Nothing more concerning meets the ear than the slightly muffled thumps of Russian-language techno from the tiny beach on the lake shore and a vague but increasingly loud buzzing sound that eventually resolves itself into a jetskier taking a turn on the far side of the island. “Uzmanību! Attention!” instructs the top half of a sign at the foot of a crumbling wall, but the contents of the urgent warning are entirely occluded by a thicket of nettles.
But this is on the ragged fringes of northern Latgale [Latvia's easternmost region] and geopolitics is always within arm’s reach.
That wall fragment, packed with misshapen fieldstones of varying sizes, may conceivably date from the fortified monastery that was built on this island by German crusaders in the late 13th century, or perhaps from the castle that was put up on its foundations a couple of hundred years later to guard Livonia against the rising power of Muscovy. Ivan the Terrible himself took the island in 1577, and a couple of hundred years later – by which time the castle and the town of Viļaka on the lake shore had passed to Polish control – Peter the Great razed it to the ground.
A few miles beyond those trees across the lake you run right into the middle of a line of Russian towns and villages which also bear alternative, Latvian, names: Kachanovo (Kacēni), Rodovoye (Radavoja), Linovo (Linava), Vyshgorodok (Augšpils) and, most significantly, the railway junction of Pytalovo (Abrene).
Latgale is shaped somewhat like a wedge, wide in the south and increasingly tapering to the north, where it eventually meets Estonia. Here, we’re at the thin end of the wedge, and getting to Viļaka from the last more-or-less-serious town before the border, Balvi, means driving eastwards through wide stretches of forest – near the largely impassable Stompaki marsh.
Viļaka has just one place to get a bite to eat, Pierobeža (Borderland) – a spacious and no-nonsense joint open only for lunch, with šlāgeris on the radio and a blackboard scrawled with the day’s offerings – but fully three museums. There’s the town museum, in a rambling wooden building in that deep carmine hue you find most frequently and intensely in Latgale; the Doll Museum, which promises to take you “around the globe in 60 minutes”, presumably via the medium of dolls; and The Abrene Rooms.
Unusually for a European country, irredentist sentiments have had quite limited sway in Latvia. It’s true that there are a small handful of places just outside Latvia that could conceivably have ended up within its modern borders.
Latvian soldiers remained in the Lithuanian coastal resort of Palanga until 1921, three years after the two countries had declared their independence from the Russian Empire; the majority-Lithuanian town and its partially ethnic Latvian hinterland ended up being the only part of the imperial Courland governorate not to find its way into Latvia.
Around the same time, the tiny and then largely Swedish-speaking island of Ruhnu in the Gulf of Riga was given the chance to become Latvia’s one and only sea island, but voted instead to join Estonia – its Latvian name, Roņu Sala (Seal Island), may give some idea of the prevailing demographics.
But the only lost territory that seems today to summon the slightest bit of excitation among Latvians is Abrene, the largest town in a small strip of the former Pskov governorate that officially went over to Latvia in a 1920 peace treaty with Soviet Russia. Once part of the Latgalian kingdom of Atzele, it subsequently fell under the sway of Pskov, ending up beyond the borders of medieval Livonia.
By the 19th century, whatever its previous ethnic composition, it seems to have been – outwardly, at least – thoroughly russified. However, in the 1890s an expedition led by the Baltic German ethnographer August Bielenstein observed that many inhabitants of the surrounding area, though Orthodox in faith and Russian in dress, spoke Latgalian at home. Its years in the new republic brought many Latvians from elsewhere, especially state employees, and some villages were given more Latvian-sounding names (Abrene itself was renamed Jaunlatgale (“New Latgale”) before reverting to its traditional name in 1938).
But in 1944, following the onset of the second Soviet occupation of Latvia, Abrene and six adjoining parishes were transferred to the Russian SFSR – oddly, though perhaps revealingly, this took place following a request by the Supreme Soviet of the Latvian SSR, on the basis of the large number of ethnic Russians in the territory.
Strangely, The Abrene Rooms is not primarily about Abrene. In fact, it would be more precise to say that it’s about Viļaka, although this experience obviously does at times overlap with the town now across the border. A neat two-storey house, it’s packed with artefacts from Viļaka and the wider region’s – often horrifying – experience of the mid-twentieth century.
A couple of rooms are fitted out with maps, posters for events, and consumer products from the Latvian republic that united Viļaka and Abrene in the 1920s and ‘30s: adverts for chocolate and sweets from Vilhelms Ķuze and Laima; an antique portable cash register; shoeshine tins; Latvia’s beautiful interwar currency, the lats; a lovely hardwood VEF radio bearing a map inset with the unfamiliar borders of Europe at the time, and much else. There’s also a terrifying match safety poster featuring a giant finger-pointing matchbox hectoring an apparently reckless and misbehaving child, to the legend “matches are not a toy”. All give some sense of the outward appearance of life in these parts before totalitarianism rolled in.
Asked why he chose this particular title for his museum when it’s primarily about Viļaka and its history, proprietor Dzintars Dvinskis answers “I wanted to preserve the name Abrene” and mentions the many historical links between the two places. Dvinskis opened the museum in 2021, but explains that the collection has been built up over many years, and that he’s travelled all over Latvia in search of new artefacts.
Curiously, a full five years after its appropriation by Russia, the name was resurrected for a small region that hugged the north-eastern border of the Latvian SSR – excluding Abrene itself, which in any case was by that point officially referred to by its Russian name, Pytalovo. (A popular explanation of this name on this side of the border is that this derives from the Latvian phrase “pie Tālava” – next to Tālava, another ancient Latgalian kingdom to the west of Atzele). The administrative centre of Abrene Region, which continued to exist until 1959, was in fact here, Viļaka.
