TEA WITH THE IRON LADY

Rafael Behr dines with Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga.

It’s a story that might have been written by Disney: A small girl flees her war-torn homeland, then returns decades later to become president. That unlikely fairy tale came true in 1999 when Vaira Vike-Freiberga, now 64, was sworn in as Latvia’s president. She was just seven when her family fled the Soviet invasion in the closing days of World War II. Their journey from Latvia was treacherous; some ships taking the same route were torpedoed and sunk. After living in disease-infested refugee camps in Germany, they eventually settled in Canada, where Vike-Freiberga’s first job was as a bank teller. She later became a respected psychology professor at Montreal University.

After retiring in 1997, she boarded a plane and returned to Latvia to head the Latvian Institute. A year later, she’d been drafted in as a dark-horse candidate for president; shocking observers, she won. Some doubted the red-headed woman who had no political experience and who spent almost 55 years outside Latvia could make it in the male-dominated world of Latvian politics. But she’s now heralded as Latvia’s most popular and arguably most competent leader. She’s up for reelection in 2003.

Latvians say Vike-Freiberga’s forte has been in foreign affairs, with her keen PR sense and language skills (in addition to Latvian, she’s fluent in French, English, Spanish and German). She also has the image of being honest and doesn’t seem beholden to any cliques or parties. Some compare her to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—“the Iron Lady”—saying she has Thatcher’s tough-mindedness and knack for biting one-liners.
Rafael Behr recently interviewed Vike-Freiberga over lunch at her castle office.

An immaculately liveried young officer, a navy-clad rectangle of shiny buttons and trimmings, ceremonially opens the door and beats a vigorous retreat to reveal Vaira Vike-Freiberga: refugee, academic, Cold War Warrior and president of Latvia.
The wood-paneled chamber in the president’s official residence is the venue for ‘afternoon tea.’ Cordial greetings are exchanged and we settle in behind an array of exotic-looking canapés and pastries. After the ceremonial entrance, the august setting—a 14th century Riga Castle—almost dissolves into informality. That is, until the rectangle executes a tea-pouring maneuver with military precision and a grandfather clock in the corner chimes with cartoon-gothic portentousness.

So does the president of Latvia get to have lunch out? “I’m allowed, but let’s say that it makes a bit of a fuss when I do, so I try and avoid it,” she says. She deploys a squadron of teeth in an ironic smile, under covering fire from steely serious eyes.

The hugely popular president can’t make impromptu restaurant appearances now, but she was barely known in Latvia before she became president in 1999. She lived most of her life in Canada, part of a die-hard Latvian diaspora that guarded the idea of a free homeland for the five decades of Soviet rule that followed after Stalin and Hitler’s notorious division of East Europe in 1939. The ensuing to-ing and fro-ing of armies across the Baltics is a footnote to most people’s recollection of World War II, but the defining national catastrophe for Latvia.

The return after a generation in exile was the key to Vike-Freiberga’s presidential success. Once the Soviet Union crumbled the race was on in the Baltics to rejoin the West, and the émigrés knew a thing or two about being Western. For one thing, I notice, in violation of Eastern-European norms, Vike-Freiberga drinks her tea with milk.

She grew up in the West, fleeing the Red Army for Germany in 1944, aged seven. “I remember every step,” the stern eyes widen with irresistible narrative impulse of the Ancient Mariner. “We were put in a camp that was a huge barrack with snow seeping in and people just lined up in three-tier wooden bunks, no warm food. And then we were put in an unheated train, and it happened to be a cold wave. It was January and it went down to minus 35 and we traveled for 6 days.”

The Third Reich was by then in its death throes. One especially vivid memory is of an allied air raid, and a hysterical man whose wife is trapped under rubble, but whose neighbors refuse to dig her out before the all clear has sounded. And other traumas: the loss of a six-month old sister to pneumonia; the sight of a girl, who had been gang-raped and mutilated by Soviet soldiers, who wouldn’t nurse her newborn baby.

