Hey, hey hey! I was born in 1988 in Latvian SSR. My parents were born in Latvian SSR in 1950's. I speak fluently in 4 languages. I did choose to go through naturalisation just to get EU citizenship and move to the UK. You are having a laugh, all Latvian-latvians have been born in the Latvian SSR as well. There are just a couple of *really* old people who had Latvian citizenship of the pre-USSR era. Anyone back to the topic - latvian languages + history was a piece of cake. What I don't understand is my ministry of internal defence was checking my record for almost 9 months? (I've started the process in December 2005 (exams, test etc) and then received my passport on 31st of August 2006......)

In the current job market many latvians of my age do not speak Russian and Latvian fluently. All the russians from russian schools in latvia do speak both languages. In the end of the day languages open doors and job opportunities. Don't blame latvians for not knowing a language spoken by ~285 million people, the government has chosen such policy instead of caring more about country's economy.

The funniest thing though is that Latvia sold itself in a form of morgages supplied by Swedish banks - both morgage to financing building the houses and morgages for people to buy those houses. Altogether it is a loss-loss situation for Latvia, since citizens will be financing Swebank, SEB, Nordea etc for the next 50 years or so....

There is sufficient amount of people who speak more than 2 languages to support dialogue across the whole population...... Unfortunately there are still significant amount of people on both sides who old-fashionate and somehow believe that the other nationality is lazy, wasn't born here, didn't vote for independance and is too dumb to learn the other language...... ABSURD!!!!

I don't care. I'd rather go on and live a happy life elsewhere. Fortunatly, I sometimes meet people from Slovakia, East Germany, etc. who do understand what it is like to be always either immigrant or 1st generation immigrant. I do know that I've been European at least for the past 5 generations.