Dealing with the deficit and with Rubiks

Uldis Ozoliņš | 

Since Latvia’s new government came into office two months ago, the atmosphere of Latvian politics has changed almost beyond recognition. When President Valdis Zatlers picked Valdis Dombrovskis to be prime minister, a sequence of events began that now show us a government facing up to the realities both of the catastrophic financial crisis engulfing Latvia, and of the need to change a political culture of corruption and self serving.

Dombrovskis is from the New Era Party (Jaunais laiks, or JL), which stood outside the previous coalition, but he quickly stitched together a coalition that has been remarkably trouble free. Paradoxically, the situation made it easier to form a government, in that all the former coaliton parties were keen to do so quickly, or face a possible early Saeima election. Dombrovskis was also able to sideline a mortal enemy of JL. Ainārs Šlesers’ First Party of Latvia (Latvijas Pirmā partija, or LPP) was not accepted into the coalition, leaving it and the two Russian-oriented parties in opposition. To show he does not give a damn, strongman Šlesers himself is now a candidate for the mayor of Rīga, another source of potential kickbacks now that his political businesses in the national government (transport, communications, infrastructure) are no longer accessible. The former coalition-leading People’s Party (Tautas partija), the Union of Greens and Farmers (Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība) as well as the much bruised and discredited For Fatherland and Freedom (Tēvzemei un brīvībai / LNNK) make up the coalition together with JL.

Overshadowing the politics is the daunting economic situation, with Latvia needing to borrow several billion euros from the International Monetary Fund but needing to bring in severe cutbacks in spending. Budget cuts of just under LVL 1 billion (EUR 1.4 billion) will reduce the deficit to an acceptable level. Latvia must be able to eventually bring its budget deficit down to 3 percent of gross domestic product to qualify for acceptance into the euro zone. This time around it is intent on limiting the budget to a 7 percent deficit, fearful that revenue decline will even make this hard to achieve.

Dombrovskis gained his credentials as a Europarliamentarian, with a penchant for economic and infrastructure issues. His team includes the extraodinary return of a previous superstar, Einars Repše, who was the celebrated director of the Bank of Latvia that maintained the currency despite all adversity, then the ill-fated self-directed prime minister of the first JL government, and then a petulant isolate. Now Repše is back in the hot seat as finance minister, and seems to have regained much of his financial credentials. He and the government are in an almost impossible situation: given falling revenues, cuts to government spending must now approach some 40 percent. The government has indicated there will be protected core areas: health, education, internal affairs (including fighting corruption) and justice, but even they must restructure many of their activities. And “protected” is a very relative term: both teachers and health workers are facing salary cuts.

One other area that has already been cut savagely was the raft of committees, councils, advisory panels, secretariats and boards of dozens of enterprises and semi-government institutions where representatives—almost all with close links to one or other former coalition parties—gained enormous salaries for little work. These sinecures have been almost totally abolished. There is an ongoing reduction of numbers in all government departments. More worryingly, both the state-owned TV and radio face massive cuts. There are concerns over their maintianing programming standards and questions have been raised even about their viability. Other state-owned institutons of national importance, including libraries, also face uncertain futures.

Under this barrage of financial woe a remarkable scene is unfolding of ministers relatively rarely openly squabbling, and even those who despised JL and kept it out of previous coalitions have had to put their heads down and follow Dombrovskis and Repše into financial responsibility. While it is certain that drastic cuts in the upcoming budget will be unpopular, ministers of all parties are caught in a bind: Each wants to fight for their area of responsibility, but each knows that if IMF requirements are not met, the country will be in even greater financial chaos, and they will be blamed.

The first test of the new political order will soon be upon us with local government and European Parliament elections on June 6. Here other, more traditional, political issues are to the fore. Both elections will be a test to see what support the former coalition parties still have in the electorate. The People’s Party has been down to less than 2 percent popularity in some recent opinion polls, and although it holds power in many local government areas it could be in for a shellacking. For Fatherland and Freedom may share a similar fate, and even the traditional Union of Farmers and Greens has struggled to gain 5 percent support. JL is now the leading party, according to opinion polls, alongside the Russian-oriented Harmony Centre (Saskaņas centrs, or SC).

Yet it will be the Europarliament elections that will generate most heat, and there the SC is at the heart of the issue. The SC is a peculiar organisation. At the last Saeima elections it had considerable success in vastly outpolling the other traditional hardline Russia-leaning party, For Human Rights in United Latvia (Par cilvēktiesībām vienotā Latvijā, or PCTVL). SC consists of three factions. Two are moderate, gaining most of their votes for Russians who are Latvian citizens, but gaining some support among Latvians as well. Their very presentable leader, Nīls Ušakovs, is running for mayor of Rīga in the local government elections. Many Latvians indeed would prefer him to Šlesers, the other celebrity candidate. Ušakovs’ faction runs a moderate line on ethnic and national issues.

