History Always Here
RIGA - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would rather forget about history on the first “historic” visit of a high-ranking Russian official to the Baltic state of Latvia.
“We‘re ready to leave white spots in our history to historians,” Lavrov said on Tuesday during a press conference in Riga after completing the border treaty on his one-day visit, which the Latvian government hailed as “a historic event.”
“The heads of both countries have to put efforts into changing public opinion and base the relations on good neighbor ties, not forgetting history, but not making it a part of contemporary politics, either,” Lavrov said after his meeting with Latvian Prime
Minister Aigars Kalvitis.
While Russia reaches into its own Soviet and tsarist history to revive its new national identity, the painstaking history in the Baltics - which joined the European Union and NATO in 2004 - walks the cobbled streets of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius.
History in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - whose total population of 7.1 million people is less than Moscow‘s - is alive in a series of commemorative days, all tied to the Soviet period.
History is present in Latvian politics and it’s felt on the street.
Their shared and bitter history makes emotional any Baltic defiance of Russian investments or energy reliance on its former
overlord.
For the three Baltic states, the last century commenced under Russia‘s tsars. After World War I, the three countries gained independence.
Then, Germany and the USSR signed a pact in 1939, which scarred the Baltic nations for decades and ultimately cost them their independence in 1940.
Soviet troops swept into the Baltics, and Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of people to die in Siberian gulags.
When Hitler‘s troops marched through in turn, some saw the Germans as liberators - and some collaborated with the Nazis.
Russian speakers arrived in Latvia and Estonia during the Soviet period following World War II, helping to reduce the number of ethnic Latvians and Estonians in these countries and instilling the fear that the small nations would eventually lose their own language and culture.
Some Russian speakers and their children remain without
citizenship in Estonia and Latvia, which complicates the relationship between the two countries and Russia.
Since the early 1990s, the Baltic states and Russia have argued over their interpretation of the post-war Soviet period.
Moscow has tried to portray it as a liberation from Nazism, but for many Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, it was a tragic period of occupation and subjugation.
Each country maintains a museum of occupation as a painful reminder of its Soviet past.
In Latvia‘s capital Riga, the Soviet-style windowless structure on a medieval town square represents an architectural and historical eyesore as a reminder of the small nation‘s painful past.
Included on an official itinerary of every visit from a queen to a diplomat, the Museum of the Occupation tracks Latvia‘s grueling history from its loss of independence to the Soviet Union, through deportations and war until 1991 when the Soviet Union fell.
However, Lavrov won‘t see its exhibitions on his historic trip. Latvia‘s Foreign Ministry said Lavrov was on a working visit to Latvia and a visit to the museum was not part of the official protocol.
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