More on the Latvian referendum and the Nisei Russians

Well, the balagāns (carnival) of sorts is over. The outcome of the referendum was clear to start with. More interesting are the results of the referendum when analyzed as a kind of survey or popularity poll. Clearly, something is the matter in Latgale, the eastern region of Latvia, and it is not only that most people there seem to be happy speaking Russian. Even before the vote, Latgallians were dissatisfied with new government rules preventing the daily crossing of the Russian border to bring back cheaper motor fuel, cigarettes, alcohol and other goods. For many “bordertown” inhabitants, this essentially “legal smuggling” for resale was a means of survival. According to some reports, when the new policies were announced, there was a near-riot in Rēzekne.

In the long term, ways have to be found to create jobs in Latgale and to at least slow down the emigration that has taken around 20% of the region's population since the last census in 2000.

The point has also been made that something has to be done to resolve issues with the so-called Russian speakers. Mostly it seems to a kind of Rodney Dangerfield complex (the late American comedian known for his repetitive line: I don't get no respect). Since just what this means, exactly, is hard to define, maybe people should talk about it.

I suspect the Rodney Dangerfield thing is something that afflicts sovoks a lot more than it affects the part of the population I called the Nisei Russians (like the second and onwards generation ethnic Japanese in the US). The Slavic Nisei are people who are fully aware that they are no longer living in the Russian motherland and, for whatever benefits their country of residence offers, there are certain sacrifices. One is that Russian is not the state language, but that it is respected or at least benignly neglected as long as you can communicate in whatever the local language is.

When Latvians arrived in the US as refugees after World War II, they learned English, and when many Latvians moved to English-speaking countries to seek work in recent years, they also had to speak English. No one is going to make their language the new state language, although countries suddenly facing significant numbers of Latvians are taking pragmatic steps to ensure that important matters are explained to them in Latvian – basic laws and regulations, procedures for dealing with the authorities, perhaps safety rules at some workplaces.

This is nothing new – countries with large migrant labor communities provide services in their languages, be it Turkish in Germany, Finnish or Serbo-Croatian in Sweden. However, by the second or third generation at the latest, the descendants of the immigrant laborers are fluent in the local language, sometimes, perhaps all too often, at the cost of their “native language”. For this reason, places like Sweden even offer home language teaching. This leads to bizarre employment ads seeking instructors (with higher education) to teach an obscure African language spoken mostly by illiterate goatherds.

What I mean to say is that there is a range of options short of adding new official languages for dealing with a significant and often permanent population that doesn't speak the local and indigenous language. In the time of the Nisei Russians (who had been there for generations) in Latvia, the Russian language was also handled pragmatically. Latgale, already a problem child back then, prevented Latvian being enshrined as a state language in the 1922 constitution. Someone wanted the Latgallian dialect (with different spellings and pronounciations) also made a state language. Latvian was later made a de facto state language in practice and by later legislation, but as I understand it, made it into the constitution only in 1998. In the Saeima, where most deputies were multilingual, indigenous languages such as German, Russian and Yiddish could be spoken, bu the transcripts of proceedings were published in Latvian.

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, except for some historical irritation with the Germans, the local ex-lords and landowners, languages had largely co-evolved, with only Russian being briefly pressured on certain parts of Latvia at certain times under the Czars when it was decided to russify the non-Slavic peoples of the Russian Empire. So no language, except for German, was politically loaded and even then, it was resented rather than resisted because no one was forcing on free citizens in a free country.

It was the Soviet Union, led mostly by Russians cowering under a fearsome Georgian, that weaponized the Russian language and turned it on the non-Russian peoples of the aptly named prison of nations. Russian was going to be the common language of a Soviet people to be forged, first by the subtractive terror of executing, deporting or imprisoning national elites and national bourgeois elements, then by “gentler” proactive methods of teaching a Soviet newspeak that closely resembled Russian. Along with it, to Latvia, came the first speakers of Soviet Russian, many of them descendants of ethnic Russian or other Slavic peoples who had already had been put through one or two runs of the Soviet grinder.

