The papers on the desks were not simply the work of deputies in Riga. On 25 August 1940, under Soviet occupation, the People’s Saeima unanimously adopted the Constitution of the Latvian SSR. Historian Heinrihs Strods, writing in Latvijas Vēstnesis, points to the uncomfortable detail: the draft had already been approved on 13 August by the Central Committee Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party in Moscow; the National Encyclopedia records the same 25 August date as part of Latvia’s forced administrative remaking after annexation.

In the summer of 1940, Latvia’s state institutions were remade according to the occupying power’s script: first military pressure and a puppet government, then “elections,” a request to join the USSR, and a Soviet constitution. The vote of 25 August shows how quickly legal language was used to cover the practical loss of sovereignty.