The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, in the centre of the country's capital, Riga, was attacked with a Molotov cocktail overnight on 28 February.
The museum posted on its Facebook page on Wednesday that “a window in the director's office was broken” and “a lit bottle of incendiary mixture” was thrown into the building.
“This is not only an attack on the museum, but also on the foundations of the Latvian state, the constitution and the truth,” the post stated. Photos showed broken glass, twisted debris and soot all over the office of the director Solvita Vība, who told Public Broadcasting of Latvia (LSM) that it was likely a “planned attack on the Occupation Museum,” but that it would keep functioning.
Latvia's president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, echoed the post's sentiments, writing on X: “The attack on the Museum of Occupation is an attack on the Latvian state, the security and law enforcement authorities must do everything to quickly discover this crime and severely punish the perpetrators.”
Officials have not revealed who was behind the attack, but local media reported today that a suspect has been detained. The attack is not the first against the museum, which was founded in 1993 to “remember what happened to Latvia, to its people and land during the Soviet and German National Socialist regimes from 1940 to 1991.” In April last year, the exterior of the building was smashed and criminal charges were pursued for "the deliberate destruction or damage of property".
The museum is in a Soviet Modernist building originally built in 1971 to honour Latvian fighters who supported Vladimir Lenin during the Bolshevik Revolution. A redesign by the Latvian-American architect Gunnar Birkerts was unveiled in 2018. In a permanent exhibition, the museum documents the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which it calls on its website, "the conspiracy of the communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany". The exhibition was updated in 2022 by Riga’s H2E Design Studio.
A second display is located in an art nouveau building that used to house the Latvian headquarters of the Soviet KGB.
The museum has been increasingly targeted in the past year. In January 2023, Glorija Grevcova, then a member of the Latvian parliament, accused the museum in a viral TikTok video of presenting a “fictional story”. Renārs Briedis, a lawyer in Riga, has sued the museum on similar grounds.