This paper engages in a comprehensive analysis of the historical processes leading to the destruction of the Original Nations of Belarus and Latvia. The research is structured in three sections, with the first outlining the tribal roots common to both Latvian and Belarusian nations, serving as a foundation for subsequent analyses. The second section constitutes the core of the research, employing an Original Nation approach to dissect the impact of historic occupations in the five key waves—religious conversion, invasions of the Mongol-Tatar Yoke that led to administrative integration into states, a language push under the Russian Empire, identity erasure during Sovietization, and lastly, the restoration of independence in both countries. The last section surveys the modern states of Belarus and Latvia, emphasising their endeavours to revive their Original Nations, as both nations share the burden of recovering lost national elements, resisting cultural repression, and building a robust national identity.

The securitization of Russian-speakers has been central to nation-building in Estonia and Latvia since they regained their independence in 1991. Securitization at the levels of discourse and policy varies over time as a result of historical legacies, Russia’s kin state activism, and the minority protection requirements of European institutions. This article introduces a typology that links discursive frames with policies to map securitizing trends in Estonia and Latvia after the Soviet collapse: securitizing exclusion — less accommodating policies are justified by presenting the minority as a threat to the state or core nation; securitizing inclusion — more accommodating policies are justified to “win over” the minority in order to decrease the threat; and desecuritizing inclusion — more accommodating policies are justified on grounds of fairness or appropriateness without reference to security. The utility of the typology is demonstrated by analyzing frames in the public broadcast media and recent policy developments in Estonia and Latvia immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The analysis points to increasing convergence across countries in favor of securitizing exclusion. The analysis points to increasing convergence across countries in favor of securitizing exclusion. We conclude by evaluating these trends in light of minority mobilization and recent data on support for the active defense of the state among Russian-speakers and titulars.

This article explores the socio-emotional dimension of national belonging in post-Soviet neoliberal Latvia from the perspective of national pride. I propose this perspective since national pride shapes the character of national belonging. Studies show that national pride in socioeconomic and political attainment is low in post-Soviet countries and Latvia particularly. Influenced by social bond and commitment theories, this study explores why this might be the case by establishing national pride as a relational emotion of national belonging. For understanding national pride it is not enough to explore how people relate to their states. It is also necessary to understand how the states relate to their people, whether they recognize their state constituents, their needs and feel pride in them, and whether they shape social bonds among people. This study explores this question: how does the character of state-society relationship accounts for the low national pride in post-Soviet neoliberal Latvia? To answer, I combine the analysis of the post-Soviet civil discourse and an in-depth exploration of the narratives of 59 emigrants that have left Latvia toward the West in the post-Soviet era. The bonds formed between the Latvian political elite and Western countries during the post-Soviet transformations brought into Latvia neoliberal ideas and policies that, I argue, formed an insecure state-society bond, eroding an opportunity for national pride to flourish and weakening national belonging.

This article is dedicated to the absent presence and mnemonic remains of the socialist-era monuments in eastern Europe. Mnemonic remains is a metaphor I employ in this paper to direct our attention to the physical absence of monuments after their removal. But it also speaks of a monument’s role in absentia, its continued existence in and its effects on the collective memory beyond its physical presence. The phenomenon, sporadically acknowledged but rarely subject of investigation in academic literature, is explored and illustrated through the lens of the removed V.I. Lenin monument in Riga. The absent monument, I contend, performs the function of a phantom monument, exerting mnemonic agency beyond its physical presence through its representational value for other memory projects. This is highlighted through the study of the proposed and completed, but never unveiled, monument to Konstantīns Čakste on the site of the former Lenin monument in Riga.

Latvia’s far right has had a great deal of political influence since the late 1980s, when nativist movements played a key role in mobilizing political opposition to Soviet power. Far-right parties have been in 16 of the 22 government coalitions in Latvia between 1993 and 2023. Since 2010, the National Alliance (NA), a merger between an established far-right party and a more youthful political party, has come to dominate Latvia’s far right and has been a part of every government coalition from 2011-2023. This article begins with a discussion of Europeanization, the Europeanization of political parties, and the qualitative methodology used in the article to examine the impact of Latvia’s membership in the European Union on NA’s international links and program. The article then outlines the development and influence of Latvia’s far-right. The following sections examine links between Latvia’s far right and Europe’s far right and the impact of Europe on NA’s ideology and program. It finds little evidence of Europeanization of Latvia’s far right. Latvia’s far right is more hawkish toward Russia than the West European right and also enjoys greater domestic influence and respectability. “New nativist” anti-immigration and cultural Marxism themes have lower salience in Latvia where Russian-speakers are perceived as a bigger and more immediate threat than Muslims or “Woke” activists.

