Today was our last day in Rīga. We’d considered staying another day, but we’ve essentially done what we came here to do and there’s still so much to see on this trip. That said, we’ve scarcely been out of Vecrīga, the historical old town district.
The highlight today (for me, anyway) was a visit to the verbosely named Museum of the Occupation of Latvia 1940 – 1991. The ironic location for this museum is inside a hideous Soviet-era building (the only one still standing in the city, left as a deliberate, haunting reminder) that was once, in an all too recent past, home to the Museum of Latvian Red Rifleman.
The museum is a moving experience, featuring heart-rending of deportation to Siberia; torture, death and famine in the Gulags; perceived liberation from the Soviets when Nazi Germany invaded, followed by horrific disillusionment when they started to systematically execute Latvia’s jews in the forests;the ousting of the Nazis by the second Soviet invasion; and last, but not least, the complicity of the West in allowing the Baltic nations to be annexed by the USSR at the end of WW II, when the rights of other European nations to self-govern were explicitly granted and protected.
Pretty much every nation has had a hand in the persecution of the Latvian people, but the USSR and Nazi Germany were the worst offenders by a considerable margin.
It’s shocking to think how recent some of these events were. For example, after the death of Stalin, the programme of forced deportation and resettlement was relaxed somewhat, and deportees were allowed to return to their native republics. However, until the end of the eighties, it wasn’t legal to even discuss the deportations. These people, whose were often separated from the rest of their families, with no knowledge of whether their loved ones were dead or alive, returned home after decades in exile and weren’t even allowed to discuss the experience with another human-being. Stories like that put problems like leaking ceilings in the proper perspective.
The museum is packed with detail and it would take a day to see it all. I did my best with two small children in tow (and Sarah trying to entertain them), but I couldn’t spend as much time on each exhibit as I would have liked.
Our other main activity today was a visit to Rīga’s central market, where one can buy everything from pig snouts to strawberries, where counterfeit CDs and Russian-manufactured bootleg MP3 CD compilations are sold next to stands purveying kvass, a drink made from fermented rye bread. Eloïse and Sarah liked this drink, but I didn’t think much of it. Still, at twenty santīms a beaker, who’s complaining?
Tomorrow, it’s a relatively short hop to Sigulda for a couple of nights.