In January 1991, as the Soviet Union came apart, people in Riga built barricades in the old town out of concrete blocks, trucks and farm machinery to protect the parliament, the radio building and the bridges from Soviet interior ministry troops. Several people were killed. The barricades held.
The museum sits in the old town near where they stood and records those days from the participants' side. It is a small museum about a fortnight, and it explains more about why the Soviet monuments elsewhere in this city remain contested than any amount of architectural description could.