The result was that the Soviet Russian used in publications and official speech also embodied or in various ways served the totalitarian regime that the Soviet occupation brought with it. It was, after a while, the Slavic language of sovoks – homo sovieticus by another name – but often, too, of lowlife and criminals (maybe I am mistaken, but the Soviet industrialized Baltic states were a place of work release for large numbers of Soviet criminals finishing their sentences for ordinary crimes). The Russian of the Soviet era (OK, I don't speak a word of it, so I am told and have read) became the carrier of totalitarian lies and nonsense in one aspect of a pretty unpleasant life, and the bljed! suka!bellowing drunk ex-jailbird neighbor pounding on the door because his wife has locked him out again in another side of Soviet reality.

Latvia's Nisei Russians, who for the most part were ordinary folk who celebrated Christmas in January and celebrated Easter for hours with kissing all around, were buried under the sovok avalanche dumped on the country under Soviet rule. They were lumped with the Russian-speaking sovoks and I have spotted a few Nisei in my circle of aquaintances. Back in the day, most Russians in Latvia spoke at least some Latvian, and it was not a threat to what they were.

However, the new Soviet world permeated by sovok-Russian was a direct threat to Latvians and Latvia's indigenous nationalities, it was a weaponized language aimed at making sovoks of everyone, with real Soviet Russians being just a bit more equal that others.

It is this attitude, that of Soviet Russian privilege, that has survived the end of Soviet rule in Latvia and has not been moderated in many cases by attempts at “integration”. Even without examining the practical effectiveness or theoretical validity of Latvia's integration efforts, it seems obvious that while immigrants can, in many societies, integrate “upwards” from the “lower” status of new arrivals to being accepted or even part of the elite (see how Latvian-born Laila Freivalds became a minister in Sweden), it is harder, if not impossible for self-proclaimed or self-deluded elites to “integrate” in a direction they perceive as downwards. For Tovarsich Bljed-Suka adjusting to a free Latvia where he had to speak the Dog Language was a serious challenge. In many cases it still is. That is what the referendum was about for many Latvians.

The referendum and Latvia's Nissei Russians

So the vote has started in the language referendum. The effort to make Russian a second state language in Latvia is doomed to failure. There is no real need for it, anyone who is monolingual in Russian can not only get their daily business done (with a bit of hassle in some places) but they can also enjoy a broad spectrum of local Russian culture and information (theater, radio, local TV) as well as a massive amount of Russian-language electronic media from Russia (both on local cable channels and with satellite dishes).

Indeed, the default choice in putting together cable TV program packages is a few local channels and almost everything else but CNN and BBC World (if available) is either in Russian or with a Russian soundtrack. Even Lattelecom, the national telecoms and pay TV operator, recently replaced the English-language History Channel (which I think could be switched to a Russian soundtrack) with a monolingual Russian science channel Nauka. It is impossible to switch languages on this, even when the Russian soundtrack seems to have been laid over English in some kind of adapted segment.

A number of commentators have said that the underlying causes of the referendum are unresolved ethnic issues after 20 years of independence and should be seen as a strong signal of failure to build a unified society based on multi-ethnic solidarity. As “let's all sing Kumbaya” - desirable that may seem, suffice it to say that there are few societies on the planet that have achieved this. That includes the US, despite the 1940s war movie Army squads where the Italian guy, the Irish kid, the wisecracking Brooklyn Jewish guy, the Scandinavian farmer's son and the college kid from Philly all joined together to fight the evil buck-toothed Jap (more on that later).

I am sure integration would have worked had Latvia been towed away in 1991 and anchored as a large island next to Tasmania, off the coast of Australia. Completely isolated from its ex-aggressor and occupier neighbor, the island republic would be a happy nation of Latvians of different ethnicities, with Russian as a home language (as were Latvian, German, Greek in hypothetically neighboring Australia) for part of the population.

This, however, was not the case. Latvia and its Russians remained under the powerful, sometimes chilling political and increasingly state power-elite-controlled media shadow of an unrepentant Russia. Vladimir Putin's outrageous statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union (prison of nations, anyone?) “was a major geopolitical disaster of the century”. How do you say WTF?? in Russian? The ethnic Russian and non-Latvian Russian speakers (Belarussians, Ukrainians, other “Soviet nations” represented here) were enveloped in a separate Russian media bubble that was hostile by default to the Baltic states, portraying them as cryptofascist apartheid societies.

