Once, Latvia and its neighbors Estonia and Lithuania were the eastern outposts of Europe, but now, Riga is the Western outpost of what Latvians see as Azija (Asia), an idiomatic abbreviation for the Slavic-oriental despotism that has ruled here under Marxist slogans for nearly 50 years.
With rampant hidden inflation and shortages of almost all consumer goods, the Soviet economy, many Latvians say, is in the last spiral of its tailspin before the crash. "We can talk more freely, but that's about the only positive thing," is an assessment often hears in Latvia of Mikhail Gorbachev's four years in power. But even glasnost reveals glaring defects when it comes to the Soviet systems' treatment of democratic movements in the Baltic.
Some 19 members of an unofficial Latvian delegation of academics, cultural workers, and Latvian Popular Front activists made a harsh reentry into Azija last April, when they flew into Moscow from a nearly monthlong visit to the United States and Canada. The delegation had met with Canadian and American cultural, educational, and political groups, as well as Latvian communities in many cities. Soviet customs officers rudely and meticulously searched the baggage of all but four members of the delegation (who had immunity as newly elected people's deputies) for every scrap of information from the West and confiscated it. "We felt spit upon," said Ramona Umblija, an official of the Latvian Cultural Fund, in a television interview.
The Latvian Popular Front, with 250,000 members, is less than a year old and already larger than the Soviet republic's Communist Party. For a time, its leaders had a somewhat starry-eyed vision of turning Latvia, by peaceful, democratic means and in the foreseeable future, into a Scandinavian-style multiparty welfare state loosely federated with a benevolent Soviet Union. But after running into a wall of uncomprehending Russian resistance to Baltic aspirations at the new Congress of People's Deputies, the Popular Front in June came out in favor of complete national independence.
In the late 1930s, independent Latvia ranked at the top of a group of small European nations (Switzerland, Denmark, and Finland were used for comparison) in many indictors of social and economic welfare. Such figures, along with displays of Latvian-built dial telephones, Minox miniature cameras, movie projectors, and photos of prototype aircraft from the late 1930s, could be viewed at a remarkable exhibition on Latvia between two world wars that ran at Riga's Historical Museum for several weeks in late 1988.
Azija is a metaphor that has little to do with the reality of Singapore, Malaysia, and even China. It measures how far Latvia is perceived as having fallen under Soviet rule. Azija is a metaphor, too, of how many Latvians have come to view the future, at least in terms of economic and social conditions.
Latvian sociologist Peteris Lakis, chairman of the Popular Front governing board for the second quarter of 1989, spoke on Latvian radio early this spring about how overcrowded apartments, often shared by several families or individuals, were "slowly destroying the kultura of the indigenous ethnic group." Lakis was not talking about culture so much as the contemporary Latvian meaning of kultura, in the sense of shared behavioral traits, civility, and good manners. By living more
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