Andris Razāns, Latvia’s ambassador to the United States, visited Stanford University on December 2, 2013. As part of his visit, Ambassador Razāns came to the Herbert Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion, where he was shown materials from the Latvian collections of the Hoover Institution Archives. Among those materials were documents pertaining to the American Relief Administration’s feeding of Latvian children during 1919-1920; photographs depicting the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, an agreement that led to the forcible annexation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union in 1940; and an album recording the lives of Latvian refugees in a displaced persons camp in Germany after World War II. He also viewed materials on the movement that led to the renewal of Latvian independence in 1991. Ambassador Razāns was accompanied on his visit by Līga Hoy, the Latvian honorary consul for northern California.
