In Europe (28 page)

Latvia was ruled by the
Drang nach Osten
, the Drive towards the East. From as early as the twelfth century, this pre-Christian, heathen Courland served as the hunting ground for Prussian crusaders. Into the twentieth century, the descendants of the Teutonic Order – with names like Lieven, Pahlen and Behr – ran enormous estates here. The area was officially part of the czarist empire, but unofficially it was an important German colony.

Vilnius occupied a position in the middle: forty per cent of the population was Jewish, thirty per cent Polish, two per cent Lithuanian. That was how things were at the time the old courthouse was built.

In 1918 the Bolsheviks seized power in the Baltic States. They sacked estates, murdered a few thousand civilians and established a ‘people's tribunal’ in the courthouse. But soon they were chased off by a joint army of German property owners and Baltic nationalists. Then the purges began on the other side: thousands of real or supposed Bolsheviks were shot without a trial. According to the French ambassador at the time, at least fifty executions took place each morning in the central prison at
Riga. And so began the rounds of slaughtering on the left and on the right that would repeat themselves again and again in the decades to come.

In 1920 the Soviet Union recognised the Baltic States’ independence ‘unto eternity’. The building once again became a normal courthouse. By then Latvia had lost forty per cent of its population to wars, famines and emigration. In 1926 the flow of goods through Riga harbour was only a tenth of what it had been in 1913. Entire factories had ‘emigrated’ to Russia. Hundreds of German estates were divided up among small farmers, and the Lievens and the Behrs left with bitterness in their hearts.

The British sent their fleet to the aid of the three little countries, but to no avail. When a youthful British diplomat stood up for Estonia and Latvia at the 1919 Paris peace conference, the British chief of staff, Sir Henry Wilson, led him to an enormous map of the Russian Empire.‘Now, my boy,’ he said. ‘Look at those two little plots on the map and look at that enormous country beside them. How can they hope to avoid being gobbled up?’

I wander now through the cellars of that courthouse. It is all still there: the bucket latrines of the NKVD, the Gestapo's hatches, the doors padded to muffle the screams. I see the ‘little cell’: officially designed for solitary confinement, but in reality often used to pack in ten or twenty prisoners; the wooden beds, dating from 1947 (before that, prisoners slept on the stone floor); the lamps that stayed on around the clock. On the wall is a photograph of a young girl with a smart cap on her head, half sitting, half lying against a wooden wall, a pair of binoculars in her lap. She is dead, her chest riddled with bullets. She belonged to the Lithuanian resistance which waged guerrilla warfare against the Soviets until 1953. These ‘Brothers of the Forest’ believed that, under international law, Lithuania was still an independent country. Their covert government had its own laws and its own administration. Courthouses were occupied to make sure Soviet law could not be applied. Some 20,000 Lithuanians were killed in that struggle. The life expectancy of a partisan was two or three years. Most of them were under the age of twenty-one.

A few of the cells are locked. Behind their doors lie the bones of the more than 700 Lithuanian members of parliament, priests and other
prominent figures killed in a KGB massacre. The bodies were dug up in 1993 and 1994; only forty of them have been identified so far.

There is another visitor walking around down here, an old man. We strike up a conversation. Antonnis Verslawskis is back here for the first time since he was seventeen. Yes, he knows about the solitary lock-up, he stood there in cold water, forever, until he finally collapsed. His German is old and rusty. ‘I had German back in my gymnasium days, but it's been half a century since I've spoken it.’ He came to Vilnius today just for this, he says, and wanted to see it one more time. ‘I spent three months here in Cell 19, in 1948. There were seven of us. All students. I was with the partisans.’ He sighs deeply, taps his chest. ‘Emotions, yes.’ He points to the door of the solitary cell. ‘I was in there for three days. Then they sent me to Siberia for twenty years. Digging. Chopping. I was thirty-seven by the time they let me go.’ He has dark brows and sunken eyes. ‘This is where it all began. I was so afraid!’ He has difficulty going on, he has to dredge up the German words from deep inside, and he becomes more and more upset.

