Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders

Border Conditions combines history and memory studies with literary and cultural studies to examine lives at the limits of contemporary Europe--those of the half-million Russian-speakers who live in Latvia. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Latvia’s Russian-speakers have balanced between Russia and Europe and between a socialist past, a capitalist and liberal present, and the illiberal regime rising in the Russian Federation. Kevin M. F. Platt describes how the members of this population have worked to define themselves through art, literature, cultural institutions, film, and music--and how others, from the Russian Federation or the Latvian state, have sought to define them.
Efforts to make sense of the border condition of Russian-speakers in Latvia often raise more questions than they answer--not just about this population, but about competing world orders on all sides. At the end of the Cold War, many anticipated that societies across the globe could come to consensus about the meaning of past history and the bases for a just politics in the present. The view from the borders of Europe demonstrates the deep contradictions pertaining to fundamental terms such as empire, state socialism, liberalism, and nation that have made it impossible to achieve such a consensus.

Platt decenters the study of history and memory in Eastern Europe, refocusing the examination of state socialism’s aftermath around questions of empire and post-colonialism. Border Conditions helps us understand the distinctions between Russian and Western worldviews driving military confrontation to this day.

Kevin M. F. Platt is Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes on history and memory in Russia and Eastern Europe, global Russophone and global socialist culture, and contemporary Russian-language