Latvians, in the early and mid-1990s, frankly, had other concerns than being hypersensitive to the needs of a nation or national minority that they saw as the oppressor nation for the previous 50 years. Never mind that those concerns were making a Charlie Foxtrot of their politics and economy with incompetence, corruption, bungling, you-name-it. The perception of Russia and what Russians in Latvia represented (whether individual Russians themselves had chosen to do so or not didn't matter) was determined by hard, recent historical experience. The Latvians and Russians shot down by the OMON paramilitary police in January, 1991, were not shot by Samoans, in case anyone hadn't noticed.

Which brings us back to the Japanese and the US in 1941. I think one of the unseen and sad aspects of the ethnic situation in Latvia has some rough parallels with the way US citizens of Japanese ancestry were perceived after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Latvia in 1940 had an indigenous, integrated Russian community, all were citizens, served in the Latvian military, had their own fraternities, the Russian Orthodox or Old Believers churches, etc. Then the “motherland” of Latvia's ethnic Russians, in a series of actions led by Russians from Russia (and aided by Latvians and other nationalities, to be sure) committed the long, drawn out atrocity of the 1940-41 and 1945-1991 occupation of Latvia. As a result “our Russians” who had lived here for centuries were overwhelmed in the consciousness of Latvia's Latvians and other victim nations by the image of the Russian as conqueror, occupier and oppressor.

In the US, in the space of a few hours on December 7, 1941 and in the years of war that followed, the “mother nation” of the Japanese in the United States became a treacherous aggressor, killing American boys on a Sunday morning, marching them to death on Bataan, and fighting with the perceived savagery of mad dogs on Pacific islands like Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where soldiers had to be burned in their caves by Marines with flamethrowers and Japanese mothers shot by snipers to keep them from throwing babies off cliffs into the sea. A slightly different image than the mild-mannered math teacher at a California high school or the family running a grocery store on Hawaii.

By no means was the internment of Japanese Americans justified, but it can be explained by the shock of what Japan did to the US (and by no small measure of racism back then). Latvia has done nothing of the kind to its Russians (including the huge contingent that were moved in during the Soviet period). Think of the mild-mannered hypohetical Mr. Nakamura being replaced at Santa Monica High by 20 samurai-sword waving wanna-be Tojos (that is the military leader of the wartime Japanese government). Something like that happened in Latvia, and it lasted almost 50 years. So maybe don't blame the Latvians too much for the referendum having a number of ironic and even absurd angles to it.

That is my quick take on things as voting gets under way. I have to go off and do some work for a a foreign newspaper as a one-off freelancer. More later.

What has Latvia's transition turned into? - a comment on political scientist Iveta Kažoka's views

A lot of buzz has been generated among the Latvian twitterati by an essay by political scientist Iveta Kažoka in her Latvian language blog on the website www.politika.lv . Kažoka contends that Latvia is no longer “a society in transition” (from totalitarian socialism to...whatever?), but something else, showing the seeds and potential for a better society. To be sure, she asserts, there are significant hinderances to such development, but, nonetheless, she is an optimist, if only Latvians (or Latvia's inhabitants as a whole) were to change their mentality somewhat.

Kažoka writes, that after attending a conference in Lithuania and getting around a bit elsewhere, she can't accept that the “transition society” label applies to Latvia any more:

Despite that 10, 6 or 4 years ago, labeling Latvia as a transitional society was almost automatic. It seems, intuitively, that in recent years the use of this term has gradually faded. Today, when identifying ourselves to an international audience, a more frequently heard description is “new European Union member state” or “new democracy”

It seems to me that this change is not simply one of description and a change of labels. It is the start of new thinking, a new paradigm about our society, a new approach to life and development. From a comparatively blind, unreflective construction of a desirable model of governance and the copying of discourse to modeling governance after one's own image and likeness (with individual borrowings from those societies that are most successful in some area). To my mind, this is the most significant change.

Kažoka goes on to say that one characteristic of the change she perceives is that Latvians no longer view other model societies uncritically, they see the flaws in such places as Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia. The political scientist believes this can lead to a desire to do better in our own way, rather than a “cynical relativism” that says that if the Scandinavians have not fully eliminated corruption, it cannot be done in Latvia.

Kažoka lists what she believes are the good qualities of Latvian society, including:

-the ability to cope, adapt, change, search for and find compromises

-a pragmatic ability to learn from their mistakes, having self-esteem, involvement as values

-education as a value

-a growing intolerance for superficial glamour, Nordic modesty.

