Why Latvia is expelling its Russian speakers

00:00 08:42

Lukas Degutis has narrated this article for you to listen to.

At the age of 74, Inessa Novikova, who is ethnically Russian, was told she had to learn Latvian or she’d be deported. ‘I felt physically ill when the policy was announced,’ she tells me when we meet in an office close to Riga’s city centre. ‘I’ve lived here peacefully for 20 years.’

There was no requirement for her to seek Latvian citizenship after the Cold War ended. Then, it was acknowledged that ethnic Russians, who make up a quarter of Latvia’s 1.8 million population, would co-exist with ethnic Latvians. But when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, this arrangement ended. If Latvia’s ‘non-citizens’ had Russian citizenship, as Inessa did, they now had to apply for a new ‘EU residence’ permit, which meant learning Latvian. The new rules, which were introduced in the autumn of 2022, apply to everyone aged over 14 and under 75.

In 2010, when she was 60, Inessa had applied for Russian citizenship. It only required a trip to the embassy and there were no examinations, so it was more appealing than naturalisation. Like 25,000 other ethnic Russians, she hadn’t anticipated her citizenship would one day pose problems for her life in Latvia. ‘It was humiliating living as a non-citizen,’ she says. She passed the language test last year, at a cost of €500. How did she afford it on her pension of €400 a month? ‘The Almighty helped, I guess,’ she says. ‘It was unbelievably difficult.’

Alyona Egorova, 69, was not so lucky. She was born in Latvia, but took Russian citizenship the same year as Inessa, tempted by the fact she would receive her pension eight years earlier if she did so.