Latvians and Russian neighbours manage to coexist

Riga Letter: The three Latvian students wandered where they could around their capital, Riga, whose pristine old heart was clamped shut by metal barriers, thousands of troops and missile batteries with orders to shoot down rogue aircraft.

"Everyone is annoyed by all the security for President Bush, but I suppose it is just for one day," said one of them, Ance Brazma (17), as a breeze fluttered the little flags in her hand.

The maroon-and-white Latvian banner and Stars and Stripes outnumbered people in central Riga for the arrival of the US leader, on a weekend visit that sent a fresh chill through relations between this little nation and its huge neighbour, a bear whose growl is still heard loudly in this northeastern outpost of the EU.

The Kremlin's staunch refusal to use the 60th anniversary of VE Day to apologise for its post-war occupation of the Baltic states only added piquancy to a rumbling row over how the three countries treat their large Russian minorities.

About a third of Latvia's 2.3 million residents are ethnic Russians, and about half of them are effectively stateless, having failed or refused to take a Latvian language exam that is part of a naturalisation process that many call humiliating and discrimin-

atory.They are also angry about a new law that they say unfairly restricts teaching in Russian, even in schools where it is most of the children's first language.

"All that is politics," tutted Ance.

"There is no real tension between Russians and Latvians."

Then a portly lady in her 50s rushed up to Ance and her friends and asked excitedly where she could get her own little flags.

"You can speak Latvian here, you know!" Ance snapped, before giving the excited lady vague directions in stumbling, reluctant Russian.

"Really, Russians and Latvians get on fine," she insisted, a little sheepishly. "But some people have lived in Latvia all their lives and still don't speak the language!"

Riga is a vibrant place, where Mitteleuropa style mingles with a staid Russian, or even Soviet, charm. A poster outside a concert hall captures that cocktail, advertising performances by glasnost-era Russian rockers Aquarium and Time Machine, alongside visits from America's Moby and Scottish starlets Franz Ferdinand.

Almost equal amounts of Russian and Latvian are heard in the cobbled streets of the old town and the stylish bars of the new city, finding a harmony that fractures almost every time officials from Moscow and Riga sit down for discussions.

Latvia's president, unlike her Estonian and Lithuanian counterparts, attended Russia's VE Day extravaganza, but took every opportunity to remind the world that, for this corner of Europe, May 1945 was not a time of great joy.

Riga's Occupation Museum, a dark, slightly sinister block alongside the Daugava river, eloquently charts this country's complex modern history.

It recalls the June day in 1940 when the Red Army marched into Latvia and proceeded to shoot or deport thousands of Latvians, creating such terror that the Nazis were widely welcomed as liberators when they took over in 1941.

The Red Army returned victorious in 1945 and stayed for 46 years, overseeing the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Russians, as well as the purging of Latvians from public life and the relentless Sovietisation of state and culture.

This was the dark history that Mr Bush acknowledged on his brief visit here, and for which the Kremlin refuses to take responsibility.

Instead, it accused Riga of trying to sabotage yesterday's EU-Russia summit, and again queried Latvia's treatment of its Russian residents; as a result, a long-delayed border treaty between the neighbours has once more been put on the long finger.

Beneath the Freedom Monument that stands between old and new Riga - and where Latvians laid flowers in Soviet times despite the threat of deportation - a Russian florist moved briskly around the stall she shares with a Latvian friend.

"We two have worked together for years and get on fine," she said.

"I am Russian but was born here, so it's shameful that they won't give me a passport," she added, briskly tying a bunch of irises.

"They give citizenship to people from Iraq, from all sorts of places, but not to people like me!

"Still, it doesn't stop us living happily together, Latvian and Russian.

"We leave the arguments to the politicians."