The third faction is headed by the notorious Alfreds Rubiks—former mayor of Rīga, Communist Party first secretary and unreconstructed pro-Moscow advocate—who was jailed in 1991 for six years because of his treason against the new Latvian state. Detesting the very existence of the Latvian state, he has worked hard to align himself with the SC instead of the PCTVL.

Now Rubiks is the No. 1 candidate for the SC in the European Parliament elections. Having a possible Latvian representative of this calibre in the EP has shocked many. It also raises questions about the “moderate” credentials of the SC. Was it really a put-up piece of political craftsmanship to assume a moderate face while still harbouring anti-Latvian and pro-Moscow policies? Although voters have the option of crossing off names and even many SC voters may balk at electing this troglodyte figure, there is a chance Rubiks may become one of Latvia’s Europarliament deputies. If PCTVL still manages enough votes, we may have two such deputies representing Latvia.

If you are a Latvian citizen your vote on June 6 may be more than usually needed.

In Nesaule’s novel, tenderness prevails tentatively

Diana Kiesners | 

In Love with Jerzy Kosinski

Fans of Agate Nesaule’s 1995 memoir A Woman in Amber have been eagerly awaiting her first novel. Now, 13 years after her memoir received an American Book Award and international praise, it has arrived.

In Love with Jerzy Kosinski explores some of the same issues as A Woman in Amber in a fictional context: immigration, exile and the search for an authentic self after the trauma of war. It’s the story of Anna Dūja, an immigrant to America who escaped from Latvia as a child during the Second World War. Now 43, Anna finds herself in a trap largely of her own devising.

Anna is married to Stanley, an occasionally charming but manipulative Polish-American man. It’s a relationship that is at best disappointing. Stanley undermines Anna‘s self-esteem by offering a punishing kind of love, and the assurance that no one else could ever love her.

She finds solace in an imaginary love affair with the novelist Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird, a book Anna reveres. (In A Woman in Amber, Nesaule described teaching this book to her American students.) Kosinski, she feels, is someone who could understand her fractured past, her post-traumatic present. They could comfort each other.

But even in her fantasies Anna has to admit that it’s unlikely that she could ever encounter the glamorous Kosinski in the northern Wisconsin countryside where she and Stanley live. Anna’s feelings of isolation there are reinforced by the fact that she can’t drive and must rely on Stanley or her neighbors to go anywhere.

Into the lake of her discontent Anna drops a tiny pebble: she learns how to drive.

The ripple effect is far reaching. One act leads to another, and eventually to the demise of Anna’s marriage. Though she remains susceptible to Stanley’s guilt-mongering and attacks on her self-worth, she begins to act in her own defence and on her own behalf, sometimes in surprisingly vigorous ways. 

Once established in her own apartment, Anna must deal with the usual struggles of a newly single middle-aged woman and face the challenges of anxiety and loneliness. She longs for companionship, for love. Her neighbor Molly tells her: “In real life it’s always women who find men. Always. So let’s get busy.” Nesaule doesn’t shrink from detailing the discrepancies between feminist beliefs and female actions and longings.

Here the novel flirts with the outlines of what can almost be called a genre: the middle-aged woman who leaves an unsatisfying marriage to find herself. Thus we are not surprised when a younger lover shows up in Anna’s life, nor that she discovers in her new relationship that the patterns of a lifetime die hard and can sometimes reincarnate in surprising guises. 

Perhaps not wishing to retrace territory already covered in A Woman in Amber, Nesaule reveals Anna’s traumatic wartime history in brief, dream-like fragments. She deals more directly with the personal histories of others. One is a Jewish survivor named Sara who becomes a friend (”…did all exiles automatically recognize and respond to each other like this? Did a complex past unite people even when they did not talk about it?”). The other is of course Jerzy Kosinski, whose autobiographical details become increasingly suspect over time. Are the events of The Painted Bird really based on his own experiences, as he once claimed? Or is the book a self-serving betrayal of those who helped him during the war? Are the growing criticisms of him, including accusations of plagiarism, true?

There is a book that Anna keeps hoping Jerzy Kosinski will write, one that will illuminate her own story as well as the stories of others. It will explain what happens when you live on the edge of war, even if you’re not one of its direct victims. When, in a line of stalled traffic, she hears that Kosinski has committed suicide, Anna thinks she knows why: “He was a child during the war: he was one of the hunted; he was one of the millions marked for death.”

One of the questions Nesaule asks in In Love with Jerzy Kosinski is about the purpose of retelling all the different narratives of suffering, of victimhood. What is the point of reliving these stories, of telling them? She comes up with a tentative possibility: “Maybe instead of clashing and competing, all the stories will weave together into a great tapestry, each thread part of an intricate, somber pattern. Maybe tenderness will prevail.”

Through her stubborn, almost unconscious quest for happiness, in the end Anna learns to have some tenderness, some compassion for herself as well. She finally manages to extricate her fate from that of the beloved Jerzy, “her idol, her soul mate, but not her twin.”