She then discusses three negative characteristics that Latvians have to overcome in order to advance along the path that she thinks is opening up. She calls them “three reflexes of helplessness:.

-a low level of mutual trust that the political scientist and commentator describes as “tragic”

-a culture of self-depreciating lamentation and “loser-ism”

-stagnant conservatism and an inability to think outside the box

In a rather upbeat ending to her post (perhaps my summary doesn't do it justice, Latvian readers or those who wish to amuse themselves with Google translate can check it out here) Kažoka writes:

I have not hidden the fact in earlier posts that I am skeptical about traditional development planning methods. I see some sense in them, but I don't believe that they are a decisive factor in the faster or slower development of a society. In my opinion, more important processes take place in people's heads, in their perception of the world, because it it is these that either encourage a person to action in the hope of some achievements, or put a brake on doing anything at all. In very general terms, things will be such as is our attitude.

No one can say for certain what the world will look like in 20 years. At the same time, it is clear that the keys to success for a society in this century are new technologies, the ability to learn and cooperate, and inner freedom for creativity. Let us take this into account and do everything so that people in Latvia will have these keys. In my opinion, Latvia as a society presently has the preconditions to become a society where people want to live (rather than leave at the very first chance) if we deprogram ourselves from three learned reflexes of helplessness (mistrust, “loser-ism” and traditionalism) we can be at the very forefront of change.

The Latvian saying “from your mouth to God's ear” is my first reaction to Kažoka's post. But in more critical terms, I would ask – does this analysis and possible future scenario fit the data? OK, I am not a social researcher, Iveta is probably better trained on such matters. The Eurobarometer survey she mentioned to me in a Twitter exchange shows that 78% of Latvians don't trust the government, 89% don't trust political parties and 82% don't trust the parliament. If this isn't dismal, perhaps it is better not to ever see dismal...

The other data that I look at are emigration and is corollary, depopulation. The region of Latgale has lost more than a fifth of its population (21.1%), even Vidzeme, often regarded as a kind of Latvian heartland, is down 17.5%. Among Latvia's cities, Daugavpils has lost 19.3% of its population since 2000, Rezekne is down 18,1% and even the capital Riga has lost 14,2% of its inhabitants.

Admittedly a lagging indicator, figures on the impoverishment of the nation from 2010 show that 46% of the Latvian population would be below the poverty line but for various kinds of social welfare payments. That could be considered a sign that the welfare system works in the country, but at the same time, that people are unable to earn a living wage in Latvia, hence the continuing emigration. Figures on household disposable income show it had fallen by 20% in 2010 compared to 2008, the last year before the economic crisis struck with full force.

There is also a recent study by University of Latvia researchers showing that the alleged Latvian love of work is a myth – the countryside population in many places has sunk into a culture of existing at a subsistence level on welfare and other transfer payments or doing temporary subsidized day labor. A culture of heavy drinking and alcoholism has also become endemic, with the result that employers – farmers and small businesses – cannot find suitable workers. The boozers and welfare dependents prefer their lifestyle to getting a steady job with taxes and social fees paid.

Another recently published “positive” figure is that the number of youth unemployed age 15 to 24 has decreased at the end of 2011 by over 7 800 from the end of 2010. Somehow I don't think these people all got jobs in Latvia. In fact, a fair guess is that most of them emigrated and only a few found work or started their own enterprise in Latvia.

Unfortunately, I don't think the data I see fits Kažoka's conditional optimism, nor, for that matter, that her conditional optimism is based on the data (unless she, whose day job is political analyses, facts, figures etc., has seen other data sets that I haven't seen).

As things stand, the paradigm for Latvia is stagnation (with some bright islands of progress in the economy, like the IT start-ups that gathered at the recent TechCrunch Baltics) and continued emigration simply because it is so easy to find places that are better governed than Latvia and where work is better paid and people better treated, in general, than here. That just comes from the facts and figures, it has nothing to do with whether I am a pessimist or optimist or cheering for Latvia to do better. In a race where your favorite horse is almost dead, it is this fact, not the cheering, that matters. 

The 2011 census of (eventual) doom?

