Latvia keen to counter Moscow moves to whitewash horrors of the past

The elegant but weather-worn "House on the Corner" stands six storeys high in central Riga, its playful blend of neoclassical and art nouveau features belying countless atrocities committed inside. Latvians tell a characteristically caustic joke about the building, which served as the country's KGB headquarters for almost 50 years: it was the only place in the capital that offered views of Siberia.

“If you came here looking for a family member who had suddenly disappeared, and you were told they had been sentenced to 25 years, you could be certain that they had been exiled to Siberia and that you’d never see them again. ‘Twenty-five years’ – that was the euphemism,” says Aija Abens, a Latvian-Canadian whose parents fled to Canada during the Soviet occupation and who has guided visitors through the building since it opened to the public for the first time in May as part of Riga’s year as European Capital of Culture.

The recourse to euphemism was common in totalitarian times. The building that once housed lavishly designed apartments and shops at the intersection of Brivibas (meaning Freedom, formerly called Lenin) and Stabu streets became known as Stura maja, the "House on the Corner", when the Soviet Committee for State Security, known as the Cheka and later the KGB, moved into it in 1940 when Latvia was annexed into the Soviet Union.

During the so-called “year of terror” until 1941 and later, from 1944 until Latvia’s restoration of independence in 1991, thousands of people were interrogated and tortured behind its walls, and an unknown number executed. It was here also that the largest mass deportations from Latvia were planned, resulting in the exile of more than 44,000 people in March 1949.

With Russia flexing its muscles in former Soviet states, authorities in Latvia are anxious to expose the horrors of totalitarianism and to counter any moves by Moscow to whitewash the past.

Tipoffs

Abens takes visitors through the cramped entrance lobby where a nondescript postbox, still in place, served as depository both for families’ inquiries about relatives and for tipoffs from informers, down to the dank cells and “shooting range” in the basement.

Prisoners – many of whom were there because a neighbour had reported them for listening to a certain radio station or for reading books unapproved by the regime – were subjected to bright lights and overheated conditions day and night, she explains, and were deprived of daylight, exercise and sleep. Up to 36 people were crammed into cells that contained only six beds. Sharp objects such as zips were cut out of detainees’ clothes to prevent suicide attempts.

An excerpt from the 2007 Polish film Katyn, showing the massacre by Soviet police of an estimated 22,000 Polish prisoners in 1940, is played in a room where Latvian detainees met a similar fate. A timber-lined wall covered with rubberised fabric dulled the noise of gunshots – truck engines were left running in the courtyard during executions to further conceal what was happening – and the room's tiled floor with a plughole was convenient for washing away blood.

“We’ve had Russian visitors here who say it’s all a fabrication, that none of this happened,” says Abens. “We’ve also had people who used to live nearby come and tell us what they saw.” Former neighbours who lived opposite on Brivibas Street have reported various sightings of a person crashing through an upper-floor window. “A few minutes later some Chekists appeared on the street, brought in the dead body and cleaned up the pavement. Shortly after, they got a knock on the door. ‘Did you see anything strange out on the street?’ Of course, what could they say? ‘Oh no, nothing, we saw nothing.’ And they would be under observation from then on.”

Papers

Much of the KGB’s documentation from the building was moved to Russia in 1991, and while the remaining papers have not yet been analysed, the building’s guides have supplemented their knowledge about its history thanks to visits by former prisoners, neighbours, and relatives of internees.

“It’s not so easy to get the stories from Chekists, the people who actually worked here, because they’re not so likely to come and admit what they did,” says Abens. On one tour, however, “we showed the KGB staff canteen and one visitor said, ‘Yes, but the food was good.’ How could you know that unless you worked here?”

It was perhaps an omen of Stura maja’s dark future that its celebrated architect, Aleksandrs Vanags, was himself executed without trial by Bolshevik forces in 1919, only seven years after the completion of his exuberantly styled, ill-fated building.

Stura maja closed this week for an unspecified period while heating is installed. With its future being widely debated in Latvia, a campaign is under way to secure its reopening to visitors so that its story is not forgotten.