Excerpt: Sewing Independence

It was overcast when I stood on Bruno’s porch. After an exchange of emails he had invited me here so he could tell his story in person. I buzzed again while a large German Shepherd barked at me, pulling on the grubby white rope that tethered him to a woodshed. The door opened and there stood Bruno in jeans, a white shirt and a hunting vest. Its many pockets made him look prepared for anything. He shook my hand and smiled. His was a face that had loosened with age since the black-and-white photos from the Corner House had been taken; his jowls and eyebrows seemed liberated, free to be moulded by emotion. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said, then turned around, gesturing for me to follow him. Inside was dark, and we negotiated our way through a maze of stacked objects, up a flight of stairs and into a sunny attic. Bruno pointed me towards a couch covered in a blanket and sat opposite.

As he settled in I took a look around the room. There was a table alongside an ironing board also being used as a table, and a basket filled with shoes was sitting on the floor. Against the far wall was a bookcase and beside that a sheet had been thrown over something boxy and another cardboard box placed on top. This house had the clutter of an owner who could be seized by an idea at any minute, domesticity suspended until its execution was complete.

On the wall behind Bruno was a portrait of a younger him wearing a military green jumpsuit. He had been handsome and his cloth cap made him look like a Hollywood actor in a Second World War film. Inserted into the wooden frame of the portrait was a black-and-white photograph of Bruno, seemingly from the same period.  As these two younger Brunos looked on, in a slightly croaky voice, he began to tell his story.

Bruno was born into a period of incredible turmoil for the Baltic states and Eastern Europe. The Soviets had invaded the year before. In 1941, Bruno was born into a Latvia occupied by the Nazis, whose brutal regime lasted until 1944 when they were beaten back by the Red Army. Then the Soviets reoccupied the Baltic states, at which point they became part of the USSR.

Bruno recalled images from those early years; after re-occupation was a period of intense Russification. Newly arrived Russian emigrants without proper shoes or luggage huddled in train stations. His parents were forced to share their apartment with two Russian families. Police on the street were ordering people to speak in Russian. After this came the deportations.

   ‘I remember March 25, 1949. Under a red sun setting, there were horse carriages, one after the other, lots of people being moved, children crying and Russian soldiers with guns.’ Citizens from all three Baltic states were deported to collective farms in the frozen wastelands of Siberia as a means of eliminating nationalist sentiment. Almost any door could expect a knock. He was in Lithuania staying with relatives when he saw the people being moved. ‘I understood what was going on. I was told which window to jump out of and which neighbours to go to in case, but they never came.’

Bruno’s real understanding of Latvia as an occupied nation came when he was fifteen and he began reading his grandmother’s books. ‘I read about Latvia as a normal independent country. At school I had always learnt about the Latvian state as a bad idea. So there were discrepancies there. I tried talking to my parents but they just told me “Shush! You can’t do anything about it. It’s just the way it is.”’ While the books were technically legal, Bruno had to be careful to hide them from the Russian families that now lived in his apartment. ‘They were always wondering what we were saying and what we were reading.’

Bruno tried to talk with friends at his school. There was a small group he knew felt the same way. They even spoke about spreading leaflets but nothing happened, which was lucky because it later emerged that there was even an informer amongst his school friends. Years later, when Bruno was interrogated, things were repeated that only someone in that schoolyard circle could have known. Bruno realised that this group was all talk and if he was to succeed, whatever he was going to do, he had to act alone.

Bruno recalled all of this to me calmly: the deportation of his countrymen, his family being forced to live with strangers. It wasn’t until I asked him why he’d felt he needed to act that I saw a flash of the fire that got him into trouble. ‘It is important, Kurt, that you understand the difference between a dissident and a man who resists. Dissidents were in Moscow, in Leningrad. Vasily Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov. They are dissidents! It’s their government, their own state!’ His voice took on a singsong quality, as if reciting something. ‘But if there is an invader in your home. If he comes in, throws your family out and brings in his family. When you say “it’s very bad!” and complain, this is not good. But if you fight! When you want and try to make free your house!’ His English tripped but the meaning carried through as his raised voice filled the room with conviction.

Bruno joined a paramilitary sports group. Whatever he did, he decided it would require military training. After school he was conscripted into the Red Army, where he applied to become an officer. He studied in Moscow and his results were so good he was approached by the local Commissar and invited to join the party. ‘I couldn’t tell him to go to hell! I said “I am not ready yet! I have to think, I have to look about!”’ He said this in a mock serious tone, his eyes wide, looking around the room, re-enacting the moment in a literal way.

In Moscow, he saw the gigantic Soviet military machine first hand and understood that to resist it militarily was not possible. When time came for Bruno to swear an oath of allegiance to the Soviet Union (or ‘The Russian Empire’, as he called it) he told them he had changed his mind, that he no longer wanted to become an officer.

Back in Riga, Bruno enrolled into the Riga Civil Aviation Engineers Institute. The Soviet Union did not look kindly on people who did not join the party: he had dropped out of officer’s school and he should have kept quiet. ‘But the Russification was ten times worse there than at school!’ he said, palms upturned, arms wide, imploring. What else could he do?

