Latvian voters have rejected by a  three to one margin a referendum that proposed recognition of Russian as a national language in the country. Russia is the mother tongue of one-third of Latvia's 2.1 million residents. The referendum was launched as a protest gesture by the country's ethnic Russian minority who knew that it was foredoomed.

The Soviet Union annexed Latvia in 1940 (the official Soviet version is that the Latvians requested incorporation in the Soviet Union that magnanimously decided to accede to their application). The Soviet Union encouraged ethnic Russians to settle in Latvia, as it considered the Baltic countries to be politically unreliable.

Under the Soviet Union, ethnic Russians did not bother to learn the Latvian language because Russian was not only an official language but it was also the language of the party, government, the military and higher education.

The Soviet Union tried to foster the Russian language to assist assimilation. Russian was to be not simply a lingua franca, but also a ticket to occupational advancement.

Russian language schools were set up in the non-Russian republics, where ethnic Russians and members of other national minorities could study the entire curriculum in Russian. In terms of broadcasting, Russian language broadcasts, even within the Latvian Republic, dwarfed the hours devoted to Latvian broadcasting. In higher education, texts were available in Russian.

The idea was that given the competition over university acceptance, Latvian parents would prefer to send their children to the Russian language schools in the expectation that this would further their child's prospects for acceptance to prestige schools such as Moscow State University.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Latvia regained its independence and sought to reverse the language policy by making knowledge of Latvian a prerequisite of citizenship. As many Russian speakers either resisted or couldn't master Latvian at their age. the Russians were relegated to the status of permanent residents and denied citizenship. This takes a toll on their vocational options.

The Voice of Russia, toeing the Kremlin line as usual, still viewed the referendum as a moral victory as it helped unite the Russians in Latvia. Russia, from time to time, espouses the cause of ethnic Russians and in 1998, Boris Yeltsin cut off oil supplies to Latvia to protest their mistreatment.