On 23 September 2020, Miķelis Valters finally returned to Latvian soil: a memorial ceremony was held in Riga Castle, after which the remains of the first interior minister, diplomat, and early articulator of the idea of Latvian statehood were solemnly reinterred in Riga’s First Forest Cemetery. The road had been long – from a Liepāja dockworker’s family to the demand for a sovereign Latvia voiced in the Swiss-based Proletāriets, from diplomatic service in Europe to the cemetery in Nice, where he had rested since 1968.

Miķelis Valters was one of the first Latvian political thinkers to formulate the idea of an independent Latvia clearly before 1918. His reinterment in 2020 was not only a private return to the homeland, but also an act of state remembrance toward a man whose ideas preceded the founding of the Republic of Latvia.