Public Attitudes toward On-Going Transitional Justice in Latvia: Sometimes More Isn’t Better

ABSTRACT∞ This article explores Latvia’s continued use of citizenship requirements and language policies as forms of transitional justice to redress vestiges of the Soviet past. This article presents an original 1,000-person survey conducted in June 2023 of Latvian residents’ attitudes toward these measures, which have been on-going for more than 30 years and have been amplified following Russia’s war in Ukraine. Despite the connections made between Russia’s war in Ukraine and potential domestic security threats from resident Russophones and Soviet-era migrants, there was only moderate agreement that transitional justice measures were needed to redress lingering problems of the past. There was lukewarm support for the use of measures to address corruption linked to lingering Soviet-era networks. Instead, respondents overwhelmingly thought the government should focus more on solving current problems than on dealing with the consequences of Soviet-era injustices. Within these trends, divisions emerged between Latvian and ethnic Russians, raising concerns that elongated measures could exacerbate political polarization along socioeconomic and ethnic lines. Generational responses yielded some unexpected results, with the youngest cohort more supportive of continued retributive measures than older cohorts. The survey findings suggest the utility and resonance of these measures might have run their course, and worse, that they could even exacerbate societal divisions.