Riga - Loudspeakers blared Soviet-era music and thousands, young and old, trooped to a war monument as Russians in the Baltic nation of Latvia honoured Red Army soldiers who fell in World War II. For most Latvians, it was an ordinary Friday in a country freed from Soviet occupation in 1991. But for most of the Russian minority in the Baltics, Victory Day still carries emotional weight.
"I don't want my daughter to forget sacrifices her great- grandfather made fighting for his fatherland," says a woman identified as Irina, who brought along her five-year-old daughter, Sveta.
Little Sveta - a diminutive of the Russian name Svetlana - carried a bouquet of red tulips to lay at the monument, constructed in 1985.
Many veterans also carried bouquets as the crowd flooded the square in Riga under the watchful eye of police.
Fireworks were scheduled for the evening, capping the May 9 celebrations of the Red Army's role in defeating Nazi Germany in 1945.
"This holiday for me is about peace. I suffered through a massive bombing when my father and I were evacuated from our home town. I don't want anything like that to be repeated," says Viktor Shelyaev, a computer science teacher, who came to the monument.
Last century, the Baltics were pawns in the big game between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Torn by the war and without their own countries, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians fought either on both sides of the front, or formed their own guerrilla units.
As a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, the Baltics changed hands from Stalin to Hitler then to Stalin again in 1944.
Soviet troops rolled through the Baltics fighting the German armies and stayed until the Baltics declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
In Lithuania's capital, Vilnius, vandals overnight splashed red paint on a Soviet-era statue on a bridge over the river Nemunas.
In Estonia, some 1,000 Russians laid flowers at a military cemetery that is the new home for the Bronze Soldier, a Soviet-era monument relocated from the Tallinn city centre last year.
Some Russians laid flowers at the Tonismagi hill where the monument used to stand until April 2007.
Estonia's decision to relocate the monument prompted riots by local Russians and clashes with police. Russians view the monument as a symbol of their victory over Nazism, while Estonians consider it a reminder of the 50 years of the Soviet occupation after the war.
V-E Day, or Victory in Europe Day, was celebrated in the Soviet Union on May 9 as the Nazi Germany protocol of surrender came into force at 11 pm European time on May 8, 1945, which was already May 9 in Moscow.
Neither day is an official holiday in the Baltics.
A day earlier, high-ranking Latvian officials laid wreaths at a military cemetery, making a subdued gesture of commemorating lives of soldiers who died during the war that killed millions of people throughout Europe.
