By
REZEKNE,
Latvia — On a continent of fractured loyalties, a kaleidoscope of separatist
passions extending from Scotland to eastern Ukraine, Piters Locs, the 70-year-old champion of an obscure
and, at least officially, nonexistent language, has a particularly esoteric
cause.
“We
are a separate people,” he said, showing visitors around the private museum he
built to celebrate the language and literature of Latgale, a sparsely populated
and impoverished region of lakes, forests and abandoned Soviet-era factories
along Latvia’s eastern border with Russia.
While
Mr. Locs insists that he has no desire to see the area break away from already
tiny Latvia, such passion for Latgale’s language and its distinct
identity helps explain why Russian nationalists see this region — about a
quarter of the country — as fertile ground for their machinations to divide and
weaken NATO’s easternmost fringe.
Only
about 100,000 people actually speak Latgalian. The authorities in Riga,
Latvia’s capital, consider it a dialect of Latvian, not a separate language,
and nobody is punished for speaking it.
But
complaints that the region’s culture, heavily influenced by Russia, is under threat have been taken up with gusto by
pro-Russian groups, fueling suspicion that they work as a front for Moscow.
In
a recent article urging Russia to undertake a “preventive occupation” of this
and two other Baltic nations, all of them NATO members, Rostislav Ishchenko, a
political analyst close to influential nationalist figures in Moscow, asserted
that Latgale’s separate identity could help open the way for a “revision” of
Baltic borders. A map accompanying the
article showed Latgale as a separate entity taking up the entire length of what
is now Latvia’s border with Russia.
Such
a scenario would mean a Baltic replay of events last year in Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists and so-called green
men — Russian soldiers in uniforms stripped of insignia — seized Crimea and
then territory along Ukraine’s border with Russia.
Much
the same strategy has been promoted in a recent series of mysterious online
appeals calling for the establishment of a “Latgalian People’s Republic,” a
Latvian version of the Donetsk People’s Republic supported by Russia in
Ukraine.
Latvia’s
Security Police, the domestic intelligence agency, have struggled to trace the
source of the appeals but believe they originated in Russia.
“They
seem to be some kind of provocation to test how we would react,” said a
security agency official, who asked not to be identified because of the
delicacy of the issue. He said there were no signs of separatist fervor in
Latgale itself and described the Latgalian People’s Republic as an “artificial
creation by outsiders.”
Eastern
Ukraine also displayed no separatist fervor until Russian-backedgunmen
in March 2014 seized government buildings in Donetsk, silenced local
supporters of Ukraine’s central government and, aided by Russian state
television, mobilized a previously passive population to the separatist cause.
“The
crux of the matter is that you have to be in charge, in control. Once you give
the initiative to the other side, you are lost,” said Janis Sarts, the state
secretary for Latvia’s Defense Ministry. He noted that regular rotations of
NATO troops and aircraft through Latvia had sent a firm message to Moscow that
“the risks would be tremendous” if it tried to copy its Ukrainian playbook in
the Baltics.
In
a blunt, if theatrical, warning to any would-be troublemakers, Latvian
soldiers, border troops and the local police held a joint exercise last month
here in Rezekne, the Latgale region’s historical and cultural capital.
With
shouts of “hands in the air” as a military helicopter clattered overhead, a
special forces unit of Latvia’s border troops stormed the district council
building to confront mock “terrorists” who had seized the premises.
The
raid lasted just a few minutes and ended with the rabble being dragged from the
building and then dumped into a military truck.
If
the whole operation had echoes of the conflict in Ukraine, down to the grimy
tracksuits of the make-believe insurgents, it was no mistake. Rather, it was
meant to send a clear signal that “we are ready, and it is not so easy to do
illegal things,” said Brig. Gen. Leonids Kalnins, the commander of Latvia’s
National Guard.
The
exercise was held in the center of town, a few yards from a bronze statue
called United for Latvia, a monument to national unity that, over the decades,
has been more an emblem of the tenuousness of power in these parts. Erected in
1939 during a short-lived Latvian republic, it was taken down when the Soviet
Union annexed the Baltics in 1940, put back up in 1943 during the Nazi
occupation, removed again in 1950 after Moscow regained control, then put back
up again in 1992 after Latvia regained its independence.
Edgars
Rinkevics, Latvia’s minister of foreign affairs, dismissed the online campaign
for Latgalian independence as the work of “Internet hooligans,” but said it was
unclear whether they were “lone wolves” or part of a broader strategy to
“create an atmosphere of uncertainty.”
Moscow,
he added, finds it “very difficult psychologically” to accept that Baltic lands
it ruled until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union are now firmly entrenched
in NATO and the European Union.
Russia,
Mr. Rinkevics said, poses “no imminent military threat” to Latvia but “will
push as far as it can” as part of a “revisionist project” to reshape the
post-Cold War order.
The Security Police have been tracking what they view as Russian-inspired
mischief-making in Latgale for years, especially since the publication in 2012
of “Latgale: In Search of
Another Life,” a
lengthy book written in Russian by co-authors who include Aleksandr
Gaponenko, the
Russian-speaking head of the Institute of European Studies, a Riga-based outfit
that security officials consider a front organization for Moscow.
Mr.
Gaponenko denied advocating Latgalian independence and accused the authorities
of fabricating the issue to whip up hostility toward Russia and excuse the
presence of American troops in Latvia.
Others, such as
Vladimir Linderman, the leader of the Latvian branch of Russia’s National
Bolshevik Party, a belligerent fringe group, claim that they do not want Russia
to grab Latgale and that they instead champion “autonomy.”
Getting power
for Latgale to set its own course will be difficult, he said, as “the people
who are ready to struggle have all left,” including many who went to seek jobs
in Western Europe and Riga, but also about a half-dozen he knew who had gone to
join separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine.
Though there are
no reliable opinion polls to gauge Latgale’s discontent, the region has many
reasons to feel separate, set apart by its religion — Catholicism instead of
the Lutheranism favored elsewhere in Latvia — its dying language and its
distinct, often nightmarish history.
The biggest
religion in Rezekne was Judaism until last century, when it was obliterated by
the Nazis, with help from Latvian police officers. The Jewish community — 70
percent of the local population in 1885 — now has just 52 members in a town of
more than 30,000 people.
“We are the
smallest community but have the biggest graveyard,” said Lev Sukhobokov, a
local Jewish leader, showing a reporter the spot where Germans and their
Latvian helpers staged a mass killing of Rezekne’s Jews in 1941.
Today, in
Daugavpils, Latgale’s biggest city, almost half the population is Russian.
Russians are not quite so numerous in Rezekne, but in a 2003 referendum, 55
percent of its voters opposed joining the European Union. In the country over all, 67.5 percent voted in favor of joining.
Rezekne also
bucked the national trend in a 2012 referendum on whether to make Russian an
official state language, voting in favor of a move that was overwhelmingly
rejected by the country as a whole.
The European
Union has financed a huge new concert hall and other projects, but the
Russian-speaking mayor, Aleksandrs Bartasevics, denounces European sanctions
against Russia, trusts Russian television more than Latvia’s mostly
pro-European news outlets and worries that NATO will bring trouble, not
security.
“What frightens
me most is that American soldiers and tanks will appear,” the mayor said. “That
is a signal of where the next conflict is happening.”
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