I’ll ignore Ambersun’s disturbing agreement (made me check the blankets for fascist fleas and such, several times [tongue]) to say that I don’t see the space that is offered to those who aren’t Latvian (cittautieši, whatever) as having much breathing room. And that is where ethnic nationalism gets dangerous—it doesn’t even have room for Latgallians, let alone Latvijas krievi.
That’s what’s horrible, in my view. Not that it’s not understandable. To operate as a defensive minority after you get a supposedly modern nation-state to run is just gritty and grotty, esp. when the main minority is not a real minority. I’ll even risk offending my friend Aleksei to say he’s not an Old Believer at all—there’s nothing in him that I’ve seen that testified to those roots, and he could just as well claim to be “Latvian” per the paternal line. But that goes for many (ethnic) Latvians, too—worse, many Latvians, those who are the most rootless, accentuate the Latvianness they lack. And what is there in that? Conviction? Or skinheads after too much glue?
Stalšāns paints a very different picture of the Old Believers than Elizabete does—they welcomed the invasion in Naujene… “they may be Bolsheviks, but at least they’re ours” is the notorious phrase. Meaning—at least they speak Russian. According to him, they were easily led—as most illiterates are. They were so violent towards Latvians once Soviet rule set in that even the Party had to step in.
The Mennonites never experienced a German occupation of America. The Old Believers lived here during Russian ascendancy (in various phases)—reports about how they behaved towards the Polish nobles who granted them refuge are mixed, to put it mildly. Later, it is quite true that many Old Believers became and remain supporters of the Latvian Republic (many did not and are not)—but a rich, urban Old Believer in the Grebenshchikov congregation vs. a poor Latgallian Old Believer vs. an utterly Sovietized descendant, or a dreaded “cosmopolitan”?
There are nearly as many Poles in Daugavpils as there are Latvians, by ethnicity—but most Poles were Russified. The self-identification is one thing. It often matters—like Old Believers, Poles were supportive of independence… as a group. But they continue to be Russified even now. If I’m a Pole but know no Polish, am I a Pole? How does that play out in our identity politics? To play with the genetic markers—like, as Germans say of the Wolgadeutsche: I’m a German ‘cause my great-grandfather once owned a German Shepherd?
The same goes for the Jewish identity in Latvia today. Most of Latvia’s Jews have no connection to Latvian Jews—they’re Soviet immigrants. At least until recently, the Jewish school was a Russian school for self-identified Jews, few of them practicing Jews.
The new EU Latvian passports don’t put the optional ethnicity line on the next page but right there, en face.
Russians claim roots here all of the time—that is a main slogan of Zhdanok’s young droogs, for instance, who carry signs like this. They took to carrying signs saying just “40%” for a time, meaning that in their view, 40% have roots here; they are 40% of the population. Besides the exaggeration of the percentage—it’s a boldfaced lie. It’s, like—maybe a third of the people of Aleppo are Christian… so if you were to move to Aleppo, you’d add a person to the percentage. And the exaggeration of the percentage is based upon the idea that everybody not Latvian is a Russian.
There are certainly many Russians with roots here. But—what grew from them? I’ve cited the actual stats many a time—most were here in Latgola, and most of those were rural Old Believers. Their total percentage was __%?
Aleks says it’s increasingly hard to tell who is who—that’s probably true. But part of that is that nobody was anybody during the occupation, as a rule. In the areas that were settled by Old Believers or colonized in the 19th C, it’s not so hard to tell; villages know everything. But that part of the population is not very large. In the cities—does it matter?
Interestingly, an objection I read in the Russian press (and unlike Ambersun I would distinguish between the Russian press and the Russian-language press in Latvia) to Latvia’s definition of what minorities are in terms of the Framework Convention was that Old Believers are already “assimilated.” This must be one of those confusions of definition.
Vysu lobu,
/P
