With the Russo-Ukrainian war, the language of decolonization has become increasingly common in the former socialist world, especially its academic niche. In Latvia, where I have been conducting research for more than twenty years, “decolonization” was not the term widely used in public and political space for dealing with the past before the war. Instead, Latvian publics, politicians, and academics talked about the legacies of Soviet occupation.Footnote 1 “Colonization” did not sit well with many Latvians because of the term’s association with western rule over non-western subjects. The Soviet Union was not quite western, and Latvians were not quite non-western, though they were not quite western either.Footnote 2 For much of the post-Soviet period, the language of decolonization was deployed by the far right and was on the brink of being deemed unlawful because it was usually mobilized to argue for the removal of Russians and other Soviet subjects considered to be the foot soldiers of occupation.Footnote 3 Today, reservations about the language of decolonization have dissipated, and it is used in the Baltics, Ukraine, Central Asia, and across eastern Europe to criticize past and present influences of Russia, the presence of the Russian language in public space, and the presence of Russians themselves, regardless of whether they are considered “bad,” that is, supportive of Vladimir Putin, or “good,” that is anti-Putin. On occasion, it is used in academic circles to point to the colonial complicity that comes with being and becoming European, but this use is currently overshadowed by the Russo-Ukrainian war.Footnote 4
Decolonization, a term previously associated with resisting European or western domination in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, has become pluralized, directed at different powers and wielded by different subjects. Yet this pluralized field shares the premise that, after the end of formal foreign rule or in its absence, many people and places continue to be affected by legacies or forms of domination that must be undone. Within this broader frame of decolonization, domination mostly manifests as oppressed or erased identities, contaminated epistemologies, inauthentic or compromised institutions, misguided aspirations, and other distortions of one’s sense of self, forms of life, ways of knowing, and one’s place in the world. Less common, but not unprecedented, is the call to expel populations that are associated with colonial powers. Such is the case in South Africa, where some argue for the expropriation of land belonging to white South Africans, and in Latvia, where citizens of Russia with permanent residence status in Latvia who have not demonstrated the required level of Latvian language skills may become—and informal reports suggest that some already are—subject to deportation.
Anti-imperialism as a frequent companion to decolonization also targets domination, but it tends to represent domination as the economic or political influence of an empire or hegemon in the domestic affairs of another state or people.Footnote 5 In contrast to decolonization, anti-imperialism is not easily pluralized even though imperial power projection has become more pluralized than it was during the Cold War. This is because anti-imperialism pertains to actual or feared forms of domination in the present rather than everlasting legacies of past oppression. Moreover, resisting one empire or imperial power often amounts to aligning with another, sometimes inadvertently so. Therefore, embracing a radical anti-imperialist stance, one that would recognize the imperial nature even of some anti-imperial alliances, would leave many small states and other self-described oppressed subjects without much maneuvering power. For most small states, but also other actors such as ethnic groups, acting in a relational imperial landscape, that is, in a world shaped by multiple and overlapping imperial forces, means referring to some of these influences as imperial, meaning unwanted, and others as non-imperial, or wanted. Put another way, this stance requires not recognizing the imperial nature of the desired ally. Moreover, as many scholars have noted, empire is largely a bad word today, and no state would willingly call itself—or its valued ally—an empire.Footnote 6 It seems sensible, then, to distinguish between unwanted presences and forms of domination and desirable presences and forms of subordination. Today’s decolonization and anti-imperialism efforts in Latvia target the unwanted forms of domination and do not think of the desirable forms of subordination as domination. Instead, the latter are thought to be the result of the sovereign decision to make the alliances one wishes to make.Footnote 7
Historically, decolonization and anti-imperialism have been both political tools directed against forms of domination and analytical lenses for understanding them. In the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the analytical dimension has been almost entirely subsumed by politics, thus obscuring the material, social, and political realities of the relational imperial landscape in which multiple political actors and alliances strive to project, consolidate, or resist power. It is imperative, however, to renew the effort of analyzing the relational imperial landscape within which a variety of subjects—empires, nation-states, supra-national entities, nations without states, and people defined otherwise—think and act, the repertoires of power and contention they deploy, and the presents and futures they make possible.Footnote 8 This means treating “empire” not as a derogatory term, but as a descriptive marker and analytical device.Footnote 9 This is difficult, however, after a whole century of relentless “nationalization of modernity.”Footnote 10 Today’s decolonization in Latvia, but also elsewhere in eastern Europe, is part of this nationalizing trajectory, insofar as it seeks to replace imperial legacies with national form and content. The decolonized subject is imagined as a national subject. However, such a stance does not recognize nationalism’s entanglement with empire. The national subject is not only an anti-imperial subject, but can itself be constituted through empire.Footnote 11 In other words, in many cases, decolonization as nationalization exhibits surprising attachment to empire.Footnote 12 It might even become an imperial power device that obscures actually existing configurations of power.