Bruno’s engineering degree had a component of Soviet history. In a large hall, the lecturer was reciting Soviet dogma about the Siberian people and the way Caucasian people had been liberated by the Red Army when Bruno, unable to contain himself, stood up and asked ‘From what?’ The class froze.

‘From the Turkish,’ the lecturer replied.

As he recreated this moment for me, Bruno stood, his voice boomed out through the attic: ‘So it was worse under the Turkish than under Russia? And what is happening in Latvia?’ There seemed something hardwired about Bruno at that moment. As if contradictions between what he knew and what he’d been told had became so gross they boiled over inside him, resulting in outbursts that simply could not be contained. I admired him for that.

‘Everybody listened and looked,’ Bruno said, ‘and I answered my own question – “It’s Russification! It’s imperialist politics!” and the lecturer, who was a big Communist Party Boss, said “Yes, yes, it’s a hard question, but in this lesson we have no time! But after the lesson we will speak about it.”’ Bruno’s tone was ironically pensive. The lecturer was putting on a show. I could hardly believe that someone would make such a bold public spectacle of defiance during those years.

After the lesson the lecturer did not have to pretend to engage in legitimate debate. He immediately called the Party Head of the Institute who called Bruno into his office. ‘He did not play nicely!’ Bruno said, switching to Russian to impersonate the Party Head. ‘Do you not like it here?’ he was asked. The question an obvious threat and Bruno was able to keep quiet for a few months. ‘But when they explained how great the Soviet constitution was, I was not strong,’ he said with a sigh. ‘It was too much for me.’

When Bruno spoke out in class again, the lecturer shouted at him, his voice echoing throughout the lecture theatre: ‘Have you not read the Soviet Constitution? If your people do not want to be in the Soviet Union, they can leave!’ This was the official party line, but there was no way the Soviet Union would have allowed a Soviet brother to secede. ‘It was in this moment that I saw the tower and the flag. It was the moment that I understood what I must do. And that I must do it now. It would be a crime to wait!’’

When he was at middle school, Bruno would pass the Riga radio tower every day on his way home. It has since been demolished but for decades this hundred-metre steel-lattice structure skewered the sky, dominating the Riga skyline, towering at least three times taller than the next tallest building. To mark the occasion of Soviet public holidays, an experienced Alpinist was required to climb to the top to attach the flag of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was November when Bruno was shouted down in that lecture and the next holiday was December 5, ironically, the day of the Soviet Constitution. That day people would be looking up at the radio tower. Bruno had no time to lose.

The Latvian national flag was crimson with a thin, white horizontal stripe through the middle. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and Latvian independence, it has once again become the country’s flag, but during the Soviet Union it referenced a chapter of Latvian history that was taboo. Bruno went straight to one market to buy the crimson fabric and another to buy the white. Separate markets would prevent people from becoming suspicious.

For weeks whenever no-one was at home he sewed on a Singer machine, and he demonstrated for me now how he worked the pedal. When people were home he hid the fabric in a compartment underneath his writing desk. Slowly, its shape began to take form.

By December 4 it was ready. Bruno wrote a letter addressed to his father, his mother and his brother. It said that if he died, he wanted to be buried in the Brother’s Cemetery, together with soldiers from the Latvian War of Independence. When I asked Bruno how he felt, he replied: ‘Like Christ in the Garden’. When I asked whether he meant he felt that he was sacrificing himself, he emphatically replied: ‘No, I had a purpose I must fulfil.’

It was about three in the morning when Bruno left his father’s house, the flag folded in a backpack. The night was cloudy and very cold but not raining. Rain would be dangerous, as it would freeze to the steel tower making it slippery to climb. Bruno went to his mother’s house and got dressed into his Russian army jumpsuit. He kept the flag in a different location from his uniform. Working carefully, Bruno folded the flag one section at a time so it could be extracted with one hand, finishing with a string that he threaded through the buttonhole at the top of his suit so it could be easily grasped.

It was around four thirty when Bruno stepped out into the dark freezing morning, his feet crunching on the snow as he marched through the sleeping city. The tower is situated in a large square beside a line of stout apartment blocks. The square was dark aside from the tower, which was lit from below and surrounded by a fence about three metres high. Bruno was about to begin scaling the fence when he suddenly sensed someone watching him. It would have looked suspicious to gaze around, but by some freak chance there was a broom directly in front of him. Bruno can only explain its presence as due to holiday the next day, for which the streets had to be cleaned. He picked the broom up and began to sweep, slowly manoeuvring around to where he thought the person must be watching him. It began to rain softly. As he swept he glanced up and in the shadows was man in a leather jacket, the glow of a cigarette burning in the gloom. When the man finished and left, Bruno threw the broom down and began to climb the fence.

Bruno climbed to the top of the fence, balanced there and then leapt across, through the rain and the glare from lights shining upward. He caught a crossbeam. ‘It was very slippery. I was well trained then, I was not like this!’ he said now as he patted his belly. I glanced past him to the portrait on the wall of the younger man in his jumpsuit.

