Latvia

Latvia emerges as a contested post-Soviet borderland where historical accountability and imperial nostalgia collide. In the book’s account, its democratic institutions prosecute a former Soviet partisan and Chekist, while young National Bolsheviks recast his punishment as an insult to the Soviet past and stage a dangerous protest in Riga. The country is not merely a setting: it becomes a test of what political independence means when Russian nationalists claim the right to intervene on behalf of Russians beyond Russia’s borders.

Independence and the politics of memory

Latvia is described as a former satellite of the Soviet Union that has become an independent democratic state. Its courts’ prosecution of an old Soviet partisan, celebrated as a hero of the Great Patriotic War and known before the fall of the Berlin Wall as a particularly brutal Chekist, represents an exercise in historical accountability. From outside the country, the narrator presents the case as a society remembering its past and calling torturers to account. The same prosecution looks radically different to National Bolsheviks: they see the former Chekist’s punishment as a humiliation of those who died in the war and of the many who had believed in communism.

That clash of interpretations makes Latvia a concentrated example of the book’s concern with political memory. The court’s action is not presented as uncomplicated proof that the past has been settled. Instead, an effort at justice becomes a provocation in the eyes of militants who identify with the Soviet inheritance. Their response makes the old Chekist into a hero and martyr, converting an individual prosecution into a symbolic struggle over the meaning of Soviet history.

Riga as a National Bolshevik target

Latvia also figures in Eduard Limonov’s effort to redirect his party’s energies beyond Russia. He argues that the Soviet Union’s dissolution left millions of Russians in former republics exposed and abandoned. In his account, these communities had once helped run the territories for the Soviet state but had become marginalized after independence. Latvia is one of his proposed fronts: the book identifies roughly 900,000 Russians there, and Riga already has about a hundred National Bolsheviks. The party’s intended response is to encourage insurgency and separatist republics in former Soviet territories, with the Baltic states and Central Asia identified as priorities.

The Riga operation makes that political program concrete. Three militants enter Saint Peter’s Cathedral, throw a fake grenade to clear the tourists, barricade themselves in the bell tower, and scatter leaflets below. They demand the release of the imprisoned former Chekist and that Latvia abandon its plans to join NATO. They also make a more limited demand: that the Russian ambassador be present when they surrender. The occupation is a deliberately theatrical intervention, but the anticipated consequences are severe. The militants know that police will surround the tower, call on them to come down, and negotiate; they nevertheless choose an action whose scale and symbolism expose them to prosecution.

Arrest, prosecution, and the Russian response

The militants eventually surrender, with the Russian ambassador present. His presence does not protect them. They are manhandled, tried not for hooliganism but for terrorism, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The Russian government approves the sentences. In the book’s telling, the severity of the punishment sharpens the paradox: the young activists claim to defend Russians and the Soviet past, yet the Russian authorities do not shield them when they act beyond Russia’s borders.

The contrast becomes more pointed because Vladimir Putin’s government is itself described as defending Soviet symbols elsewhere. Putin threatens a forceful response when Estonia seeks to remove a Red Army monument, yet Russian security officials cooperate with Latvian police to pursue the militants who have acted in defense of a former Soviet colleague. The book does not treat this as a simple opposition between pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet camps. The Russian state can invoke the past when it serves its purposes while leaving the National Bolsheviks exposed when their activism becomes inconvenient.

A borderland of competing loyalties

The episode links Latvia’s domestic pursuit of historical justice to Limonov’s broader project of political action in the post-Soviet periphery. His claim that Russian minorities need defending supplies a rationale for intervention; the occupation in Riga shows the consequences when that rationale becomes direct action. For the militants, imprisonment confirms their image of themselves as persecuted defenders of a cause. For Latvia, the prosecution asserts the authority of an independent state over its own territory and its own account of Soviet-era violence.

The narrator stresses that these positions do not resolve neatly into a contest between democratic virtue and nationalist villainy. Latvia’s institutions are pursuing a recognizably democratic form of accountability, while the militants’ self-presentation as defenders of the oppressed coexists with an imperial vision that would destabilize neighboring states. Meanwhile, the Russian government can sympathize with Soviet memory in public and cooperate with Latvian police in practice. Riga therefore condenses the book’s larger political contradiction: historical symbols, national belonging, and state power do not line up into stable opposing sides.