The history of Latvia

Latvia lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, between Estonia and Lithuania. Its Baltic and Finnic peoples were conquered by German crusaders in the thirteenth century, and for the next seven hundred years a German-speaking nobility and merchant class ruled over Latvian peasants under the successive overlordship of the Livonian Order, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden and the Russian Empire. A Latvian nation took shape in the nineteenth century and won independence in 1918, only to be occupied by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the Second World War and annexed to the USSR for half a century. Latvia restored its independence in 1991 and joined the European Union and NATO in 2004.

Hunter-gatherers moved into the region around 9000 BCE as the ice sheets melted, living by fishing and hunting along rivers and lakes. Later Stone Age cultures, known to archaeologists from their pottery, such as the Kunda, Narva and Comb Ceramic cultures, left settlements around Lake Lubāns and other waters. Speakers of Baltic languages, related to Lithuanian and the extinct Old Prussian, arrived in the second millennium BCE, while Finnic peoples lived along the coast.

By the end of the first millennium CE the land was divided among several peoples: the Curonians on the western coast, the Semigallians on the central plain, the Selonians and the Latgalians in the east, and the Finnic Livonians around the Gulf of Riga. They lived in hill forts and farmsteads, worshipped their own gods and traded amber, furs and wax. The Daugava river was part of a trade route from Scandinavia to Kievan Rus' and Byzantium, and Curonian sea raiders were feared in the Viking Age. Some tribes formed small realms; the Latgalian principality of Jersika, whose rulers were Orthodox Christians and paid tribute to Polotsk, was the most developed.

German merchants and missionaries reached the mouth of the Daugava in the late twelfth century. Bishop Meinhard built a church at Ikšķile in the 1180s, but the locals resisted conversion, and the papacy proclaimed a crusade. In 1201 Bishop Albert founded Riga, and the following year he established the Brothers of the Sword, a military order of knights. Over the next decades the crusaders conquered the Livonians, Latgalians and Selonians. The Curonians and Semigallians held out longer, and in 1236 they helped the Samogitians destroy the Sword Brothers at the Battle of Saule. The survivors joined the Teutonic Order, which ruled Prussia as the State of the Teutonic Order, as its Livonian branch, and the Semigallians were finally subdued in 1290.

The conquered land, called Livonia, became a patchwork of territories ruled by the Livonian Order, the archbishop of Riga and other bishops, loosely joined in the Livonian Confederation. Riga, which joined the Hanseatic League in 1282, became a prosperous German trading city. A German-speaking elite held the land and the towns, and the native peoples, gradually merging into a single Latvian-speaking population, were increasingly bound as serfs. In the 1520s the towns and much of the nobility adopted Lutheranism during the Protestant Reformation.

In 1558 Tsar Ivan the Terrible of Muscovy invaded Livonia, starting the Livonian War. The Livonian Order could not resist and in 1561 placed itself under the protection of Poland and Lithuania. Its last master, Gotthard Kettler, became the hereditary Duke of Courland and Semigallia, a vassal of the Polish-Lithuanian king, while the land north of the Daugava became the Duchy of Livonia. After decades of war the region was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Riga submitted to the king in 1581.

Sweden contested the region from the start of the seventeenth century. Gustavus Adolphus captured Riga in 1621, and most of Livonia north of the Daugava, the region now called Vidzeme, became Swedish Livonia, confirmed by the Treaty of Oliva in 1660. Riga became the largest city of the Swedish realm. The period was later remembered as "the good Swedish times", when schools were founded for peasant children and the pastor Ernst Glück translated the Bible into Latvian. Latgale in the south-east stayed under Poland-Lithuania and Catholic, which still sets it apart. The Duchy of Courland flourished under Duke Jacob Kettler, who ruled from 1642 to 1682, built a merchant fleet and even acquired small colonies on the island of Tobago in the Caribbean and on the Gambia river in Africa.

During the Great Northern War Russia under Peter the Great captured Riga in 1710, while war and plague killed a large part of the population. The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 confirmed Russian rule over Livonia. Latgale passed to Russia with the first partition of Poland in 1772, and in 1795 Catherine the Great annexed Courland, so that all Latvian lands were part of the Russian Empire. The Baltic German nobility kept its privileges, its own law and the use of German in administration.

Serfdom was abolished in Courland in 1817 and in Livonia in 1819, though the peasants were freed without land; only from the mid-nineteenth century could they buy farms, and in Latgale serfdom ended only with the general emancipation of 1861. A Latvian national awakening followed. The Young Latvians of the 1850s and 1860s, such as Krišjānis Valdemārs, argued that Latvians were a nation in their own right; Krišjānis Barons collected hundreds of thousands of folk songs, the dainas; and the first Latvian song festival was held in Riga in 1873. From the 1880s the government pursued Russification of schools and administration. Riga grew into one of the largest industrial ports of the empire, and in the revolution of 1905 Latvian workers and peasants rose against both the tsar and the German landlords; punitive expeditions executed and exiled thousands.

