[lg policy] Fwd: Nils Usakovs, Mayor of Riga, Aims to Move Beyond Ethnic Politics

Sat Dec 13 15:41:49 UTC 2014

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From: Fierman, William <wfierman at indiana.edu>

 *Russian Mayor of Latvian Capital Bids to Bridge an Old Divide*

*Nils Usakovs, Mayor of Riga, Aims to Move Beyond Ethnic Politics*

New York Times DEC. 12, 2014

Photo

[image:
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/12/13/world/13usakovs-1/13usakovs-1-articleLarge.jpg]

“We don’t talk about ethnic issues,” said Nils  Usakovs, the first ethnic
Russian to be elected mayor of Riga, Latvia. “I believe that, in the long
run, the politics in our city and our country needs to be based on
ideological values, not ethnicity.” Credit Maciek Nabrdalik for The New
York Times

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The Saturday Profile

By RICK LYMAN
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/rick_lyman/index.html>

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RIGA, Latvia — Nils Usakovs smiled a bit uncertainly as the three
tap-dancing elves in Santa caps pointed from tree to tree in the cold,
vaporous forest on the capital’s outskirts.

“Pick this one,” shouted one elf. “No, this one,” yelled another. They
tapped away on square platforms sunk into a carpet of slushy, spongy
leaves, while news crews huddled around a blazing wood fire.

Mr. Usakovs, 38, the first ethnic Russian to be elected mayor of Riga, made
a show of studiously marching around two nearly perfect pines. Finally, he
declared that one of them would become the official tree on the square
outside the main cathedral while the other would adorn the Riga riverfront.

“We make it a show,” Mr. Usakovs said afterward. “It helps to give the city
a sense of identity.”

A sense of identity is precisely at the core of Latvia’s — and Mr. Usakovs’
— predicament at the moment.

In 2005, Mr. Usakovs, a former television personality and newspaper editor,
took control of Harmony Center, the largest party advocating the rights of
Latvia’s ethnic Russian minority.

Russian ethnicity is a sensitive subject here in one of the former Soviet
republics, which, with its small standing army, feels perpetually
vulnerable to its powerful neighbor — especially at a time when protecting
Ukraine’s sizable Russian minority has been used by Russia
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/russiaandtheformersovietunion/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>
as a pretext for meddling in that country’s conflict.

Latvia’s population is about 61 percent Latvian and 26 percent Russian,
with a small scattering of Poles, Ukrainians, Belarussians and others.
Ethnic Russians, even those born in Latvia, like Mr. Usakovs, were not
automatically made citizens when the country became independent of Russia
in 1989. Today, about 300,000 ethnic Russians living in Latvia are still
not citizens, including Mr. Usakovs’ mother.

On taking the reins, Mr. Usakovs announced that Harmony would no longer be
an ethnically driven party but a social democratic one, like others across
Europe. Other parties, whose voters are overwhelmingly of Latvian ethnic
origin, have viewed his declaration with stubborn skepticism.

“We don’t talk about ethnic issues,” Mr. Usakovs insisted. “I believe that,
in the long run, the politics in our city and our country needs to be based
on ideological values, not ethnicity.”

While the majority of Harmony’s voters are still ethnic Russians, he said,
the number of its Latvian supporters has been growing. In this year’s
elections, when Mr. Usakovs won a second term as mayor, the party got 20
percent of its support from Latvians, he said.

This is proof, he said, that Harmony’s message of taking Latvia beyond
ethnic politics is resonating with voters – even at a time when tensions
between Latvia and Russia are rising.

Skepticism persists, though, about whether Harmony can actually made the
leap.

“I don’t know,” said Andris Ameriks, Riga’s vice mayor and a member of a
small, city-based party called I’m Proud to Serve Riga. “They say they are
social democrats. Mostly, though, it’s still another ethnic party for the
Russians.”

