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Memories of Soviet Repression Still Vivid in Baltics
Storefronts in Riga display posters of President Bush, who arrived in the Latvian capital Friday to meet with the leaders of the three Baltic states.
(By Mindaugas Kulbis -- Associated Press)
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Russia often tries to turn the tables, accusing Latvia of Nazi sympathies during the war and discrimination against its ethnic Russian minority today. Some Latvians did join the Nazis to fight the Soviets and win their independence. Latvian officials insist they have bolstered the rights of Russians, who still make up 29 percent of the 2.3 million-strong population.
In an interview with Bush, a Russian television reporter pressed him on U.S. culpability for abandoning Eastern Europe to Communist rule after the war, noting that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill went along with Stalin's division of the continent at the Yalta conference in 1945. "There's no question three leaders made the decision," Bush conceded to NTV television in remarks released Friday.
The history of the period is documented at the occupation museum. Opened in 1993 and visited by 65,000 people a year, it has become the region's premier memorial to the suffering of the era.
By most accounts, the Soviets engineered provocations to send troops into Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in June 1940, then installed puppet governments, supposedly elected by margins of up to 99 percent of the population, which then asked to join the Soviet Union.
The Soviets moved quickly to deport Latvians en masse and relocate Russians into the states. In 1941, the Nazis captured the republics and held them until 1944, when the Soviets moved back in. About 550,000 Latvians, or one-third of the population, died during the two wartime occupations. Moscow remained in command until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Gundega Michel was born 11 days before Soviet troops first moved in and was a year old when 15,000 of her neighbors and countrymen were rounded up one night and loaded aboard cattle cars bound for Siberia. When she was 4 years old, her family escaped, remaining in exile for half a century. Eventually, she made her way to the United States, where she became a chemistry professor in Chicago.
After she retired, Michel came back to Latvia in January 2002 and took over as director of the museum. She found a homeland still bruised from an occupation Russia denies ever happened.
This week's statements out of Moscow, she said, reminded her of the museum's mission. "It makes us feel very, very badly," she said. "It's a denial of reality. Those who have lived through it, they're told, 'What you experienced, what you lived through, that's not real, that didn't happen.' "
