Region In Latvia Has Allure For Russia

REZEKNE, Latvia — “We are a separate people,” said Piters Locs, 70, showing visitors around the private museum he built to celebrate the language and literature of Latgale, an impoverished region of lakes, forests and abandoned Soviet- era factories along Latvia’s eastern border with Russia.

Mr. Locs insists that he has no desire to see Latgale break away from already tiny Latvia. But such passion for Latgale’s language and its distinct identity helps explain why Russian nationalists see this region — about a quarter of the country — as fertile ground for their machinations to divide and weaken NATO’s easternmost fringe.

Only about 100,000 people speak Latgalian. The authorities in Riga, Latvia’s capital, consider it a dialect of Latvian, not a separate language. But complaints that the region’s culture, heavily influenced by Russia, is under threat have been taken up with gusto by pro-Russian groups.

In a recent article urging Russia to undertake a “preventive occupation” of this and two other Baltic nations, all of them NATO members, Rostislav Ishchenko, a political analyst close to nationalist figures in Moscow, said Latgale’s separate identity could help open the way for a “revision” of Baltic borders.

A recent series of mysterious online appeals called for the establishment of a “Latgalian People’s Republic,” a Latvian version of the Donetsk People’s Republic supported by Russia in Ukraine. Latvia’s Security Police believe the appeals originated in Russia. “They seem to be some kind of provocation to test how we would react,” said an agency official. He said there were no signs of separatist fervor in Latgale itself.

Janis Sarts, the state secretary for Latvia’s Defense Ministry, said regular rotations of NATO troops and aircraft through Latvia had sent a message to Moscow that “the risks would be tremendous” if it tried to copy its Ukrainian playbook in Latvia. Latvian forces held a joint exercise last month in Rezekne, the Latgale region’s historical and cultural capital.

Edgars Rinkevics, Latvia’s minister of foreign affairs, said Moscow finds it “very difficult psychologically” to accept that Baltic lands it ruled until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union are now entrenched in NATO and the European Union.

The region has many reasons to feel separate, set apart by its religion — Catholicism instead of the Lutheranism favored elsewhere in Latvia — its dying language and its distinct, often nightmarish history.

The biggest religion in Rezekne was Judaism until it was obliterated by the Nazis, with help from Latvian police officers. The Jewish community — 70 percent of the local population in 1885 — now has just 52 members in a town of more than 30,000 people. “We are the smallest community but have the biggest graveyard,” said Lev Sukhobokov, a local Jewish leader.

Today, in Daugavpils, Latgale’s biggest city, almost half the population is Russian.

Russians are not quite so numerous in Rezekne, but in a 2003 referendum, 55 percent of its voters opposed joining the European Union. In the country over all, 67.5 percent voted in favor of joining. The Russian-speaking mayor, Aleksandrs Bartasevics, denounces European sanctions against Russia and worries that NATO will bring trouble, not security.

“What frightens me most is that American soldiers and tanks will appear,” the mayor said. “That is a signal of where the next conflict is happening.”

Ukraine’s conflict finds an echo along a Baltic border.