It seems history has given you no choice! It's very obvious to anyone who visits this country that there are two language groups of near equal size.

If you don't want to do the politically correct option - accept reality and be a bilingual country - then you have two other options:

1) Throw out the Russian speakers.
2) Somehow force them to speak to Latvian.

Both are a historical reciept for trouble, complaints, unrest and worst case, war!

It COULD work with SMALL minorities (less than 10% perhaps, there are examples of that.) But with a large minority I doubt that it will. In Sweden, we forced the minorities to speak Swedish. But that was small minorities and this was 75-300 years ago. They are still very angry about it and there are lots of problems related to that.

And has it occurred to you that to most visitors, the situation is very interesting and your language skills are impressive? It will only enrich Latvia! What harm does it do? Your language is still there and developing.

Also, most Russians seem to have a very reasonable view of the situation. Most, including older people are trying to speak Latvian as far as I can tell. It's lucky these people are so pliable.... Look at Spain etc where they practically take to arms because someone forgot to put up a bilingual street sign somewhere...

Pissing off Russia doesn't seem like a good idea either. They are next door to you and getting back on their feet, while the USA is on the other side of the Atlantic and going broke as we speak.

It just seems to ME that you have everything to win by being a bit more accommodating to these people, but quite a lot to lose by taking a rigid position. Not to mention the fact that it's the decent thing to do.