Soviet-Occupied Latvia – Where the Sun of Socialism was Always Setting

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 14 – When Moscow occupied Latvia in 1940, among the new regime’s first steps was to promulgate a coat of arms for the newly minted Soviet republic. Being consistent with all but two other republics (Armenia and Georgia), it featured the sun – but with a major variation that led to a joke that turned out to be true.

            The Soviets wanted the sun to be rising but the Latvian coat of arms showed it half out of the sea. The only sea Latvia abuts, of course, is the Baltic; and that means the sun as shown was setting not rising. For half a century, Latvians joked that “Latvia was the republic of the setting sun” (russian7.ru/post/kakuyu-oshibku-dopustil-avtor-gerba-lat/).

            Only in 1990, when Latvia was on the way to recovering its de facto independence was the coat of arms changed. It too featured the sun but not half submerged by the sea but over land, an arrangement that suggested that Latvia was on the rise rather than in decline, according to heraldic principles.

The Soviet-era Latvian coat of arms was designed by prominent Riga artist Artur Apinis also contained another variation from the Moscow standard which some may have seen as having an additional message. In all other Soviet coats of arms, the hammer was always shown over the sickle but on the Latvian one, the reverse was true.

But the Soviets had problems not just with the Latvian coat of arms but with the original coat of arms for the country as a whole. As designed by Ivan Dubasov, a native Muscovite, the sickle was shown with a handle that got smaller away from the blade, an arrangement making it impossible to hold and that no one who had ever used a sickle would make.

That mistake, which was repeated on Soviet coinage in the 1920s and 1930s, was finally corrected in 1937.