first, before i give the details of my day, i thought i'd make an offer: anybody who wants a postcard from me, send me your snail mail address to me, even if you know that i already have it. if you don't have my e-mail addy, send a message here, which is my spam account - that is i don't care if it gets spammed. anyway, on to the day:
i woke up, bought some cereal, consumed some of it and proceeded into the beautiful daylight. but it didn't last long...
...because i went to the occupation museum, which is in a soviet-era, ugly, old building (with no windows). and so i spent the first few hours of my active day walking around and reading the thorough descriptions of every aspect of life under occupation. the museum offered up detailed descriptions of the initial occupation of Latvia by the soviets in 1940. this occupation only lasted one year before the Germans broke their treaty with the USSR and occupied Latvia.
the Nazi occupation lasted three years, until 1944 when the German army was on the retreat and the soviets had the advantage and regained the baltic nations. what i didn't know before, but that i know now, was how complacent the West was. you see, the treaty signed at the end of the war gave sovereignty back to all nations who had it before the war... except those occupied by the soviets. we, the west, sorta turned a blind eye.
and sweden... SWEDEN, the "neutral" country, even returned some 300 refugees back to soviet controlled Latvia, knowing full well they'd go to the gulags and most likely be executed.
yeah, so the soviets reoccupied the Baltic states in 1944 as Germany collapsed. i had heard things about how stalin was worse than hitler, but i never really considered it. i imagined it to be true, but it never really weighed on me. certainly, the discrimination and extermination wasn't as racially motivated in the USSR as it was with the Nazis... but the exterminations and deportations were more numerous in the Baltics under Stalin than they were under the Nazis. yes, the Jews were virtually eradicated under the Nazis, but most other people in the Baltics were allowed to live - maybe they were moved, but they weren't annihalated. whereas, Stalin's soviet occupiers were ruthless.
what surprised me more was the amount that Khruschev relaxed in terms of internments and deportations. appartently, he had a secret meeting with the party wherein he condemned stalin's atrocities. but the party didn't like him overall and he was replaced by Brezhnev, who tightened the soviet authority again. it was under Brezhnev that the soviets attacked Czechoslovakia again in order to reassert their power. (the communists were already in power, but they needed to regain control and domination of the growing revolutionary spirit in the populace.)
there were some truly excellent chess sets on display in the museum as well. i know that's odd to say, but they were carved by prisoners in the gulags. one of them was a set wherein the board was painted on a suitcase, so as to make the set portable when the workers were moved around.
the museum also chronicled extensively the extent to which the party censored all forms of free speech, be they art or film or written pieces. i wrote this on some post cards i sent, but i am truly glad to have been raised in a democracy like america. yes, it has problems, but free speech has never been controlled. (that is, of course, a sometimes questionable assertion..)
after the occupation museum, i emerged into the bright daylight. knowing that i need to be in Tallinn, Estonia tomorrow, i made plans to get to the bus station and buy a ticket. on my way to the bus station, i went the wrong direction. twice.
the first time i went vertically instead of horizontally. just off of Town Hall square in Riga is St. Peter's Basilica which has a tower that was, at one point, the tallest building in Europe. the same tower collapsed or was destroyed quite a few times since it was initially constructed. it was made of wood until 1944, when it was destroyed during the Soviet's siege of Riga towards the end of WWII. it was rebuilt in the late-60's and early-70's (and finished in 1973) but it was rebuilt with copper, so it will take a little more effort to bring it down again. not that it will happen again.
the tower now has an elevator up to one of the top floors. this is something i took advantage of today. i went up and got a spectacular vista of Riga in all directions. it was also up here that my digi camera card finally ran out after taking some 300 pictures so far. luckily i was prepared with my spare, which has a somewhat more diminished capacity. (that diminished capacity, however, will not last me the rest of my trip, which is why i bought another enormous card way back in Krakow.)
after going up the tower, i decided to go for coffee somewhere excellent - as i've mentioned before, i've bought the "In Your Pocket" guide for Riga and i went to a bakery which supposedly had strong coffee and the most authentic French pastries in the Baltic. i won't argue either fact. but the catch was that the cafe was the opposite direction of the bus station and it was already late in the day...
but i didn't miss buying the bus ticket, since apparently i didn't need to do anything special to buy the ticket, unlike other cities (see Warsaw, cough cough).
that task was taken care of so quickly, i decided to do a tour of some Art Nouveau architecture. thankfully, a whole area of Riga survived the war that is stuffed full of Art Nouveau architecture, in particular that of Michal Eisenstein, a russian architect. the area is absolutely stunning and building after building, while not necessarily Eisenstein's, is spectacularly designed. the other thing that is apparent in the neighborhood is which buildings have undergone renovations since 1991, when the USSR acknowledged Latvia's independence. the difference is stunning and i will be able to illustrate the point when i post the pictures later. (i'm picturing a series of blog updates with photos on a city-by-city basis and individual image pages per city.)
after that, i headed back to the hostel to change into long pants (it was that warm today) and go to dinner. after wandering around trying to locate a decent place to eat dinner, i ended up going to the "Latvian" restaurant the hostel owner recommends (named "Lido"). it was decent food, although not tremendously different from any other skewer meal (i had basically a skewer of chicken), and accompanied by their homemade beer.
after that, knowing full well the taste of the Czech liqeur Becherovka (of which i've gifted upon some people who are probably reading this), i decided that i needed to taste the Latvian version, called Melnais Balzams (or "Black Balsam").
the more important thing was where to do it. i didn't want to do it alone in the darkness of the restaurant, so i wandered out into the streets. and i wandered across the street to a beer garden, where a band was playing late-70's rock hits from the states and the U.K. "Sweet Home Alabama", anyone? how about "Smoke on the Water", in both Latvian and English?! they were actually really good and after a break they came back and played some instrumentals with one of the two guitarists playing a violin instead.
as for the liqeur, the liqeur was much more syrupy and anise-flavored than Becherovka. (also, the color was much more opaque and black than the beige, transparent Becher...)
and as for tomorrow, i'm catching a bus to Tallinn, Estonia at 10:50 and will most likely be there sometime before 19:00, if i'm lucky. i'm scheduled to arrive at 16:50, but knowing my luck with the roads so far...
Posted by iain at August 18, 2005 10:51 PM