All About Latvia

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.”

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RIGA – Let’s get to know each other. Readers, send it pictures of a view out of your windows to aleks - at - allaboutlatvia.com with the following information: city, date and time and we’ll posted on here.

Here’s the view out of my window this morning.

Rīga, Latvia. May 20, 2008, 8:15 a.m.

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RIGA – Excerpts from an interview with Juris Savickis published in Diena newspaper on May 19, 2008. A former KGB officer, Savickis is now involved in energy, chairs the Russian chapter of Itera energy company and sits on the board of Latvian gas monopoly Latvijas Gaze. Original can be found on the Diena newspaper Web site.
…
So you’re saying that 10 years later Latvia’s 70 per cent dependence on Russia gas would be okay? Is that your vision?

My vision is the same as yours – we have to find an independent source… Why am I not afraid of Russians? All our experience shows that there has never been a single moment when Russians somehow managed to influence us through gas. A monument ought to erected to Juris Savickis and Adrians Davis because we’ve managed to make sure that prices rise gradually in the last ten years when Russians decided to raise them really quickly a long time ago. Russians own 34 per cent of Latvijas Gaze. Four men from Gazprom sit on the board of Latvijas Gaze. They work as a lobby with Gazprom so the prices wouldn’t be raised because we’ve approved a Latvijas Gaze program for three years with investment and everything else. I had a thought that in the construction of a new power plant we need to involve Russians and Germans, but everyone jumped on my case for political reasons. What’s he want from those Russians? Germans are very attentive, very precise in following everything - there are many pluses there. On the other hand, Russians never neglect their property. All history of Latvijas Gaze shows that they understand it and it benefits us. Another reason why I’m not afraid of Russians is because we have [natural gas storage in] Inčukalns. Don’t underestimate it - it’s a colossal argument against Russia. 600 to 800 million cubic meters of gas goes from Inčukalns to Russia. In those regions, they only can sell gas from Inčukalns. We have 5.7 billion cubic meters of gas in Inčukalns. We can survive five years without the Russian gas.

The EU is afraid of its dependence on Russia for energy resources not because they’re worried that Russia would turn the gas off – Russia needs customers. The fear is that Russia’s energy policy is defined as a strategic weapon in formation of the foreign-policy discussions.

Those are two different questions. First one is that Russians use gas a political weapon. I absolutely cannot agree with this thesis. In my opinion everything is quite the opposite. In my view, gas is used as a political weapon against Russia.

Who uses it?

Russians haven’t violated a single agreement. Even with Ukraine and Belarus. I know everything in detail what really happened in Ukraine and Belarus.

You’re saying that Russian gas isn’t a political weapon. Why then in your interviews, you’ve said that they were worried that Latvia harms Russia? If it’s a clean business – one side harms Russia, the other trade with gas. Why are you saying that Latvian television should not have shown Putin’s System documentary before the Russian elections if it’s got no connection with politics.

It’s got no connection with gas politics.

Why then you were concerned about [a rescheduled anti-Putin documentary]Putin’s System [that was to be shown on Latvian TV on the eve of the parliamentary elections]?

Now you’ve moved into political questions about which I wouldn’t want to talk. It had no connection with politics. All agreements are fulfilled. Latvia’s relationship with Russia doesn’t stop with only gas and electricity. There are sprats and hell knows what else – then starts politics. I wasn’t shocked about the documentary but I had a few questions. For example, why did you make a ruckus about the question who canceled the film? I have another question - why weren’t you asking who scheduled the film in that time for our taxpayers money?

Latvian Constitution says that censorship is forbidden.

All people who scheduled that film - they were thinking what they were doing?

Yes, and they know that Latvia is not part of Russia and here censorship doesn’t work.

Why wasn’t the film shown a month earlier?

Why not show it on the same day? It’s timely.

Okay, we’re a free people. Why wouldn’t we now show a film about Clinton and Lewiski?

If you have a specific film, offer it to Latvian television and they’ll show it with pleasure.

No, they won’t.

Why not?

Because they won’t. It’s the same as with that monument – why did Estonia have to move the [Bronze Soldier] Alyosha near May 9? Do it in September, October. Your neighbor urinates on the steps when another is celebrating his birthday. but he pees on his own steps, not the neighbor’s, because he’s afraid to go near the other steps. That’s the level we’re talking about here.

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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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