Thanks for this article, I shared it with my facebook friends. To my mind Putin is like Stalin, he first destroys his own country's economy like Stalin destroyed NEP (New Economy Policy in Russia that allowed cooperation with foreign companies to improve local economy and then killed on, to erase people's goodwill and - went to attack the Western countries). Putin has also found that Russians live too well already in Russia. He's got nothing to offer to the people he is going to "release". How can it be so that more than hundred million people allow to be leaded themselves by one madman? And it seems that international justice on 21st century is again helpless like it has been so far. Just one man against the world - and we all are afraid of him?

When Moscow demonstrators last week declared that Latgalia is a Russian land, they were entirely mistaken. Archaeologists have reported that the Eastern Latgalian tribes formed from the most ancient East-Baltic inhabitants of Latvia. In this sense they are the original Latvians. Their language is the Latgollian dialect which is very similar to Latvian. The widespread Catholicism stems from their Polish (not Russian) era in history.
Latgale is indeed an economically poorer region of Latvia but this is an inheritance from the Soviet era when forced collectivized farming caused economic damage to people in that region. Stalin-era deportations of local inhabitants did not help either since it was usually the educated or business owners who were affected the most.