Hat in hand, not fist raised: that is how Kārlis Ulmanis returned to Riga’s cityscape on 22 July 2003. At the corner of Krišjāņa Valdemāra Street and Raiņa Boulevard, his monument was unveiled that day; Latvijas Vēstnesis recorded the officials present – Ingrīda Ūdre, Einars Repše, and Guntis Ulmanis. The date was not accidental. On 22 July 1940, Soviet authorities took the former president out of Latvia onto a road of imprisonment from which he never returned.

Kārlis Ulmanis remains one of the most contested Latvian figures of the twentieth century – a founder of the state and long-serving head of government, but also the leader of the authoritarian coup of 1934. The monument’s unveiling in 2003 came as restored Latvia was actively rethinking how to commemorate the prewar republic and the political generation cut off by occupation.