The Hotel Latvia is a modern high quality tourist hotel but has a sinister and secretive past. It was built by the previous communist regime and was one of the few State approved tourist hotels run by the Russian travel Agency, Intourist.
Intourist was founded in 1929 by the dictator Joseph Stalin and was staffed almost exclusively by the KGB secret police. It was responsible for managing the great majority of travellers access to, and travel within, the Soviet Union and it grew into one of the largest tourism organisations in the world, with a network embracing banks, hotels, and bureaux de change.
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