All About Latvia

TALLINN - A majority of the people living in Estonia believe
improvement in the relationship between Russia and Estonia depends on both countries, a recent survey found.

The survey published in the Estonian media on Wednesday found that 58 per cent of ethnic Estonians and 64 per cent of ethnic Russians say improving the relationship between the two countries will take political will in both Moscow and Tallinn.

Ninety per cent of Estonians and 73 per cent of non-Estonians see the relationship between Russia and Estonia as bad.

However, those who blame only Tallinn or Moscow is marginal. Only 9 per cent of Estonians believe it is up to Russia alone to improve the relationship, while 19 per cent of non-Estonians believe it is up to Estonia.

“The political line in Moscow is aimed at aggravating relations,”
member of the Estonian parliament Sven Mikser told Estonian daily Postimees.

“There is no good will in Russia and the same applies for Russia‘s relations with other countries. It would be naive to think that Russia would be interested in improving relations right now.”

As ways to improve relations between the two countries,
respondents suggested seeking political compromise on both sides.

The relationship between Moscow and Tallinn hit a new low in April after the Estonian government decided to relocate a Soviet-era World War II monument from the centre of Tallinn to a military cemetery.

Ethnic Estonians see the monument as a reminder of their state‘s illegal occupation by the USSR, but most ethnic Russians see it as a tribute to Russian sacrifices in WWII.

The move sparked riots in Tallinn and a diplomatic row abroad.
Russia accused Estonia of “blasphemy” and supporting Nazism, while Estonia accused Russian state web servers of hosting a series of cyber-attacks on Estonian government servers.

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TALLINN – Thank God the pride parade in Estonia went peacefully last weekend.

I wrote this in Tallinn to a friend, but I think I’ll share it with all now that all Latvians have six toes.

I’m sitting in what could definitely be described as a bomb shelter. It’s an Internet cafe inside the Viru shopping center, in the basement inside the bus station, which occupies most of the basement. It’s always dark outside here.

There is a surprising lack of pretty girls in the capital of Estonia, at least, by Latvian standards. Maybe they all left to work in bordellos of Finland, bearing bastard-children. Or maybe a gay pride parade is not a kind of place one expects to see pretty girls. I don’t know. With just six hours spent in the capital, I really didn’t have time to look closer.

Last time I was here was when the country stood on the ruins of the Soviet Union and it still felt like we were together in the same post-Soviet crapper in some way. Now, it feels like a completely foreign country. In a word: civilization.

The country is filled with another language I don’t understand and has the money I’m not used to. 1 US dollar is worth about 12 kroner, so all prices seemed astronomical. This hour on the Internet, for example, costs 25.-.

But really, Tallinn has grown and improved greatly following my last visit in 1994. The only thing I remember from that visit was the Viru Hotel in the center and lots of small shops. Now, the Hotel transformed into a shopping center. And small shops were replaced by larger stores, including a McDonalds on Viru.

I had no problems speaking English. Unless it’s the older people I talked to.

One older woman who befriended me as we walked along the gay pride processional called Latvians “brothers”, complained about local Russians and Russia as a whole. I tried to speak English, at first. She didn’t understand. So we switched to Russian. She came to the parade out of curiosity to see whether any of her friends, relatives, strangers that she knows, are gays. And sure enough, she saw a woman who works in the health ministry marching in the parade.

“She always dressed in shirts and slacks,” the woman told me.

The other old guy who was watching “his friends” march asked me if I was living alone. I think it was a subtle hit on me.

“With wife and children,” I told him. “Many, many children.”

Well, if anything good came out of the parade, it’s fresh gossip information for the old lady, parades for those for and against sexual minorities. But it did seem like there were more people watching than participating. Like in Riga, the first time several years ago.

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RIGA – An excellent information service is advertised in every phone booth of a Latvian phone giant Latelekom. The information service is supposed to answer any question you may have. You can dial 1188 on your phone and for 0.25 lats a pleasant voice will answer any questions you can come up with.

Don’t know the shortest route to an Internet cafe? They will.

Argue with your friend about the age of Latvia’s new president? They will help you.

Now the service is expanding. A service in Latvia will be able to answer questions about our other two Baltic neighbors. Lithuania and Estonia. In ads, it’s impossible to avoid stereotypes when talking about our neighbors. For Lithuania, a creative advertising agent invented a basketball, featured under the words “You want to know what knows a Lithuanian?”

Estonia’s case is a bit different. Sorry Justin.

Under the words, “You want to know what knows an Estonian?’, there’s a picture of snail, clearly imply the slow nature of Estonians in general. In the Latvian language, the word “igaunis” or Estonian, can also describe someone who’s slow.

Tomorrow, I’m leaving on a slow bus for Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, to speak to some slow folks over there and to watch what will happen with the gay pride parade this year.

Have a great weekend.

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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.

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