Why go
This account gives sober context for Riga’s twentieth-century memorials and the city’s later residential districts. It distinguishes the successive occupying powers and the people they targeted, while showing how post-war Soviet industrialisation and migration altered the shape of the city.
The full story
The Soviet Union occupied and annexed Latvia in 1940. Soviet authorities arrested, executed and deported many people. Nazi Germany occupied Riga from 1941 to 1944. The occupiers forced the city’s Jewish community into a ghetto in the Maskavas neighbourhood and established camps at Kaiserwald and nearby Salaspils. The sequence matters: different regimes carried out distinct campaigns of persecution. Soviet rule returned in 1945. More Latvians were deported to Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union, often accused of collaboration or support for post-war resistance. Planned industrialisation then drew people from other Soviet republics to Riga. Large apartment districts, including Purvciems, Zolitūde and Ziepniekkalns, developed around the city’s edge. Old Town alone cannot tell this history. Memorial sites speak to violence and loss, while the outer residential areas show the scale of post-war urban change. Both are part of understanding the modern capital.