Latvia lacks money to assess “Soviet damage”
Published: 18 June, 2009, 12:14
Edited: 23 January, 2010, 12:31
TAGS: Conflict, EU, Crisis Chronicle
The Latvian commission tasked with calculating what they call “damage from occupation by the Soviet Union” has been disbanded. The government has axed it to save budget money.
Shortly before its disbandment, the commission voiced a preliminary figure of the alleged damage. It claimed Moscow’s control over Latvia cost it $715 million in resources extracted, rent of local infrastructure and other actions during the Soviet times. The damages are meant to be collected from Russia.
Before the global financial crisis hit the country, the commission was expected to do its work until at least 2010.
The commission was among other things Latvia has had to abandon in order to cut down governmental expenditure. On Tuesday, the parliament voted for budget amendments, which curb spending by approximately $1 billion – still not enough to eliminate the budget deficit. The amendments, among other things, lower pensions, unemployment benefits and other social spending.
The grave financial situation has already made one Latvian government collapse. In February, the previous administration stepped down after mass protests.
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The spirit and thrust of this article accurately represent Russia’s established Baltic policies and viewpoints. They are a mixture of antagonism towards the Baltic States of the present, ridicule of the Baltic’s insistence on acknowledging the truth Soviet aggression against them, and an absolute, point-blank denial by Moscow and its agencies of Moscow’s Soviet-era Baltic crimes. The article’s sarcastic opening paragraph, complete with inverted commas, is a case in point: “The Latvian commission tasked with calculating what they call ‘damage from occupation by the Soviet Union’ has been disbanded. The government has axed it to save budget money.” Does the article mean to convey that there was no damage from occupation by the Soviet Union, or that there was no occupation? All of Europe is currently suffering a financial downturn, but it is severest in ex-Soviet countries precisely because of the utterly damaged condition that Soviet Moscow left them in. In 1939, for example, Estonia’s standard of living was slightly higher than Finland’s; by 1991 it was somewhere around a quarter of Finland’s. Were it not for the Soviet-era damage wreaked on it, Estonia would still have Scandinavian living standards today; as it is, this will take perhaps another 20 years to achieve. Nor does this gross and mathematically measurable financial damage take into account the psychological, moral, ethical, civic and environmental damage done by fifty years of terror-enforced and foreign control, at the point of foreign guns, of Moscow’s "non-occupation" of Estonia. The same is correspondingly true also for Latvia and Lithuania. Until Russia genuinely changes in regard to its Baltic aberrations, it cannot be taken seriously. Strangely enough, Moscow itself seems unaware of the ongoing damage to its credibility which its traditional anti-Baltic expressions earn for it in the world.
Russia could counter sue as the Latvia red rifle army were crucial in bring about Communism in Russia providing arms for the coup of 1917 as well as the Holomodor in Ukraine. In fact Russia could sue all these international banks and organisations that organised and pulled of the coup of 1917 who destroyed there Christian churches, lead the Soviet apparatus and transferred the Czars wealth including the substantial gold reserves for the creation of the Federal Reserve.
One has to wonder who the would seek to pursue. The Soviet Union was an autocracy with Stalin as it's leader. Stalin was of course Georgian and Russia just like every other part of the Soviet Union was as much a victim of Stalin and his cronies. Seems pretty pointless to pursue one of the poorest and most poorly run parts ex-parts of the Soviet Union, perhaps they might be doing a run on chewed ties that the Latvian's can grab.