In 2015 the Latvian author Guna Roze published her novel The 101st kilometre. Soviet zone of shame, drawing on stories of her family and of their home village, Brīdaga. Roze’s book begins in the early days of Soviet power when ‘suspect’ families were deported to distant regions of the country, particularly in Siberia. But Brīdaga also became a place of exile itself: measures to ‘cleanse’ the Latvian capital led to various undesirable groups being deported from both the metropolis and its surrounding hinterland. In the mid-1950s, barracks were built in Brīdaga to house the ‘social parasites’ ejected from Riga. Using archival sources and oral history, alongside Roze’s powerful text, this paper examines the social space of these barracks and the different cohorts that inhabited them.
