Negative Dialectics on the Baltic Frontier: Russophone Communities of Latvia as a Touchstone for “Grand Narratives”

Border Conditions offers a bold and ambitious contribution to literary and cultural studies, extending well beyond its immediate focus on Slavic and East European literature to inform broader theoretical discussions in the field.Through its examination of identity formation and cultural practices among Latvia's Russianspeaking population, Platt's study illuminates broader questions about post-imperial conditions and cultural hybridity.With this case study, however, Platt problematizes and revises many familiar tenets of postcolonial and post-imperial studies.The trajectory of Latvia's new nation-building began in 1990-91, that is, even before the Soviet Union's collapse, as Latvian politicians embarked on reconstructing what they viewed as their republic, destroyed by Soviet occupation in 1940.The situation of Latvia's Russian-speaking residents, who had previously felt generally quite comfortable-given that Russian was the "default" state language of the USSR-changed significantly in the course of the post-Soviet transformations.As Platt explains, "this population has been the subject of policies of Latvian nationalization that, while understandable as a pragmatic response to the injustices of the Soviet past and the looming presence of the Russian Federation, have ironically reproduced matrices of exclusion and imperial schemes of governance, allowing distorted echoes of those injustices to carry forward in history in unexpected new forms" (p.xvii).A notable portion of Latvia's Russian-speaking minority currently holds "non-citizen" status, documented through what is commonly known as a "gray passport."This status confers all basic rights except voting privileges; in order to obtain full citizenship, it is necessary to pass examinations in the Latvian language and basic information about the Constitution, history, and culture of Latvia.Latvia presents a particularly significant case study due to its distinctive demographic composition, with a substantially higher percentage of Russian speakers than its Baltic neighbors.According to the Central Statistical Office of Latvia, in 2021 ethnic Russians numbered 463,000, or about 24.5 percent of the population, but the country also includes other ethnic groups that use the Russian language, such as Jews and Belarusians.Among the population, "non-citizens" in 2021 constituted approximately 9 percent, of whom ethnic Russians made up two-thirds, about 6 percent.