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Mr. Usakovs’ Russian-born parents were brought to Latvia as children
shortly after World War II, part of a migration of Russians into regions
that had been absorbed into the Soviet Union.

He was raised speaking Russian, and his elementary schooling was in
Russian. Not until he was 16 did he learn to speak Latvian, he said, partly
so he could take classes at the University of Latvia, where he majored in
analytical economics.

In 1999, when he graduated from college, Mr. Usakovs went through the
naturalization process, which involves passing a test on Latvian history,
demonstrating a proficiency in the Latvian language and taking an oath of
allegiance to the country.

Fast on his feet and deeply interested in social policy issues, he took a
job as a producer for the Baltic division of the Russian television channel
NTV, then moved to Latvian Public Television before becoming an editor at
two Riga newspapers, the host of his own weekly television program and,
finally, the editor at the First Baltic Channel for the evening news in
Lithuania and Estonia.

But the deeper he got into political reporting, the more persistent the
itch was to become a politician.

When the leaders of the struggling Harmony Center, stuck in seemingly
permanent minority status, asked the telegenic young Russian – so unlike
the aged and dour leaders the party had before – to assume control in 2005,
he jumped at it.

“If you believe some things are being done wrong, what do you do?” he
asked. “You can stay in journalism and try to address them through
education, or you go into politics.”

He makes no secret of his desire for higher, national office, something
that would be quite difficult if his party remained rooted in its
Russian-ethnic base. It is not an easy path for him. He can, and has,
spoken in favor of maintaining Ukraine’s territorial integrity, a move that
he believes cost him some votes among his hard-core base. But he also came
out strongly against Western sanctions on Russia over the conflict.

“We are not alone,” Mr. Usakovs said. “We are among the Europeans who
believe that sanctions will not work. And we are rational. We believe it is
beneficial for us to have good relations with Russia.”

Whether he can find a way to satisfy his base, many of whom are fiercely
pro-Russian, while attracting enough Latvians to the party, is the key to
his future.

Ethnic integration is still “too big a divide” in Latvia, said Douglas
Wake, a former American diplomat who was a visiting fellow at the Latvian
Institute of International Affairs. There is still “not enough sense that
everybody feels there is a Latvian state one can feel good about, offering
allegiance without any ethnic characteristics whatsoever,” he said during a
presentation at the institute last month.

Still, there is very little open conflict in everyday life between Latvian
speakers and Russian speakers, leading some to wonder whether it is the
political class that is keeping the divide from closing,

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“People are not fighting,” said Karlis Bukovskis, the institute’s deputy
director, in an interview. “About 35 percent of marriages are mixed.
Sometimes, perhaps, some politicians use it opportunistically.”

Indeed, just last month, Mr. Usakovs married his longtime chief of staff,
Iveta Stravtina, an ethnic Latvian.

Both Mr. Bukovskis and Mr. Wake mentioned the “two information societies”
that exist in Latvia, in which Russian speakers get their news from
Russia-based media outlets while Latvians get theirs from Latvian ones,
each offering a different spin on the Ukraine crisis. The result is
conflicting opinions about who is at fault there.

The reality, Mr. Usakovs said, is a bit more complex. Both populations, he
said, are awash in Russian culture. “And when I say culture, I don’t mean
Dostoyevsky,” he said. “I mean pop culture.”

And there is far from unanimity, even among ethnic Russians, on the subject
of Ukraine, he said. “Society is split in general and Russian speakers are
also split,” he said.

A thin morning fog had given way to a golden haze by the time Mr. Usakovs
had finished picking out the Christmas trees and begun to make his way
through the loamy woods of the Riga Forest — 160,000 acres of pine and
marshland given to the city by Bishop Albert, who founded Riga in 1201. The
scent of the nearby sea was in the crystalline air.

“We are going through a complete transformation in a country that is
multi-linguistic and multi-ethnic with debates about very serious
historical issues,” he said. “It is complicated.”

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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