Latvia

• 1. Introduction

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  Latvia covers 64,573 square kilometres on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, yet its population numbers only 1.83 million people. It is one of three Baltic states, sitting between Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south, with Russia to the east. For centuries this stretch of forest, plain, and white sand beach belonged to others. Teutonic knights, Swedish kings, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russian Empire each took their turn. The independent Republic of Latvia was proclaimed on the 18th of November 1918, only to lose its freedom again two decades later. So how does a nation survive being erased from the map, occupied three times in a single war, then resettled by colonists until its own people nearly became a minority in their capital? And what does a country sing about when singing itself back into existence? The answers run through amber traded with Vikings, a roof collapse that toppled a government, and a referendum that turned on a single question of language.

• 2. The Tribes Beneath The Name

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  The name Latvija comes from the ancient Latgalians, one of four Indo-European Baltic tribes. The Curonians, Selonians, and Semigallians were the others, and together with the Finnic Livonians they formed the ethnic core of modern Latvians. Henry of Latvia coined the Latin forms Lettigallia and Lethia, both drawn from the Latgalians. Those terms shaped the country's name in other tongues, giving Letonia in Romance languages and Lettland in several Germanic ones.

  Around 3000 BC, the Proto-Baltic ancestors of the Latvian people settled the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea. They established trade routes to Rome and Byzantium, exchanging local amber for precious metals. By 900 AD, four distinct Baltic tribes lived across the land, alongside the Finnic Livonians who spoke a language unrelated to their neighbours. Under Swedish and largely German rule, these ancient tribes assimilated into a single Latvian people speaking one language. Because no Latvian state yet existed, the borders of who belonged to that group remained largely subjective, a question without a fixed answer.

• 3. Crusaders And Conquerors

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  In the late 12th century, the first missionaries sent by the pope sailed up the Daugava River seeking converts. The local people did not turn to Christianity as readily as the church had hoped. By the start of the 13th century, Germans ruled large parts of what is now Latvia, and the influx of German crusaders grew after the Crusader States in the Middle East declined and fell.

  Together with southern Estonia, the conquered lands formed a crusader state known as Terra Mariana, Medieval Latin for Land of Mary, or Livonia. In 1282, Riga joined the Hanseatic League, followed by Cesis, Limbazi, Koknese, and Valmiera. Riga became an important point of east-west trading and forged close cultural links with western Europe. The first German settlers were knights from northern Germany and townspeople who brought their Low German language, which shaped many loanwords in Latvian.

  The Livonian War, fought from 1558 to 1583, ended Livonia's old order. Gotthard Kettler, the last master of the Order of Livonia, formed the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. A vassal state of the Lithuanian Grand Duchy and later of Poland-Lithuania, it kept considerable autonomy and enjoyed a golden age in the 16th century. Under Swedish and German influence, western Latvia adopted Lutheranism, while the isolated southern Latgallians took up Catholicism under Polish and Jesuit influence, their native dialect picking up Polish and Russian loanwords.

• 4. Under The Russian Empire

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  During the Great Northern War, fought from 1700 to 1721, up to 40 percent of Latvians died from famine and plague. Half the residents of Riga were killed by plague in 1710 and 1711. The Treaty of Nystad ended the war in 1721 and gave Vidzeme to Russia, while Latgale remained part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1772. The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia was annexed in 1795 in the Third Partition of Poland, bringing all of present-day Latvia into the Russian Empire.

  The emancipation of the serfs came to Courland in 1817 and to Vidzeme in 1819. In practice it favoured the landowners, dispossessing peasants of their land without compensation and forcing them back to the estates of their own free will. Riga, meanwhile, grew into the largest port in the Russian Empire, and railways, factories, banks, and a university were built. Numeracy ran higher in the Livonian and Courlandian parts of the empire, a pattern possibly tied to the Protestant religion of the inhabitants.

  The Young Latvian movement laid the groundwork for nationalism from the middle of the 19th century, and the rise of Latvian in literature became known as the First National Awakening. Russification began in Latgale after the January Uprising of 1863 and spread by the 1880s. The Young Latvians were eclipsed in the 1890s by the New Current, a broad leftist movement, and discontent exploded in the 1905 Russian Revolution, which took a nationalist character in the Baltic provinces.

• 5. A Republic Born And Seized

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  The People's Council of Latvia proclaimed independence, and Karlis Ulmanis was entrusted to set up a government as prime minister. On the 26th of November 1918, the German representative August Winnig formally handed political power to the Latvian provisional government. By the spring of 1919 there were three rival governments at once: the provisional government under Ulmanis, the Latvian Soviet government led by Peteris Stucka and backed by the Red Army, and a provisional government under Andrievs Niedra supported by Baltic-German forces.

