Latvia

Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is the middle Baltic state between Estonia and Lithuania, facing Sweden across the water and Russia and Belarus by land, sixty-four thousand square kilometres and one point eight million people round the capital Riga. Teutonic knights, Swedes, Poles and Russians ruled the Livonian shore in turn before the rifles of 1918: on 18 November, as empires fell, the People's Council proclaimed the republic, and Ulmanis's farmers, Chakste's assembly and the army's Cēsis victory secured it against Germans and Bolsheviks alike. Parliament ruled until Ulmanis's own coup of 1934 made him president-dictator. The pact of dictators erased the state in 1940: Soviet annexation, Nazi occupation from 1941, Soviet return in 1944, forty-five years as the Latvian SSR with Russians settled in by the hundred thousand. The Singing Revolution of 1987 carried songs into demonstrations and demonstrations into the restored independence of 21 August 1991, a parliamentary republic ever since.