The Baltic Way: Two Million Hands, 1989
1989 · event
On the evening of 23 August 1989 about two million people stepped out onto a single road and took each other by the hand. The chain ran for roughly six hundred and seventy kilometres, from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius, across the three Baltic republics that were then part of the Soviet Union. Buses brought people from villages, families stood together on empty stretches of highway, and for fifteen minutes the line held from the Gulf of Finland almost to the border of Poland.
The date was chosen precisely. Fifty years earlier, on 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany had signed a pact whose secret protocols divided eastern Europe into spheres of influence and assigned Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Moscow. The occupation that followed had been denied for decades. The demonstrators were not asking for a favour, they were asking for a historical fact to be admitted.
The scale of it made denial impossible. Soviet authorities responded with anger in the press, but the images were already abroad, and in December 1989 the Congress of People's Deputies in Moscow acknowledged the secret protocols and declared them invalid. Lithuania declared independence in March 1990, and all three states had restored their statehood by the autumn of 1991.
The Baltic Way is remembered for its method as much as its result. Nobody was hurt, nothing was broken, and the whole demonstration consisted of people standing in the open air holding hands. Its records were entered into the UNESCO register of documentary heritage, and the chain remains one of the largest peaceful demonstrations ever organised anywhere.