Empires are notoriously difficult to define.Footnote 13 Krishan Kumar goes as far as to suggest that empires and nation-states are “alternative political projects, both of which are available for elites to pursue depending on the circumstances of the moment.”Footnote 14 Giovanni Arrighi similarly writes that it is not states that pursue imperial projects, but rather “government-business complexes.”Footnote 15 And yet, it is still common to think of empires as states and some states as being more empire-like than others. Few will deny that states like the United States, Russia, and China act like empires and are, in fact, informal empires, empire-like states, or imperial formations.Footnote 16 What makes them more empire-like than other states is their ability not only to extend their influence beyond their borders, which most states try to do to some extent, but to shape the world order, whether through military, political, or economic means.Footnote 17 However, most concepts and entities are best defined at the boundaries.Footnote 18 In what follows, therefore, I reflect on the limits of the politics of decolonization and the possible uses of the lens of empire from a deindustrialized settlement in Latgale, a region in eastern Latvia near the border with Russia, where people describe their worlds as emptying.Footnote 19 In the 1970s, people arrived in this settlement—I’ll call it Lielciems—from all over the Soviet Union to work in the newly built clay drainpipe factory. At the end of the Soviet period in 1989, 1469 people lived in Lielciems. Today there are 222 on the books. Current-day residents cite what must have been official Soviet statistics that eighteen nationalities were represented in Lielciems in the 1970s and 1980s. Life was bubbling, and the only way was up.Footnote 20 But then the factory closed in 1992. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the factory lost its markets and fuel supply. Nothing of equal magnitude replaced the productive unit that had held the place together, and people started leaving. Five of the seven multi-story apartment buildings were shut or dismantled brick by brick, while two remain standing and are partly occupied. With no apartments privatized, the once-coveted and now decaying apartments constitute the district’s housing stock. As a result, Lielciems is turning into a dumping site for the district’s impoverished and indebted who are settled alongside the former factory workers, some equally impoverished and others living on remittances from their children who work abroad.
The remaining residents still trace their roots to various parts of the former Soviet Union, from Siberia and Moldova to Ukraine and Karelia. The national frame is not available to many because they are Latvia’s “non-citizens” (individuals who could not or would not naturalize after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and therefore hold social but not political rights).Footnote 21 Most speak Russian at home and in public. The Latvian-speaking residents do not mind switching back and forth between Latgalian, Latvian, and Russian, depending on whom they are talking to.Footnote 22 Moreover, like the Italian dietristas, described by Wolfgang Streeck, most of the Lielciems residents read everything for its double bottom, asking what it really means when commentators and politicians from either side of the Russia-Latvia frontier have something to say.Footnote 23 Most of them refuse to articulate positive identifications as pro-Latvian, pro-Ukrainian, pro-Russian or otherwise, instead preferring to pose pregnant questions (“don’t you think they will abandon us here, if something happens?”) or make skeptical or cynical statements (“now you see why they let everything fall into ruination; they were preparing this place to become a militarized no-man’s land”). People refer to political power as “they” without specifying who the “they” are, thus lumping together all of those who have the power to shape their lives. Indeed, most residents—citizens, and non-citizens alike—are resentful of Latvian urban and national elites. The residents of Lielciems are also suspicious of Russian official discourse, though some, on occasion, state or imply that not everything Putin says is wrong. Most importantly, however, they reject the sorting that the Latvian national state demands of them, that is, to differentiate between loyal national subjects and agents of the former empire in their midst. The residents of Lielciems are difficult to decolonize; their lives are too entangled. They have forged a unique form of sociality that they try to keep up at the same time as they complain that it’s long gone. They practice a particular kind of “postcolonial estrangement” by disengaging from situations they cannot control and rejecting forms of subjectivity and agency imposed from the outside.Footnote 24
Lielciems is important for another reason. For the last thirty years, ever since the town-forming factory closed, Lielciems has experienced a variety of “de-processes”—deindustrialization, depopulation, and perhaps even demodernization.Footnote 25 Instead of unwanted presences (if one brackets, for the time being, the fact that the entire settlement is an unwanted presence from the perspective of the Latvian national public insofar as it is a manifestation of the Soviet industrialization and Russification policy), the place has been characterized by absences—of people that should be there but are not, of a school that should be used but is not, of residential buildings that should be inhabited but are not, of the post office that was there but is no longer, and so forth.Footnote 26 People go on with life, forge new practices and relations, but they overwhelmingly live in a material reality and frame of meaning of their own making, that of absences. When I was moving out of my apartment at the end of fieldwork in August 2023, the municipal secretary—a Latgalian and a citizen—asked me to sign a petition against the closing of the maternity ward in the next town’s hospital. “Are we supposed to give birth in the fields, like in the old days?” she asked.
