Housing

My flat (“apartment” for you Americans) is a studio – not big by any means, but all the room that I could need for the next six months. The head of Daugavpils University’s international student office, Jeļena Tamane, found it by asking around, sent me photos, and asked me if I were interested. Of course I said yes; it was a great relief to know before I left for Latvia that a place would be waiting for me in the city.

I met her and my landlord Jans Rimvids, who is Polish, at the flat on my arrival. I signed the lease – surely the first time I have signed a legal document in Latvian – after they had translated all of it, and there it was! I had an address!

The building itself is not much to look at. Like so many Baltic cities, the charming part of the town is the Old Town, the part that wasn’t destroyed in a war, and in most cities it’s not very big. Typically, the Old Town is surrounded by the real city, where people actually live. I’m lucky in that regard; my building sits on one of the city’s parks, the Old Town is right on the other side. In Daugavpils, Old Town means 19^th-century buildings built to a human scale, three or four stories tall at most, vest-pocket parks filled with trees, and the occasional old wooden building in the Russian style, with beautifully carved shutters.

My neighborhood is a set of narrow high rises of about five stories that housed lots of people when there was a huge influx of immigrants from Russia during the “Soviet times” who came – maybe voluntarily, possibly involuntarily as well, so that the Soviet Union could make over Latvia into its own Soviet image by flooding it with its own Russian citizens. (“Soviet times” is a ubiquitous phrase here. I am hearing it a lot.) The flats are smallish, which I expected, though I think it may be more accurate to say that American houses are far, far too large.

Natalija at the USA Info Center here in town called my building a “Krushko.” I’m not sure of the exact spelling of that, but it refers to the fact that it was built during a building boom while Nikita Khrushchev was Soviet premier. Older buildings in town are “Stalkos,” built under Stalin. Given that it was built by the Soviets, and the Soviet Union was not kind to the Baltic states in general, one wants to dislike this housing on general principle. But I can’t; it’s perfectly adequate, generally built sturdily though looking its age, and not unpleasant sitting as it does among very tall trees.

And appearances are deceiving. From the outside, these buildings don’t look like much, and some of them are in fact downright ugly: crumbling concrete, peeling paint, cheap finishes. On the inside, however, their occupants turn them into very cozy, very comfortable homes. I remember walking up the concrete steps to my flat once I was inside the building, the stairwell stale with the sour smell of winter air that hadn’t circulated for far too long, and dark paint peeling off the walls. And then I got in the apartment, all new and bright and decked out with cheery, simple IKEA furniture. The contrast was startling.

And one has to give the Soviets credit. For all their hypocrisy, their insistence that the Baltic states didn’t really exist until they were “liberated” by the USSR, and that they existed to feed and provide for Moscow, you have to give them one thing: they sure knew how to house large masses of people.