In the First World War the front ran through Latvia. Germany occupied Courland in 1915, and hundreds of thousands of refugees fled east. Latvian Riflemen units formed within the Russian army fought hard battles near Riga, which fell to Germany in 1917. After the Russian Revolution and Germany's defeat, the Latvian People's Council proclaimed independence on 18 November 1918, with Kārlis Ulmanis as prime minister.

The new state had to fight for its existence. A Soviet Latvian government under Pēteris Stučka, supported by the Red Army and many Latvian Riflemen, took Riga in early 1919, while German volunteer units and the Baltic German Landeswehr fought the Bolsheviks and in May overthrew Ulmanis's government. With help from Estonia, Latvian forces defeated the Landeswehr near Cēsis in June 1919, repelled a German-Russian army under Pavel Bermondt-Avalov at Riga that autumn and, with Polish help, drove the Red Army from Latgale. Soviet Russia recognised Latvia in the Peace of Riga of 11 August 1920, and the major Western powers recognised it in January 1921.

Latvia adopted a democratic constitution, the Satversme, in 1922. A land reform broke up the Baltic German estates and gave land to tens of thousands of farmers, and the country exported butter, timber and bacon. Politics were fragmented among many parties, and on 15 May 1934 Ulmanis staged a coup, dissolved parliament and banned parties, ruling as an authoritarian leader until 1940.

The secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 assigned Latvia to the Soviet sphere. Most Baltic Germans were resettled to Germany that winter, ending their seven-century presence. In June 1940 the Soviet Union delivered an ultimatum and occupied the country; after staged elections Latvia was annexed on 5 August 1940. Under Joseph Stalin arrests and executions followed, and on 13 and 14 June 1941 more than 15,000 people, including whole families, were deported to Siberia.

Nazi Germany invaded a week later and took Riga on 1 July 1941. About 94,000 Jews had lived in Latvia before the war, and the Holocaust destroyed the community almost completely. German Einsatzgruppen, assisted by Latvian collaborators such as the Arājs Kommando, shot tens of thousands of Jews in the summer and autumn of 1941. In the Rumbula forest outside Riga, on 30 November and 8 December 1941, about 25,000 people from the Riga ghetto and deported German Jews were murdered. Jews from Germany and Austria were deported to Riga and killed there as well. Roma and others were also murdered. In 1943 Germany formed a Latvian Legion within the Waffen-SS, largely through conscription, while other Latvians were conscripted into the Red Army, so that Latvians fought on both sides of the Second World War.

The Red Army retook Riga in October 1944, though German forces held the Courland Pocket until the end of the war in May 1945. Around 160,000 Latvians fled west to Germany and Sweden.

Soviet rule returned with renewed repression. Armed partisans, the "forest brothers", resisted in the countryside into the early 1950s. In March 1949 more than 40,000 people, many of them farming families, were deported to Siberia to break resistance to collectivisation. Heavy industry was built up and workers were brought in from other Soviet republics, so that the ethnic Latvian share of the population fell from about three quarters before the war to about 52 percent in 1989. Russian dominated public life, though Latvian culture, language and the song festival tradition survived.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the late 1980s, Latvians organised openly. Environmental protests were followed by the founding of the Popular Front of Latvia in 1988. On 23 August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, around two million people across the three republics joined hands in the Baltic Way, a human chain about 600 kilometres long from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius, part of the wider revolutions of 1989.

On 4 May 1990 the newly elected Supreme Council declared the restoration of independence, with a transition period. When Soviet special forces tried to seize power in neighbouring Lithuania in January 1991, Latvians built barricades around key buildings in Riga, and several people were killed when Soviet OMON troops attacked the interior ministry. During the failed coup in Moscow, the Supreme Council declared full independence on 21 August 1991, and the Soviet Union recognised it on 6 September, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The last Russian troops left in 1994.

Latvia restored its 1922 constitution and based citizenship on continuity with the pre-1940 state, so that many Soviet-era settlers and their descendants became non-citizens who had to naturalise; the issue strained relations with Russia and the Russian-speaking minority. The economy was rebuilt on market lines. Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, president from 1999 to 2007, was the first woman head of state in the former Soviet bloc. Latvia joined NATO in March 2004 and the European Union on 1 May 2004. A boom was followed by a deep crash in the financial crisis of 2008, which drove many Latvians to emigrate to Western Europe. In November 2013 the roof of a supermarket in Riga's Zolitūde district collapsed, killing 54 people, the country's worst disaster since independence. Latvia adopted the euro on 1 January 2014.

In 2023 parliament elected Edgars Rinkēvičs as president. Prime Minister Evika Siliņa resigned in May 2026, and a four-party government under Andris Kulbergs of the United List took office to serve until the next election. At the election of 3 October 2026, with turnout of about 52 percent, the United List won 41 of the 100 seats, short of a majority, and coalition talks followed. Latvia has about 1.8 million people, down from almost 2.7 million in 1990; around a quarter of them are ethnic Russians.