Rogers Brubaker notes that Russia, as the ‘natural external homeland’ for many of Latvia's Russian speakers and Soviet migrants, inevitably plays a significant role in the formation of their national identity. Brubaker cites the example of interwar Europe to illustrate how ‘fault lines’ of tension emerge between nationalising states such as Poland, where there were sizable German, Belarusian, and Ukrainian populations, and the homeland nationalism of Germany and the Soviet Union. Here, the Soviet Union and Germany attempted to exert their influence on peoples that they considered as ‘their own’. Germans living in Poland consequently had to contend with and manage competing national identities. According to Brubaker this phenomenon is all the more apparent in ‘nationalising states’ that are attempting to define and consolidate their statehood such as Latvia and Estonia, where ‘their restrictive citizenship policies toward their large Russian minorities, have met with harsh Russian condemnations of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” and repeated assertions of Russia's right to protect Russians against allegedly massive human rights violations’ (1996: 108).

It is perhaps not surprising therefore, that Russia should be able to hold some cultural, political, social, or economic influence over Russian speakers in the Baltic states. In the chapter that follows, consideration is given to how the Russian Federation has discursively conceptualised its ‘diaspora’ in Latvia, and how this has evolved into observable policies and discursive expectations. Following on from the previous chapter, this chapter also investigates the impact of the renewed nationalisation of the Latvian state as well as the political crises that tragically engulfed Ukraine in 2014.