Latvia's history: a republic resumed after fifty years

Who ruled Latvia before Latvians did

The Balts who became the Latvians settled the territory in the Late Neolithic, between 2900 and 1800 BC, and by the end of the first millennium AD four Baltic peoples were distinguishable on it: the Curonians, the Latgalians, the Selonians and the Semigallians, with the Finnic Livonians along the Gulf of Riga. The Daugava carried the trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks, and the coast supplied amber that reached Greece and Rome, which is why the country is still sometimes called Dzintarzeme, the amber land. Before the German invasions of the late twelfth century the territory held about 135,000 Baltic people and 20,000 Livonians.

Conversion came by force. Meinhard, a monk from Holstein, began preaching among the Daugava Livonians in the early 1180s; his successor Berthold was killed near the site of Riga in 1198; Pope Celestine III had authorised a crusade in 1195. Bishop Albert founded Riga in 1201 and the Order of the Brothers of the Sword in 1202. The Livonians were conquered by 1207 and most of the Latgalians by 1214, and once the Curonians and the Semigallians had been subdued at the end of the thirteenth century, the separate Latvian tribal realms were finished.

What replaced them lasted seven centuries. Riga joined the Hanseatic League in 1282, while in the countryside the German vassals of the order and the bishops hardened into a hereditary landed class. A law of 1494 forbade peasants to leave the land they worked, and by the sixteenth century labour service had risen to between four and six days a week with dues at about a quarter of what a farm produced. The people who owned the land and the people who worked it spoke different languages, and they went on doing so into the twentieth century.

How the Latvian lands changed hands repeatedly

Ivan IV invaded Livonia in January 1558 and the German confederation did not survive the war. The order was dissolved by the Treaty of Vilnius in 1561 and the territory was cut up: Riga became a free imperial city, the Duchy of Livonia a Lithuanian vassal, and the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia a Polish one. Under Duke Jacob Kettler, Courland then built a merchant fleet and held two overseas colonies, St Andrews Island in the estuary of the Gambia and Tobago in the Caribbean.

North of the Daugava, Riga and most of Livonia passed to Sweden in 1621 and were recognised as Swedish at the Truce of Altmark in 1629. Karl XI abolished serfdom on crown estates, the Swedish government paid for Johann Ernst Glueck's translation of the whole Bible into Latvian in 1685, and parish schools were opened for Latvian-speaking peasants. Latvian historical writing calls it the good Swedish times. Peter I reversed most of it after taking Riga in 1710.

Russia absorbed the Latvian lands in three instalments: Livonia at the Peace of Nystad in 1721, Latgale with the first partition of Poland in 1772, Courland with the third in 1795. Nystad mattered longest, because it wrote the privileges of the Baltic German nobility into the settlement, their customs border, their provincial Landtags, their Lutheran church and their German language. Every Russian emperor from Peter the Great to Alexander II confirmed that position, and only the judicial reform of 1889 imposed Russian law and Russian-language schooling. Latgale, attached to the Vitebsk Governorate after 1802, drifted away from the rest, and the difference is still audible.

Why emancipation came before the national awakening

Serfdom was dismantled in stages and gave nothing away for free. Emancipation was proclaimed for Courland at Jelgava on 30 August 1818 and for Livonia under a law of 26 March 1819, and neither gave anybody land. In Latgale, inside the Russian interior, serfdom lasted until the imperial reform of 1861.

Emancipation created a paperwork problem, and the answer to it is why Latvian surnames look the way they do. Peasants in Livonia had to choose family names by 1826, and in Courland the campaign ran from October 1834 to July 1835. Taking the name of a German noble family was forbidden, so most people took names from plants and trees, with the diminutive especially common: Berzs for birch and Berzins for small birch. The surnames of most Latvians were chosen inside a single decade.

