LEMBERGSVILLE – I arrived just in time for the city’s 717th birthday. In the post-Soviet years, the city celebrated it by hosting city days. National flags adorned buildings. Many visitors were visiting the town, which is probably why there was no place to sit on the bus here.
This year, the mayor of the city Aivars Lembergs, who is under house arrest during an investigation into bribery, and abuse of public office, received the Citizen of the Year award, the highest prize the City can bestow upon its citizen. Lembergs’ attorneys and Lembergs himself asked a permission to have his his daily walk at the time of the festival. A headline in one publication said, “Lembergs Asked to Walk and to Address the Public.”
His request was denied and he had to pen a letter to the citizens, instead. The letter is very much resembled Vladimir Lenin’s letters from his Siberian or Western exile at the dawn of the last century, where the great leader speaks of his struggle for the people, his own martyrdom for the good of the people. Ironically, the letter was signed “Ventspils City mayor Aivars Lembergs, political prisoner,” which caused just a rocket of laughter from a single man in the crowd. The rest of the present public applauded and cheered.
And there’s a lot to cheer about. Lembergs has been the city mayor for the last 19 years. He began his tenure as the city’s head honcho in the dying days of the Soviet Union and developed this town into probably the wealthiest provincial town in Latvia. Wherever you look, you see the Lembergs’ hand. Out of some 50 tourist attractions in the Ventspils travel guide, perhaps, more than 75 percent have been either reconstructed or built from scratch with the help of the mayor. In 1997, for example, the city opened Ventspils University, a completely independent educational facility. A 2.8 meter-tall fountain “Ship Watcher” was constructed in 2002 from slub brought in from Sweden. Lembersville is still decorated with seven cows, which originally were created during an international art project Ventspils Cow Parade 2002. Ventspils Library has received a total overhaul in 2004-2005 and has been recognized as the best constructed building in Latvia in 2004. A bus terminal has been updated and modernized in 2001. And the list goes on.
It’s a neat place, streets laden with stones, beautiful churches, small buildings in the Old Town. Lembergsville, pop. 44,000, has cleaned up its face thanks in large to the contributions of its mayor and the money it receives from pumping the Russian oil from Russia to the rest of Europe.
In the end, the figure of Lembergs in people’s eyes resembles that of last pre-war president Karlis Ulmanis, who suspended the democracy in this country in 1934. Ulmanis served as a benevolent dictator and he is still loved by many older people of that era, especially among those who had to leave Latvia for Western countries following World War II. Much like Ulmanis, who could do no wrong in their eyes, some folks in Latvia focus on Lembergs’ contributions to the town’s development.