If you are to understand anything about Latvia and its people, then the Museum of Occupations should be your first point of call in Riga. After the Nazi occupation during the war, Latvia passed into Stalin's hands post 1945. The following years saw the Latvian people terrorised by Russian totalitarian ideals, with thousands deported to the gulags whilst the rest endured a programme of 'Russification' - as the USSR tried to suppress and kill any sense of Latvian identity. The Museum combines information boards, video, exhibits and even mock-ups of what a Siberian gulag barrack looked like to bring the full force of the horrors across. The first hand accounts of the 'parashas' (prisoners' toilets) make particularly grim reading.
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