What does decolonization as the removal of unwanted presences and influences look like in a place that is characterized by absences? What does it look like in a place where residents have experienced the retreat of the social and modernizing Soviet state and the arrival of the neoliberal and national Latvian state as abandonment? In other words, what does it mean when decolonial efforts are directed eastward, while devaluation and dispossession is associated with becoming western? Which actors are to be thought of as colonial and imperial, or, to quote Ilya Budraitskis, “who is to decolonize whom and from what?”Footnote 27
Waiting for Capital
Since the 1990s, Latgale has lost more than one third of its population. This is the combined effect of the specificity of “postsocialist transition” in Latvia (deindustrialization, privatization, (neo)liberalization, and Latvianization), the spatial division of labor within the European Union (labor moving from east to west and not much capital moving the other way), specific events (the 2008 financial crisis), and the perpetual reproduction of Latgale as a laggard region (for example, if Latvia has lost about 30% of the population since 1990, Latgale has lost over 40%).Footnote 28 In the 2010s when I began research there, nobody voiced concerns about Russian imperialism, but about schools that were closing, hospitals and post offices that were “optimizing services,” buses that came once a day, buildings that were abandoned, and social networks that had spread thin. Capitalist relations had taken hold—some people had established small businesses, a few people had become successful mid-sized farmers, and many people transported cheap goods (fuel and cigarettes) from the Russian side of the border to sell on the Latvian side of the border. However, no large-scale labor-intensive enterprises had replaced the socialist farms and factories. Small parcels of agricultural land that had been returned to their pre-Soviet owners or their descendants were being bought up by land speculators and sold to Danish investors (via joint venture companies due to a transitional ban on land purchase that was still in force in 2010), and forested areas were being bought up by Swedish forestry companies.Footnote 29 Many working-age people were migrating to the UK, Ireland, and later to Germany and Norway.
Those who stayed muddled through by assembling livelihoods from a variety of sources, including a few municipal positions, some shops, some farming and tourism, income from berry picking or seasonal labor, social support, and meagre pensions. The Border Guard was a stable source of employment, but many of the young men and women that took it up worked there for a short time before leaving for work abroad. In the summer of 2023, a staff member of the Border Guard College told me that they had trouble recruiting students because it no longer made sense for young people to live in Latgale due to the closure of schools and hospitals. If some ten years ago young people were applying because they wanted to continue living in the area and working for the Border Guard because it ensured a job close to home, it is no longer the case today. In many places, uninhabited houses line the roadsides. Their owners are either working abroad and keep their inherited properties for a rainy day or for nostalgic reasons, or they have sold the land to farmers who have not yet taken the buildings down (local farmers, for example, are reluctant to do so due to sentimental attachment to the landscape).
In the 2010s, quite a few people in Latgale, but also in other parts of Latvia, talked about how the Danes were taking over “our land,” thus articulating concerns about uneven access to capital in the language of nationalism. Nobody thought that the Danes or Swedes had any sinister plans to extend territorial rule to Latvia, but a good many people suspected that large-scale land ownership increases the power of capital in decision-making. Moreover, the rural residents thought that northern Europeans with more capital were actively encouraged to extract value from Latvia and other places in eastern Europe, leaving behind polluted fields, killed bees, stripped forests, and financial losses (the latter referring to Scandinavian bank involvement in perpetuating the financial crisis, or “Europeanizing Latvia,” depending on the perspective).Footnote 30 In the 2010s, most everyone in the Latvian countryside (and also some parliamentary deputies) believed that the Danish state was breaking EU law by paying extra subsidies to Danish farmers to take their business abroad. From what I was able to establish, the Danish state had offered tax relief to Danish farmers if they invested abroad, but that only applied during the period prior to Latvia’s accession to the EU. After that, no additional state support or incentive was provided. Instead, it was Scandinavian banks that dominated the banking sector in Latvia and encouraged Danish farmers to mobilize the stagnant capital that they had accumulated at home by taking it to Latvia and elsewhere in eastern Europe. The same banks pushed credit for Latvian clients, which created a rather large segment of indebted population susceptible to the financial crisis that hit in 2008.Footnote 31
At the height of the financial crisis, some talk of “Swedish times” (zviedru laiki) surfaced, thus making references to late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when Karl XII (who was later defeated by Peter I) ruled Livonia. The term—zviedru laiki—that used to be positive or neutral was now being used to indicate unwanted foreign domination.Footnote 32 The crisis had reshaped established historical narratives, reordering and revaluating episodes of domination in the process of articulating a critique of the present.Footnote 33 And although no consistent critique of the financial crisis was formulated at that time, there was a sense that the arrival of capital was connected to imperial forms of power that the locals could not affect. And thus zviedru laiki temporarily took their place next to the Soviet occupation and the “700 years of German yoke,” which referred to the Baltic German nobility that mediated Russian—but not Soviet—imperial rule in the Baltic provinces (the Polish nobility that ruled in Latgale which was part of Vitebsk province has not become a reference in Latvian public discourse). Indeed, the arrival of Danish capital very much resembled the spatial fix that characterizes David Harvey’s “new imperialism,” whereby the crisis of overaccumulation of capital (Danish farmers’ money in Danish banks) is resolved by extending capital across space in the form of agricultural investments.Footnote 34 These agricultural investments came without job creation. The few Danish farmers that tried to farm brought their own managers and worked with advanced technology. Overall, people in Latgale, especially in Lielciems, felt that neither land, nor labor, nor remains of Soviet material infrastructure were used properly or to their full potential. And yet, “empty space does not stay empty,” residents would invoke a well-known phrase as a preface to the far-fetched speculation that, surely, it will not be long before someone—for example, the Chinese—come and sort things out.
