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You should visit Riga’s Soviet neighbourhoods

You should visit Riga’s Soviet neighbourhoods
20 January 2025

When I arrived to my share flat in Riga last summer (which was organised by Liden & Denz), I met with a bloke from the Czech Republic. It was five in the evening. We cooked pasta together in our small kitchen, shared a beer with the other fellow living in the flat (from Belgium), and the three of us instantly became friends. It was a surprise; three persons from completely different parts of the world, of different ages, brought together in a small Soviet flat in Riga by a fascination with the Russian language, a desire to know about a foreign culture, to communicate with people. Many afternoons “Czech Jan” (as he has become known to me), myself and other students would spend on excursions around the city, at the beach or the lake, and soon thereafter at a local bar practicing grammatically impugnable Russian (though, I promise you, your Russian will sound more correct after a few…). 

One day at LIDO  Czech Jan and I were speaking about childhood. Jan said to me, “I grew up in Soviet apartments and you know, they aren’t what you think they are. They’re not depressing. There’s an aesthetic to them, an experience I can’t quite explain… they’re nice, actually. My friends and I liked where we lived- we saw each other often, did things together.”
He paused, ate part of his Shashlik and with bright eyes said,
“There are Soviet regions in Riga, you know. There are Soviet apartments, playgrounds, benches. There are whole regions from the past; they look just like my home. We should go there.”
I smiled. For an Australian, or at least to this Australian, nothing sounded more exciting.

Давай, Czech Jan.

The Purvciems neighbourhood yesterday, Jan 19 2025. 

The Purvciems neighbourhood yesterday, Jan 19 2025. 

 

(Before you continue reading, I recommend you search “Molchat Doma” in your preferred app and shuffle it.)

With Jan and others in Summer

We finished our meal and jumped on the number 22 bus from outside of Liden & Denz. 25 minutes later we were in Plavnieki. The contrast between this place and, for example, the old town, really is incredible. Jan couldn’t have said it better; on the bus full of Babushkas with plastic bags you pass fewer and fewer Art Nouveau buildings, the roads become wider and straighter, and the Soviet apartment blocks (‘Khrushchevkas’) become unanimous. It’s Molchat Doma territory, even at the height of summer. And there is a romance to it, instantly; there’s something dark and wonderful, something unassuming, completely and utterly ordinary, and maybe it’s an allure only available to a foreigner who doesn’t have to live in the place he wanders through, maybe it’s a tourist’s apparition, but in this place of remarkable ordinariness I felt somehow at home.

Jan and I, having walked a maze of apartment buildings, the balconies of which are small garages replete with bicycles, shirtless dyadyas (uncles) smoking and wet washing, from the windows of which sing the inevitable gold star or Ikea plastic plant, found ourselves at “UGOLOK” (“Corner” in Russian) Bar and Grill. We ordered Borscht, some chicken with vegetables, and two pints of kvass in broken Russian and the lovely waitress, about our age, looked at us in wonderment as if to ask, “are you lost?”
No, from the look on Czech Jan’s face, we were exactly where we needed to be.
We finished our food, paid with smiles and lose change, and headed outside for a smoke where we listened to two older men trying to figure out in conversation where to obtain a mobile phone and, shortly thereafter, the torments of married life. Jan was beaming. He took me by the arm and, finding an old playground, he pulled a beer from his backpack.

 

“You see this,” he smiled, pointing to the square. “This was the town square of my childhood. This bench, this swing. This is where we came before class, during class, after class. This is where we met before a birthday or after a breakup.”
“Here,” he said, handing me the beer, “look at the windows.”

And as sometimes in Australia, after a surf, you fail to see ants among the summer grass, when I looked more carefully to these windows I saw people, dozens of people. They were cooking, cleaning, playing video games, watching films, sitting and doing nothing… there were people talking, arguing, smiling, thinking. There in that old playground we watched lives- not our own, not imagined in a book- but real lives; unassuming, ordinary, beautiful. We didn’t talk much, actually, except when we noticed something worth mentioning and, slowly sipping on our beer, I felt as if I had slipped beneath a foreign language properly. That I was observing something without ruining it with my eyes.
“Jan mate,” I said to him. “This is bloody cool. This Soviet bench.”
“Yes!” He yelped. “Soviet bench is exactly right!”

The next day we told our class about the Soviet bench. Americans, Brits… everyone expressed a desire to see it for themselves. And so we went, and we went again, and it became one of many of our cherished post-class activities.

Winter

It’s the 19th of January and I’m back in the Soviet neighbourhood of Purvciems to take some photos. Winter, it’s safe to say, entails new challenges for the local inhabitants. Part of me imagines that sentence in a wildlife documentary about a desert, but actually, with Russian post-punk in my ears and the many koshkas (cats) stationed around me, I stand by my characterisation of this place, at least as it appears to a tourist.

 If you want to know more about the history of Riga’s Soviet neighbourhoods, I recommend this article on Neighbourhood.lv; https://neighborhood.lv/en/riga-that-tourists-avoid-purvciems-plavnieki-kengarags/. Neighbourhood.lv also run a great instagram page for anyone studying/considering studying in Riga.

До свидания!

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