A skate over the two “L” Countries in the Baltics.

It’s not that I want to roll Latvia and Lithuania together. The problem is I didn’t spend enough time in either one to speak with intelligence. It was a little of the “ Oh, it’s Rome, then it must be Monday.”

I have two friends who came from Latvia and Lithuania respectively. Friend 1. was brought up in Riga, the capital of Latvia, before emigrating with her family to Israel. Her father lost his first family in the holocaust before marrying a second time and then giving up his country because of the Soviets. But she has memories of a lovely childhood in the city, as only children can do, when the weight of invasion seems such a far away concept. Friend 2. Never lived in Lithuania, but her mother came from there and would sing songs in her native tongue all the time. Her mother ran away in a party frock when she was a child, when the Russians invaded her town and her grandmother spent decades in the soviet gulags’s before gaining her freedom. I always wanted to go to Lithuania with my friend, but sadly she died a couple of years ago. So I took a tiny bag of her ashes instead. The Finns go to Estonia to buy their alcohol. The Estonians go to Latvia for theirs. And so on. The price seems to drop the further south you travel. Alcohol in all the countries are sold in shops called ALKOHOLE. Seriously. Latvia seemed more Russian than Estonia. And indeed it has a much higher percentage of Russians than Lithuania.

The story seems to be that Latvia is demanding that any person unable to speak the Latvian language by the end of the year will be repatriated. To be clear, they are talking about the Russians. These Russians were settled in Latvia from that period after World War II until independence in 1991, but for the last 32 years the Latvian flag has been flying and still, not only is Russian their first language, it’s their only language.

There is a similar story in Lithuania. But there, the Russian Population is much smaller. Education is taught in Lithuanian, so all the young Russians speak the language, but their parents do not. Nobody, anywhere, seems to be flying the flag for Russia. But the blue and yellow flag…. In the plaza in Riga, bang in front of the Russian embassy. there is a large scaffold where many Ukrainian flags are whipping around in defiance.

And with the young Rigans, the educated, multi-lingual, clear-eyed and astute young Rigans; they know that Uber-wealthy Russians are being allowed to bring their “ not so clean” money in and have bought into the nicer parts of the city and the beach resorts. They know Latvians are not without blame in the atrocities that happened under the Nazi’s and the Soviets. But they are looking westwards and all of them are very conscious of the drumbeats on their eastern border. And the Lithuanians. They are still struggling to find a way to teach the children in school about that dark period of their history in the Second World War. It is an active and ongoing story. Some would like to be truthful. But others wonder if they will ever know the truth. So I end this eavesdrop of a note on Latvia and Lithuania, with this fantastic image.

On the 23rd of August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of that Hitler/ Stalin Pact made to invade and then share the Baltic States that no one was ever willing to acknowledge; On that day in August… One and half million people stretched in a line from Tallinn the capital of Estonia, down through Riga the capital of Latvia to Vilnius the capital of Lithuania. They held hands. Women, children, men, Priests. They stood there all day. To demand their independence. They sang. A protest that shook the Soviet Union. They got their independence. The Berlin Wall fell less than three months later.