Sandra Kalniete, tireless dissident

Russia is 300 kilometers away. But, very quickly, an obviousness is essential: that will not be enough to explain the haunting presence of the war through the streets of Riga. Ukrainian flags hoisted on all official buildings, adorning buses, trams, private houses, cars, passers-by’s T-shirts… The mobilization of the Latvian capital is both too obstinate and too peaceful not to evoke another thing a threatening neighbor. An intimate affair. An immediacy of historical memories, still in the background of contemporary events in this former Soviet republic. And which reappear more than ever since February 24.

It is undoubtedly, one says to oneself while emerging from the park Bastejkalna in front of the building of the party Vienotiba (“unity”, centre-right), the ideal moment to meet Sandra Kalniete. The 69-year-old MEP has been enthusiastically relaying in Brussels, since the start of the war, the determination of her people in the face of the old enemy. But, above all, the life of this major actress of the revolution who, between 1988 and 1991, led Latvia to independence, resembles a miniature of the history of the Baltic country, of which she recapitulates the lowering and the rebirth , the dramas, the hopes, the desire for freedom.

That’s why we came to see her. For her early childhood in Siberia, where her parents had been deported as teenagers, her mother in 1941, her family being considered “class enemies” (she had a little property), her father in 1949, her own father having joined the anti-Soviet resistance – she gave a magnificent account of this exile in In high heels in the snows of Siberia (Sirtes, 2003). For the long years of totalitarian crushing and the sudden awakening, which takes everything away, as she tells it, again, in very beautiful memories, Let’s sing freedom (Publicetava, 2019, digital only). Because revisiting dissidence in the Soviet era is not just about rediscovering the memory of the dead. Some fighters are still with us, engaged, active. We may not be paying enough attention to it.

Sandra Kalniete’s life resembles a miniature of the history of Latvia, of which she summarizes the abasement and the rebirth, the dramas, the hopes, the desire for freedom

And since they are alive, the past and the present mingle when we speak with them. The Latvian Revolution? We will come there. Or, rather, we get there right away, but we have to go through kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol… ” What is necessaryattacks Sandra Kalniete, is that Europeans understand that we are all at war. We understand it perhaps better here than in the West, because our memory of wars is still vivid. For us, the war only really ended when we joined the European Union and NATO in 2004.”

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