All About Latvia

RIGA – To paraphrase the forefather of the first workers country in the world, Vladimir Lenin, the most important art form for the proletariat is film. The Bolsheviks were among the first ones in the world to develop a fresh, new film industry as way to impact public opinion, rather than a source of making money as it has been in the West.

In 1924, just seven years after the October Revolution, the Soviet filmmakers released a silent film “Unusual Adventures of Mr. West in the Bolshevik Country.” In the film, frightened by the foreign press regarding the Bolsheviks crimes, a U.S. Senator Mr. West decides to visit the Soviet Union to “learn of the savages that invaded that distant land.” The Internet Movie Database says, “Through various mishaps, Mr. West discovers that the Soviets are actually quite remarkable people, and, by the end of the film, his opinion of them has changed to one of glowing admiration.”

Mr. West was a work of fiction. The Soviet Story is not. Written and directed by the Latvian filmmaker Edvīns Šnore, the 90-minute film tells a tale of the Soviet atrocities, all too familiar to eastern Europeans. The Holodomor. Katyn.

The film made the international headlines after Russian nationalists burned Šnore’s effigy near the embassy of Latvia in Moscow. The Latvian national TV showed it last night on the day commemorating the Soviet occupation of Latvia back in 1940. Then, with an agreement of the Latvian government, the Soviet tanks rolled into the small Baltic nation and launched the year of terror. While the film received a lot of positive reviews, I found it an excellent work of modern propaganda. It’s no better than any other Soviet propaganda films. In some way, it is even worse than a propaganda film as it presents itself as a documentary. It is not. With a deep voice of the narrator on the background, images of mauled bodies, shot men, dead children flashed the screen at the Occupation Museum to an audience of mostly young people this afternoon. The director chose to repeat the grueling images again and again, with a clear purpose to disturb a viewer. The images are intertwined with commentaries from Western historians and former Soviet dissidents.

Not a single time, the narrator contradicts the so-called experts during the 90-minute film. For a good measure, the infamous Putin quote about the fall of the Soviet Union being the greatest calamity of the last century is played twice. It creates an impression that the script was written ahead of time – and experts were there to provide weight to the already conceived view of history. The visual effects, the replayed images are there to manipulate the audience, not to educate them. It is on the same par as Soviet propagandists who twisted facts, interviewed a certain group of people to get a certain point of view across.

In a way, I agree with a historian Gustavs Strenga. Perhaps, Latvians – as Russians – aren’t ready yet to study history for history’s sake. Twenty years after gaining independence from the Soviet Union, Latvians would rather use history as a political tool, which differs very little from Russian “documentary” masterpieces we’ve seen in the last several years.

And Lenin was right after all - films still matter.

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We’ll be liveblogging the Eurovision Song Contest Saturday night, but in the preparation of this shining example of the -decadent West- popular culture, let’s take a history walk.

Here’s almost every Latvian Eurovision song ever.

2000 - the group Brainstorm performed “My star.” The group came in third, after Russia and Denmark, which won that competition held in Sweden. Not bad for a debut. Latvia was selected as the last 25th country to participate in the contest replacing Greece, which withdrew.

2001 - Arnis Mednis represented Latvia in the contest with a song “Too much”. Unfortunately, his performance was not found among the vast universes of YouTube. He came 16th.

2002 - Marie N (also known as Marija Naumova) with a song I wanna earned Latvia the right to host the next Eurovision Song Contest. She came first.

2003 - F.L.Y. performed Hello From Mars, which didn’t fair well among the earthlings on the European continent. They came 24th.

2004 - The rules were changed to accommodate more countries-participants. Latvia was represented by Fomins & Kleins with Dziesma par laimi, A Song About Happiness. Happy or not, the song didn’t qualify for the final.

2005 - Valters un Kaza sang The War is not Over. They came 5th.

2006 - Cosmos performed I hear your heart. Talented though they may have been, they came only 17th.

2007 - bonaparti.lv with Questa Notte. They came 16th.

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RIGA – On Tuesday, Latvian State Police moved out of a building with a bloody violent history. The Corner House on the main artery in the Latvian capital was a source of fear and horror among local population. It housed the local office of the KGB. Back in February, All About Latvia teamed up with the Baltic Bulletin to look through the notorious KGB basement. And here’s the replay of the account.

A First-Hand History Lesson
originally published on February 22, 2008.

Russian sign reads “No Smoking” inside the basement of the corner house in Riga.

RIGA – Russian-language signs adorn the walls of the narrow low-ceiling hallways that zigzag through a dirty, dusty basement under dim lights between tight cells in the most notorious building in Riga.

During the 50 years of the Soviet occupation that ended in 1991, the building on the corner of two city arteries housed the regional KGB headquarters, instilling fears into Latvians that no one dared to utter its real name.

Instead, everyone, including a Latvian writer Anita Liepa, called it “the corner house.”

read more

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RIGA – History plays an important part in the inter-ethnic relations in Latvia as well as in the relationship between Latvia and Russia. It has a direct impact on people here.

Russians who live here in the Kremlin-saturated media sphere know about the Soviet occupation. It’s hard not to. The Occupation Museum is next-door. Some have naturalized and answered the question about what happened on June 17, 1940. Latvia has many, many days of mourning, commemorating those who had been sent to Gulags.

Elderly people – the ones waving red flags at the Victory monument last weekend – get their news from Moscow. Young people like to watch comedy shows, music shows, films available on Russian TV.

Of course, some of those shows are turned into propaganda. In a Russian film “We’re from the Future” (trailer) four young hip heroes – you know they’re hip because they drive hip cars and one of them even has a hip tattoo of a swastika, another has a hip nickname like Borman – anyway, four young hip heroes make a living selling World War II medals they find in graves outside St. Petersburg. They uncover a mud-hut with skeletons inside. Anyway, they go skinny dipping in a nearby lake. They dive in. And when they come back out they end up in 1942 on the Soviet side of the front, learning an obligatory lesson that connects their modern lifestyle with those soldiers who perished during the Second World War.

But the film is not about Stalin, or his crimes. It is part of the great search for the national identity.

When it comes to the Stalin crimes, much wood has been turned into paper for publications about that topic. The Soviet Union Congress of Deputies, a fully elected parliament, in 1989 even adopted a resolution (the link’s in Russian) condemning the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 and its secret protocols declaring them void from the moment of their signing.

At the same time, the press took a whiff of freedom and became high on publishing anything about the Stalin years – from a documentary research on the crimes to an absurd accounts of private lives of Stalin and his comrades.

A documentary was released here in Rīga trying to piece together communist crimes to persuade the West to place an equal sign between the communist crimes and the crimes of Nazi Germany. Surprisingly, the film caused little interest – some 900 people saw the film called The Soviet Story since it opened last week. But, the film would actually be a waste of time for educated Russians in the Baltics even if it’s subtitled in Russian. Nothing the film shows people don’t already know.

Most sane people without any political agenda don’t question whether Stalin’s crimes had taken place. In fact, the Russian-language press here went into great length to show that Baltic Russians (some did live here before 1940), too, suffered under Stalin. Russians generally question the necessity of those atrocities. They attempt to explain away deportations of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Russians, Jews from this part of the world into Siberia. They say they deserved it for being too rich, or too intelligent, too political, too influential, or too nationalistic.

The disagreement is not whether crimes have taken place. The disagreement is about the interpretation of those crimes.

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