During the period when the Kremlin was collaborating with big business to extend Russia’s influence in the post-Soviet space, the residents of Latgale had no doubt that all business, Russian or non-Russian, but especially of the kind that could create workplaces, was bypassing them.Footnote 35 China figured in their imagination as both a site of global production and a state with a global presence (an informal empire or an empire-like state) that expanded by “fixing things in space,” that is, by building roads, railways, and factories that, they imagined based on media reports and local rumor, might benefit them. The Chinese had already been in Lielciems, as residents with several generations of family history in Lielciems told me. Their grandparents had told them that the Chinese built the Russian imperial railway line of Riga-Pytalovo, which was built in 1916 and ran through Lielciems (the railway line has now been physically dismantled). Some of the workers have apparently been buried in the local cemetery in unmarked graves. While I have not yet sought archival evidence for the use of Chinese labor in the building of the Lielciems’ railway, it is entirely plausible because Chinese labor was used in the Russian empire during World War I, especially in the rebuilding of roads and railways near the front line.Footnote 36
Be that as may, what is important here is the mobilization of stories about previous instances of Chinese presence for articulation of what I will call a “desire for empire.” If Chinese workers in the Russian empire during WWI arrived as citizens of a semi-colonial state subject to the influence of various foreign powers, the residents of Lielciems rendered this episode “culturally proximate” to China’s current-day capacity to extend power across space through infrastructural means and to their own hopes that someone would do that in Lielciems.Footnote 37 While some of Lielciems’s residents—mostly women—lamented the disappearance of social services and forms of sociality that had been forged by the Soviet state’s investment in the area, thus exhibiting what scholars of postsocialism have called “desire for the state,” others—mostly men—desired the arrival of capital that would establish lasting productive structures around which life could flourish.Footnote 38 Theirs was not a desire for a providing and caring state, but rather for the type of investment that exceeded the capacity of the nation-state. It seemed clear to them that the nation-state, especially the Latvian state, was neither able nor willing to provide their desired outcomes. Moreover, they did not recognize themselves in the normative public and as political subjects associated with the Latvian state. They were workers, but the normative subject of the Latvian state was a Latvian middle-class professional. Perhaps a larger entity—a formal or informal empire—could offer both some form of recognition and capital? They knew, however, that it could not be Russian capital, if only because the border was closed for that. Yet Russian capital was not absent from Latvia.
Triangulating within a Relational Imperial Landscape
On April 22, 2010, the Latvian Parliament, on the basis of a successful alliance between opposition parties (the Russia-oriented Harmony Center and the business with Russia oriented Latvian First Party/Latvian Way) and the Union of Greens and Farmers, adopted changes in the Immigration Law that stipulated that making a real estate, commercial, or credit investment in the amount of €142,300 (€71,150 outside urban areas) would entitle a “third-country citizen” to a fixed-term extendable residence permit in Latvia and therefore the European Union.Footnote 39 Even though the law did not name Russian citizens specifically, it was clear from the parliamentary debates and subsequent statistics that Russian citizens were the implicit target and the most active users of this new legal window for establishing residence in the EU.Footnote 40 The parliament was divided on this question, and the law imposed various restrictions. For example, property in strategically important areas was off limits to those buying property to obtain residence permits, effectively limiting Russian real estate purchases to the Riga metropolitan area, Jūrmala, and a few other places. This prevented Russian citizens, mostly middle-class Muscovites, government officials, businessmen and oligarchs, from distributing investment throughout the Latvian territory, while also appealing to their Soviet-era repertoire of leisure, which included spending summers near the Baltic Sea. This repertoire, which quite a few Latvians perceive as imperial, was shared by both pro-Putin and anti-Putin Russians, many of whom carry two passports or secure European visas and can therefore continue to avail themselves of the privileges even as Russian citizens are not currently issued visas to enter Latvia.
This change in the Immigration Law was meant to offset the effects of the 2008 financial crisis that nearly destroyed the construction sector. The idea was that the Russian investors would renovate their property and thus revive the construction sector. Andrejs Šlesers, the initiator of the changes, was accused by his opponents—Nacionālā Apvienība (the National Union) and, to a lesser extent, Vienotība (Unity)—of endangering state security in an attempt to save his own real estate investments. In effect, a Latvian parliamentarian with close ties to the real estate and construction sectors that, together with the same Scandinavian banks that later got the Danish farmers off their couches, had caused the crisis in the first place, was attempting to offset the crisis by appealing to investments from Russia. When the initiative was evaluated in 2014, it appeared that the investment had indeed been significant, that it was mostly in the real estate sector, that 70% of those taking advantage of it were Russian citizens, including some oligarchs close to Putin, and that, as a result, Jūrmala had become “a Russian enclave” in Latvia.Footnote 41 The program’s opponents, similar to Latvia’s rural residents who were concerned about Danes buying “our land,” worried that the formation of such a Russian enclave would facilitate Russia’s ability to extend imperial power into Latvia and therefore undermine Latvian sovereignty. Debates about the program continued for several years. In 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the threshold of investment was raised to €250,000. The program was shut down in March 2022.
