Archive - Wednesday, 8 June 2011


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Changes bring fresh challenges

I WRITE this having just returned from a fascinating, yet disturbing, holiday experience.

In truth it wasn’t just a holiday. My wife is Latvian and our trip out to the Baltic was as much a family duty as it was a welcome break.

As part of our trip we visited Latvia’s poorest region Latgalia, a heavily forested, sparsely populated outpost of the European Union which borders Russia and Belarus.

In the region’s capital Daugavpils we saw members of Natalja’s Russian-speaking family for whom membership of the EU has brought few obvious benefits. A relative’s home we visited in one of the city’s suburbs still has an outside earth toilet because there is no mains sewerage.

The tiny single-storey house with three rooms and a kitchen is home to four generations.The grandmother has a monthly pension of around £200, her daughter earns the monthly minimum wage of £175 and the granddaughter, in her twenties, is jobless.

She recently returned to the family home with her young son, having spent several years working in Ireland. She can’t wait to get out again.

In Latgalia, unemployment and alcoholism are a curse; and everywhere you sense all hope is lost. Everyone I asked said they would welcome a return to the security of the old Soviet times, when there was full employment and rents, telephone, health and other public services were heavily subsidised or genuinely free. They aren’t today.

The EU has brought some improvements to Latvian infrastructure, mainly around the capital Riga, but in the country - especially Latgalia - the poverty is damning.

The break-up of the Soviet Union was inevitable and to be applauded; but the rush to free market economics happened much too fast after such a long dependency on Communism.

Following 20 years of independence, a lot of older Latvians feel cheated and abandoned, while new generations consider the political and economic freedoms to be as vital as oxygen, no matter what the difficulties.

The result is a population largely facing two ways - the elderly nostalgically towards the East and the young appealingly to the West.