'I Grew Up In the Blockhouse' is an interactive archive that asks you to share your story or impression of life in Soviet blockhouses.

During Soviet times, the Latvian population grew rapidly due to an influx of migrant workers from across the Soviet Union, particularly from Russia. Today, about one-third of Latvia’s inhabitants are native Russian speakers. Yet for decades, a social and political divide has persisted between Latvian and Russian-speaking communities. Finding common ground between these groups is crucial—especially now, in light of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has further strained interethnic relations and raised difficult questions about shared history and identity.

The houses themselves were positioned as a tool to cultivate communism according to Soviet ideology. From the 1950s until the 1980s, blockhouses were constructed following very similar architectural guidelines, which affected the flat plan, the shared space around the buildings, and the infrastructure. Therefore, people all around the Soviet Union, no matter their nationality or their location, were exposed to the same living experiences that remain nowadays as well. Regardless of nationality or region, people across the Soviet Union lived in similar conditions. And even if it was a short-lived experience, people still tend to carry the shared memories of things that define those spaces: knowing your neighbor’s music taste, sensing a mixed smell of dinner and cologne in the stairway, and encountering potato sellers at the doors.

Today, despite political tensions and historical wounds, we still live side by side. But somewhere along the way, we have forgotten the ordinary, human things that once connected us. This archive aims to recover and reflect on those shared moments—not to romanticize the past, but to foster dialogue across post-Soviet communities.

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