Church in Karosta, an imperial Russian/Soviet ex-navy town in Eastern Latvia. If I understood things correctly, it was more or less shut off from the rest of Liepaja and people could not cross the bridge into Karosta unless they had legit business there. Lots of military families lived there, and some are still there.



Karosta is not exactly a chic place to live nowadays.


It was getting dark while I was getting to the military sights and I did not want to walk around there by myself so I left without having seen some of the things there.

However I noticed that a few radar towers were still in use, and a large building that looked very much like a military kaserne (baracks) had been fixed up, was in use but there was no signs at all to indicate what it was for and lots of dogs were guarding it. Maybe Nato is doing something there, what an irony!


================================================== =============================================

Sorry about my absence from this thread.
It was very interesting to read Nulle's post. Thank you for taking the time to respond!

I was expressing an opinion and he was expressing another, from a much more solid perspective than me, since he is Latvian. I don't think there is any problem and I respect his opinion and everything he says.

I don't think that the Russians in Latvia are actively discriminated against in a brutal way, or anything like that. There are more problems with this in Estonia as I understand. The groups are mixing quite a bit between themselves in Latvia. In Liepaja, the mix seems to be exactly 50-50 based on languages spoken in the street.

The thing that seems wrong to me is that there isn't more usage of Russian on town. Clearly it's either banned or strongly discouraged. Normally in bilingual countries you see both languages in use, consistently.
However, lots of papers etc are available to buy in Russian and lots of cafes etc play Russian speaking radio stations.
I have not watched TV but I noticed that there are plenty of Russian TV channels when I flicked through.

I spoke with a girl whose father was Russian and mother Latvian. She said most people who took a strong stand on this were extremists and that she could understand the arguments of both sides. However she said that in Riga there are gangs fighting each other Russians vs Latvians. But most people simply don't think about it.

Andrei, the guide I met in Belarus was born in Latvia. He said that his family "escaped" because they were being discriminated against, language-wise. They lived in Ventspils and his dad was an operator of some piece of navy monitoring equipment.

The view that the USSR liberated Latvia which then more or less voluntarily entered the USSR (which incidentally I more or less believed while growing up) is simply not something that normal Latvians agree with.

Practically nobody over the age of 25 can speak English to a useful level, but everyone can communicate in Russian, or in many cases speak native sounding Russian even though they are Latvian. I usually ask people if I can speak English with them, they usually look panicked and indicate "no" and I then speak Russian with them. Young people are happy to speak English though. There are plenty of young Latvians who are practically trilingual - very impressive.

My personal opinion about this is:
The state should provide services in both languages, like Belgium, UK, Finland, Switzerland etc do... That is the norm in the EU which Latvia has chosen to be in. The only reason why Latvia is not following EUs standard on minorities is because of the bad reputation of the USSR.
Anyone who was born in Latvia, or who grew up there, including in USSR times should automatically get citizenship, regardless of language skills. Anything else is discrimination in my opinion.
Russians who live in Latvia definitely ought to make a serious effort to learn Latvian unless they have a very solid reason not to (like if they are very old or have a learning disability). It is disrespectful and arrogant not to.
Russians who are not prepared to respect Latvia should move somewhere else.

I spoke with a man whose age was a bit unclear to me. We spoke in English because he wanted to practice. He said his mother was in her 50s but he looked like he was in his forties or fifties himself. He first said he could speak Latvian. Later he changed the story, it seemed, and said he could understand it but not speak well at all. He was born in Latvia, so this situation was not very impressive to me. Hard to believe he managed to learn decent English and was not a fluent Latvian speaker.

He said that his mother was getting a pension from the state, but when she went to get it, the staff at the office refused to speak Russian with her, even though they knew it. For that reason he needed to go with her every time she had to go to this pensions agency. He himself was unemployed but if I understood him right he was a specialist on a piece of software that is used for steel production. He was off to a job interview the next day.

I also think he said that he himself was not currently a Latvian citizen, but in the process of becoming one. People who are not citizens have a document that cannot be used for travelling anywhere other than Russia. Of course, there is nobody to stop them going elsewhere in the EU since there are no borders anymore. But they could not for example travel to the USA on this document.

With a few exceptions it is almost impossible to look at people and guess whether they are Russian or Latvian speakers. Only if somebody has very dark complexion and look almost impossible as a Northern European - then they are likely to be Russian. But the dress sense is the same and peoples behaviour is similar. The Russian people seem very un-Russian in many ways. Or maybe my stereotypes of Russian people are wrong.

I saw a churchyard where people of all faiths and backgrounds were buried together. Orthodox, Lutheran and Catholic.
Some Russians actually had stars and even hammer and sickle on their gravestones. Hm! Communism is not the way to get into heaven! Lots of people had a photo of themselves on their gravestone. I have never seen that before.

There was a very strange part of the church yard that consisted of about 200 white identical graves of people with Latvian names. They were all born in 1919 or 1920. An obelisk with a swastika (nazi symbol) was raised near these graves, and there were some swastikas on the gates to this area too. There was a text in Latvian which I could not understand at all.
I have no idea what this was about. If it was something raised by the Nazis during the war, then I really can't understand that the Soviets let it stay as it was. I saw this on the way to the "Karosta" navy base town.

My camera was having some problems, so the pictures in this post have been taken by other people.

Basically some of Karosta has been re-instated as it was (although without any maintenance, so it looks crap...) Tourists can even sleep in a Soviet military prison, as a "hotel".

In my childhood there were some problems with foreign (unknown) submarines sneaking around the cost of Sweden. Most people thought they were from the USSR, namely from the Liepaja navy base (i.e. Karosta). However later, long after the end of the Cold War it turned out that the majority of the incidents involved Nato submarines.