Baltic Way

On the evening of 23 August 1989, perhaps two million people in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stood by the roadside and joined hands, forming an unbroken human chain some 675 kilometres long from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. The Baltic Way, as it became known, marked fifty years since the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, whose secret protocols had assigned the three countries to the Soviet sphere. It was one of the defining moments of the Singing Revolution and drew worldwide attention to the Baltic demand for independence.

In 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided eastern Europe into spheres of influence, and in June 1940 Soviet forces occupied the Baltic states. For decades Moscow denied that the secret protocols existed and maintained that the three countries had joined the Union voluntarily. For Baltic activists the protocols were the key: if the annexation rested on an illegal deal, Soviet rule had never been lawful, and independence would mean restoring the interwar states rather than seceding.

As the anniversary approached, the atmosphere grew tense. Strikes broke out among Russian workers in Estonia over proposed voting rules, and the Soviet press attacked "extremist" nationalism. On 18 August a senior Soviet official, Alexander Yakovlev, admitted that the protocols were genuine, though he denied they had caused the annexation. On 22 August a commission of Lithuania's Supreme Soviet went further, declaring the 1940 occupation a direct result of the pact and therefore illegal, the first time an official Soviet body had challenged the legitimacy of Soviet rule.

The Black Ribbon Day protests held by émigrés in Western cities on 23 August since the mid-1980s gave the date its meaning. The idea of a chain seems to have emerged at a meeting of the three popular movements, Estonia's Popular Front, the Popular Front of Latvia and Lithuania's Sąjūdis, in July 1989, and a formal agreement was reached at Cēsis on 12 August. Organisers assigned each town a stretch of road, laid on free buses and coordinated the event by radio. At 7 p.m. local time participants linked hands for fifteen minutes. Candles, pre-war flags with black ribbons and a symbolic funeral at the Estonian–Latvian border recalled the victims of deportation and repression.

Figures vary. The number most often cited is about two million people, out of a combined population of around eight million, while Western estimates ranged from one to two million; the organisers had hoped for 1.5 million. Reuters reported some 700,000 participants in Estonia and a million in Lithuania, and the Latvian Popular Front estimated 400,000 in Latvia. Official Soviet figures were much lower.

On 26 August the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee issued a stern statement, read on the evening television news, condemning "nationalist hysteria" and warning of catastrophe. It hinted at force but left the door open to dialogue, and Moscow did not follow through on its threats. The demonstration had shown that the popular movements now sought full independence rather than greater autonomy within the Union.

In December 1989 the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies formally condemned the secret protocols. Pro-independence candidates won elections in all three republics in early 1990, and on 11 March 1990 Lithuania declared independence, the first Soviet republic to do so. By the end of 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the independence of all three states had been widely recognised. In 2009 UNESCO placed the Baltic Way documents on its Memory of the World Register, and 23 August is now observed in Europe as a day of remembrance for the victims of Stalinism and Nazism.

Our 1985 map shows the three Baltic republics as part of the Soviet Union; the 1994 map shows them as independent states.