Latvia

The Baltic republic with the largest Russian-speaking minority and the most complicated argument about who belongs. Latvians speak a Baltic language, one of only two surviving, and their territory was divided for centuries between the Teutonic Order, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden and Russia, with Riga growing into a major Hanseatic and then imperial port. The landowning class was German-speaking, and Latvian national consciousness formed against it. Independence came in 1918 after a confused war fought against Bolsheviks and German freikorps at once. The interwar republic ended in 1940 with Soviet annexation under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, followed by mass deportations in 1941, German occupation and the murder of almost the entire Jewish population, then Soviet reoccupation and further deportations in 1949. Industrialisation brought so many Soviet workers that Latvians fell close to half the population, and the citizenship law adopted after independence in 1991 granted automatic citizenship only to prewar citizens and their descendants, leaving hundreds of thousands as non-citizens. That question still shapes politics and relations with Moscow. The Baltic Way of 1989 linked two million people in a human chain across all three republics. Latvia joined the EU and NATO in 2004. Riga's art nouveau centre is a World Heritage site. Riga is the capital and the largest city in the Baltic states. The country has about 1.8 million people. Latvian and Lithuanian are the only surviving Baltic languages. The song and dance festival, held every five years, gathers tens of thousands of singers. Riga was founded in 1201 by a German bishop and joined the Hanseatic League soon after.

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