Par mums visiem pofig: tukšums Ķengaragā kā Latvijā īstenoto izstumšanas prakšu liecība

Ķengarags, a densely populated, green Soviet era looking district and with its 45,000 residents, is the second largest by population in Riga, the capital of Latvia. The proximity to the biggest river of Latvia and its green scenery should make Ķengarags a desirable space for development. Yet in the past years, particularly two or three, I have noticed something preventing this district from rising higher. A strange stagnation has set in. Although various initiatives and projects have been developed by the Riga municipality and implemented in other districts, they bypass Ķengarags, leaving me, as my research project has shown, and others feeling abandoned and empty.
In my MA thesis, I argue that the sense of emptiness in this neighborhood is rooted in a specific public discourse, in which the designation "Russian" is applied to this micro-district - in a historically rooted metaphor in Latvia, which has accumulated associations with the Soviet Union, the worthless one and full of suffering. It serves as a basis for the implementation and justification of exclusion practices existing in Latvia. As one of my informants said, trying to explain why nothing is happening in Ķengarags: “This is a Russian [speaking] district after all.” According to statistics of ethnic division in Riga city districts, Ķengarags takes the 8th place by number of Russian residents in this chart of the total of 58 Riga districts, with 45% of all residents being Russians, 37% Latvians. At the same time, in the ideas expressed by the municipality, not only Ķengarags but all micro-districts are associated with places where mostly Russian speakers live, hanging certain label, even despite the large number of Latvians living here. This is a paradox; with such a notion, everyone, regardless of nationality, is subject to exclusion.
The ongoing war in Ukraine has raised the issue of the Russian-speaking situation in Latvia to a new level. Inhabitants of Ķengarags feel unheard and unimportant both for the government and the Riga municipality. As one informant said: “They don’t give a damn about us.” From this expression I developed the title of this master theses “They don’t give a damn about us”: the varied emptiness in Ķengarags as evidence of the practices of exclusion in Latvia”. In my work, I look at Ķengarags as a spatial-political riddle. I specifically explore how the war in Ukraine has impacted the exclusion-inclusion practices of the state of Latvia and the city of Riga in this district. Specifically, through the attitudes towards the dismantling of the so-called Victory Monument, a Soviet era monument that is viewed very differently by Latvian and Russian speaking inhabitants of Riga, I look at how the geography of the city of Riga is used to include and exclude.