A CITY PAPER interview with the leader singer of the Latvian band BrainStorm, Renars Kaupers.
More than one local band has dreamed about it, but virtually none has actually succeeded in breaking into pop music markets beyond Baltic borders—except, that is, Latvia’s BrainStorm. In recent years, it’s had a string of hits, including [...]

Coke cashes in by producing a nostalgic, Soviet-era drink.
By J. Michael Lyons
Vyacheslav Shamarin doesn’t like what mass-production has done to kvas, a cloudy brown yeast concoction that was a favorite soft drink in Latvia and elsewhere across the Soviet empire during communist rule.
Local companies have been challenging the giant Coca-Cola Company in recent years [...]

By Benjamin Smith
As if in a deliberate cosmic insult to Karl Marx, communism’s iconic color has been transmuted here into a symbol of electronic commerce. We’re not talking just any kind of red. Not maroon or pinkish. The color Kaur Kender was looking for recently was the “dirty, yellowish” shade that flew over Baltic capitals [...]

At the turn of the 13th century, after trying and failing to conquer the Holy Land, crusading Christians looked around for easier pickings. They looked towards the last unconquered piece of pagan real estate in Europe—the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea.
The ancient Chronicles of Henry of Livonia (1227) provides a rich, descriptive account of [...]

The story of a Latvian woman whose double-agent father defected to the United States, and of how she finally found her way back home.
By Benjamin Smith
On the morning the Iron Curtain rattled open for her, Ieva Lesinska was standing in a Marriott Hotel suite in Washington.
It was September 3, 1978, and Ms. Lesinska had just [...]