The Corner House in Riga: Former KGB Headquarters and Museum of the Occupation of Latvia

An ordinary house on a busy street

The Corner House stands at Brīvības iela 61, on the corner of Stabu iela, on one of the long, busy main streets that run out of central Riga to the north-east. The street has changed its name many times over the years, from Alexander Street to Freedom Street, to Lenin Street under the Soviets, and today it is Brīvības iela again, the Street of Freedom. The Latvian architect Aleksandrs Vanags designed the building, and it was built between 1910 and 1912 in an elegant Art Nouveau style, six storeys and around 8,500 square metres around a large inner courtyard. For its first decades it was an ordinary, perfectly respectable address: apartments, a pharmacy, a bookshop, grocery stores, a music school, a library. In the years of the first Latvian republic the state used it too, among others the Ministry of the Interior through the 1920s and 1930s.

Latvians simply call it the Stūra māja, the house on the corner. The plain nickname became a euphemism for something everyone understood and no one wanted to name. That is what makes the place so unsettling: a house like any other, on a street full of life, turned into the centre of a machine built to intimidate a nation's own citizens.

Three occupations in five years

To follow what happened here, it helps to hold the timeline. In the space of five years Latvia, independent since 1918, was occupied three times. In June 1940 the Soviet Union marched in and annexed the country. In July 1941 Nazi Germany drove the Soviets out and occupied Latvia in turn, until 1944. Then the Red Army returned under Stalin, and the second Soviet occupation lasted until independence was finally restored in 1991.

Both the Soviet and the Nazi regimes were brutal for Latvia, each in its own way. This house, though, tells the Soviet part of the story: it was the headquarters of the Soviet secret police during the first occupation and again, for almost half a century, during the second.

1940 to 1941: the first Soviet occupation

In June 1940 the Soviet Union occupied Latvia. Within weeks the NKVD, the Soviet secret police that Latvians called the Cheka and that later became the KGB, took over the Corner House. Floors of flats became offices, and forty-four cells were built in, ten of them in the cellar. They were often overcrowded.

This first year is remembered in Latvia as the Baigais gads, the Year of Terror. In that time more than 35,000 people in Latvia were arrested, shot or deported.

How the apparatus worked

The building was engineered for control. Prisoners were driven in through the courtyard gateway in closed vans, out of sight of the street. A special lift with a lockable compartment then carried them upstairs; the staircases and windows were lined with wire mesh so no one could jump. Interrogations happened in a windowless room on the ground floor: a single desk, a truncheon on it, and a mirror that hid an observation chamber behind the wall. In the hallway stood a wooden box where ordinary people dropped written denunciations of their neighbours and colleagues. Fear was not only inflicted here, it was collected here.

In the small courtyard a narrow exercise pen survives, its top sealed with iron grilles so nothing could be thrown in or out. Visitors call it the tiger cage.

The execution room

During that first Soviet year, prisoners were shot inside the building itself. In the execution room of the Corner House the Soviet secret police killed up to nearly two hundred people between January and June 1941; the historian Inese Dreimane, working for the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, puts the figure at 188. A panel in the room names thirty of them. When the Germans arrived in July 1941 they found around 240 spent cartridges and some 94 bullet marks in the room. Those bullet holes are still in the wooden panelling, each one now marked, and in one corner there is a drain in the floor. Outside, a truck was left running so the noise of its engine would cover the gunshots, then the bodies were loaded into it and driven away. After the Soviets returned in 1944 the shootings no longer took place mainly in the house, so the execution room belongs above all to this first year.

The deportation of 14 June 1941

The Year of Terror ended with its largest crime. On the night of 13 to 14 June 1941, 15,424 people were deported from Latvia to Siberia, whole families, including more than 3,700 children under sixteen. The target was deliberately the backbone of the country: its teachers, officers, officials and professionals. Of those taken that year, around 40 percent, roughly 6,000 people, died in exile, on the journey or by execution.

1941 to 1944: the Nazi occupation

In July 1941 German forces drove the Soviets out and occupied Latvia. When they entered the Corner House they found the bodies of prisoners the retreating Soviets had shot, and used the discovery for propaganda. The Nazi-appointed Latvian self-administration and a collaborationist youth group took over rooms in the building.

The German occupation was its own catastrophe for Latvia, even though its worst crimes did not take place in this house. Within months almost the entire Jewish community of Latvia was murdered, around 70,000 people. In the Rumbula forest on the edge of Riga, some 25,000 Jews were shot over two days in late 1941, one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust before the death camps. German units carried it out, helped by local collaborators. We name it here so the period is not glossed over: these were two totalitarian occupations, not one villain and one rescuer. What the Corner House itself preserves, in its cells and its execution room, is the record of the Soviet terror that came before and after.

1944 to 1953: the Stalin years

When the Red Army returned in 1944, the Corner House went back to its role as the headquarters of the state security service, the KGB from 1954, and remained so until 1991. Interrogation and imprisonment continued, and the cells were now often packed with twenty to twenty-five people. The focus shifted to crushing the armed resistance: between 1945 and 1953 alone, around 72,850 people were arrested in Latvia.

