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From 2008 to 2015, the FEMEN movement emerged from post-Soviet Ukraine to become a phenomenon recognised worldwide and inspiring local offshoots in a dozen countries, first in Eastern Europe, then Western Europe, and eventually as far afield as North Africa and the Americas. Throughout this period, however, no real attempt was ever made to establish a local FEMEN branch in any of the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania, even when many of their neighbours had them. This chapter seeks to explore why this was so when many of the preconditions that led to the foundation of FEMEN in Ukraine seemed also to exist in the post-Soviet Baltic societies as well. What made the Baltics different from both those post-socialist and those Western European societies where certain women felt the need to embrace the techniques and ideas of FEMEN? Both socio-political developments in the Baltic States, as well as the under-researched aspect of the underlying ideology of FEMEN shed light on why Baltic societies did not join the “new” feminist activism embodied by FEMEN and Pussy Riot. By presenting three cases that compare and contrast with FEMEN’s activities, some preliminary explanations are offered for why this could be.

The volume moves beyond an exclusively political context to incorporate a variety of social and cultural perspectives, ranging from the experiences of Latvian mapmakers in the Russian Empire, to the participation of Latvians in the Wehrmacht and Red Army during World War II, Latvian national communism, and the development of extremist politics following Latvia’s accession to the European Union. Other chapters address developing trends in the fields of history and political science, including the history of antisemitism, memory, language politics, photography, and political extremism.

Based on the book’s temporal span from the nineteenth century to the present, the authors and editors of Defining Latvia understand the construction of Latvian identity as a continuous and interconnected process across significant political and ideological ruptures.

Present-day Latvia is a multi-ethnic society divided by the traumatic experiences of the twentieth century. It was both a locus of the Holocaust and a society deeply affected by decades of Soviet rule. Today, Latvia’s Jewish community is trying to negotiate its place as a re-emergent historical minority in the space between two dominant ethno-cultural communities, Latvian speakers and Russian speakers. After outlining the expressions of antisemitism in both the Lettophone and Russophone milieus since 1991, this article argues that competing nationalist narratives of threat and ownership of the state best explain antisemitism in contemporary Latvia. The fluctuating influence of the 1941 Rumbula Massacre on popular memory culture is a recurrent point of reference, which illustrates my argument. Recent events suggest a new, more conciliatory, trend where Jews are seen as an integral part of the people of Latvia, rather than as a potential risk to the state and nation.