Why Every High School Student In Latvia Is Learning To Shoot A Gun

RIGA, Latvia — Sindija Brakovska is 18 years old and dreams of becoming a hairstylist or a dance teacher. She studies at the Riga Technical School of Tourism and Creative Industry, a vocational school centered on hospitality, tourism and fashion.

“I love girly stuff,” the tall Latvian tells me.

On this March morning, roughly two dozen girls between 16 and 18 are sitting in the classroom with Brakovska. Some of the girls look shy. Others sprawl with the studied boredom of teenagers everywhere.

The room could be almost anywhere in Europe — if not for the rifles on the desks.

They are clunky, black and weigh over 6 pounds. Made by the American manufacturer Crosman, model SBR, the air rifles resemble the U.S. military’s M4 assault rifles and fire steel BBs. To an untrained eye, they look like the real thing.

“I’m a little nervous,” Brakovska tells me before she picks up a weapon for the first time. What does she make of her national defense class? “I think it makes sense,” she says.

In many European countries, rifles in a classroom would be a scandal. In my home country, Germany, for example, the influential Education and Science Workers’ Union firmly opposes any form of military outreach in schools, viewing even visits by so-called “youth officers” with skepticism, as they are seen as a subtle form of recruitment.

In Latvia, by contrast, there is no such resistance, and weapons training has become part of the lesson plan, even for budding hairstylists and dance teachers.

The country sits on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, with Russia to the east and Belarus to the southeast. Together with its neighbors Estonia and Lithuania, Latvia spent decades inside the Soviet Union. This is NATO’s northeastern frontier, and allied troops are stationed across the region; it now hosts a Canada-led multinational brigade, and American forces operate in the country as part of the alliance’s deterrence posture.

Anyone here old enough to remember the Soviet years does not need a lecture on what foreign domination feels like. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 and more than four years of war, the much smaller Baltic states have every reason to wonder whether they could be next. That is why threats from Moscow are taken seriously, and why the Baltics are preparing for the possibility of another Russian war of aggression. While much of the world is currently focused on Iran, the Baltics are keeping their eyes on Moscow.

The Baltics’ vulnerability drove their early and eager push to join NATO, and all three countries have been among the alliance’s most committed members ever since. But they also know that NATO is under strain, that the United States’ commitment to its allies has been questioned, and that in the event of a Russian attack, they must be prepared, as Ukraine was, to defend themselves.

All three European countries have military conscription. In Latvia the service is compulsory for young men, but not across the board: if too few volunteers come forward, the remaining recruits are chosen by lottery. Currently, around 400 young men are drafted this way each year, while roughly 1,300 volunteer.

In addition, both Latvia and Estonia have introduced a compulsory “National Defense Education” for students in secondary school. The syllabus includes military history, marching and drilling, land navigation, first aid, crisis response and weapons handling. Students who want more can spend part of the summer in camp, in uniform.

Of the three counties, Latvia goes the farthest in mandating military training to high school students. In Estonia, the mandatory classroom course is 35 hours. In Latvia, it runs 112 hours over two years.

“The purpose is not to train soldiers, but to develop more responsible citizens,” Col. Valts Āboliņš tells me during a break in one of the school’s classrooms. The 53-year-old officer oversees the national program. “We want to remove the phobias many young people and their parents have when they encounter anything military."

The training is not without mishap for students studying cosmetology. One student snaps a carefully polished fingernail while pulling back the charging handle. She yelps and runs out. Another struggles with her magazine, which keeps catching. Eventually she starts to cry. A female instructor puts an arm around her shoulder and leads her outside.

Five minutes later, both are back. The second student picks up her unarmed rifle again. This time the magazine slides into place on the first try. One smack with the flat of the hand, and that’s that. A smile flickers across her face.

Nearby, students in their second year of the course are allowed to shoot loaded BB guns. For that, they simply lie down on the grass beside the school’s main entrance. An instructor marks the firing zone with red-and-white tape. The paper targets lean against a wall; sheets of Styrofoam serve as backstops. In the background, Riga’s Soviet-era apartment blocks rise into the sky.

The shooting range has an air of improvisation, but the rules are enforced with notable strictness. Weapons always lie in the same place, and every movement is preceded by a command. No one fires without an order.