By mobilizing investment from Russia, Šlesers and his supporters were engaging in a politics of triangulation.Footnote 42 They were opening doors to one partner—Russian investors—to mitigate the fallout from a relationship with another—Scandinavian banks. The fact that Šlesers was able to mobilize most of Parliament to support his initiative suggests that the political elites were torn between their westward political orientations and eastward economic orientations. They tried to offset the effects of having joined the imperial formation where their sovereignty was politically honored but economically compromised by establishing economic links with the imperial formation that presented dangers to political sovereignty, but, it was hoped, could be used in a controlled manner for economic ends. Even though significant resources did come in because of the investment program, it was hard to discern who benefited from it more: Šlesers’ business or the Latvian state. The residents of Lielciems certainly did not benefit from this initiative. None of them worked in or were otherwise connected to the construction sector in Riga. Instead, they suffered from border closures, which cut off one of their sources of income, namely frequent trips to Russia for cheap fuel. They were living in a place that was losing residential value and was of questionable profit value.
It is not entirely clear whether this was because Lielciems was simply of no interest to capital due to its location or unwieldy material legacy, because it suffered from the political decision to prevent the cross-border flow of Russian capital, or because of corrupt dealings: the clay reserves that fed the drain pipe factory were privatized in the early post-Soviet years, separated from the factory infrastructure, and remain flooded. The residents of Lielciems, along with the rest of the residents of Latgale, were encouraged to compensate for the disappearance of workplaces with feverish entrepreneurial activity. Some took the advice, only not in the emptying borderlands, but in the United Kingdom. The neoliberal logic that accompanied the devaluation of the socialist area socio-spatial arrangements was not the doing of a single state or of naturalized market forces, but rather of the imperial reorientation that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This reorientation reshaped space in line with changing forms of post-Cold War capitalism, which made Lielciems into a labor-providing “operational hinterland” for new imperial centers.Footnote 43
It also changed Lielciems as a place. In the absence of productive investment, Lielciems was relegated to a process of slow erasure. The residents of Lielciems did not have much triangulation capacity, for they held no labor value in situ—many of them were retired and quite a few drank heavily. They also did not hold any political value for the urban Latvian elites, who saw them as a political liability due to their potential eastward orientation. They held no labor value for Russia either, though they did hold some political value as potential subjects of Russkii Mir (Russian world), Russia’s program for promoting Russian culture or extending Russia’s geopolitical influence abroad.Footnote 44 Their children had labor value in the UK, where many had emigrated. They retained links with Lielciems in online groups that spanned multiple countries, including Russia, and during summer visits. They formed a peculiar Lielciems diaspora, extending and reproducing the multi-ethnic community of Lielciems across space. Their grandparents, alienated by the Latvian state politically and economically and bored by Latvian TV channels, readily turned their antennas eastward. Most of the time, however, they watched Privet, Andrei! (a talk show about pop and folk music) and other entertainment. This does not mean that they did not watch the news, but it also does not mean that they were “zombified,” as the Latvian public assumes. When asked, they would practice their form of “postcolonial estrangement” by saying that “it’s all propaganda.” That is, until the troops came and it “became clear” to some of the residents of the borderlands that “this is what had been planned all along.”
Watching the Military While Still Waiting for Capital
On September 29, 2023, Kostia, a Russian-speaking man whose family had lived in Lielciems since before the Soviet occupation, sent me photographs and videos depicting some eerie scenes. The square surrounded by two half-inhabited apartment buildings and several empty ones was filled with military personnel. Some were walking at regular intervals while holding rifles, and others were ducking, also at regular intervals, as if in a shooting position. The men walked and ducked in complete silence. “Does this happen in normal countries,” Kostia wrote, “does military training not usually take place at firing ranges?” “I am afraid you will have nowhere to come back to,” he continued, “all that will be left of Lielciems will be ruins.” (Figure 1).Footnote 45 I cannot say that it was unexpected. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, talk of the future arrival of the Chinese had been replaced by a military imaginary. It started with a notice on the entrance doors of the two remaining multi-story apartment buildings in the spring of 2022, informing residents that the Latvian National Guard (Zemessardze) will conduct training exercises in the settlement during the following week. During one week in 2022, companies of volunteers occupied the ruins of the factory but never appeared in the residential area. From time to time, one could hear the sound of shooting, but, generally, their presence was felt but not easily seen. Around the same time, municipal and district leaders began to discuss whether the empty school building (where the sports hall alone measures some 300 square meters) would be a good dormitory for military units. They told me that they had approached the Ministry of Defense with some drawings of how the space could be rearranged. Over the next year, I heard more and more street talk of border areas “being emptied for military purposes.” Aleksei, the head of the Lielciems municipality, was particularly eager to suggest a variety of conspiratorial scenarios: “Why do you think they established those nature reserves in southeast Latvia some twenty years ago and did not let farmers use the land? It is those same reserves that are now being turned into training grounds.”Footnote 46
Military personnel in Lielciems, September 2023. This photo was taken by Kostia, one of my interlocutors, and sent over WhatsApp.
While I was doing fieldwork, no military units established permanent presence in Lielciems. This was not unusual; the residents were used to transience. The ruins of the factory were used by a variety of outsiders, none of whom ever made it to the residential areas. This included weekend “dark tourists” (those seeking adventures in ruins) who usually came at night, a few bikers, a pandemic-era DJ who set up a production studio overnight and filmed a video in the ruins, and a drone flying club from the provincial capital some two hours away. Thus, when the military entered the courtyard in broad daylight and complete silence, it was eerie indeed. They remained in the vicinity for some days and then left.