Buying the land took longer. A law of 1864 allowed credit unions, which put purchase within reach of ordinary farmers, and by 1914 about 99% of farm houses in Courland and 90% in Livonia had been bought outright. A land-owning farming class with money sent its sons to school, and the schooling produced the movement: the first Latvian-language weekly, Latviesu avizes, in 1822, the Young Latvians of the 1850s to the 1880s collecting folk songs and arguing that the Latvians were a nation, and the New Current of the late 1880s, which produced the Latvian Social Democratic Labour Party. Alexander III's russification of the 1880s and 1890s was aimed at German autonomy in the Baltic provinces, and it pushed Latvian out of schools and administration as a side effect.

All of it arrived at once in 1905. Russian troops fired on demonstrators in Riga on 13 January, killing 73 and injuring 200. Through the summer 470 new parish councils were elected across 94% of the parishes, and in the autumn 449 German manor houses were burned. Punitive expeditions of Cossack cavalry and Baltic Germans executed more than 2,000 people without trial; 2,652 were exiled to Siberia and over 5,000 went abroad. The rising was aimed at the tsarist authorities and at the Baltic German nobility, roughly 7% of the population, in whose hands the land had stayed.

What the Great War took from Latvia

Courland bordered Germany, so the fighting started immediately, and the decisive damage was done by the Russian side. On 29 June 1915 the Russian Supreme Command ordered the entire population of Courland evacuated, and about 500,000 refugees moved east while crops and housing were destroyed behind them. On 19 July 1915 the war minister ordered Riga's factories evacuated with their workers, and 30,000 railway wagons of machinery went east that summer, cutting the city's population by roughly half. Riga took until the Soviet industrialisation after the Second World War to become a manufacturing centre again.

The Latvian Riflemen were raised out of that collapse. A proclamation by Duma members, written by Karlis Skalbe, called for volunteer Latvian units in July 1915, and the first battalions formed in August. They held the Daugava line and were cut to pieces in the Christmas Battles of December 1916 and January 1917. After the February Revolution most of them went over to the Bolsheviks, and Jukums Vacietis, a Latvian, became the first commander-in-chief of the Red Army. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March 1918 handed Courland and Livonia to Germany, though not Latgale.

A survey in 1920 counted the result. War damage was recorded in 56.7% of parishes, 87,700 buildings were destroyed, 27% of arable land lay waste, and 25,000 farms were gone. The population had fallen from 2,552,000 to 1,596,000, and Riga from 520,000 to 225,000. The number of ethnic Latvians has never returned to its 1914 level.

How the republic survived its war of independence

The People's Council proclaimed the Republic of Latvia on 18 November 1918 under Karlis Ulmanis, the German plenipotentiary August Winnig handed political power over on 26 November, and Soviet Russia invaded on 1 December.

By the spring of 1919 three governments claimed the same country. Ulmanis and his cabinet were aboard the steamship Saratov in Liepaja harbour under British naval protection. Peteris Stucka led a Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic proclaimed on 13 January 1919 and backed by the Red Army, much of whose invading force consisted of Red Latvian Riflemen; his tribunals executed about 1,000 people and 8,590 starved to death in Riga. Andrievs Niedra headed a Baltic German cabinet installed by a coup at Liepaja on 16 April.

The fighting that settled it was done largely by other people's armies. Ruediger von der Goltz's German Freikorps retook Riga on 22 May 1919; the Estonian army, with the North Latvian Brigade attached, beat the German force at Cesis on 23 June and forced it to agree to leave. It did not leave. The German units were folded into Pavel Bermondt-Avalov's West Russian Volunteer Army, which attacked Riga on 8 October and split the city until a Latvian counteroffensive from 11 November drove it out. Latvian and Polish forces cleared Latgale in January 1920.