Maybe it is just a kind of scientific fallacy, but it is said that some large animals, when shot by hunters, will keep moving or attacking even after they have suffered fatal injuries. The damage is done, but for various reasons, it can take many seconds or even minutes for the animal to die. Given a “freeze frame” image of the animal just after it was shot, a veterinarian could say that while the creature is very much alive when the snapshot is taken, it is just a matter time before the injury it has suffered will kill it or at best severely cripple it.

The 2011 Latvian census, sadly, is this kind of snapshot. A nation isn't exactly a charging rhinoceros, so the analogy is poor, but it is a living socio-economic and historical organism. It can suffer fatal damage that is visible, obvious, yet will take time to work its ultimate effects.

The 2011 figures show that Latvia had a population of 2.068 million, down 13% from the last census in 2000 and down 22.4% from the 1989 census, the last before Latvia regained its independence. In absolute numbers, this represents a population loss of 600 000, more than the losses suffered to political repression (including deportations), combat in the Second World War, and refugee flight to the West.

At first glance, these figures would appear to be evidence for the strident claims that Latvia's 20 year period of independence has amounted to “genocide” in excess of anything the national has every experienced. This is not true. Of the 13% population loss since 2000, 190 000 are emigrants. Presumably most of them are alive and many of them are better off economically than their cohorts in Latvia. 119 000 represent deaths in excess of births, but very few of these deaths were violent, although some could be considered premature by European life expectancy standards. So to speak of “genocide”, except in some peculiar metaphorical sense, is a misleading exaggeration.

However, it is not an exaggeration to say that the end result of Latvia's demographic decline will be further depopulation in coming decades and the eventual unsustainability of the Latvian nation as such. In other words, there will not be enough people of working age to support a growing number of pensioners and, indeed, to prevent economic stagnation. Labor immigration may be the only way to remedy this, reversing the depletion of the active labor force by emigration and low birth rates.

Who or what is at fault for this? I would say that the Latvian political elite over the past 20 years is responsible for, in effect, keeping open and “salting” the deep wounds ripped into the nation's fabric by 50 years of Soviet Communist occupation. Not the least, most of Latvia's governments since 1991 have, to a greater or lesser degree, perpetuated the Soviet mentality and Soviet way of handling matters. Most notably, they have largely ignored the advice (sometimes not well presented) of Western countries and during the European Union accession process to do a number of things that require little or no spending – stop bribery, end other forms of corruption, run government cleanly and efficiently. I have expounded on this before.

Now that Latvia has failed to do what it could have done to heal and mitigate the wounds of occupation, it has, in effect, turned these into self-perpetuated wounds that have now turned the nation into a ticking demographic bomb that it is probably too late to disarm. Latvia is well on its way to becoming, and will probably inexorably become a territory with a shrinking, aging, demoralized population and a stagnating, most likely shrinking and unsustainable economy. That is the brutal reality of the census.

Latvia: A drab, grey nation in midwinter

I am writing these recent impressions of Latvia while visiting the US East Coast (the Boston area). While life is no picnic here at all, there are “shiny happy people” around instead of what I saw just before departing. I will be going back to the drab, gray nation on Friday.

One of the things I have been doing as a hobby is to walk around Riga and photograph people, buildings, street scenes and the like. A place I have gone a couple of times with my camera is the Riga Central Market, with its former Zeppelin hangar halls and open-air area. To get there, one way is to go through the Central Station, which has partly been turned into a multi-level shopping center with clothing stores, electronics shops, restaurants, newsstands and a supermarket.

To go from this modern 20^th or even 21^st century environment (shops selling iPads etc.) into the Central Market is a remarkable and depressing transition in terms of the people one encounters. It is a socio-economic leap to another world of mostly old, haggard, grey, apathetic and resigned faces and bodies. Listless, old, greyish-pale expressionless or ravaged faces abound, almost like a contingent of people shuffling away from some disaster just around the corner or over the horizon, too burned out to move very fast. Is this the Third World, the photos of Somali or Ethiopian war victim and refugee faces, only white and better nourished?

The impression one gets is of a society from which the life-spark has vanished, or more precisely, emigrated. There is only a scattering of young people in the otherwise old and worn masses shuffling about the market with tattered plastic bags (almost like the Soviet era, except that then plastic bags were a sign of privilege, net bags and cloth abounded). The young are tourists or shoppers seeking fresh, organically grown vegetables and other foods from the countryside. The sellers, too, for the most part are babushka type country women, with a bit higher energy level than their often morose shoppers.

