Isaiah Berlin Day in Riga

Sir Isaiah Berlin died on November 5, 1997. Since 2009, the centenary of his birth, an annual Isaiah Berlin Day has been held in Riga, the city of his birth. Each one features a keynote lecture and other festive events.

Riga, the capital of Latvia, is a beautiful city with a terrible history. Caught between Hitler and Stalin, Latvia lost one third (550,000) of its pre-war population in ten years, 1939-49. Its Jews were killed by the Nazis: some 70,000. Only 1500 survived. Tens of thousands of Latvians were deported to the Soviet Union, many of them to the Gulag, between 1940-1 and, again, after 1945, where they lived in indescribable conditions. Thousands more were killed outright. The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, meaning the Soviet Occupation, is one of the most moving museums in eastern Europe.

The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga.

There is, of course, another, very different, side to Riga. It is one of the jewels of the Baltic. Wagner conducted there, Eisenstein was born there, his father was an architect who built beautiful art nouveau apartments, including the one where Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909. In 2009, the centenary of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s birth, a conference was held in Riga, commemorating his life and works. Nearly every year since there has been an annual conference – sponsored by the Soros Foundation — on themes drawn from Berlin’s work on liberalism and pluralism. Past speakers have included Timothy Garton Ash, Anne Applebaum, Ian Buruma and Michael Ignatieff.

In 2009 the centenary celebration featured an inaugural Berlin Lecture by Timothy Garton Ash on “Isaiah Berlin, Europe and Diversity”. Other speakers included Berlin’s longtime editor, Henry Hardy, then at Wolfson College, Oxford, the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit, and the writers Ian Buruma, Justin Cartwright and Aryeh Neier.

Since then, keynote speakers have included Anne Applebaum on “The New Authoritarianism”; Ian Buruma on “The Pleasures of Liberalism”; Henry Hardy on “‘My Name is Isaiah Berlin and I Come from Riga’” and later on “Isaiah Berlin on Human Nature”; Berlin’s biographer Michael Ignatieff on “Isaiah Berlin, the Soviet Union and the Captive Nations”; John Gray on “Isaiah Berlin and the Meaning of Freedom”; the then President of Estonia, Anatoly Naiman, on Berlin’s famous meetings with Anna Akhmatova; Timothy Snyder on ”The New Politics of Unfreedom”; Stalin’s biographer, Stephen Kotkin, the Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan and the Israeli academic and politician Yuli Tamir.

View from the Tower of St. Peter’s Church to the Dome Church, Riga, Latvia

On 9 October this year, the keynote address was given by Edward Luce, US National Editor of The Financial Times on “Brzezinski and the revenge of geopolitics”.

Berlin was born in Riga in 1909. In his superb biography of Berlin (first published in 1998, with a revised edition published in 2023), Michael Ignatieff writes of Berlin’s early childhood in Riga: “The  first six years of his life were spent in the apartment on Albertstrasse. His Latvian governess would take him out … down the street to the public gardens,, grandly called the Esplanade, where ancient Crimean veterans sunned themselves and relived Inkerman and Sebastopol.” Tsarist Riga was a curious social mix of Baltic barons, German merchants, Jewish merchants, traders and professional people.

Berlin came from a German-speaking Jewish family. His father, Mendel, was the grandson of a rabbi, who devoted his waking hours to the study of holy books. Berlin’s mother was a Volshonok who grew up in an observant family on the Riga ghetto. But as Ignatieff points out, “Both Isaiah’s maternal great-grandmother and his adoptive paternal great-grandmother” were descendants from one of the most distinguished Hasidic families. The Berlins ”took family holidays at the Baltic resorts and winter cures  at the German spas”.

In 1916 the family moved to Petrograd, where the young Isaiah witnessed the two Russian Revolutions. They returned to Riga in 1920 and early in 1921 they left for England.  “[H]e had his first meal in England,” writes Ignatieff, “a resolutely non-kosher plate of bacon and eggs. After breakfast, Isaiah got up, went over to the piano in the sitting room and, with one hand, picked out ‘God Save the King’.”

The Angliyskaya Embankment in Saint Petersburg, where Berlin lived as a child during the Russian Revolutions

What about Riga? “Longing, nostalgia?” asks Ignatieff. “He was always peremptory on the subject of longings: ‘None. New life. I began afresh.’” He became, in Perry Anderson’s phrase, “a White émigré”. “His was a version of Englishness,” writes Ignatieff, “frozen  in the moment when he first encountered it in the 1920s: the England of Kipling, King George V, GK Chesterton, the gold standard, empire and victory.”

Riga reappears briefly in Ignatieff’s biography during the Holocaust. “In November and December 1941 the Jews of Riga were rounded up by Latvian Fascists and German police and forced to walk along the railway line to sandy pits in Rumb ula forest on the outskirts of the city, where they were shot, and their bodies thrown into mass graves. The Volshonoks and Berlins of Riga – the entirety of Isaiah’s family connections in the city – were among some 25,000 Jews who perished in this manner. He was not to learn of their fate until the end of the war.” Walking through Rumbula Forest today, it is impossible not to think of the freezing conditions as the Jews were marched there from Riga that winter.

Damaged House of the Blackheads and St. Peter’s Church during World War II

Interestingly, writes Ignatieff, “[i]t was Stalin’s crimes, not Hitler’s, that roused his most intense imaginative response.” Berlin’s visits to Moscow and Leningrad immediately after the war, his encounters with the writers Boris Pasternak and especially Anna Akhmatova, and later with the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, changed his life.

He became one of the great liberal political philosophers. This is why so many of the keynote speeches to mark Isaiah Berlin Day in Riga since 2009 have been about liberalism, pluralism and freedom. What is striking, especially in the current era, is that none of them have been about the Holocaust, antisemitism or Jewish history. Berlin, I suspect, would not have wanted it any other way.

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