Peace with Soviet Russia was signed on 11 August 1920, and its wording is the foundation the continuity doctrine later rested on. Russia, it said, "recognizes without objection the independence and sovereignty of the Latvian State and forever renounces all sovereign rights held by Russia in relation to the Latvian nation and land". The Allied Supreme War Council recognised Latvia on 26 January 1921 and it entered the League of Nations that September. Forty-two countries had recognised Latvia before 1940, and those recognitions are what a diplomatic service in exile would spend the next half century invoking.

Why the parliamentary republic ended in a coup

Elections to the Constitutional Assembly on 17 and 18 April 1920 drew close to 85% turnout. The Satversme, adopted on 15 February 1922, gave the country a president and a unicameral Saeima of 100 members elected for three years. Twenty-two parties sat in the chamber in 1922 and 24 in 1931, and between 1922 and 1934 Latvia had 13 governments and 9 prime ministers. The largest party, the Social Democrats, held the speaker's chair throughout and almost always refused to govern.

The land question was settled faster than the political one. The agrarian reform law of 16 September 1920 created a State Land Fund that took over 61% of all land, left German nobles no more than 50 hectares each and distributed the rest without charge; Britannica puts the number of peasants who received land at about 145,000. More than 54,000 jaunsaimnieki, new farmers, set up holdings averaging 17.1 hectares. Landlessness in the countryside fell from 61.2% of the rural population in 1897 to 18% in 1936, and the small holdings pushed the country into dairying, with butter, bacon and eggs becoming the export trade.

The Depression cut national income from 600 lats a head in 1930 to 390 lats a head in 1932. On the night of 15 to 16 May 1934 the prime minister, Karlis Ulmanis, and the war minister, Janis Balodis, took power in a bloodless coup. Parliament and the constitution were suspended, every political party banned and press censorship imposed, and figures of the far right and the far left were detained together. Ulmanis declared himself president on 11 April 1936, and the state took over the economy it had rescued, running 38 companies of its own by 1939. Latvia proclaimed absolute neutrality on 13 December 1938.

What the occupation years cost in people

Three occupying administrations followed one another in five years, and each treated the population as a resource to be moved.

How the Soviet year of terror worked

The secret protocol of the German-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 placed Latvia in the Soviet sphere. A dictated mutual assistance treaty of 5 October 1939 admitted between 25,000 and 30,000 Soviet troops. An ultimatum on 16 June 1940 demanded a new government and unlimited troop numbers; the Red Army occupied the country on 17 June. Elections staged on 14 and 15 July offered one list, and the results were announced in Moscow twelve hours before the polls closed. The new assembly applied to join the Soviet Union on 21 July and Latvia was incorporated on 5 August 1940. The Latvian diplomatic service abroad kept operating, from the embassy in Washington reopened in 1935 among others, for the next fifty years.

In the first year at least 34,250 people were deported or killed, most to camps and settlements in Siberia where deaths have been estimated at 40%. The largest single operation came on the night of 13 and 14 June 1941, when 15,424 inhabitants were deported under instructions signed by General Ivan Serov, among them 1,771 Jews and 742 ethnic Russians.

What the German occupation destroyed

German troops entered Riga on 1 July 1941 and Latvia was administered as part of Reichskommissariat Ostland. The killing of Jews began immediately: about 30,000 were shot in the autumn of 1941, and another 30,000 from the Riga ghetto were killed at Rumbula in November and December to make room for Jews brought from Germany and the west, of whom roughly 20,000 of about 25,000 were also killed. The perpetrators were Einsatzgruppe A, the Wehrmacht and marines at Liepaja, and Latvian units, among them the Arajs Commando, which killed around 26,000 Jews by itself. The totals are given differently: Britannica puts the number of Latvian Jews killed at between 65,000 and 75,000, while the Wikipedia history of Latvia gives approximately 85,000 lives lost in the Holocaust in Latvia, the great majority of them Jews.

Resistance split between pro-independence units under the Latvian Central Council and Soviet partisans directed from Moscow. Two Waffen-SS divisions were raised from Latvian conscripts and volunteers in 1943 and 1944 under German order. Both occupying powers conscripted Latvian men, which is the reason Latvians fought on both sides of the front in their own country.

