With the Russo-Ukrainian war, the language of decolonization has become central to scholarship on eastern Europe. Yet, residents of Lielciems in eastern Latvia find it hard to orient in a political field defined by the binary of colonized and the colonizer. They live in a place that is losing its constitutive elements due to a variety of other “de” processes – deindustrialization, depopulation, and devaluation. They live amidst absences rather than unwanted presences. They wish for someone – the Chinese, NATO, or the European Union – to establish some permanent structure that could bring back life to their place of residence. Otherwise, the place is doomed to empty out completely, and their children are destined to permanently settle abroad. Based on an ethnography of an emptying town, this article outlines the limits of the politics of decolonization and argues for the use of the lens of empire for analyzing the intersecting forms of power that shape Lielciems, Latvia and eastern Europe today.