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For once, it seems that one of the new democracies of the former Soviet Union may be able to avoid the worst of the enslavement to western tobacco companies that has happened to so many other countries in the same situation. Latvia, in fact, is actually quite an old democracy, having tasted independence and freedom in the early part of the 20th century, developing to have one of the highest standards of living anywhere in Europe in the 1930s. From 1940, it was occupied with extreme brutality first by the Soviet Union, then by Nazi Germany, and then again by the Soviets, whose pretence of allowing independence turned into forcible membership of the USSR. But eventually, in 1991, this small nation finally regained its independence. Nowadays it has around two and a half million people, including a …