1 Ounce 70th Anniversary of Independence

Latvia declared independence in November 1918, but by 1988 the country was still formally incorporated into the Soviet Union — meaning this coin was issued under Soviet authority, not a sovereign Latvian state. That contradiction is the entire point. The late 1980s saw Baltic nationalist movements pushing hard against Moscow, and commemorative issues like this one functioned as quiet political assertions, produced within the system that denied what they were commemorating.