The Municipal and district leadership interpret the reluctance of the Ministry of Defense to establish lasting structures in the area as a sign that it is bound to become a zone of sacrifice, a no man’s land. The municipal leadership wants lasting military structures not for reasons of safety, but because they think of them as a form of capital investment, of a spatial fixing of capital, even if it is security capital. They interpret its absence as part of the territorial logic of a state that is working at cross-purposes with the logic of capital.Footnote 47 “You know, the defense line runs between us and Riga,” Aleksei remarked in the summer of 2023. “I am discussing with my staff [three middle-aged women] how and where to move the elderly in case something happens.”Footnote 48 His statements attest to the prevailing sentiment that the area—and the people—are only good for transient purposes. Indeed, the training coordinator of one of the units of the Latvian National Guard that had expressed an interest in the ruins of the factory told me that the settlement was very good for simulating urban warfare because public buildings, such as the closed-down school and factory, were near what remained of the residential buildings. “Well, it would be better if there were no people here at all,” he said, “but they seem to be quiet, so it’s ok.”Footnote 49
A few days after Kostia sent me the initial image and videos of the military presence in the settlement, he sent more. This time, Kostia was more upset. The soundtrack to one of the videos which depicted bright lights in the school building, surrounded by what looked like quadricycles and military trucks, consisted of him cursing. He wrote: “It’s as if we weren’t here anymore. Nobody told us anything, they just came.” “What do the other people say?” I asked? “What can they say?” Kostia replied, “they pass by, look, and then leave.”Footnote 50 While he was clearly resentful about the unannounced arrival of what he thought were NATO forces, it is hard to gauge whether the municipal and district leaders fear them or desire them. All, however, think that their presence is temporary. It is as if the front was already going through without recognizing the place and people and without establishing any permanent structures.
The logic of capital, then, has been replaced—or supplanted—by the territorial logic of the state driven by security concerns. As a result, the locals think of the area as a buffer zone, an imperial fault line. This territorial logic of security has led to new forms of expulsion. Three of Lielciems’s residents, all women, had taken up Russian citizenship in 2008. Before that, they had been Latvia’s non-citizens, meaning that, as Soviet-era migrants, they were not granted automatic citizenship after Latvia restored independence. Instead, they were required to naturalize and, in the process, demonstrate Latvian language skills and knowledge of history. They had not done that, though their children had. The three women had become citizens of Russia, because around 2008, at the same time as Latvian parliamentarians were attempting to offset the financial crisis with the help of the “golden visa” program, they were offsetting their own personal financial crises by taking advantage of the opportunity to retire early, at the age of 55, which came with Russian citizenship. This meant that they could start collecting a pension at 55, which they thought would be a financial asset. This offer was part of Russia’s “compatriots abroad” strategy, which, according to Mikhail Suslov, was an explicit attempt to extend Russia’s sphere of influence.Footnote 51 The women, however, had taken advantage of it for pragmatic reasons. It was a tactic in their repertoire of assembling livelihoods—they thought that the early pension, however meagre, could help the family in tough times. Today, one of them—Sonia—is preparing to leave, for she does not even want to attempt the Latvian language test required of Russia’s citizens with residence permits in Latvia (the other two women are over seventy-five and therefore exempt from this requirement). Sonia does not think she can pass it and has decided to leave before she is made to leave. “I am suffering because of my greed,” Sonia told me, though it’s clear that the €135 per month pension did not propel her into prosperity.Footnote 52 Her children are Latvian and therefore European Union citizens, some working in Ireland, others in Riga. She and her Latvian husband will go live in Russia. In the process of decolonization, Latvia was expelling its citizens whose lives were too entangled with objects of decolonization. Sonia’s household was being torn apart. Latvia was spitting her family out, scattering it across the relational imperial landscape, with some family members working in Europe, and others residing in Russia.
Lielciems plays no role in how capital moves today. Its Soviet-era infrastructure has been devalued, and no new infrastructure to move capital is put in place: the railway has been dismantled, the roads have potholes, no large production or logistics facilities exist anywhere nearby. In the last few years, broadband internet infrastructure has been laid in the settlement because funding was available to meet the European Union commitment to provide broadband access to most households. The infrastructure has not been connected to a service provider, however, because nobody in the settlement needs it. They barely use internet on their phones. Things and people pass by, through and over Lielciems without creating any permanent structures. Even the securitization and militarization of the area have not resulted in permanent structures, but the hope is there, especially since a refugee center was opened in a former boarding school in another borderland village. Yet at the same time as desiring empire, Lielciems residents value their subaltern form of sociality and fear they might lose it. Aleksei was reluctant to settle Ukrainian refugees in the empty apartments (few wanted to come anyway). He said: “Can you imagine if we had an influx of women with kids and no husbands? And I have these idle drinking men living here with their mothers? All kinds of things could happen. And then the husbands will come, and what will I do then?”Footnote 53 For now, in the absence of other options, he works on maintaining the social structure of the community, the same community that from the perspective of national urban elites is the object par excellence of decolonization.
