via
http://ift.tt/2rnLhGi:
itgoesdingwhentheresstuff reblogged your post: oh one more tiny note on The Shape of Water, which…
#reblogging for latvia#deniss has gotten shit fir being too russian snd not latvianebough#which is frustrating because he always says good things about his country#and tries hard to speak latvian in interviews
I didn’t know that! (Well, I haven’t followed anything about the guy, so.)
That’s the crux of the weirdo situation Latvia is in. 35% of their population are Russians who came in during the occupation. Born there, but not “””Latvian”””. And they never learned the language because the official language was Russian so why would they??
Latvia has been a thing for so long, but a nation for such a short period of time. It’s very confusing. That language has been spoken there from time immemorial (and others; Livonian, and extinct variants). They’re an ancient culture, the last pagans of Europe but devout Catholics now, except where the Soviets took that away too…
My dude is eligible for citizenship. He’s never been there and doesn’t speak the language. But if he can prove who his grandparents were, which he could quite easily do, he’s in.
People born there who’ve been there their whole lives can’t get citizenship.
But what’s a tiny nation to do? It took everything they had to get away from the Soviet Union. They want to undo the work the Soviets did to homogenize and de-ethnize them. They want themselves back, they want their language and their Baltic identity. They want people like Dude, whose family fled the Soviets, to come back, but it’s been 70 years and the actual migrants are dead of old age, leaving behind these disconnected children. It’s an understandable desire.
But for people born there, they’re in a terrible position.
It’s very hard, and I have no particular insight into it.
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