The Freedom Monument was unveiled in 1935, during Latvia's first period of independence — a slender column carrying a figure who holds three gilded stars above her head, one for each historical region of the country.
It survived the Soviet period standing, which was not inevitable; proposals to remove it were made and not carried out. Laying flowers here was a punishable act for much of that time, and the monument became the place where the independence movement gathered in the late 1980s. It is the one thing in this collection that the Soviet state did not build and could not quite absorb.