The annual celebrations of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany held at Victory Park across the river from down town Riga, Latvia, (memorial shown here) have been growing in popularity in recent years as Russian confidence grows and more and more of Latvia's Russians recover from the despondency of the period immediately after the Soviet collapse. There are large, active Russian youth groups in Estonia and especially Latvia with strong nationalist sentiment and ties to Putin's Russia.

Both Victory Park and the 9th of May are contested sites of memory. Baltic participation in the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the victory over Naziism was ambiguous - then Latvian president Vike-Freiberga went to the Moscow event only to explain in a public forum the ambiguous results of the war for Latvia - the ending of one horrid occupation and the beginning of another. Violent protests were the result of the removal of a memorial and the re-interring of the remains of Soviet soldiers from down town Tallinn, Estonia, two years ago.

Today I received this call to prohibit the demonstration in my e-mail inbox. I have translated it from the Latvian:

The 9th of May is approaching. That is the day that the Soviet regime celebrated as the "Day of Victory." Every year various events happen in Latvia organized by pro-Russian groups. These events don't only recognize those who fell in battle, but also praise the Red Army, the Soviet regime and its symbols. In previous years the participants in these events haven't just used Soviet symbols and uniforms, but even decorated Stalin's portrait with flowers.

The world recognizes the end of the Second World War on the 8th of May. The 9th of May is a Russian/Soviet imperial holiday. For Latvia that day means the renewal of the Soviet occupation of Latvian territory. The older residents of Kurzeme clearly remember remember the atrocities committed by the Red Army soldiers immediately following the collapse of the front held by Latvian and German troops still holding out there. Rape, robbery, and arson were the true fulfillment of the 9th of May.

That is why we, the signatories, call for an end to the situation that is perceived as an insult to the tens of thousands of victims of the occupation and for Latvian statehood and call for:

- the Riga city council to prohibit the mass celebration on the 9th of May
- the institutions responsible for maintaining justice to vigorously assure that totalitarian symbols of the USSR regime are not used
- the police to see that in the Pardaugava part of town and in Victory Park where celebrants usually meet on the 9th of May there is no mass consumption of alcohol and no loitering in the area
- the lawmakers to change the laws to make the selling of regime symbols of the Soviet regime or the glorification of its leaders or policies a criminal offence.

The Club of Latvian Nationalists

The political party “Visu Latvijai” (Everything for Latvia)

(Read the original Latvian at http://www.visulatvijai.lv/news.php?readmore=1156318651.)

I will try to keep abreast of events as they unfold in Riga.

Impious behavior at memorial sites is not infrequent. The Holocaust memorial in Berlin had hardly been open a month when reports of children playing and lovers kissing among the pylons made the news. A report from this week's Baltic Times takes the cake, however: Apparently, more and more British nationals (presumably drunken male tourists) are getting caught peeing on the Freedom Monument in downtown Riga. For the first time the regional court handed down jail time to a British citizen: five days of administrative arrest. The problem has drawn comment from local politicians all the way up to the interior minister.

In the most recent case, the defendent claimed that he was not peeing, but just happened to be running around the statue when his pants fell down. His obviousely false testimony contributed to the decision to not give him the usual fine of 50 lats (about 70 Euros).

For my part, I am having difficulty understanding why anyone would relieve themselves directly on the monument unless they are blind drunk or actually intend to desecrate it. It is flanked on two sides by parks which offer much better opportunities. In addition, all the downtown bars and outdoor restaurants and cafes have facilities, some of them less than two blocks from the site.

Of the more than 90 memorials I photographed while in Riga in September, 55 of them are now online:

http://sites-of-memory.de/main/location.html#latvia

Some of the descriptions are only cursory and not all the inscriptions are translated yet. But the photos are now online for viewing. They include complete visual documentation of the famous Brethren Cemetery, the execution site memorial at Rumbula, Bikernieki forest, and the concentration camp memorial complex in Salaspils.

The rest should be up over the next several weeks. Among the missing memorials there are the centennial marker for the Latvian song festivals, the "white crosses" for Latvian deportees, and numerous memorials to individual persons or more minor events.

One of the conversations I had in Riga was with a Russian woman in her 60s. Since my goal in Riga was to research memorials, I asked her about them. She recounted what she knew about the memorial to the liberators of Riga in victory park - one of my favorite places in Riga. She told me that the alleged Latvian designer - Gulbis - was not really the man behind it. It was rather the Russian Bugaev. (Both these men are listed among the artists involved in the project.) She said they put Gulbis first to make the project palatable for the Latvians, but then when the political transformation came, Gulbis disconnected himself from the memorial. If any reader here knows more about this story, I would appreciate getting more details about it!

I asked her about the Lenin memorial and how she felt when it came down. She says she never had a relationship to Lenin that was positive. She considers him a criminal. But for her, the Lenin monument was a symbol of her connection to Riga and Latvia. She experienced the removal of the statue as a rejection.

If I could go back to that conversation, I would now ask her if the statue to Barclay de Tolly, which stands across the street from where Lenin once stood, and not only represents a Russian hero, but is also a rallying point for Russian political groups in the city, had since restored her sense of belonging. Did the renewal of the Russian-era de Tolly monument compensate her earlier sense of rejection? It would seem that if Lenin were somehow a symbol of the community, but not only or even at all a positively-laden symbol of ideology, then the de Tolly statue would be a much more positive, inclusive gesture than leaving Lenin standing could ever have been. Taking down Lenin rejects communism, restoring the 1912 statue of the Napoleonic-era Russian General de Tolly acknowledges the role of Russia in Latvia's past and the special place that some of Riga's Russians have in the history of the city.