An important political barometer for the region is the
Baltic Times
. The weekly, only three years old, is put together by a dozen journalists working in a few jumbled rooms. A brief selection of this week's news: ‘Female President of Latvian Association of Models Arrested for Drug Trafficking’, ‘Parade of Waffen-SSVeterans Divides Latvia’,‘Estonian Parliament Broadens Language Demands: all Russian businessmen, civil servants, waiters and physicians must now speak Estonian’.

There is an article about anti-Semitic posters at the Lithuanian embassy in Warsaw. The text reads: ‘All crimes are instigated by Jewish Freemasons, and carried out by Jews.’ A demonstration by the elderly: ‘My retirement pay is just enough to pay the heating bill, but the Riga City Council doesn't care. How am I supposed to buy groceries?'The mayor of Visaginas has hanged himself: an investigation had been started concerning his alleged corruption and ‘pro-Moscow activities’. There is a report on the Estonian province of Polva, where the farmers have lost their Russian export market. ‘Unemployment, poverty, the young people are leaving by the hundreds. The locals, worried about their future, no longer dare to have children.'The Latvian prime minister, Vilis Kristopans, is interviewed: ‘If you want to see what Latvia should look like, look at the Netherlands.’

Steven Johnson, a young American, has been the weekly's editor-in-chief for the last two years. The supposed unity of the Baltic States, he feels, is only there when viewed from a distance. ‘Just look at the capital cities. Vilnius was built as the capital of a huge empire, Lithuania. Tallinn is and remains an overgrown Danish village, every bit as Scandinavian as the rest of Estonia. Latvia always was more or less a remote Prussian province, and you can see that as well: Riga is a true German trading town, and always has been.’

In recent years, Johnson says, the differences are becoming marked. After 1989, Estonia immediately established an excellent image in the West, and still leads the pack. Until 1996, Lithuania was still half communist. ‘The three countries may be working at the moment on a kind of economic community, but they are developing at very different rates. And that leads to a great deal of tension. You regularly hear Estonians in Riga or Vilnius shout: “What do we need these people for?”’

And what about the Russians? ‘After all those years, that intertwining is more complicated than ever. I know of a city in the south-east of Lithuania where eighty-five per cent of the population speaks Russian. In that same region there's a city that is dependent on one dairy factory, which is in turn totally dependent on the dairy consumption of a number of Russian cities. That still works, but for how long?’

According to Johnson, there are also huge differences between the Baltic States in terms of their relationship with Russia. ‘Latvia has always had the worst relations, Lithuania the best. Right after independence, Lithuania granted citizenship to all its Russians. In Latvia, only those Russians between the ages of fifteen and thirty were allowed to be naturalised. But if you were thirty-one and your native language happened to be Russian, then it was no go, even if you had lived there all your life. Latvian Russians are still in a tight spot: their pension rights are limited, they enjoy few or no social facilities, and they have no say in things.’ Latvia would rather focus on the Baltic, and forget the rest, Johnson feels. ‘The president is always talking about the Nordic Six. In his view, the Baltic must become the Mediterranean of the North.’

The young people in these countries, Johnson says, are very optimistic. The older generations simply let all the changes roll over them. ‘They've become cynical, they've been through too much already, they don't trust
anyone, including the West. The last time the Baltic states became independent it lasted only twenty years. Then, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, they were swallowed up by Russia again. The West never lifted a finger to help. They haven't forgotten that.’

Riga has an intimate feel to it, and at the same time the lightness of the sea. It is a true Hanseatic port, with a whiff of Denmark, and sometimes a touch of Deventer. In ten years’ time, a fantastic Potemkin town has been created here as well.

Today is the first real day of spring. The centre of Riga has been transformed into a cozy place full of pleasant little streets, pretty façades, restaurants and grand cafés. On a smaller scale, the city's story is almost the same as that of St Petersburg: because the poverty allowed little construction work or demolition after 1918, Riga is a city almost perfectly intact, unchanged from the year 1900. Everyone is out strolling under the bare trees: a tall man with a moustache and a beret, a Jewish woman with a mink cap and stole, a drunken worker with torn trousers and no toecaps in his shoes. Engraved in a rusty wrought-iron balcony is the date 1879, and I think: who lived behind that date in 1918, 1920, 1940, 1941, 1944, 1989? A Jewish businessman, German officers, a Soviet civil servant and his family?