How Soviet industry changed who lived here

The Red Army retook Riga on 13 October 1944, though the Courland Pocket held out until 9 May 1945. Estimates of the flight west differ: the Wikipedia history of Latvia gives 160,000 people leaving for Germany and Sweden, Britannica about 100,000. National partisans kept fighting inside the country. Several waves of mass deportation removed at least 140,000 people to northern Russia and Siberia, the largest in 1949 alongside the collectivisation of farming, and the minority-language schools were closed, leaving Latvian and Russian.

Moscow then placed advanced Soviet manufacturing in Latvia, on the reasoning that the infrastructure and the trained workers were already there: the RAF vehicle works at Jelgava, electrotechnical plants in Riga, chemical plants at Daugavpils and Olaine. There were not enough people to run them, so labour came from other republics. By 1959 about 400,000 settlers had arrived from Russia and the ethnic Latvian share of the population had fallen to 62%; by 1989 it stood at about 52%, or 1,387,757 people, against 77% before the war. In 1959 the national communists around Eduards Berklavs, who had tried to slow that shift and protect the position of the Latvian language, were stripped of their posts and Berklavs was deported to Russia.

Why the restoration resumed an older state

The reopening began with ecology and with the calendar. Mass demonstrations on environmental questions in 1987 were the first unofficial political gatherings held in the country since the war. The Popular Front of Latvia formed in 1988; the pre-war flag flew again that year and became official in 1990. On 23 August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the German-Soviet pact, Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians linked hands in a chain 600 kilometres long from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. That year the Supreme Soviet of the USSR itself declared the occupation of the Baltic states "not in accordance with law".

On 4 May 1990 the Supreme Council, elected in the first free elections since the 1930s and held by the Popular Front with a two-thirds majority, adopted the Declaration on the Restoration of Independence and put four articles of the 1922 Satversme back into force, with a transition period to follow. Soviet forces tried to reverse that in January 1991 by seizing buildings in Riga, and demonstrators held the positions. After the Moscow coup failed, the constitutional law of 21 August 1991 ended the transition, restored the whole political system under the Satversme of 15 February 1922 and voided Soviet law in Latvia. The Soviet Union recognised the restoration on 6 September 1991, and Russian troops completed their withdrawal in August 1994, keeping the early-warning radar at Skrunda until 1998.

Continuity then answered the membership question, and answered it narrowly. The Popular Front had argued for citizenship for every permanent resident, and that was not adopted. Citizenship was renewed instead for those who had held it on 17 June 1940 and their descendants, so most residents who had arrived during the Soviet period had to naturalise as any foreign national would. The first post-Soviet election, in June 1993, was voted in by pre-1940 citizens and their descendants alone, and the new Saeima restored the 1922 constitution in full. A temporary status for former Soviet citizens holding no citizenship of Latvia or of anywhere else was created in 1995. Non-citizens made up almost 30% of the population in 1996; at the beginning of 2025 the Central Statistical Bureau put citizens of Latvia at 87.8% of residents, non-citizens at 8.9% and citizens of other countries at 3.2%, with Latvians at 63.7%. Children born to two non-citizen parents have been Latvian citizens at birth since 1 January 2020 unless their parents choose another citizenship for them.

A referendum in September 2003 approved European Union membership with about 67% in favour on a turnout of 72.5%; NATO accession followed on 29 March 2004 and European Union accession on 1 May 2004, with the euro replacing the lats on 1 January 2014. A border treaty with Russia in 2007 gave up Latvian claims to the Abrene lands annexed to the Russian republic after 1944, and it remained contested at home because it confirmed a boundary the Soviet Union had drawn. The Satversme, written by an assembly elected in April 1920 and adopted on 15 February 1922, is still the document the country is governed under.