Museum of the Occupation of Latvia: Unvarnished History by Peter Kalnin

 For most of the past 20 years I’ve been a teacher, and most of that was high-school German north of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Now I'm working with Baltics and Beyond Travel to arrange and lead tours in the Baltics. I'm 

also working as a guide and translator for the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. 

The museum was founded in 1993, and its guiding spirit was Professor Paulis Lazda from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Although it is not a state museum, and depends on private donations for its subsistence, it has become enough of an institution that diplomats and visiting foreign heads of state make it a part of their official visits to Latvia. Signed photos of Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron are among the many lining the stairway leading up to the main exhibit hall.

Until 1991 the main building served as a museum commemorating the communist Latvian Riflemen in the Russian Civil War. The planned renovation of the building, which began in the summer of 2018 after years of planning and negotiations, is still going on, so that the museum is temporarily housed in Raiņa bulvāris 7, the site of the former US Embassy. It is planned that the renovated museum building by the Latvian-American architect Gunnar Birkerts (father of essayist Sven Birkerts) will be completed in early 2022. 
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In Western European countries, there are museums related to the occupation by Nazi Germany. In the three Baltic countries, the question of occupation is much more thorny. When Hitler and Stalin divided Eastern Europe among them, leaving Hitler a free hand to invade France, the Soviets went to great lengths to plan their annexations in the Baltic to give them a veneer of legitimacy. Their sham elections-- voters could only choose from the communist party candidate lists, thus 99% voted to join the USSR-- let the Soviets claim that no occupation occurred. It is a worrying sign that the official position of Putin’s Russia is that the Baltic states requested accession to the Soviet Union.


So instead of a simple narrative of independence (good), Nazi invasion (bad), resistance (good), collaboration (bad), and liberation (good), the Baltic states are still dealing with a welter of troubling issues. Were the local authoritarian rulers wrong to try and mollify the Soviets in 1939? How to judge the collaborators under Nazi or Soviet occupation? Last week I began translating interview transcripts with Latvian linguists and language scholars, and it was clear what a tightrope people had to walk to balance their desire for intellectual and personal integrity with the need to keep the communist authorities from punishing them for Thoughtcrime. It’s unsettling to watch an interview with a personable, decent old linguist whose story tracks Orwell’s 1984 to a tee. 

Since 1991 each of the three Baltic states have been trying to throw off the pain and trauma of foreign occupation, with varying success. In the U.S., POWs and Holocaust survivors have long been honored guests and public speakers for their ordeals. But Gulag survivors returned to their Baltic homelands where they were still tainted as class enemies, where their homes had been confiscated, and where they were unable to work in their chosen careers. And their families stayed silent about their suffering, lest the children blurt something out at school and get everyone in trouble. 

When you visit the Baltic countries, if your mind is filled with the unresolved issues and sufferings from the past 80 years, you may arrive expecting gloom and darkness. And many cities and towns are still full of shabby, ugly Soviet-era buildings. But when you meet the people here, there is a spark of vitality and toughness that is quite heartening. What Nelson Algren famously wrote about Chicago is also true of the blemished parts of Riga: “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

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