Voices of import

By the age of eight Vaira Vike-Freiberga had learnt that life was both ‘very strange and very unfair’. Her baby sister had died from pneumonia the previous year because of the harsh conditions of life in a refugee camp in Germany (this was late 1944 and her family had fled their native Latvia for fear of the communists). Her mother soon had another child but when Vaira went to see her new brother in hospital she observed the young woman in the next-door bed turning her face to the wall against her wailing baby, product of a gang-rape by Russian soldiers.

The nurses had given this unwanted baby girl the same name as Vaira’s much-mourned sister. Vaira was struck by the paradox, she tells Lyse Doucet in the first of a new series of interviews with women who have achieved remarkable things, Her Story Made History, on Radio 4 (produced by Ben Carter). One baby dead but much-loved; the other unloved but very much alive.

After a working life as an academic psychologist spent in Canada, where her parents took her after years of exile in Germany and later Casablanca (and where she ended up studying psychology because she didn’t know how to pronounce ‘philosophy’), Vike-Freiberga was invited to go back to Latvia to establish a Latvian Institute. Eight months later she was president, the first female head of a former Soviet bloc state, voted in on a wave of popular enthusiasm for an independent candidate.

‘Do women lead differently from men?’ Doucet asks.

‘Being a woman was an advantage,’ declares Vike-Freiberga, who at 81 still sounds formidable. She had no feminist qualms about using old-fashioned chivalry to achieve her goals. At a Nato summit in Istanbul, she recalls, she allowed president George W.