Aug 11
RIGA – Some of my photos that I took this afternoon during the peaceful march in Riga in support of Georgia. All photos © 2008 All About Latvia. If you need to use them, go ahead, but don’t forget to let your readers know where you got them.
The Flash Player and a browser with Javascript support are needed..
Aug 11
Uncategorized war in Georgia 3 Comments
RIGA – “How horrible,” my grandmother told her friend over the phone. “How horrible is this war! What are the Georgians fighting about?”
Perhaps, no other place offers a greater example of a division of points of view than my own household. My grandmother, who gets her news from the Kremlin-sponsored Russian TV channels that would have made Goebells proud, condemns Georgians who are fighting “our boys.” On the other hand, I am of a different opinion.
No better place to watch geopolitics unfold that in the Baltic States. The great divide between the local Russians and other groups in a small country like Latvia became even more acute when I picked up Russian newspapers published in Riga.
“Latvia sides with Georgia,” says the Telegraf.
“Zatlers against Russia,” whines Vesti Segodnya, referring to the joint statement signed by the Poland’s and Baltics presidents over the weekend.
Russian Society in Latvia that allegedly represents the Russian community in Latvia along with quasi-fascist Latvian national democratic party condemned Georgia and called on Russians here to boycott Georgian products, such as mineral water and wine.
“Every purchased bottle of mineral water from Georgia is a shot into an Ossetian child, woman, older man, or a Russian solder,” said the party’s leader Evgeny Osipov.
Taking a page out of the Russia’s media, the condemnation invoked images of genocide of the South Ossetian people and of the beginning of the so-called Great Patriotic War.
It is also sad to conclude that those same people would welcome the Russian army with an open arms, if it were to decide to invade the Baltics.
Aug 11
Uncategorized Comments Off
A bit of Russian psyche, or the reason why the Baltics should fear and respect Russia.
From the Baltic News Service:
RIGA – Russian ambassador to Latvia Alexander Veshnyakov has called a resolution the Baltics states and Poland have passed in support of Georgia a mistake.
Asked at a news conference to comment the document signed by the presidents of the four countries last Saturday, the Russian diplomat said: “One must not hurry on such serious issues, as serious mistakes can be made that have to be paid for a long time afterward.”
Aug 11
Personal culture, Personal 6 Comments
NEED PHOTO
RIGA – “Did you hear, Solzhenitsin became a great Russian writer yesterday,” I told Peteris.
“No. Why?”
“He died.”
It takes crossing into another life for a writer to be elevated into a position of a great writer in Russia as great writers have served as prophets for the nation and its people. And no one likes prophets.
“We ridiculed you, Aleksandr Isayevich,” said a man in the crowd of mourners walking by the body of a dead writer laying in state.
“We ridiculed you. You are the best writer in the world,” he said.
Reading this well-written account of the funeral in Kommersant, I thought of two things: the way different nations handle death and what happened since my grandfather died.
I’ve been to many funerals in the West. I attended a funeral once when a coffin stood right outside the doorway of a south Michigan church. Every time someone walked in, the door would hit the coffin making a noise. I attended a funeral which ended in cremation, when a coffin moves on the belt into a firy furnace to be buried. Another graveside service ended with people leaving the coffin above the ground – some in the West apparently believe that seeing the body of a loved one lowered into the 6-foot deep hole is too distressing, so they avoid it all together not realizing that this constitutes a normal grieving process.
Westerners think it’s too traumatic of an experience seeing your loved one lowed into the ground and covered in dirt. They seem to shun death, hoping to avoid the unavoidable. They want to look young, feel healthy. Elderly are shipped into nursing homes away from people’s eyes. Then, they gradually make a transition into death and even then family and friends aren’t confronted with the Eternal Question.
I remember when the former US president Ronald Regan became great. His body had laid in state at the U.S. Capitol, a coffin covered in an American flag standing into the middle of the rotunda. People passing by where saying goodbye to an expensive wooden box rather than their former president.
Russian – and Latvian – funerals take place with an open coffin. I attended a funeral of one of my friend’s mom in Latvia last January, which was a simple protestant funeral, but it had an open coffin standing in a chapel where people who knew her could gather to give her the last respect. “She lost so much weight,” I remember a woman saying.
Then, a processional marched through the cemetery into the graveside before men shut the coffin with a lid.
In January, my grandfather died. We buried him using all traditional Old Believer rites, including an open casket. My grandmother regretted not taking any pictures of the funeral. Since then, my grandmother has been faithfully visiting his grave. For Russians, a grave isn’t simply a place of burial, it’s a place of communion between the living and the dead.
“How are you, Grisha,” my grandmother would say, calling on my grandfather’s name. “Have you missed me? How is it for you here in the rain?”
