All About Latvia

RIGA – The Open House blog at UK’s Independent newspaper published interesting entry from Maris Sants, a gay pastor who left Latvia for the UK last month. Sadly, his story isn’t unique. Public homosexuality is still seen as propaganda of sexual deviance here in Latvia.

Here’s what Maris writes:

Before I came out in 2002, the rumours about my sexuality had already had huge ramifications on my life. I was a pastor in the Latvian church and I had a column in the church newspaper and that was stopped. My weekly radio sermon was taken off the air, and I was kicked out of the cathedral I served in.

On 22 May 2002, I was ex-communicated from the church. Back then there were only three openly gay people in Latvia. My story was on the front pages of all the Latvian newspapers and I have suffered dozens of personal attacks since then. I have been verbally abused, spat at and physically attacked. Last year, two guys ambushed me as I went to baptise a child. Since then my sight started to deteriorate, which my doctor blamed squarely on the stress caused by the attacks.

Read the whole thing. On the photo: protesters against gay pride parade pile up at the fence at the November 11 Embankment in Riga in June 2008.

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RIGA – The shame of public urination has hit home. I can certainly understand a John Smith from Somewhereshire in the UK wanting to relieve himself at the Freedom Monument on his trip to the Latvian capital. I could even understand a guy from New Zealand who decided to turn up at the monument in the Borat bathing suit. But now, locals began flocking to take a leak at the monumental monument in the heart of our beloved capital. First, it was a subhuman non-citizen, Nikolai and then, a citizen of Latvia joined in the list of public “urinators,” earning a slap on, well, you get the idea.

Actually, aside from the Freedom Monument, public urination is part of Latvia’s culture, part of drunken peasant culture. I suppose when no one is looking, you could urinate at the building of the Cabinet of Ministers, or some ministry you don’t like - that of agriculture, perhaps, is the least popular at the moment. I’ve seen men walk out of temporary parked cars at the railroad crossing, cross the road, walk a few meters into the green, whip it out and piss like there’s no tomorrow. It tends to leave passing-by women with a deformed face. Near my humble house on the outskirts of Riga, a man facing the road was watering a huge tree.

Recently, an op-ed piece in Diena ironically called to fence off the Freedom Monument from any one wishing to exercise their natural needs at the beloved landmark. In Latvia, you see, people believe that freedom usually means setting up fences. But the problem is not in their disrespect of Milda, rather the chronic lack of toilets.

What should a drunk Latvian, Russian, Brit, etc. do when he found a certain pressure on the inner wall of his bladder - to paraphrase “Spies Like Us” - with no toilet in sight? Men tend to want to urinate on something. Male ego tends to urinate on something large. When you’re in Old Town, the Freedom Monument is the largest thing you see. Besides, it’s got the girl on top. So they urinate there.

Near the office where I occasionally find myself, I saw two men pissing inside a tunnel near the Akmens Tilts. Good for them as there’s no public restroom on this side of the river either. The town’s sleeping areas – Agenskalns, Sarkandaugava, Torņakalns, Borderaja are the worst in the number of public restrooms. Certainly, a smart man might buy a coffee at a coffee-shop to be able to use their facilities, but as the interior minister Mareks Segliņš reminded us recently, even Čiekurkanls doesn’t have a nice place to eat and, therefore, to pee.

If our city fathers – once they stop fighting over the next local government coalition – wanted to deter Johns Smiths from using the Freedom Monument as their personal john, they’d create a citywide stop ‘n’ pee natural relief system for pleasure of local and tourists alike.

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RIGA – I’d lost all motivation to write about Latvia. This site – launched a way to stay in touch with my homeland when I was in the US – turned into a testament of Latvian pessimism.

Recent political events make it really difficult – down right impossible – to predict this country’s future. Cynicism of politicians toward those whom they are supposed to serve, lack of strong political leadership on all levels, jeopardize Latvia’s future as a European nation where democratic principles are upheld. I want to believe that this country will eventually manage to pull itself out of the Soviet swamp where it still seemed to have stuck, even after 18 years of independence. But I don’t hold much hope.

Watching history being made in the parliament on Sunday left a bad aftertaste for me. Not for me as a journalist, but as a citizen. The Saeima made three wrong decisions in one day. The competence was punished and the incompetence was rewarded. It was painful to watch how politicians justified why the Latvian Horse Minister Vinets Veldre should keep his job even though he has been obviously incompetent. Or how the ruling coalition tried to make the case to fire the head of the anti-corruption agency Aleksejs Loskutovs, failing to communicate a clear reason for the rush of his firing. It was even more painful to eavesdrop on MPs conversations during lunch talking about Loskutovs and several hundred people, who gathered outside to support him, with such a disdain.

Undoubtedly, the June 29 parliamentary session will enter history books as another sign that this country is at the crossroads. The question stands whether it will mark a day when politicians continue to be unaccountable for their actions, or a day when people start pay close attention and demand their public servants walk the line.

The next test will be the August 2 referendum, when Latvians decide for what they care more – their country or their summer holidays. For holiday-loving Latvians, it’ll be a tough choice to make. The referendum itself to allow people to dissolve the parliament is a scary one. A positive outcome could thwart the country into an era of constant signature-gathering referenda, stalling its progress. However given political elite’s cynicism, one has little choice but to support the measure.

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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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