The building is a black, windowless box raised on piers, built in 1971 as the Museum of the Latvian Red Riflemen — purpose-built to house the official Soviet account of the twentieth century.
Since 1993 the same building has housed the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, which documents the Soviet and Nazi occupations from 1940 to 1991. The structure did not change; the argument inside it was replaced with its opposite. There are few clearer demonstrations anywhere of what happens to a monument when the state that commissioned it is gone.