A Study on Nationality and Citizenship of the Russians in Latvia

The majority of the foreign population in Latvia is Russian ethnic origin. During the Soviet era, these Soviet citizens particular Russian ethnics had settled as internal migrants. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they changed their status to be the “international migrants.” My first travel to Latvia was in 2005, I was unexpected to see one country two standards. At that time, I realized that in order to understand the atmosphere between Russian and Latvian ethnics, there was a need to learn from daily news, life information, religions, cultures and languages of these two cultures. It is also useful to study in as parallel. According to the Council of Europe the Parliamentary Assembly working Papers of 2008 indicated that there are 432,896 people were non-citizens or without any citizenship at all. Although the structure of USSR was disappeared for many decades, however, the shadow of this structure is still influenced the atmosphere of Russia and its neighbor countries.