  Estonian and Latvian forces defeated the Germans at the Battle of Wenden in June 1919. A massive attack by the West Russian Volunteer Army under Pavel Bermondt-Avalov was repelled that November. A freely elected constituent assembly convened on the 1st of May 1920 and adopted the liberal constitution, the Satversme, in February 1922. Radical land reform reshaped the young state. In 1897-61.2 percent of the rural population had been landless; by 1936 that share had fallen to 18 percent.

  On the 15th of May 1934, Ulmanis staged a bloodless coup, establishing a nationalist dictatorship that lasted until 1940. He built government corporations to buy up private firms and Latvianise the economy. The Satversme he partly suspended was reaffirmed in 1990 and remains in effect today. That document would outlast the dictator, the war, and the empire that came next.

• 6. Three Occupations

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  Early on the morning of the 24th of August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a 10-year non-aggression treaty. A secret protocol, revealed only after Germany's defeat in 1945, divided northern and eastern Europe into spheres of influence, with Latvia assigned to the Soviet sphere. On the 5th of October 1939, Latvia was forced to accept a mutual assistance pact granting the Soviets the right to station between 25,000 and 30,000 troops on its soil. The Soviet Union incorporated Latvia on the 5th of August 1940 as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic.

  In less than a year before Operation Barbarossa, at least 34,250 Latvians were deported or killed, most sent to Siberia where deaths were estimated at 40 percent. On the 22nd of June 1941, German troops attacked Soviet forces, reaching Riga by the 29th. Under German occupation Latvia was administered as part of Reichskommissariat Ostland. Latvian paramilitary and Auxiliary Police units took part in the Holocaust. Thirty thousand Jews were shot in the autumn of 1941, and another 30,000 from the Riga ghetto were killed in the Rumbula Forest that November and December.

  Soviet troops re-entered Latvia in July 1944 and captured Riga on the 13th of October 1944, forming the Latvian SSR for the next 45 years. Further deportations followed as the country was collectivised and Sovietised. Minority schools for Jews, Poles, Belarusians, Estonians, and Lithuanians were closed, leaving instruction only in Latvian and Russian. By 1959 about 400,000 Russian settlers had arrived, and the ethnic Latvian population had fallen to 62 percent.

• 7. Singing Back To Freedom

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  In the summer of 1987, the first large demonstrations gathered in Riga at the Freedom Monument, a symbol of independence. The peaceful Singing Revolution had begun across the Baltic Soviet republics. A national movement coalesced in 1988 as the Popular Front of Latvia, opposed by the Interfront, and the old pre-war flag flew again, replacing the Soviet Latvian flag as official in 1990. In 1989 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR declared the occupation of the Baltic states not in accordance with law.

  On the 4th of May 1990, the Supreme Council adopted the Declaration on the Restoration of Independence, renaming the Latvian SSR the Republic of Latvia. In January 1991, Soviet forces tried and failed to overthrow the new authorities by occupying the central publishing house in Riga. Full independence was restored on the 21st of August 1991, in the aftermath of the failed Soviet coup. Russia completed its troop withdrawal in 1994 and shut the Skrunda-1 radar station in 1998.

  Citizenship became a lasting question. It was granted to those who had been citizens in 1940 and their descendants, leaving many ethnic non-Latvians as non-citizens. By 2015 there were still 290,660 non-citizens, 14.1 percent of the population, holding no citizenship of any country and unable to vote in parliamentary elections. Children born after the 21st of August 1991 to such residents are automatically entitled to citizenship, a slow closing of the gap the occupation left behind.

• 8. A Modern Baltic Nation

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  The major goals of the 1990s, joining NATO and the European Union, were both achieved in 2004. Vaira Vike-Freiberga served as President from 1999 until 2007, the first female head of state in any former Soviet bloc nation. On the 1st of January 2014 the euro replaced the lats. In May 2023 the parliament elected Edgars Rinkevics as President, making him the European Union's first openly gay head of state.

  The land itself remains strikingly green. Latvia has the fifth highest proportion of forest cover in the European Union, with forests across 56 percent of the territory, and more than 12,500 rivers. Amber, fossilised tree resin found along the coast, was sought in ancient times by Vikings and by traders from Egypt, Greece, and Rome, giving rise to the Amber Road. The country's national trees are the oak and the linden, its national flower the daisy, and its national bird the white wagtail.

  Not all of the modern story is triumphant. In November 2013 a roof collapsed at a Riga shopping centre, killing 54 shoppers and rescue workers in the country's worst post-independence disaster and prompting the prime minister's resignation. Culture, though, runs deep. The Latvian Song and Dance Festival has been held since 1873, roughly every five years, drawing about 30,000 performers who favour a cappella singing. More than 1.2 million folk song texts and 30,000 melodies have been identified, a thousand years of voices that no occupation managed to silence.