It’s oddly appropriate that a museum named for a place that no longer bears that name in a town that served as the capital for a region that didn’t include it is not in fact directly about Abrene.
But the building is very much a suitable base for such a museum, having served as the Viļaka headquarters of the Cheka under the Soviet occupation and then the Gestapo when the Nazis invaded a year later. Prior to the war, it belonged to Movša Gurevičs, a local Jew who ran a shop from the building until his property was confiscated by the incoming Soviet administration. The following year he fell victim to the bloodiest and most sweeping of all the terrible acts to take place in the region during the period, executed along with around 500 other Latvian and Lithuanian Jews by the Arājs Commando, an SS unit composed of Latvian volunteers involved in multiple atrocities. His son was able to escape to Abrene/Pytalovo by bicycle and later to the US, and had the property restituted to him on the restoration of Latvian independence many years later.
Of a community that once made up a third of the population of Viļaka, there are today few detectable traces – little more than some photos in the town museum and a monument in the nearby woods where the massacre took place.
Further on, we see the arrival and return of Soviet power: alongside a looming bust of “Lielais Staļins” (Great Stalin), there’s a Latvian-language proclamation from the occupying power emblazoned “To All Who Are Still Hiding in the Forests”. Two columns of close-packed print promise clemency to repentant partisans, and – for the benefit of those hoping for assistance from the West – repeat the words of a seemingly Soviet-sympathetic UK Labour Party member of parliament who visited Riga in 1946 and spoke about the ignorance and indifference of the average Brit to Latvia’s plight. There’s a rough map, annotated in Russian, showing the patrol routes around the tiny town taken by the militia stationed here during the turbulent years immediately after the war.
And this was very much a hardship post. Remote northern Latgale saw the most intense partisan activity of anywhere in Latvia, with Stompaki marsh serving as an ideal hideout for the “forest brothers”. Some remained underground until the mid-’50s. As well as those hoping to restore an independent Latvia, there had also been partisans with different sympathies. A blank concrete plinth at the centre of a nearby park supported a sculptural depiction of a crouching Red partisan figure as recently as last month – a casualty of Latvia’s decision, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to dismantle all monuments seen as glorifying the USSR.
To the question of whether the loss of Abrene still smarts for local people, Dvinskis replies that people are used to it now, and aren’t particularly interested anymore – though, of course, there is regret.
Regret – certainly attention – may have peaked in 2007, when Latvia ratified a treaty with Russia confirming the de facto existing borders and thus officially relinquishing its claims to Pytalovo and the surrounding area. While this can be seen as a pragmatic decision given that Latvia had little practical way of regaining control over the region, in legal terms its case seemed strong: in the treaty signed in 1920, Russia gave up claims to Latvian territory “for all time”.
In response, the youth organisation All for Latvia! organised a protest at the parliament: in -17 Celsius temperatures, a line of shirtless young men stood with the names of Latvian cities spattered with red on their chests; at their centre, with “Abrene” stencilled on his chest, was Raivis Dzintars, now a leader of the nationalist political group the National Alliance in the Saeima, Latvia's parliament. Studies at the time showed that around a third of Latvians wanted the state to contest Abrene – a not insignificant proportion, though a fairly nugatory show of passion by European irredentist standards.
But then it’s generally seen as a very hard case in a region that is already full of hard cases. In a country that has often struggled to satisfactorily integrate its russophone minority, there’s limited appetite for adding a further Russian-majority patch, one where ethnic Latvians now represent no more than a small sliver of the population.
The reports from those who have visited are not typically flattering. Riga-based Lauris Olups, who works as a fixer for foreigners wanting to research their Latvian roots, visited Pytalovo in 2019 with a client, and recalls: “The roads near the border were brand new and smooth. But when we got to Pytalovo it was a pothole slalom. Never seen roads that bad here. Ugly Soviet apartment blocks, the only aesthetic buildings were left from Latvian times.”
The snow-white Abrene folk costume can still be seen at the Song and Dance Festival in Riga every five years. But even the author of a recent Latvian-language book on the Abrene district concluded: “Abrene is no longer our land, it lives only in memory, it’s just history.”
In many Latgalian dialects, including the grammatically idiosyncratic forms of this northern corner, a common term for a village is sola, the same word as that used for “island”. And particularly in the thickly forested frontier zone, you can easily see how the association may have arisen – and with much of their hinterland inaccessible on account of a hard border that’s become even harder in recent years, these places seem even more cut off.
Viļaka has considerable charms, though: its dual-spired and extravagantly decorated Catholic church, “the pearl of northern Latgale”, may be among the most impressive in the whole of Latvia, while the picturesque island in the lake, which you’d think might be a bit cramped even for the limited needs of medieval monks, has since 2020 been linked to the mainland by a pontoon bridge that takes you through rustling reedbeds.
Still, remote and poorly connected northern Latgale has suffered from disproportionately high unemployment and intense depopulation – the rare cultural products to consider this stretch of borderland often have a grim edge to them.
The 2019 documentary Latvian Cowboy (directed by Ivars Zviedris) follows the trial and prison sentence of a man from a remote and economically depressed northern Latgalian town, convicted for involvement in conveying Vietnamese immigrants across the border into the EU, and offers bleak snapshots into the desperation and degradation of both smugglers and smuggled.
On noticeboards around town, alongside the usual scrappy, often handwritten, notifications that people are selling firewood, fruit, vehicles or random bric-a-brac, there’s an alert from the border force urging citizens to report any “observed possible infringements, sveši [a word that could mean foreign, strange or simply unfamiliar], unknown people or vehicles at any time of the day or night”.
