the first stage of the Latvian school reform and introduced three mandatory subjects taught in Lithuanian in the ethnic minority schools; this was done in Latvia back in 1993. It lead to active protests whose initiators and participants were mainly Polish teachers and students.[12]
Poland’s Ministry of Interior reacted very strongly, including calling in their ambassador ‘for consultations’.[13] And Poland has every right to do so, since there a treaty between Poland and Lithuania guaranteeing free functioning and state support of Lithuanian schools in Poland and vice versa.
Similar treaty also exists between Poland and Latvia.[14] However, Poland does not respond to the situation with the ethnic minority schools in Latvia, where the situation is by far more serious, demonstrating a double standard policy towards their compatriots which is common in the EU.
As for a similar intergovernmental treaty of 1994 between Estonia and Russia, in July 2013 the guarantees of the existence of Russian language school education in Estonia were in the process of being cancelled.[15]
The data on the surpassing reduction of the number of schoolchildren in the educational programmed for ethnic minorities are given in Table 6.
Table 6
Population and schoolchildren number trends in the Baltic states in 1990–2011[16] *
* In columns related to particular years absolute figures are given. The last column contains the ratio of the existing difference in 2011 and 1900 in per cent to 1990. Population figures in the column related to 1990 are given based in the 1989 population census.
For all schoolchildren studying in the state languages, a positive influence of the Soviet demographic policy was still present at the beginning of XXI century. Nonetheless, the number of schoolchildren in Latvia and Estonia in the entire period has seen greater decline than the number of adults.
As for the schoolchildren studying in the ethnic minority languages in Latvia and Estonia and in Russian in Lithuania, the decline of the their number up to 2001 corresponded to the rates of forcing the adult representatives of the groups in question out of the country. In the subsequent decade this process accelerated due to significant fall in birth rate among the ethnic minorities compared with representatives of national majority and sending children to majority schools for education.
Long-term trend of the education in Polish in Lithuania in the first ten years is related to overcoming the consequences of using the Soviet bilingual principle in each republic without any due support languages of the third minorities. In the last decade the closing down process also affected Polish education. The data on Russian education, unlike in Latvia and Estonia in relation to the number of ethnic Russians, indicate its substantial role in the education of the non-Russian children, which has not yet been lost.
In Latvia, the number of schools providing education in Russian is decreasing four times faster than the number of Latvian schools (Table 7).
Average occupancy of Latvian schools has dropped from 267 to 209 students, i.e. by 22 %, and the Russian schools from 533 to 458, or by 14 %.
In four years of the ‘social-democratic’ administration’s rule in Riga, 6 Latvian and 12 Russian schools were closed. At the same time, the average number of students in Latvian schools dropped from 523 to 505 and in Russian increased from 548 to 639.
The number of schools providing education in Russian (Russian and mixed) across the country fell by 43 % from 2002 to 2011: by 28 % in major cities, by 61 % in five statistical rural regions, including by 80 % in Vidzeme and 85 % in Zemgale regions. For comparison, the decrease of overall number of Latvian schools in the country is 11 % with 0.9 % in major cities and 14 % in regions, including 17 % in Vidzeme and 15 % in Zemgale regions.
Table 7
Decrease of number of schools in Latvia
In these regions in 2010 the number of adult representatives of ethnic minorities per schoolchild was 68 and 48, and in Kurzeme regions a fantastic figure of 988 people. At the same time for Latvians this figure was about 8–9 persons.
Historical memory in electoral behaviour in Latvia
Andrei Vladimirovich Solopenko, M.Soc.Sc., SKDS, Latvia
Introduction
Historical memory is one of the important factors forming ethnic identity of a group. Different interpretations of certain historic events allow dividing any society into different groups and play them against each other.
In electoral behaviour of people in Latvia, there is an apparent ethnolinguistic segregation, where ethnic Latvians mainly vote for certain parties while non-Latvians, who are mostly Russian-speaking, tend to vote for other parties.
One of the reasons of such segregation may lie in different historical memory of particular historic events in the two aforementioned groups. Identification of this problem has determined the choice of the topic for this article.
The article provides overall and territorial characteristic of two communities in Latvia, their interpretation of particular historic events and their support of particular political parties in parliamentary elections of 2011.
Overall and territorial characteristic of Latvian population
According to the population census, as of 1 March 2011 the population of Latvia was 2,070,371 people, of those 1,285,136 (62.1 %) Latvians; 557,119 (26.9 %) Russians; 68,202 (3.3 %) Byelorussians; 45,798 (2.2 %) Ukrainians; 44,772 (2.2 %) Poles; 24,479 (1.2 %) Lithuanians.[17] However, according to the results of the population census, mainly people in Latvia speak either Latvian or Russian at home. Among all people who have answered about their language, 62.1 % mainly use Latvian at home, 37.2 % use Russian and only 0.7 % use other languages.[18] Based on that, we can state that all population of Latvia can be provisionally divided into two large groups: Latvian-speaking and Russian-speaking.
This conclusion was confirmed by the monthly population survey Omnibus conducted by SKDS Centre, which included the questions regarding both respondent’s ethnic background and the language of communication used in his/her family. The respondents were asked: “What language do you mainly speak at home?” and only one of three options (Latvian, Russian, other) could be selected. The respondents were also asked: “What is your ethnic background?” and also only one of three options (Latvian, Russian, other) could be selected. Comparing the responses to the above two questions, we can see that the amount of ethnic Latvians and those who speak Latvian at home is almost the same. However, those who use Russian, include not only ethnic Russians, but also people of other ethnic backgrounds. The respondents using other language of communication at home account for about 1 %; therefore, in the author’s opinion, they can be excluded from the consideration, as their share is negligible and will not affect the outcome. The author also believes that it is possible to conclude that Latvians mainly use Latvian for communication and Russians mainly use Russian language.
At the same time, the distribution of these groups across Latvia is not uniform. A large share of Latvian-speaking
