Suchergebnisse

The article discusses the process of emergence and semantic load of the state symbols of the Baltic states. The Baltic republican symbols began to emerge at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, during the period of "national awakening". State paraphernalia in the form of a flag and coat of arms in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania was legally fixed in the early 1920s. As a result of incorporation into the USSR in 1940, the state symbols were replaced by the Soviet version. However, during the period of perestroika and the growth of disintegration processes in the Soviet Union, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius in 1989–1990 officially returned to the original paraphernalia of the bourgeois republics of the interwar period, thus sanctioning the consolidation of the principle of continuity – historical succession to the states of the 1920s – 1930s. State symbols undoubtedly have an impact on public memory, as that builds historical parallels between the current republics and key stages of the past, the memory of which is the attributes of national statehood.

The article considers the change in the status of the Russian-speaking population of Latvia in conjunction with the local memory policy. In this work, we were able to analyse a significant number of legislative sources of the Republic of Latvia, including in the Latvian language, and to reveal cause-and-effect relationships in decision-making regarding national minorities. Based on the highlighted legislative material (some of which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time), as well as the works of Latvian authors, we traced changes in the political and socio-economic status of the Russian-speaking population of Latvia during the 1990s - 2000s. We can state that the local state-historical policy is directly related to state integration measures and it was the ideological platform for discriminatory legislation in relation to national minorities. Nevertheless, the Russian-speaking population found itself in unfavourable conditions, a sharply reduced socio-economic and political status, managed to consolidate and adapt to the conditions of independent Latvia, taking its niche in all spheres of social society.