RIGA, Latvia — Viktor Dergunov has lived in this graceful old city of church spires and cobblestone streets since 1961, when the Soviet army dispatched his father to this tiny Baltic republic that once formed the forbidding edge of the Iron Curtain.
Over the decades, the Russian family came to see Latvia as their home. Dergunov met and married Yelena, who was born in Riga. So were their children and, last year, a granddaughter. But when Latvia entered the European Union today along with nine other nations, Dergunov and his family did not join other Latvians as new EU citizens.
Their Latvian passports are marked "alien." They will not be able to travel through the rest of Europe, at least for the next few years, without obtaining a visa. There are limits on the jobs they can hold and the property they can own. They cannot vote, although a Spaniard who establishes residence here is now eligible, as an EU citizen, to vote in municipal elections.
When Dergunov, a 53-year-old anesthesiologist, was asked about Latvia's decision to join the European Union, he was blunt. "I can say one thing: They didn't ask us. We didn't take part."
The hundreds of thousands of Russians still living in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania 13 years after independence are among the most visible reminders of the stunning transformation of the post-Cold War landscape. In recently joining NATO as well as the EU, republics that once were part of the Soviet Union are for the first time becoming members of an alliance that for years was Russia's sworn enemy.
In the Baltics, the Iron Curtain's fault line still looms large. The region carries the footprints of Hitler and Stalin's armies, of five decades of Soviet rule, of a grass-roots independence movement that helped close the book on Russian dreams of enduring empire. In Latvia, with half as many Russians as ethnic Latvians, there is little chance of agreement on which is the greater cause for regret.
"To the majority of the Russian people, Latvia is something that was ours and got away," said Karlis Kaukshts, vice rector of the Baltic Russian Institute. "It's like an unfaithful husband."
For Latvians, NATO membership represents security for a nation that was subjected to Nazi and Soviet occupation. The tiny nation lost more than half a million people to death, deportation and flight during World War II, including more than 90,000 Latvians, Jews and Gypsies who were killed in Nazi concentration camps.