I fear this somehow illustrates the state and fate of the Latvian nation (including non-Latvians, too). Drab, haggard, impoverished, drained of any hope for the future and of an age when, given the overall demographics and state of health care, there probably is little time left for many of the individuals one encounters. All this just a few hundred meters from the modern center of Riga, where tourists and somewhat better looking locals gather, as well as the significant but visibly dwindling young, who are often livelier and happier.

What is going on? As a colleague working for a foreign news agency said, it appears that the local Latvian media don't really care. Poverty and long-term unemployment statistics are big news in many other countries. A shift in the number of poor generates considerable media attention, analyses, searches for root causes and the like. Not in Latvia. Even the annual Human Development report seems to focus on issues of identity and emigration/immigration (to be honest, I have only skimmed parts of the document).

It would be facile to say that the root of all this is the transition to a capitalist market economy. There were similar scenes in the Central Market of huddled, grey masses of socialist citizens waiting in huge lines (sometimes crowds bordering on mobs) for a piece of gray frozen meat to be hacked off a huge block with an axe. One of the roots of the seeming exhaustion and demoralization of Latvia's people is fifty years of occupation and a totalitarian, centrally planned economy that did provide a dull, monotonous subsistence for most people living under the system. It was the era of stagnation, shortages and little apparent hope that anything would change, though with a certain reliability that rents would be low, electricity cheap, bread, fish, potatoes and other basic foods generally available and the occasional sausage or fruit waiting at the end of a long queue if you were lucky. Being a victim was nothing new to Latvians leaving socialism and entering the new system of the 1990s.

The problem was that the new “system” in the 1990s consisted of most of the ex-Communist elite of an entire country trying to imitate the behavior and lifestyle of characters on the American TV show Dallas, since this best approximated what they had been taught about capitalism. The idea was to immediately spend money – the more, the better – on huge houses and big cars. Dishonesty and cheating – whether on wives or business partners – was part of the deal.

To be sure, stuff like that happened in the real world, so that the picture of how things were in non-socialist economies as presented by Dallas was selective, but not entirely inaccurate. There was no show made called Central Committee, which could have shown the depravity (now documented) of the Communist elite running a state-owned, planned socialist economy and succeeding poorly, sometimes pointlessly and often sloppily at providing what are still the promises of socialist movements everywhere – free healthcare, free education, and full employment.

It is obvious that a grab-whatever-you-can economy will generate inequality, or rather, exaggerate existing inequalities among a population that had been indoctrinated that complete equality was possible and that, indeed, a semblance of it existed in the low, but barely adequate standard of living shared by most of the population. Among the old and hopeless, memories of this have turned to nostalgia for “better times” under the old system.

Why is Latvia turning into a society with a significant, even dominant population of the aging, passive and helpless poor? Some would say that the cause of poverty is the failure to equally distribute wealth, bringing us back to the socialist argument that all one needs is a centralized system for equally distributing resources in a planned way. This works, more or less, in organizations that are smaller and somewhat less complex than society as a whole. The best example, in rough and general terms, is the military. All soldiers have more or less the same uniforms, weapons, food and medical support and can be relied upon, as a whole, to carry out centrally issued orders and instructions. The military is, looked at this way, an organization that produces the outcomes for its members that are promised by socialism – equality in the fulfillment of all basic needs by central planning and allocation.

However, it can also be argued that the root cause of poverty is low productivity. Here the military analogy breaks down, because functionally “socialist” armies do not produce what they consume. They are not, strictly speaking, “economies”, and it is economic systems that create wealth, multiply and refine resources. Latvia's poverty stems in part from a failure to form an economic system that increases its own productivity and, thereby, the wealth available for “redistribution”, should anyone choose to do so.

Productive and evolving economic systems also need strong institutions that ensure the rule of law, the enforcement of contract and the orderly elimination of non-productive economic entities in favor of those that are innovative and more productive. With all their imperfections and failings, Western European countries have created such economic systems based largely on private ownership and market relations among economic actors.

