I got back from Riga three days ago and impressions are still bouncing around in my head. The last few days there I had two interesting conversations I would like to recount here.

One was with one of the women in the coat room. I have always wondered about those coat room jobs. How miserable is that? They sit there all day reading some newspaper and taking coats from the dozen or two dozen people who come into the library or archive or wherever it is. I noticed that one women has had that job at least since 1999 at one of the places I visited. Anyway, in the evening, another woman was there. She and a friend, who was simply down in the coatroom to "be" because she didn't have an apartment any more, engaged me in conversation. The topic started out about me - where I was from, what I do, etc., but quickly turned to comparisons between life here and life there and then to how terrible everything was. It was interesting in that I recall hearing it all before from Russians in Riga: I used to be an economist with an important and well-paid job in an electronics factory, I used to be able to vacation to the Black Sea every year, I used to have more time, etc. - Now I have to work several jobs - just look at this terrible job (coat room attendent) I have now. The other woman had been kicked out of her apartment for some reason (I suspected it had been failure to pay the rent as she is obviously unemployed as she sits in the library reading room all day). When I had that same conversation a number of years ago, I recall trying to explain where that earlier luxury came from: borrowing from the future, taking from other branches of the economy, primarily living off of oil exports, etc. I tried to make a real case for capitalism. But to do so in this case would not have helped much. I was not as freshly read on the facts of the matter and I would have had to argue, "What you did in the factory was probably not real work in the sense that it was saleable in a market. When the market came, what you do proved worthless." That is harsh - both for her and for those who consider "markets" to be a cure-all. She was a Russian, but one who could speak Latvian (the conversation went back and forth between the two languages, confusing me). She did not get on the Russian stump about about how terrible the Latvians had been to her and her people. That issue did not come up at all.

Another conversation I had one morning while out walking in a corner of the old town I had not been to before because it had always been in ruins, the part near the train station and close to the river, where the synagogue is. I went exploring there and found a kind of empty space that looked like it might have been a small park or perhaps a cafe or something. A woman was sitting on the wall sunning herself. I asked her what used to be there. She didn't understand, so I tried in Russian. There followed a long conversation in which she talked about growing up in wartime Novokuznetsk, coming to Riga when she was nine, and various aspects of past and current life in Riga. She was all a-flutter about how interesting Novokuznetsk was - a multi-ethnic city with an industrial base built on American know-how. Not only the multi-ethnic Siberian population had made it interesting, she said, but also the wartime refugees from besieged Leningrad. Apparently, the whole cultural elite of the city endd up in Novokuznetsk. Her teachers and friends of her parents were authors and muscians. She later mentioned the cultural fall of Riga over the past 20 years, but did not make a direct comparison.

I asked her if she ever had a problem relating to the Latvians, having come here with the big wave of Russians, not speaking Latvian. She seemed to have a favorable impression of them. She described the Latvians as shy, humble people who don't like the arrogant, self-centered attitude of many Russians. But if you approach them on their level, without barging in, without arrogance, as a normal person, there is no problem. I asked specifically about dealing with state institutions - getting documents, dealing with the mail, the police, etc. and she said it was never a problem.

She also described the Latvians as "hard working." That is in stark contrast to a conversation I had in Riga with some Russians 10 years ago. It was right after the attempt to blow up the large, Soviet monument in Victory Park in 1997. I went to see the monument and found a sizeable crowd of Russians gathered around it holding signs in protest. I spoke with them about how they understood their own history and whether or not they were "occupiers" here in Latvia. One man told me that he and his fellow Russians had built the city. It had been in ruins from the war. Nothing was going on here. When he and his fellows arrived they got to work and made Riga what it is today. The Latvians, he reported, "svetami torgovali" - "were busy selling flowers." When I later reported that to my hostess, a women who puts in long hours, year after year, sewing buttons onto shirts to pay the rent in her apartment, she was obviously a bit annoyed. She recalled that it was very difficult for Latvians to find decent work in the late 1940s because all the good jobs were being turned over to the Russian speakers being brought in from all over the Soviet Union.

While I was in Riga doing research on memorial sites, I visited over 90 of them. The picture here shows me standing in front of the final memorial I saw, about an hour before boarding the plane for my flight home. It is a memorial to the battle of Pinki, just outside Riga. This section of the front was the Latvian contribution to the liberation of the city from the Bolsheviks on 22 May, 1919, a date usually associated with a Baltic German victory over communism.