Seda: People of the Marsh

Overview

In Seda, a remote peat miners' town in Latvia, time seems to be frozen in the Soviet era. Built in 1952 and inhabited by a multi-ethnic workforce from different parts of the former USSR, it still preserves intact the inflated style of a Stalinist "shock work" construction project. Culturally Seda's people feel like a community apart. Their lingua franca is Russian, and their social life is a mixture of Soviet and Russian Orthodox traditions. They don't want the European Union, they want to live in their own state - the Marshland.