two compensations, most notably the Museum of the Occupation, which turn out in the circumstances – though this may only have been a consequence of having recently left Russia – to be reasonably even-handed in its account of recent Latvian history, as well as informative. There was perhaps too little emphasis on the population’s general support for the Nazi invasion of 1941, and still less on popular Latvian participation in the SS and Wehrmacht. But it was better than one might have expected; only the tacit treatment of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as morally equivalent – that is, as occupying foreign dictatorships – jarred. One had a policy of imprisoning or executing all opposition, real or imagined; the other had a programme of genocide: though both were heinous, they were fundamentally different. But the core of the Latvian perspective remained national sovereignty, or rather the taking away of it: next to this, everything else came second (since on this view the Holocaust itself can be seen as a consequence of the abolition of national independence). It is for this reason surely that the museum compared unfavourably the Soviet policy of resettling 700,000 Russians in their country with the proposed Nazi one of installing only 174,000 Germans. And it is so in part no doubt because of the political repercussions this policy of resettlement is still having.

Otherwise Riga seems to have become richer, sleeker and more expensive over the last year, with the old town beginning to lose the last vestiges of its crumbling Soviet facades and turning into an all too familiar tourist zone of cafes, restaurants and bars: an affectless, neutral and almost generic Euro-space. The city itself is physically remarkably modest and self-effacing: low-lying and dispersed, and situated either side of an enormously wide river, it is almost invisible from its banks, so that it still retains, oddly enough, the character of a settlement that it must have had since it was founded. Riga is largely without pretensions: this is one of its attractions.

But why are you writing approvingly of the Latvian Museum of the Occupation when you opposed the Georgian one? What difference does thirty years make (or even, for that matter, two hundred)? Or is it that the Latvians are northern Europeans and consequently undeserving of Russian domination, while the Georgians are southerners in need of “modernising” (=civilising) by their large neighbour? Doesn’t your difference in attitude towards the two reveal a racist and imperialist discrimination? And if so, where have you gone wrong: in believing the Latvians or in disbelieving the Georgians?