The response is always the same: silence.
My grandmother has been going to his grave every Saturday: to clean up, plant flowers– and more importantly to talk. The grave site now has transformed from a flowerbed grave into a stone monument to my grandfather.
When I was gone on a three-week trip recently, she went to the cemetery to cry, to complain about life, and find some kind of communion with her deceased husband. From time to time, we take a picnic and go to the grave to give remembrance to the dead. And almost every time, my grandmother leaves sweets, meat cakes, and a shot of vodka for my grandfather.
Aug 10
Tourism Estonia, Latvia, travel Comments Off
RIGA – A slick, black and red bus rumbles along a motorway trying to do the impossible – to win a competition with a plane in a race to its destination. Thronged with passengers, the bus trundles through the woodlands of northern Latvia, carrying its passengers from one small Baltic country to the next.
Passengers can take the four-hour bus journey from Riga to the Estonian capital, Tallinn, in comfort and that is perhaps unique among EU bus lines connecting major cities in the 27-nation bloc. On the 310-kilometre journey, two Baltic bus lines offer an upgraded service which includes video programmes, free hot drinks, and for those who want to use their time wisely – free, wireless internet access on board.
A brochure advertising Eurolines services suggests that riding a bus between the two capitals is better than than boarding a flight. Business people can use their time productively as buses do not limit phone and internet usage.
‘The bus is rather luxurious. They have coffee here and everything. Four hours of travel without any hassle at the airport with delays and waiting,’ a passenger named Vladimir told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa during his recent trip to Tallinn.
The Baltic bus line, Eurolines, and its main rival, Estonia’s Hansabuss, offer a little extra in a bid to lure customers who normally would not travel by bus.
Eurolines offers deluxe services aboard buses from Tallinn to St. Petersburg and starting this month, it is expanding the service to another route – from Riga to Klaipeda, Lithuania, a town on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
In the Soviet era of poor customer service, travelling in comfort was considered a luxury reserved for the chosen few. Since then, the two tiny Baltic nations that broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991 and joined the European Union in 2004, are continuing to break the remainder of Soviet-style stereotypes.
Buses used to be bad, old, and extremely uncomfortable. The former Soviet way and Western way of travelling to this day collide at the central bus station in the Latvian capital, perhaps as a testament to the Baltics proximity to Russia on the outskirts of the EU.
Nowadays, you can still spend a three-hour bus journey standing and is no laughing matter when passengers literally ‘fry’ in the heat of summer aboard a bus without air conditioning.
However, Eurolines wanted to prompt travellers to reconsider taking a bus for their next journey.
‘So we offered them free use of the internet, hot coffee, an entertainment programme and more space between their seats,’ said the a spokeswoman Unda Bujane.
The new concept appears to be going down well among passengers.
Aug 07
History, Parliament, Politics, President, The Godmanis government 2 Comments
RIGA – I went to listen to the president speak yesterday at the Saeima and I almost fell asleep. If leaders are supposed to be inspirational, Latvia’s President Valdis Zatlers was not. It is best to listen to his speech before you go to bed.
But the speech was good. Zatlers called on members of parliament to heed to call of the electorate (yeah, right!), following the Saturday’s political circus, or to put it the boringly, the Referendum on the Constitutional Amendments. More than 600,000 allegedly apathetic Latvians for a moment set a keg of beer aside and went to the polls to tell the government what they thought of it.
The government told them they were wrong and it knew better.
The zoo-elected president, Zatlers now has another chance to earn some political capital that may even carry him into the second term. The silver-haired doctor has a chance to heal the nation. To fix political crisis in our little kingdom, Zatlers can dissolve the parliament and, I believe, he would keep his job in a national referendum. The question is how long it will take him to make that decision.
The president appeared to give the parliament until Christmas to decide on constitutional amendments drafted by a group of legal experts that do indeed give voters a right to call snap elections but with harsher restrictions so not to destabilize the country.
Stability has been a token of dictatorship though and I find it very interesting that we find ourselves in a similar situation as back in May 1934, on the eve of the Murder of Democracy when Latvia’s Prime Minister Karlis Ulmanis dissolved the parliament and became a de facto dictator. A day before his coup d’etat, the parliament voted in second reading on amendments to allow voters a right to dissolve the assembly. The bill never went to the third reading as the parliament was dissolved under the pretext of re-writing the constitution.
Chances of a benevelent dictator stepping out of the shadows in the modern-day Latvia is unlikely. What is likely, however, is the continual denial of those in power that people just don’t know any better until it is too late. Add a good dose of the economic crisis and you’ve got a good political and economic climate for a revolution.
RSS
Recent Comments