In November 2022, Mārtiņš Kaprāns, senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia, published an in-depth analysis of how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine accelerated the dismantling of Soviet-era monuments in Latvia — most notably the so-called “Victory Monument” in Riga, demolished on 25 August 2022.
Kaprāns traces how the monument, officially named the Monument to the Liberators of Soviet Latvia and Riga from the German Fascist Invaders, evolved over three decades from a largely neglected Soviet relic into a central identity symbol for Latvia’s Russophone minority. Annual 9 May gatherings grew to approximately 15,000 participants by the mid-2010s, fueled by Russia’s historical propaganda and the mobilization strategies of Russophone political parties. Before February 2022, public opinion in Latvia did not clearly support demolition, and a 1994 bilateral agreement with Russia complicated any removal.
The invasion changed this dynamic rapidly. By June 2022, the Latvian parliament adopted legislation mandating the removal of not only the Victory Monument but also 69 other objects glorifying the Soviet or Nazi regimes. The process unfolded with remarkably little resistance, which the author attributes to three factors: the ideological fragmentation within Latvia’s Russophone community, the inability of Russophone political parties to coordinate opposition, and decisive preventive measures by law enforcement agencies.
The article raises a critical question that resonates with the broader themes of the Nordic Insights project: does removing contested monuments resolve intergroup memory conflicts, or does it risk deepening them? Kaprāns warns that eliminating material representations of oppositional memories has historically tended to reproduce rather than resolve conflict, and argues that the future of social cohesion in Latvia depends on whether the dominant memory narrative allows space for democratic dialogue about the past.
For a more recent development in Riga’s ongoing monument debates, see also our resource on The dismantling of Soviet monuments: the controversial decision of Riga City Council (2024).
Source information: The article is published in Cultures of History Forum (DOI: 10.25626/0142), a peer-reviewed online journal produced by the Imre Kertész Kolleg at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The publication has no political affiliation and focuses on how Central and Eastern European countries negotiate their histories in public. All articles are reviewed by an editorial board.
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