I wondered about Anna’s last name, Dūja. It wasn’t a word I recognized. My Latvian-English dictionary translated it as both “pigeon” and “dove.” In fact the two birds are close relatives and belong to the same family. Both have mournful songs and tend to build relatively flimsy nests, often in insecure places. But they are the strongest fliers of all birds, and are highly manoeuvrable in flight.

Details

In Love with Jerzy Kosinski

Agate Nesaule

Madison, Wis.:  University of Wisconsin Press,  2009

ISBN 978-0-299-23130-9

Where to buy

Purchase In Love with Jerzy Kosinski from Amazon.com.

Note: Latvians Online receives a commission on purchases.

Latvians start to tweet

Arnis Gross | 

Ever since a certain talk show celebrity began to “tweet” earlier this year, usage of Twitter has skyrocketed in popularity so much that it soon may have MySpace and Facebook—not to mention Latvia’s very own draugiem.lv social network—looking worried. While some are still arguing on how to use Twitter and where it fits into the current social networking scene, others are forging ahead and adapting the technology for their own needs.

Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that lets users broadcast messages up to 140 characters, known as tweets, to followers who subscribe to the feeds. About 25 million people use Twitter worldwide and the number is growing at a staggering 40 percent each week. Compare this to 200 million Facebook and 120 million MySpace users. In Latvia, as a result of recent media coverage, the number of users has already multiplied to several thousand, but still is well short of the nearly 2.5 million entities registered on draugiem.lv. Registering in Twitter is as simple as entering a username and e-mail address. Then you can begin to broadcast to the world.

What makes Twitter especially attractive is its accessibility via mobile devices. In January Jānis Krūms, a Latvian from Sarasota, Fla., effectively launched citizen journalism on Twitter as he whipped out his iPhone to photograph passengers huddled on the wing of the U.S. Airways aircraft that had plunged into the Hudson River. His photo and accompanying tweet, “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people, Crazy,” instantly propelled him into Internet stardom. Nearly 40,000 Web users viewed the photo in the first four hours.

The most popular use of Twitter up until now has been to literally respond to the “What are you doing?” prompt at the top of every page. It could be as simple as enjoying a Malabar Gold coffee, reading the latest bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell, sipping on birch juice in Cēsis or doing the customary jump over the bonfire. But Twitter has proven to be much more than that. The MarsPhoenix project used Twitter to provide updates both during the Mars landing in May 2008 and the subsequent surface cruising in the following months. The Tower Bridge in London regularly tweets every time it opens and closes for Thames River traffic and announces the names of the ships as well. During the worst bushfires in Australia’s history February users traded first-hand accounts, news and information on how to donate and seek help. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, recently used Twitter to inform the public about the latest news on the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu.

Just as well the Twitter prompt could be “What are you thinking?” because people report what they are thinking about, planning, reading, watching and paying attention to. Millions of thoughts contained within the 140 character messages are being gathered to form a collective consciousness.  Since last year Twitter has begun to use a smart tool to detect emerging trends from its increasingly growing database of tweets. Its trending tool reported “North Korea launches missile” last month before many of the news sites had any mention of the event. With even more accumulated data Twitter could be able to predict events.

If you are looking for a hot topic, Twitter is the place to find up-to-the-second information. Google and the other search engines are now having trouble keeping up. When you ask Google a question it tells you where to go to find the answer, but when you ask Twitter the response reveals what individuals have posted on the topic. Twitter probably won’t replace Google, but it certainly adds a new perspective on searching on the Internet.

Latvians have also embraced Twitter (or čivinātājs as it is now commonly referred to in the Internet community) in myriad ways.

Toms Grēviņš from Rīga-based Radio SWH uses Twitter during his evening show to obtain instant feedback from his listeners.

Sandra Kalniete from the political party Pilsoniskā savienība provides an inside view to Latvian politics as she regularly tweets from the Saeima. Other politicians getting in on the game are Einars Repše, Aivars Lembergs, Ainārs Šlesers and Aleksejs Loskutovs, with more expected as the elections approach next month.

Current affairs programmes such as Latvian State Television’s 100.pants and TV3’s Nekā personīga provide details on what is coming up and who they plan to interview. For those Latvians who can’t get enough of travelling, the latest air fare bargains are provided by the Web site Superbiletes.lv. Well-known journalists such as Jānis Domburs, Juris Kaža and Pauls Raudseps have also been tweeting away for several months. Dienas bizness and Latvians Online, have been pumping daily newsfeeds via Twitter. Stay up to date with all things iPod and iPhone at ipodslv.

But it definitely won’t end there. What about getting updates on the movements of President Valdis Zatlers or your favourite Latvian rock band, getting the latest snow condition reports from the ski resorts in Latvia, learning a new word in Latvian every day or finding out when and where the next Latvian cultural event is about to occur. If this technology ever becomes mainstream, organisations and Latvian government agencies will be able to quickly read the sentiment of the general population and readjust their policies appropriately. The real capabilities of the Internet are only emerging.