Not Having a Choice
My interlocutors in the borderlands, as well as Latvia’s urban and national elites, are aware that their agency is shaped and constrained by more powerful actors. They differ, however, in how they talk about these influences, what they think can and should be done about them, if anything at all, and to what extent they can act upon them. In the mainstream public discourse, which is linguistically and culturally Latvian, out of the external influences that shape or attempt to shape the lives of Latvia’s residents, including those in Lielciems, Russia is clearly marked as imperial, while others are not. The European Union has been criticized by many for imposing various things, from institutions to standards to attitudes, but it has not been referred to as an empire.Footnote 54 Indeed, in and of itself it does not come across as imperial, because it does not have an army and extends its influence through bureaucratic governance. Moreover, its influence is regarded as desirable and its civilizational gift as welcome.Footnote 55 The United States features similarly. It has military prowess and is widely understood to be the decision-maker of NATO, but there are no qualms in the Latvian mainstream public about having to be on the right side of the US to make sure that NATO is present and ready to protect should something happen. NATO military presence is not perceived as imperial by most Latvians, because it is wanted, or, as my students at the University of Latvia put it, “we have no choice.” Theoretically, they understand that they navigate a constrained terrain, and that the US is more likely than not an empire, but, politically, they are convinced that “empire” is bad and that it is Russia, and that an alliance with Europe and the US—or the west more broadly—is the only way forward.
For the residents of the borderlands, it makes no difference. They think they live in a zone of sacrifice. To them, there are empires on both sides, and their relationship to them is mediated by national elites, which they cannot bypass. What we see when we look from Lielciems, situated on the imperial fault line between Russia and the west, is that people’s imaginaries of life possibilities and the future of the place in which they reside recognize how outside forces shape their lives: the factory was built by the Soviet Union and its destruction was linked to post-Soviet Latvia’s reorientation towards the EU and NATO and the associated deindustrialization and border closure politics. Their imagination about how their place of residence could come back to life is linked to actors other than the Latvian nation-state bringing investment. Ten years ago, it was the Chinese, as far-fetched as such imagination may have been. Today, it is NATO, for, without NATO support, Latvia would not be able to consider boosting military infrastructure near, but not too close, to the border. And it is the EU that financed the broadband internet infrastructure that sits unused, and it is also the EU that provides labor migration pathways. In the summer, there are kids in Lielciems visiting grandmothers from various places in Europe. They are referred to as Germans, the Irish, the English, Norwegians, and Danes. The cross-border imaginary of Lielciems’s residents is not simply globalized. It is explicitly imperial, as it recognizes that it is only by some greater powers extending their influence, whether through military or economic means, that their place of residence can come back to life, and it is only by having access to other parts of the empire that their children can survive. Russia remains a living presence for Lielciems residents, Latvians and Russians alike. It is only 25km away but no longer easily accessible. It is an object of nostalgia—the places where one has been, but can no longer go, a source of entertainment—Privet, Andrei!, a place of cultural identification—shared history, and home to various kin—siblings, parents, extended family, and friends. “Russia is our neighbor,” said Juris, the Latvian boiler room worker who had come back to work after retirement, because there was nobody else to do the work. “But you know who our boss is?” he asked, leaving me to ponder in meaningful silence.Footnote 56
The lens of decolonization is not sufficient for understanding contemporary configurations of power in Lielciems, and the dispossession and devaluation that they produce.Footnote 57 Moreover, it obscures how power works in a relational imperial landscape. In Latvia, the rise of the decolonial discourse has lent new life to the already familiar use of the Soviet crutch, namely the attribution of most of the ills of the present to the legacy of Soviet occupation.Footnote 58 In a recent essay, the economist Edmunds Krastiņš finds mainstream economic theories insufficient for explaining why Latvia falls behind most of Europe with regard to a variety of economic indicators.Footnote 59 He suggests moving towards interdisciplinary analysis by which he understands replacing economic determinism with a cultural one. He concludes that the Latvian society was more affected by colonization than Estonia and Lithuania because more of the “intellectual elites,” including Baltic Germans and Jews, were expelled, killed, deported, or went into exile, while more Russian-speaking Soviet people were brought in. In a section entitled “What is to be done?,” which may or may not be a reference to Vladimir Lenin, Krastiņš writes that the explanation he offers might be paralyzing—indeed, if the problem is the past, what is to be done in the present? Krastiņš suggests consolidation of a political nation, by which he means elimination of the risks of bi-national society. Since Latvia is constitutionally a national state, one can only conclude that the political nation cannot but be modeled on the state-forming nation, namely Latvians. In other words, the answer to economic troubles is Latvianization or, to put it another way, homogenization. One might also call it decolonization.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to fully engage with Krastiņš’s argument, but it has proved to be enormously popular with Latvian political and scholarly elites. It is perhaps because what can actually be done is quite restricted in the relational imperial landscape in which Latvia maneuvers. How much of Latvia’s economic or financial policy can be radically changed? In such conditions, talk of decolonization is a godsend. It takes off the pressure to analyze the ills of the present. If Soviet legacy is to blame, then all one needs to do is further decolonize by getting rid of any remnants, which today consist of monuments, street names and, on occasion, Russians themselves. It takes away the need to figure out, for example, which part of one’s subjectivity is Soviet legacy and which part is not. Which decisions of the Central Bank’s leaders were the result of their “captive minds,” and which were the result of their attempt to follow neoliberal prescriptions?Footnote 60 It would be a mistake, of course, to blame it all on neoliberalism, just as it would be a mistake to blame it all on history without taking a close look at how the past and the future intersect to produce the present. With decolonization as the only tool, such analysis is foreclosed.