Certain geographical and social borderlands breed despair and pessimism. In the post-Soviet Latvian borderlands traditions of alcohol use mark out some of the contradictory expectations of masculinity in the new liberal economy. In this perspective piece I will be looking at how certain discourses serve to conceal the degrading conditions and lack of opportunity in certain occupations. This argument will be pursued in relation to the occupation of timber logging which is an exclusively male occupation (although this was not the case during the early Soviet period). This occupation reflects not just the terms of working conditions but illustrates the gendered nature of misfortune in Latvia. Loggers speak of a lack of perspective in their lives. I will examine the meaning and implications of this lack of perspective.

The shell-midden site of Riņņukalns in northern Latvia offers a rare opportunity to study long-term trends in ceramic production and function at a European hunter-fisher-gatherer site. Riņņukalns was occupied from the sixth millennium BC, with the midden developing from the later fourth millennium. Here, the authors discuss the chaîne opératoire and function of the Riņņukalns material, showing that pottery was used in both the pre-midden and midden phases primarily to cook aquatic and porcine resources. The technology used to produce these cooking vessels, however, changed over time, with new firing techniques associated with a shift to the use of shell temper. The results have implications for understanding prehistoric technology and subsistence in other parts of the world.

The well-known Zvejnieki cemetery, with 330 burials, is one of the largest hunter-gatherer cemeteries in northern Europe, overshadowing the more than 115 other Stone Age burials from over ten sites in Latvia. This article is a first overview of these other burials, summarizing their research history, characteristics, and assemblages. The authors discuss the problematic chronology of Latvian Stone Age burials and place them in a wider regional context. Most of the burials are hunter-gatherer burials, and a few are Corded Ware graves. This overview broadens our understanding of Latvian Stone Age burials and brings to light the diversity of hunter-fisher-gatherer mortuary practices in the eastern Baltic region.

Until recently, there was a lack of radiocarbon (14C) dates from the Bronze and Earliest Iron Age (1800–500–1 BC) burial sites in Latvia. The chronology of the sites was assessed on the basis of archaeological analogies with neighboring regions and typological studies of the rather meagre grave inventory. In order to establish a firm foundation for an absolute chronology of burial sites and to better understand changes in mortuary practices during the period, sequences of samples from various burial sites have been dated. In this paper we report 48 14C dates from 12 different sites and discuss them in the context of previously established archaeological chronologies. 14C reservoir effects are addressed: regarding FRE, stable isotope analysis is helpful; however, more data should be gathered in future research. In some cases, the new dates are in accord with previous chronologies, while in other cases some widely accepted assumptions may need to be revised. The new dates have proved false several previous assumptions about both the dates of individual graves and whole sites. Based on the 14C dates, we model the chronological spread of burial barrows in Latvia along waterways, the earliest examples appearing in coastal western Latvia.

The cemetery at Zvejnieki in Latvia was in use from c. 7500–2600 BC, spanning part of the regional Mesolithic and Neolithic. This article presents a reanalysis of finds from a double inhumation burial of a male and a female dating to 3786–3521 BC. A unique leg ornament associated with the female is composed of tubular beads. Previously believed to have been made of bird bone, reanalysis of 68 of these beads now demonstrates that they were produced from fossilised sea lilies (Crinoidea). This new identification of a rarely recognised raw material is discussed in the context of other hunter-gatherer encounters with unusual materials and their environments.

In the Soviet Union, song competitions had an important role in presenting new artists and songs. The Mikrofona aptauja contest of Latvian radio (1968–1994) was the main forum for new Latvian pop music. It had a reputation for expressing nationalist feelings within the limits of Soviet censorship. In 1988, with the rise of new political movements in the Soviet Union, the competition became a venue for the Latvian independence movement. The winning song of 1988 was a demand for ‘freedom to the fatherland’. The competition also played a part in the rehabilitation of pre-war popular music which had been forbidden in Soviet Latvia. The paper discusses the role of journalists, politicians and songwriters in this process. After the privatisation of the economy, the song competition was taken over by private entrepreneurs, as public interest in political songs waned.

