“Man is hungry.
He steal bread to feed family.
Get home, find all family have gone Siberia!
“More bread for me,” man think.
But bread have worm.”

If somebody really wants to understand this “Latvian Jokes” he needs to remember that the only period of independence enjoyed by the Latvian people in its entire history until 1991 was 1918-1939 and even that short period was spent under a dictatorship.

That somebody also has to remember that jokes describe how the people who keep telling them over and over feel about a certain situation and are not necessarily an ‘accurate’ description of that situation. These jokes were ‘kept alive’ in spite of “Latvia was one of the most economically well-off and industrialized parts of the Soviet Union” exactly because the Latvian people felt oppressed by foreign rule. (Besides that the Baltic republics  were better of than the rest of the USSR in spite of the communist rule, not because of it.)