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Would You Flee, or Would You Fight? Tracing the Tensions at the Latvian-Russian Border

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2019

Liene Ozoliņa
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Abstract

“In case of Russian invasion, would you be ready to pick up arms and fight or would you flee the country?” This morally charged question has recently been pre-occupying the Latvian collective imagination. The Latvian Ministry of Defense has conducted several nation-wide surveys to monitor the public's response to it. Focusing on two controversies that recently erupted in the Latvian public sphere, this essay maps the growing militarization in Latvia and the tensions in the symbolic space between the state and the citizen that it brings to the surface. I argue that the recent militarization brings into sharp relief the socio-economic and political tensions created by several decades of postsocialist neoliberal restructuring. To the extent that we can observe here contemporary reconfigurations of the state and political subjectivity, I propose considering the Baltics as not only geopolitical but also analytical borderlands.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum: New War Frontiers and the End of Postsocialism
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , Summer 2019 , pp. 348 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

I thank Neringa Klumbyte for inviting me to take part in a panel at the American Anthropological Association's annual conference in 2017 and for prompting the observations in this essay. I am grateful also to Nancy Ries, Catherine Wanner, George Gaskell, Zanda Šadre, Didzis Melbiksis, and the Slavic Review anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

References

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4. The Latvian alphabet uses Roman letters, so this exhibition title can be read as a deliberate play with language to invoke Russia or Russians.

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11. Apart from the embittered citizenry, there are also 242,000 mostly Russian-speaking “non-citizens” living in Latvia, holding a legal status that by definition makes their relationship with the state tense.

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15. Military service was mandatory in Latvia between 1991 and 2007.

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