Finally the humiliating queue for a new country at the UN refugee agencies: “We had these commissions coming around from all across the world, sort of like looking over cattle or slaves at a market, saying we need cotton pickers in Mississippi and coffee pickers in Brazil and quarry workers in Australia…wonderful offers!” The ironic smile is back, and the story lightens as it moves to Morocco, where Vike-Freiberga’s parents settled. Technical work in Casablanca was more appealing than hewing stones.

I have followed the president’s choice of delicacy from the spread before us, a sculpted heap of smoked salmon, disguised with a rich egg-yoke sauce. The salmon is good, we agree. “I don’t get this every day. That’s in your honor,” she reminds me, lest I suspect decadence. The caterer is a young Latvian, a third generation émigré who also hastened back to the old country when independence came.

The émigré community is close. Vike-Freiberga’s family joined the French-flight from newly independent Morocco in 1954 and settled in Toronto, an emerging center for the Latvian diaspora. “By that time the ‘when’ was becoming an ‘if’ Latvia ever became independent,” says the president. With the Soviet Union at the height of its powers the emphasis among émigrés shifted to resisting the New World melting pot and passing the torch of Latvianness from generation to generation.

“It was a constant. You are constantly an outsider,” Vike-Freiberga raises her voice over the ominous clock. She married a fellow exile, and made an academic career of studying Latvian identity. She also became active in organizing summer camps and conferences. Worldwide congresses of young Latvians for full immersion in the endangered language and culture, “brain-washing if you like.” The ironic smile is back, this time breaking into a laugh.

Even in the final stages of the Cold War, Latvians were pessimistic about the prospects of return. Mikhail Gorbachev, the darling of the West, was especially reviled for authorizing a violent crackdown on the Baltic independence movements, for fear that it would unravel the whole Union. “I suppose he was right,” said Vike Freiberga, who clearly savors the moral victory. “We did dismantle the Soviet Union by stepping out of it.”

With independence restored in 1991, a steady tide of second and third generation Latvians poured into the country, to reclaim property seized by the Soviet Union and to lend their expertise in rebuilding the country. In 1999 Vike-Freiberga, by then a seasoned ambassador for Latvia-in-exile, triumphed as a non-partisan candidate when parliament was deadlocked in its choice of a head of state.

Since then the job has consisted by and large of trumpeting Latvia’s progress in Western integration abroad and slapping a presidential veto on any legislation at home that threatens the cherished goals of EU and NATO membership. Vike-Freiberga has lobbied foreign heads of state and disciplined domestic politicians with the iron capitalist will of Margaret Thatcher and the refugee-made-good vigor of Madeleine Albright.

Membership of the North Atlantic Alliance, through which Latvia hopes to expiate the ghost of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that divided Europe, is now in sight. Later this year NATO countries meet in Prague to decide who will be asked to join. An invitation for Latvia, says the president, would be a starting point for new neighborly relations with Russia. It worked, she says for the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians.

Vladimir Putin, she observes, has even been invited on an official visit to the Czech Republic in November—just when NATO countries meet there to decide on enlargement: “If Mr. Putin happened to be in Prague at the time, it could be that the NATO alliance will invite him…to witness the invitation of the Baltic states into NATO, I think it would be rather interesting,” she says, again with the trademark smile. “But that’s a hypothetical scenario.”

Time only for a short post-mortem on the unfinished feast, concluding unanimously that eating and interviewing are a tricky combination. Also a brief lament on the torments of official functions where lavish buffets have to be foregone for fear of being snapped by a Latvian paparazzo while unpresidentially scoffing a profiterole. Then the clock announces solemnly that teatime is over.

Rafael Behr is a Riga-based journalist for The Financial Times. This article first appeared in The Financial Times in April; it was republished in a recent CITY PAPER with The Financial Times’ kind permission.