In an old episode of Wallander from 1995 (just inside the 20-year rule...), the eponymous detective investigates the murder of a Latvian police officer, and somehow ends up in Riga. Wallander is constantly mindered and his hotel rooms bugged, and everyone around him has to meet and talk in secret. There is reference to 'East Germany no longer existing' so it doesn't seem as if the episode was set before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Did Latvia really remain a totalitarian state even well into the 90s, or were the writers of this particular episode of Wallander simply using dramatic licence? (or was it just because something sensitive was being investigated?) I always assumed that liberal democracy came immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but was the transitional period between communism and democracy quite long?
Was this also true for many of the other European ex-Warsaw Pact countries (places like Belarus aside)?
Latvian here. I hope the mods forgive me for this transgression of not-quite-strictly-historianistic-reply, but the Baltic states of LV-LT-EST were welcomed back into the fold of free countries after the fall of the Soviet Union, in large part because they enjoyed a certain special relationship with the USA vis-a-vis the US non-recognition policy of the Soviet Union's annexation of the Baltic states. Bill Clinton visited in 1994, if I remember correctly.
Furthermore, the 90s were really a time of chaos in Latvia, like in the rest of the Soviet Union. Lots of gangsters, spies, cops, shady businessmen and one person could actually be all of these without much problem. There was no "totalitarian" authority in that sense.
But the Baltic states definitely were a stomping ground for all sorts of spies and free agents from both West and East.
If there is one book I can recommend on it, it would be Edward Lucas' Deception, which touches on this subject regarding the case of Herman Simm.
Hope this helped a bit. :)