In late June 1941, Nazi Germany stormed the borders of the Soviet Union, occupying the three Baltic republics within weeks. By the end of 1941, a significant proportion of the Jewish population had been murdered by German forces and local collaborators. In the days before full Nazi occupation of the territory, Latvia's Jews confronted the question of whether to flee into the Russian interior or stay in their communities. History shows that this would be a critical choice. Testimonies and memoirs of Jewish survivors illuminate the competing motivations to leave or to remain. This article highlights the key factors that figured into these calculations and the interaction between individual agency and structural opportunities and obstacles in determining where Latvia's Jews were when Holocaust in their homeland began.

The article argues that property redistribution was a major tool of democratization and nationalization in Poland and the Baltics. It provided governments with a means to give peasants a stake in the new democratic states, thus empower the new titular nations and at the same time marginalize former elites, who became national minorities. The most significant acts of property redistribution were the land reforms passed between 1919 and 1925, which achieved the status of founding charters of the new states. Activists of the disenfranchised minorities conceptualized minority protection as the “Magna Carta” of the international order, which should contain the principle of national self-determination and thus safeguard private property, the protection of which was not clearly regulated by international law. By examining the contingencies of the aftermath of the war in East Central Europe as well as discussions about changing conceptions of property ownership in both East Central and Western Europe, the article shows that land reform was meant to counter Bolshevism, but, at the same time, created the impression abroad that the new states themselves displayed revolutionary tendencies and did not respect private property — an image that became a significant argument of interwar territorial revisionists.

The literature on collective memories in the Baltic states often stresses the irreconcilable division between Russian and Baltic official interpretations of the Second World War. This paper seeks to challenge this popular notion of two polemic collective memories – “Latvian” and “Russian”. While there is evidence that Latvia's Russian-speakers are heavily influenced by Russian cultural and political discourses, I will argue that the actual positions taken up by Russian-speakers are more nuanced than a crude Latvian–Russian dichotomy would suggest.

Based on survey data collected at the site of the 2011 Victory Day celebrations in Riga, this paper points to the germane existence of a partial “democratization of history” among Latvia's Russian-speakers, typified by an increasing willingness to countenance and take stock of alternative views of history. Through an examination of the data it will be argued that such tentative steps towards a democratization of history are most visible among the younger cohort of Russian-speakers, whose collective memory-myths have been tempered by their dual habitation of the Latvian, as well as Russian, mythscapes. In order to more fully understand this process both bottom-up and top-down pressures will be examined.

This paper examines the legacy of the Duchy of Courland's overseas colony of Tobago as it relates to present-day Latvian national identity using the ethno-symbolist approach of Anthony D. Smith and comparative cases. As Latvia is a small nation that has been an independent nation-state for only two short periods, national legitimacy and pride pose particular problems for Latvians. To this end, Latvian historians have worked to reinterpret the Baltic German-dominated Duchy of Courland as a positive period of Latvian national history and have sought to emphasize ethnic Latvian involvement in the Duchy's colonial endeavors, especially on the island of Tobago. Their efforts have then filtered into the general Latvian consciousness through books, film, plays, and place names. Since Latvia's independence from the USSR, the former colony of Tobago has gained renewed importance for Latvians who are experiencing a widely perceived notion of postcolonialism. This paper concludes that the appropriated colony of Tobago will continue to rise in importance as a component of Latvian national identity.

This study draws on ethnographic research conducted in a small village, Baltinava in Latvia, 2.5 kilometres from the border with Russia. The research examines how ethnic Russian women create a specific Latvian Russian identity by contrasting themselves from ethnic Latvians and Russians who live in Russia and identifying with both groups at the same time. To narrate their lives and to make them meaningful, real and/or perceived “attributes” are combined to draw boundaries between “us” and “them.” Thus, the same thing such as language can be used not only both to distinguish themselves from Russians in Russia or Latvians but also to form coherent identities and to emphasize similarities. This study suggests that ethnicities cannot be reduced to a list of set ethnic groups that are very often used in official government statistics. Ethnic identities have to be viewed as fluid and situational. Moreover, this study shows the dialectic nature of ethnicity. On the one hand, external political, historical and social processes create and recreate ethnic categories and definitions. Yet, on the other hand, the women in this study are active agents creating meaningful and symbolic ethnic boundaries.