In 1939 the Baltic States were divided between Hitler and Stalin, when the two powers carefully circumscribed their future European spheres of influence. In the afternoon and evening of 17 June, 1940, while the whole world was focusing on the German occupation of Paris, a long column of Russian tanks rolled into Riga. One year later, more than 650,000 Soviet troops were garrisoned in the Baltic States. Looting was commonplace. Hundreds of ‘enemies of the people’ were lined up and shot. In the night of 14 June, 1941, more than 20,000 people were rounded up in Lithuania, loaded into cattle cars and deported to the remotest corners of the Soviet Union. That same night in Latvia, 15,000 people were picked up, in Estonia 11,000. Only a few thousand of them ever came back.

Riga's Museum of the Occupation contains an original
parasha
, the middlepoint of existence in all Soviet prisons. The
parasha
– also referred to as ‘Red Moscow’, after a popular brand of perfume – was a wide, fairly low barrel with a shelf around the edges. In the corner of each
cell, each cattle car, each ship's hold and camp barrack one found these barrels full of shit, ready to slosh over the next time someone sat down on it. ‘All of the barracks, all our clothes, even our food, everything was permeated with that stench,’ wrote a former prisoner, Martinus Melluzi. ‘That stench, that unimaginable filth, that was perhaps the worst thing they did to us.’

In the summer of 1941, the Baltic States were occupied by the advancing German Army. Nazi rule lasted for three years, until the Red Army moved back into the region in 1944. The Soviets immediately resumed their old ways: lootings, rapes, the mass execution of ‘saboteurs’, deportations of ‘recalcitrant bourgeois’.

Again, not a single Western country came forward to support those little dots on the Soviet map. During the final days of March 1949, 40,000 men, women and children were arrested in Riga alone and deported to Siberia. In all three Baltic States, that number was 150,000. Between 1947–50, 220,000 Lithuanians were sent to other parts of the Soviet Union. Conversely, almost half a million Russians were brought into the Baltic States. By the end of the 1970s, the Latvians formed a minority in their own capital.

A replica of a camp barrack has been constructed in the Museum of the Occupation. I see a handmade spoon, a decayed violin, a letter written on bark and a book full of words of farewell, thrown in desperation out of a moving cattle car. There is also a little bookmark from 1946, woven in Riga's central prison with painstaking devotion from loose red threads: ‘For Jüris, from Drosma’. But Jüris Mucenieks never saw it. He had already perished in the Siberian
taiga
, part of that number on display at the museum's exit: ‘During the periods of Soviet and German occupation, Latvia lost 550,000 of its citizens, more than a third of the population. This is the number of Latvians who were murdered, killed at war, sentenced to death, deported, scattered across the world as refugees or who disappeared without a trace.’

Thank God Riga's memory is short, for otherwise it would be unbearable. It is Saturday evening. The squatters’ café, called the Horseradish Sandwich, is enormously popular because of its old Soviet flotsam and cheap vodka. Restaurant Nostalgia, once the watering hole for the Soviet
elite, is now full of young people. The dining room was designed in inimitable Stalinist style, with Roman pillars, heavy chandeliers, French viewing holes in the ceiling and everything else that might appeal to the party's parvenus. Ten years later the Latvian young people see this as ‘cool camp’. This is the place to be, the place to be seen. I myself take to Café Amsterdama. I stare at the two Amsterdam cityscapes on the wall and the three bottles of Grolsch beer behind the bar.

This is a peculiar city, it occurs to me, a city that switches historical eras as though they were backdrops on a stage. I have brought along the fat catalogue from the Museum of the Occupation, glossy and colourful, subsidised with a grant from the
Landtag
of Mecklenburg Vorpommern. At the door I was also handed a thin, cheap brochure:
The Jews in Riga
, published by the local Jewish documentation centre. I lay them side by side. What the official catalogue – with a foreword by the Latvian president – writes about the Soviet occupation is quite striking, but striking as well are all the things it does not mention.

The catalogue correctly mentions the flowers with which the German ‘liberators’ were welcomed by the Latvians in 1941. I read all about the Nazis’ plans to ‘Germanise’ the Baltic States and recolonise them. The Boulevard of Liberty in the centre of Riga was rechristened Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, the traditional holidays were banned, the economy was placed under German control, workers were sent to Germany to perform forced labour.