The Daugavgriva fortress

Back when Moscow was preparing for the Summer Olympics, one important issue was where the sailing competitions would be held. Rīga was initially chosen because the Bay of Rīga is perfect for sailing, and the city is old and beautiful, so it would not cause any embarrassment. Some people remember and others have read on the Internet that Rīga supposedly waived this great honour, and that’s why the competition was moved to a suburb of Tallinn. The Estonians received huge financing and built a new and modern sailing and leisure complex which lots of Latvians visited after the Olympics were over. Now, however, we are aware of an interesting nuance – we now know why Rīga waived the honour. Bureaucracy was a slow process back in Soviet times, because the apparatus was fairly enormous and weighty. While the issue was being discussed, someone decided that because of the Olympics, a new highway had to be built to connect the Pārdaugava region of Rīga to Bolderāja and Daugavgrīva. It was to have four lanes, and construction began. If we head from Pārdaugava to Daugavgrīva today, we find that on the left side of the highway, near the place where the runway of the old Spilve airport used to be, there is a flat area approximately one kilometre long which seemingly doubles the width of the road. The area is covered with grass, bushes and even a few small trees, and obviously that is where the road was supposed to be. Today the remains can be seen almost up to the turn toward Krēmeri. But why did the process stop? Why was everything moved to Estonia? It was the military which put the kibosh on the project. Bolderāja was the site of a repair plant for the Baltic fleet, and it was discovered in the late 1980s that it repaired not just Soviet submarines, but also Iraqi ones – Saddam Hussein at that time was a friend of the USSR. Libyan naval personnel were trained at a training base in Bolderāja. Right alongside it is Mangaļsala island, where there were special antennae used to listen in on the conversations of people in NATO aircraft above the Baltic Sea. It may be that there were other nearby things which the Soviet military wanted to keep secret. We must remember that foreign yachts could not easily sail to Latvia at that time, because they would not have been able to pass through the Irbe narrows. Clearly, the Russian military did not want to unveil the secrets that were hidden in Bolderāja and at the mouth of the Daugava River. Here’s another interesting fact: Before World War II, the location where the submarines of regimes friendly to the Soviet Union were repaired, the independent Latvian state had a shipbuilding plant called Vairogs. The decision to turn it over to the Soviet Navy was taken in September 1940 by none other than Vilis Lācis, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Latvian SSR. Of course, he did not do so on the basis of his own initiative – he did it because of a decision taken by the relevant Soviet institutions.