Beyond Decolonization
Since the 1990s, the language of decolonization (and decoloniality) has been largely associated with Latin America and dependency theory. It developed in response to the Marxist-inspired World-systems theory and posited the Spanish conquest of the Americas as the constitutive moment of colonial modernity and as a condition of possibility for European philosophy and social theory, including its critical Marxist strands.Footnote 61 Decolonial thinkers from Latin America argued that the World-systems theory, which was crucial for understanding global capitalism, was Eurocentric and therefore not able to explain the perpetuation of dependency in Latin America. They argued that it was necessary to analyze capitalist domination together with racial division of labor, that is, “to think from colonial difference.”Footnote 62 Once identified, the colonial difference came to dominate decolonial thinking. Colonial difference became the point of departure for developing alternatives to colonial modernity and capitalism.Footnote 63 With its focus on difference, decolonial theory moved closer to postcolonial theory, which originated in South Asian and African studies, exhibited affinities with poststructuralism, and was concerned with race, subjectivity, Eurocentrism, and history. Postcolonial theory, too, was influenced by Marxist thought and, like the decolonial tradition, grappled with its Eurocentrism.Footnote 64 After the end of the Cold War, when socialism as a possible future horizon was definitively discredited, decolonial and postcolonial theory converged in a focus on knowledge production and subject formation in lieu of sustained analysis of changing forms of capitalism and political authority.Footnote 65
While during the Cold War some form of socialism was present in the hoped-for future implied by postcolonial theory, after the end of the Cold War, postcolonial and decolonial theories did not seem to have been much informed by postsocialism, as argued by Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery.Footnote 66 Instead, it was scholars from the former socialist world that engaged with postcolonial and decolonial theory in order to take a fresh look at the societies they studied or in which they lived.Footnote 67 They picked up on postcolonial and decolonial theories’ concerns with knowledge production, subject formation, nation, race, and gender, but they did not build on the Marxist critique of capitalism that had been central to the genealogies of both postcolonial and decolonial theories. However, they did enrich the field by questioning the stability of the colonizer/colonized binary and by pointing to the complexity of imperial landscapes, where subjects of empire can transform into empire’s agents as they move across space, and where some imperial powers, including Russia, are in a position of subordination in relation to other more powerful or influential empires.Footnote 68 Considerations of postcolonial and decolonial theories in former socialist contexts often led to considerations of empire, if only because scholars were forced to examine what, if anything, was colonial in socialism and socialist in post-colonialism, and whether the Soviet Union was to be considered imperial or colonial in any way that resembled Britain, France, the Ottoman empire, or US.
Some Baltic scholars examined Baltic subjectivities as shaped by multiple colonial arrangements, from Baltic German feudalism to Soviet socialism.Footnote 69 Very few picked up postcolonial theory to criticize post-Soviet nationalism, that is, the political repertoire that compensates for Soviet occupation by performing its own violence in relation to minorities.Footnote 70 This is noteworthy, considering that critique of postcolonial nationalism is central to postcolonial theory.Footnote 71 At the same time, postcolonial and decolonial theories did force Latvians and other east Europeans who claimed Europeanness to turn a critical lens onto themselves, because by becoming European they transformed from subjects of decolonization (that is victims of colonization that engage in decolonization) into objects of decolonization. That is, they became associated with European colonialism—by virtue of claiming Europeanness or Latvianness as Europeanness, and were urged to recognize their complicity and relate to it in a morally and politically correct way.Footnote 72
With the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war, there has been a re-drawing of the field. A frontier has emerged between a clear imperial aggressor and its victims. The relational imperial landscape has become simplified. The resulting politicization of decolonization has also sidelined questions of subject formation or, more specifically, the question of how the subject of decolonization is formed and what forms of dispossession and devaluation this has entailed.Footnote 73 It is imperative, however, not to lose sight of the relationality of imperial landscape where there is more than one imperial power and where most national subjects are formed through a complex set of relations of autonomy and dependency, if not subordination. It is also imperative to be attentive to postsocialism’s “colonial difference,” that is, spaces and subjects that cannot be reduced to alliances with one or another imperial formation (which does not mean that they have not been shaped by them), but that have produced something new and/or of their own, such as the sociality valued by Lielciems residents and perhaps other social and political forms that have stayed beyond the scope of this article.Footnote 74 This requires “thinking between the posts,” that is, joining the forces of postsocialism and postcoloniality to analyze the intersecting forms of power that structure the world today.Footnote 75 Most importantly, it means paying close attention to the lives of people on imperial fault lines, where these intersecting forms of power have gone on a rampage of devaluation, dispossession, displacement, destruction, and now, decolonization.
Dace Dzenovska is Associate Professor in Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford. She is the author of School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia (Cornell, 2018). Currently, she is working on a book on empire, migration, and sovereignty that spans a century and connects the Latvian borderlands to the East Midlands in England. She is also leading a comparative ethnographic project on “emptiness” as a key spatial coordinate of our times.
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