The crimes of communism in Latvia
The crimes of communism in Latvia

Author(s): Valters Nollendorfs
Subject(s): Criminal Law, Recent History (1900 till today), Criminology, History of Communism
Published by: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů
Summary/Abstract: „My mother had three wishes: returning to Latvia, seeing her brothers and our family and having a flat. All of these wishes have been fulfilled. But even today my mother wakes from a dreadful dream. Again it is night and someone is knocking at the door. Strange men enter and order her to get ready. The deportation nightmare begins, and my mother in despair thinks: “The last time it was a dream. Now it’s real.” On waking she gazes long into the empty night until she calms down and understands: she is home again. In Latvia.“ I have chosen these last lines in Sandra Kalniete’s book With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows, a book that has been translated into 11 languages, to remind ourselves that the term “crimes against humanity” as a legal abstraction, last defined in Article 7 of the 1998 Rome Statute, is woefully inadequate in terms of fully grasping the human tragedy and its lingering aftermath for which the original crime is only a starting point. The statute concentrates on the perpetrators and their culpability. Any culture of memory must be much more inclusive and never leave sight of the victims and survivors as the direct carriers and inheritors of the memory. It must not only deal with the crime but the entire context in which the crime was perpetrated and even more – the lingering political, social, moral and psychological after-effects. The crime is with us as long as the nightmare persists in the psyches of its victims.

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