This country remained under often brutal Soviet rule until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. As I wander around the cobblestone streets of the beautiful old town with upmarket shops, restaurants and cafes I try to imagine what this was all like before 1991. A dictator repressive state, no shops, food shortages fear of arbitrary arrest and execution.
We visit the KGB headquarters and once again I am struck by the ordinariness of the building. It is just an old multistory house on the main street. Like similar institutions I have visited in Budapest and Tirana there is no surrounding wall, no barbed wire just a house that the locals quickly learn that if you are brought in here you are not seen again. People were arrested and interrogated on suspicion of being enemies to the state. They never left alive. Apart from executions with the body dumped in local forests the other fate was export to Siberia to eventually perish in the freezing gulags.
The parting speech from our guide is an ongoing call to freedom. He directly references Russia and Putin. The Russian border is only 300 km away and it’s 1.5 million Latvians vs 100 million Russians. There is clearly a sense of anxiety with the war with Ukraine. Sadly it seems that a new Soviet empire is waxing and the Baltic states are jittery. Hopefully history does not repeat itself here and these Baltic minnows are not swallowed up by an increasingly chauvinistic and aggressive Russian superpower.
I blink on emerging into the bright sunlight, aware of the fact that hundreds of others never got the opportunity to do so. The finale for Riga is a relaxing river and canal cruise.