The shootings no longer took place in the Corner House. After 1941 death sentences were carried out at Riga Central Prison, and whether anyone was still killed in the building's execution room after 1944 is not documented. How many people were shot across Latvia in these years can only be estimated; for the period from 1945 to 1953, estimates run to around 2,300 to 2,500 death sentences carried out. That it was not more had a sober reason too: the Soviet Union abolished the death penalty entirely from 1947 to 1950, replacing it with twenty-five years in the camps.

In the countryside, armed partisans known as the Forest Brothers fought on for years. From this house, the Latvian headquarters of the service, the interrogations of suspected partisans and the use of informers against them were directed, until the last groups were crushed in the mid-1950s.

The resistance was broken above all on a single day. On 25 March 1949, in Operation Priboi, more than 42,000 people were deported from Latvia in cattle wagons, mostly farming families who refused to give up their land to the collective farms, together with anyone suspected of helping the resistance. More than 5,000 died in exile. This largest of the mass deportations was carried out by the Soviet state security apparatus, whose Latvian headquarters was this house.

1953 to 1991: the long watch

After Stalin's death in 1953 the worst of the terror eased, but the house stayed what it was; physical violence gave way more and more to psychological pressure. Deportees could begin to return only from 1956. The old execution room was altered, and in one of the coldest details of the whole house it was later turned into a kiosk where staff could buy cigarettes.

What remained was surveillance. Denunciation stayed part of the system, the wooden box in the hallway an everyday tool. From this address the KGB watched over the country until independence was restored in 1991.

The scale in numbers

The figures from these years come from different sources and count different things, so they cannot be compared directly. As orders of magnitude, though, they show the scale.

• 14 June 1941: 15,424 people deported from Latvia in a single day, around 40 percent of whom died.
• 25 March 1949, Operation Priboi: more than 42,000 people deported, over 5,000 died in exile.
• In all, around 60,000 people were deported from Latvia during the Soviet occupation; between 1945 and 1953 alone there were some 72,850 arrests.
• In the Corner House itself, up to nearly two hundred people were shot in 1941 (museum research: 188); thirty of them are named on a panel in the room.

According to the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, more than 200,000 people in Latvia suffered under communist repression over the whole occupation, and more than 260,000 fled the country. Across both occupations, the Soviet and the Nazi, Latvia lost roughly a third of its population through death and flight, by various estimates.

The people behind the numbers

Many of the totals from these years are only estimates. But some numbers are exact, and those are the ones that stay with you: the 15,424 of a single June night, the nearly two hundred people shot in this building. It helps to hold on to individuals too. The Latvian poet Knuts Skujenieks was held here, accused of "anti-Soviet" activity. When he returned to the building many years later, he asked for one simple thing: to see the cell where he had been kept.

The museum guide Aija Abens says visitors often fall silent, and some break down in tears, because they or their parents or grandparents passed through these rooms. After one tour through the KGB canteen, a visitor said only: yes, but the food was good. Lines like that show how close this history still is for many families. This is not distant history in Latvia; it is one or two generations back, in almost every family.

Visiting the Corner House today

The house stood empty after the KGB was dissolved in 1991, and the Latvian police used it until 2008. In 2014, when Riga was a European Capital of Culture, it finally opened to the public, and since 2015 the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia has run an exhibition here on the history of the KGB in Latvia.

The ground-floor exhibition is free. To see the cells, the tiger cage and the execution room you join a guided tour of about an hour, which you should book ahead because places fill quickly. Children under 12 are not admitted to the tours. On the Stabu iela side of the building, a memorial called "The Black Threshold", a half-open steel door by the artist Glebs Pantelejevs, has remembered the victims of the KGB since 2003.

The Corner House sits right in the centre, a short walk from the Old Town and from our own residences, so it is easy to fit into a day in the city. It is a heavy hour, but we think it is one of the most important things you can do in Riga.

Why we take our guests here

We almost always bring the people who stay with us, or who travel to Riga with us, to the Corner House. Not because it is pleasant, but because you understand Latvia, and this corner of Europe, better through this place.

Three things stay with you. First, that the terror was not chaos but administration: lifts, wire mesh, filing cabinets, a box for denunciations, a truck to hide the sound. A perfectly ordinary building in which a state processed its own citizens. Second, that freedom is not a given. Latvia only regained its independence in 1991, and standing in these cells you feel how recent and how fragile that is, especially in this region, especially now. And third, that behind every number is a person, a family, a cell with a name scratched into the wall.

A word on language, because it matters. The people who ran this house were the Soviet totalitarian regime and its security police: the Cheka, the NKVD, the KGB. It was a system, not a nationality. Latvia suffered under two totalitarian occupations in those years; this house keeps the memory of the Soviet one. Remembering it clearly is the whole point of keeping the doors open, so that it is never repeated.