When students speak to me, they do so quietly. No wonder: The uniformed instructors carry themselves more sharply than ordinary teachers. The most imposing is the bearded chief instructor, whose broad back nearly fills the door frame.

“Stop chattering!” Andris Skanis bellows in Latvian when a group of girls drifts out of focus for a moment. The whole class jolts.

But the rough edge is softened by humor. After a young female instructor and one of Skanis’ colleagues explain the safety rules, the 44-year-old soldier moves through the classroom. He shows each student how to hold the unarmed rifle so the BBs will later hit the target. He keeps making jokes as he goes from desk to desk.

“You cannot teach defense in theory only,” Skanis explains to me. “You have to do it, again and again.”

But, he adds, without the Soviet-era brutality.

“Our military today is completely different from what it was under Soviet rule. There is no dedovshchina.” The term literally means “rule of the grandfathers” and refers to the vicious hazing of recruits by older soldiers, a system that scarred generations of young men in Soviet barracks and still haunts the Russian army.

In Latvia, this distinction matters. The country declared independence after World War I, only to lose it again in the cataclysms of the 20th century: occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, then by Nazi Germany, and then reoccupied by the Soviets. Repression and decades of forced Russification followed.

Understandably, the resolve to never again be at the mercy of an outside power is now at the core of the country's defense education. It is not simply about rifles and drills. It is about telling Latvia's story in unmistakably patriotic terms and preparing future generations to defend a state that was lost almost as soon as it was born.

Today, with about a quarter of the population ethnically Russian, and Russian speakers still prominent in Riga and the east, the school program has another aim: to bind this large minority more closely to the state – starting with the young who are considered less entrenched in narratives shaped by Russian propaganda.

“Our goal is not necessarily to change minds overnight,” Āboliņš tells me. “We may not turn them from red to blue, but we can encourage critical thinking. That can simply mean teenagers asking new questions at the dinner table at home.”

Regular teachers do not take part in Latvia’s defense classes. “This allows us to ensure that certain critical points of our history are taught as facts,” Āboliņš says. “They are not open to the teacher’s interpretations.”

In this logic, civilian instructors who might openly or subtly question the patriotic goals are regarded as an obstacle.

There was debate in Latvia about the program, Āboliņš says. But it was “surprisingly calm.” The crucial thing, he argues, was that the government introduced it gradually. The first courses began in 2018 in 13 schools, all on a voluntary basis. More schools joined each year. By the time the course became mandatory on September 1, 2024, most were already taking part. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine did the rest.

Āboliņš is built as broadly as Skanis. The two soldiers served together in Afghanistan, and the local training chief calls his boss “Father” with visible respect. The colonel has two children. His 18-year-old daughter is currently taking part in the national defense program and likes it, he says. “I just feel sorry for her instructors. They know that I hear about their performance.”

Skanis has two children as well, both daughters. “The 4-year-old loves my job, especially the uniform.” Then he pauses. And the older daughter? “My 19-year-old is a pacifist.” His smile disappears. “She remembers my deployments to Afghanistan. She was a little girl then. To her, my being a soldier means being away from her.”

How does a country in defense mode deal with young people who do not want to touch a weapon? “We don’t force anyone,” Skanis says. If someone is a convinced pacifist or says that his religion forbids it, the instructors ask for a presentation in the classroom instead. At least in peacetime.

“If war comes to Latvia, everyone needs to be ready,” Skanis says. “Some say they’ll fly away, but there won’t be any planes leaving anymore.”

That said, pacifism is much less prevalent in Latvia than elsewhere in the EU. Across the bloc, willingness to fight for one’s country tends to be low in Western Europe and markedly higher in the states that live in Russia’s shadow.

For Latvia, the threat lies just across the border. The country shares a 176-mile border with Russia and a 107-mile border with Belarus, a country firmly within Russia’s sphere of influence that served as a staging ground for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

For the course’s female instructor, Monika Lazdina, the war in Ukraine was also the turning point. She quit her job in finance and joined Latvia’s National Guard. After 72 hours of teacher training, the 32-year-old mother of two now teaches national defense. In the classroom, the slight woman with the blond ponytail is firm but quiet — a contrast to Skanis and his thundering bass voice.

“I try not to think too much about the possibility of war,” Lazdina tells me. If war comes to Latvia, she says, her first move would be to try to get her children out of the country. And then she would come back. “I would stay and fight.”