Since the early 1990s, Latvia has had a long parade of advice and instruction on how to reform and transition society from a failing socialist economy to a modern market system, including the necessary institutions to underpin such an economic system. To be sure, a lot of the advice given to Latvia over the past 20+ years has been condescending, oversimplified, overoptimistic, and presented with little understanding of how the presumed audience – homo (post)sovieticus saw the world. But at the end of the day, or rather, the two decades, Latvia was given almost all of the basic and much of the sophisticated knowledge on reforming its society that was needed to build a socio-economic system that would increase productivity and increase the total wealth of society.

So it can be said that much of the poverty in Latvia, exacerbated by the emigration of productive and potentially productive individuals, was caused by a failure of politicians and institutions and, to some extent, society as a whole, to learn the lessons repeatedly given to them since 1991. They can be summed up as – don't bribe, don't steal, deal honestly, pay fairly, invest for the mid-to-long term, educate your workforce, streamline government, make bureaucracy small, smart and efficient, make the benefits of tax-paying visible and obvious, keeping taxes moderate, etc. etc.

Too little of this has been done. Instead, the political elite has discredited itself to an extent unheard of since modern polling methods have been used. The collapse of trust in institutions in Latvia is very likely irreversible and has already mutated into a kind of social paranoia as witnessed by the run on Swedbank. The end result is that we have a society that, at least by street-level observation, is ravaged by poverty and has failed to implement the practices that would have significantly reduced that poverty. It is too late to retrain the older part of the population to do the work, say, of five Chinese while getting paid three times Chinese wages (probably a bad comparison), and the young are making decisions every day to leave a country they perceive as failing and futureless. The drab, gray, haggard, exhausted, aged population that one sees behind the socio-economic divide of the Riga Central Station (and probably in many rural areas) is the result of a series of choices over the past 20 years that, whether intentional or simply clueless, have resulted in an act of “futuricide” agains the Latvian nation.

Banking with Chicken Little in Latvia

There are reasons for concern everywhere about the financial system, especially in light of the Eurozone debt crisis, the postponed, but still possible collapse of the euro and other things based on facts, figure, events and rational analysis. But that is not the biggest immediate risk for bank customers in Latvia. The biggest risk is proving to be the customers themselves.

Whatever else banks are, they are institutions based on trust at the customer level. That is, the bank is kept solvent by the fact that depositors a) believe the bank will be there the next day, which depends on b) most of the other depositors being there the next day. If that doesn't happen, whatever else the bank is doing with the money entrusted to it by customers doesn't matter, because, basically, the customers cannot be trusted to stay with the bank and can, for whatever reason, seriously damage it or pull it down.

This is what is starting to happen in Latvia with the initially groundless panic surrounding Swedbank and, to a far lesser extent, SEB. Both parent banks in Sweden are stable, solvent, and there are no signals from any of the many third parties watching the banks (auditors, analysts, shareholders) that anything is wrong (or, for that matter, that the official authorities, which there may be some reason to mistrust, are hiding anything). But now in Latvia, the mass hysteria of bank depositors is itself becoming at least a low intensity threat to Swedbank and the other banks. It at least suggests there is some truth, but little reason behind the saying that in bank panics and runs, the cool and rational will fare the worst, remaining as the “last man not taking everything out of the bank”.

There may be an explanation, but not a justification of public behavior in Latvia in connection with the recent closing of Latvijas Krājbanka. However, that was a relatively small bank in terms of assets (but broad-based in terms of numbers of customers) and its demise was the result of alleged criminal behavior by the owner of its parent Snoras Bank, the Russian millionaire Vladimir Antonov. Also, thousands of customers were compensated to the extent of their deposit insurance coverage very quickly, with some LVL 200 million paid out within days of the collapse.

The fundamental problem is that people in Latvia now have a largely irrational distrust of banking system as a whole, with Swedbank singled out as the market leader, and a far  less irrational mistrust of government authority based on inept initial statements (Krājbanka is OK) by the Financial and Capital Markets Commission (FCMC) in connection with the collapse of Snoras in Lithuania. This mistrust is showing signs of turning into a kind of mind-set of the Middle Ages. What I mean by that is that people see their surroundings as governed by incomprehensible, mainly malevolent and arbitrary forces beyond their control or understanding. Wars, plagues, famines were frequent occurances and to the average illiterate peasant, they simply happened or were acts of God or other mystical forces. It now seems that many Latvians view the financial system and their environment as a whole as a malevolent force to which one can only react in the short term, based on the basic emotions fear and suspicion, putting reason and the checking of emotions against facts on the back burner. It is the kind of mindset that led to numerous panics, delusions, witch-burnings, children's crusades and other acts of mass hysteria in one form or another. This is shocking and baffling to the more rational societies of Europe, in particular, the Swedes.

