Tuesday 22 September 2009

RRR today




Rīgas Radio Rūpnīca aka Radiotehnika RRR or just RRR for short, which means Riga Radio factory, was producing radios, turntables and cassette players in Soviet Latvia but went bust in 1990s. Located in Imanta district of Riga the waste territory is now occupied by various small companies, strorages and empty buildings. One of the companies is RRR VEF, a merge of names of RRR and another famous company VEF, however besides the grand name there is a small firm that produces sound speakers.
Photos by (c) Arnis Balcus

3 comments:

Boris Miller said...

Previous post is a little contradictory - in Soviet times those factories actually were quite succesful (in the context of Eastern Block), producing variety of decent electronics and employing thousands of people. It's a crying shame what happened to Latvia's industry after independence. I'm not defending soviet communists, but are they to blame for the demise of RRR or VEF?

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

One of great factories now destroyed and demolished and turned in to useless shopping center. It's great when you have approx 2 shops per each latvian citizen, but how about leaving at least one working industrial facility to keep the money flowing in to spend it on one of your useless shopping centers? There are two stories why these factories were shut down and both of them are very truly. First story that i keep hearing from both Latvians and Russians is that Latvians started to destroy everything so that all russians would of leave Latvia. Second story less possible is that Gorbachjov the "sellout" who destroyed USSR and send Russian economy downhill, gave this order that all USSR factories needed to be shut down. Possibly not all but most of those that were outside Russian region were shut down by him. Believe it or not but if those factories would of been kept Latvia would of been a much more successful country than it is now. this is just one of many factories that were in Latvia during USSR, there are much more REMR, Mikro, RZAK, (Red Star) Sarkana Zvaigzne...