A personal postscript...

Over half a century has passed since "The Story of Latvia - A Historical Survey" was published. The Baltics are once again independent and members of the western European community.

The Soviet Union is gone, yet, tragically, the Soviet mentality continues in Russia, still preoccupied with the Baltics, still insisting the Baltics joined the Soviet Union willingly and legally, still branding Baltic anti-Soviet heros as "anti-" anti-fascists, that is, Nazis. NKVD agents, freed from Latvian jails for health reasons after being convicted of sending Latvian women and children to their deaths in Siberia remain defiant and unrepentant:

"You have to remember that the war was coming, and these people were not simple farmers. They were spies, and they were dangerous."

- Mikhail Farbtukh, convicted for crimes against humanity

...and receive red carnations in their Riga apartment from the Russian government.

Long after Germany has been held to account for Nazism, has admitted to its past, and remains vigilant to insure that past never repeats again, why is it that Russia remains untouched for murdering tens of millions more under circumstances no less brutal or premeditated than the Holocaust?

Until the past is acknowledged, and that era of history brought to closure, Arveds Svabe's question of world conscience, "To be, or not to be," remains unanswered, its urgency undimmed by the passage of half a century.

There is no victory over the Iron Curtain
if it is only the wall which has turned to dust.