Another way to put it is that these recent and still ongoing events show that the greatest risk to any Latvian customer of a stable, well capitalized and profitable Swedish-owned bank is the fact the many of his or her fellow customers are like Chicken Little, ready to run about madly shouting that “the sky is falling”. It would almost be reason enough to move one's assets, if possible, to Swedbank in Sweden, where the cohort of bank customers is less excitable and irrational.

Weaponizing the Russian language in Latvia again

When I wrote about the successful signature campaign by Latvian citizens to make Russian the second state language, I got some comments on Twitter and elsewhere that “a language is just a language” and it was somehow wrong to associate demands for Russian as a state language with the Soviet policy of Russification.

This is surprising, except when it comes from the generation that doesn't fully remember what the Soviet Union was like. To be honest, I didn't live in Latvia then, but I participated in many emigre Latvian activities, including demonstrations against the Soviet russification policy, which consisted both of imposing the Russian language on the Baltic populations and massively importing Russian-speaking labor (at least to Estonia and Latvia). The latter means of russification ended with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

The actions of Balts abroad were based on personal experience (visiting the Baltic States), anecdotal stories and academic research (including a book by the Latvian political scientist and present-day Saeima deputy Rasma Kārkliņa) that characterized policies regarding the use of Russian in non-Russian Soviet republics as part of the policy of russification. It is probably beyond reasonable dispute that the Russian language, during the Soviet era, but also with precedents in Czarist Russia as far as the Baltic were concerned, was used as a weapon of state policy aimed at subjugating and, eventually, assimilating the Baltic nations to some greater, Russian-dominated ethnos.

The Soviets made it clear-- the future belonged to a Russian-speaking new Soviet people that would have erased all traces of the diverse national identities that had been (in some cases forcibly) incorporated into the USSR. Those policies were terminated with the collapse of the USSR, but it is reasonable to say that the widespread post-Soviet knowledge of Russian, whatever merits one can ascribe to it otherwise, could also be described as one of the badges of occupation. In other words, on a “but for” basis, many Latvians would not speak Russian but for the occupation of Latvia for 50 years, a period of time when they were compelled to learn Russian. Above and beyond Russian as a compulsory subject in school, there were also campaigns (proclaimed in the Latvian-language Soviet press) exhorting people to improve their Russian and emphasizing the role of Russian as the basis for the new Soviet nation of the future.

As a language learned by compulsion during the totalitarian occupation of Latvia, Russian can be seen as a weapon that has left its impact on most Latvians (and non-Russians in Latvia, such as Armenians, Poles, Georgians, etc.), even if that impact has entirely benign consquences today (buying a beer at a Moscow bar, watching Russian movies, whatever). However, those consquences are benign only because the regime of Russian domination and compulsory teaching of Russian has ended. If it had not, “Russianspeakingness” would continue to be a sympton of russification and a badge of occupation and dominance by a foreign power.

The successful signature campaign to restore Russian as a state language in an independent Latvian state, reviving, at least formally, the status it had in the Soviet Union, is an effort to make Russian a weaponized language again. Since there is little or no evidence that ethnic Russians in Latvia cannot conduct most of their daily lives speaking Russian, there is no logical need to make Russian a second state language except to make it a weapon again.

To be sure, it is a weak and irrational weapon if, as some suggest, it is aimed at expressing some kind of protest by the “Russian-speaking” (read ethnic Russian) citizenry for not getting a share of political power after the recent election. Unfortunately, their poster-boy, Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs, ran mostly as a populist social democrat, attracting some ethnic Latvian votes. His Harmony Center party (Saskaņas centrs/SC) was acting like a party of Russians, not a Russian party pushing for specific issues relating to Russians as a significant minority in Latvian. As a “Russian” party, SC should have agitated for more adult education in Latvian as a foreign language to make more citzens functionally bi-lingual as well as for home language instruction to keep Russian children form losing their native language (something the USSR never did for minorities living outside their borders). Most non-Russian Latvian citizens would have no issues with that. But those Latvians, who don't see Russian as “just another language”, should object against having a weapon pointed at them again.