Up, through the centre of the tower, Bruno climbed the narrow ladder. As Riga began to gather beneath him, he worried that his gloves would get wet and freeze solid, make it impossible to grip the ladder. ‘The moon was under the cloud and it was very dark and very slippery and I had to make like this,’ he said, blowing on his fingers.

Higher and higher he climbed. The four legs of the old Riga radio tower converged quickly and then the tower continued for a long time as a single mast. At this point, Bruno had to manoeuvre to another ladder that ran along the outside of the building, attached to the central mast. Lattice towers such as this are an illusion of mass. The same way that a skeleton can appear as a real person, these towers appear to have solid form. It is only when you get up close that the illusion shatters and you realise they mostly consist of air. Listening to Bruno describe this realisation, I felt the cold fear for myself; this moment of illusion shattering occurred as Bruno moved to the outside of the tower. He was no longer surrounded by the illusion of solidity, but found himself clinging to a ladder in the freezing cold, above the clouds of fog and smoke that sailed between him and early morning Riga.

When he finally reached the top of the ladder, Bruno could hear a flag flapping in the wind, but above him he could see nothing but darkness. His belt was long enough that he could use it to lash himself to the mast. Now he could use both hands. Reaching upwards, into the void, he grasped air once, and again. Eventually he managed to grab hold of a pulley. From his pocket he pulled out his knife and cut down the flag of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Bruno didn’t feel he could just hurl it into the dark city: he did not know where it would land, so he rolled it up and stuffed it away in his suit. Then he pulled the string from his buttonhole and attached it to the end of the rope he had just cut. Piece by piece, he extracted the Latvian flag from inside his jumpsuit. Once it was attached, he waited. It hung limp for a moment, until it was taken by the wind to bellow out over Riga.

‘I felt very proud and very happy at this moment. Before this I had only seen the flag in books. And there it was in front of my eyes. I can’t remember how long I stayed up there. Perhaps half an hour or fifteen minutes.’ His eyes were gleaming when he said it.

But eventually his survival instincts kicked in. ‘Perhaps it might be possible to make it out alive.’ He began to climb down, and as he got lower he saw policemen standing at the base. One had his gun drawn and pointed to a pot on the ground where he wanted Bruno to jump. As soon as he hit the cobblestones they set on him: beat him then dragged him into the police station. He was interviewed, first by the police, and then two other men came into the interview room. One chastised the policemen for beating Bruno up, and ordered them to get him some water. Bruno could not see them properly through the blood in his eyes, but he could tell they wore leather jackets, the typical uniform of the KGB. They were polite and the first people to speak to him in Latvian. They wanted to know with whom he was working. ‘With us you will tell everything,’ they said.

Bruno was taken to the Corner House where he spent eight months imprisoned in those dank subterranean cells I had seen. In the beginning his time was spent in solitary: Bruno wasn’t allowed to sleep, the light was constantly kept on. ‘I was being marinated,’ he said.

Then they tried putting him with another prisoner who was clearly a stool pigeon. When they were sure he was working alone and he had no-one else to give up, he was tried in a closed court, the Soviet authorities afraid to reveal a spark of Latvian independence to the broader public.

Bruno was then sentenced to seven years’ labour in a gulag in Mordovia, surrounded by a swamp. He did not recount this with any bitterness. ‘I was alive!’ he said simply. At this stage of his story, Bruno reached up behind him and took the portrait off the wall. ‘This was done by a Ukrainian inside. His name was Dozhinsky. It cost me two packs of Indian Tea,’ he said as he looked at the portrait of a younger him. ‘The photo is also from the gulag. It was done by a man with a camera smuggled in his wooden leg.’

After he was released from the gulag, Bruno’s crime followed him everywhere and he could not find work. The director of the Natural History Museum, a friend of the family, took a risk and hired him. Bruno tried to enrol in the Art Academy but they would not accept him. An old secretary secretly showed Bruno his card, which had the stain of someone convicted of political crimes. She whispered that he would never get let in here, but that the state museum in Tartu, Estonia, would hire him. He worked there until 1987, but when Bruno refused to join the Party again, he was fired from this job. He went to a small school where, ironically, he taught history. ‘I had to teach Soviet history, but I never lied!’ he said.

‘I have to show you something!’ said Bruno, he pulled out a plastic bag and from the bag he retrieved a Latvian flag. It had been presented to him by the Museum of Occupation in 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of his tower climb. This flag was the same size as the one that Bruno put on the radio tower; they knew because the dimensions were recorded in public KGB files. I helped Bruno unfold the red-and-white material. It grew larger and larger, taking up the entire room, and I had to raise my hands nearly to the ceiling to stretch it out. ‘I wanted it to be big because it was so high up,’ he said by way of explanation.

I was amazed that Bruno could have sewed such a large design in secret and then extracted it while lashed a hundred metres up to a single mast. It was a struggle to fit it into a photo. In the white section people had written wishes: ‘Thank you, Bruno, you are the bravest Latvian I know’ and ‘Long Live Latvia!’