Baltic Way

• 1. Introduction

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  The Baltic Way began at exactly 19:00 local time on the 23rd of August 1989, when approximately two million people across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania lifted their arms and joined hands. For 15 minutes, a living line stretched 675 kilometres, connecting three capital cities that had been inside the Soviet Union for nearly half a century. No weapons, no riots, no barricades. Just people standing in a field, or on a highway, or on a city street, holding on.

  The date was not chosen at random. Fifty years earlier, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a secret agreement that divided large parts of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were handed to the Soviet side. What followed was occupation, deportation, and decades of rule from Moscow that the Baltics would insist, to anyone who would listen, had never been legal.

  By 1989, the three Baltic pro-independence movements had been planning for months. They had a single overriding goal: to draw global attention, to make the world see what was happening, and to show that the desire for independence was not a fringe position held by a few extremists but an overwhelming popular will. What they built that August evening became one of the earliest and longest unbroken human chains in recorded history, and it set off a chain of political events that would end, within seven months, with Lithuania declaring independence from the Soviet Union.

• 2. The Pact and the Lie

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  For decades, the Soviet Union denied that the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had ever existed. This was a remarkable position to maintain, given that the protocols' texts had already been used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials and had been published widely by Western scholars. Moscow's official line was equally clear on a second point: there had been no occupation. The People's Parliaments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had, the Soviet argument went, freely petitioned to join the union. Their admission was voluntary.

  The Baltic states held the opposite view, and the implications were far-reaching. If activists could establish a direct legal link between the Pact and the Soviet occupation, every Soviet law applied in the Baltics since 1940 would be null and void. The states would never have belonged to the union in the first place. There would be no need to follow the Soviet constitution's secession procedures. The path would be open to restoring the legal continuity of the independent nations that had existed during the interwar period.

  By the summer of 1989, that argument was gaining traction even within Soviet institutions. On the 18th of August, Pravda published an interview with Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, chairman of a 26-member commission set up by the Congress of People's Deputies. Yakovlev admitted that the secret protocols were genuine. He condemned them, but insisted they had no bearing on how the Baltic states came to join the union. It was a partial concession, and it satisfied no one in Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius. Four days later, a commission of the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR went further: it announced that the 1940 occupation was a direct result of the Pact and therefore illegal. It was the first time any official Soviet body had challenged the legitimacy of Soviet rule in the Baltics.

• 3. Building the Chain

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  The idea of a human chain appears to have first surfaced at a trilateral meeting in Pärnu on the 15th of July 1989. By the 12th of August, an official agreement had been reached between Baltic activists meeting in Cēsis. The three pro-independence movements doing the organising were the Estonian Rahvarinne, the Latvian Tautas fronte, and the Lithuanian Sąjūdis, each of which had only been established about a year before the protest.

  Organisers mapped the route with precision, assigning specific stretches to specific cities and towns so no gap would appear in the line. The chain ran from Vilnius along the A2 highway north through Ukmergė and Panevėžys, then along the Via Baltica into Latvia, through Bauska and Iecava to Riga, and from there northeast through Sigulda and Cēsis to Valmiera, then across the Estonian border through Karksi-Nuia and on through Viljandi, Türi, and Rapla to Tallinn.

  Free bus rides were arranged for those without other transportation. The preparations reached into rural communities that had previously stayed on the sidelines of the independence movement. Some employers refused to let workers take the day off, since the 23rd of August fell on a Wednesday. Others paid for the bus rides themselves. On the day, special radio broadcasts coordinated the effort across hundreds of kilometres. Estonia went further and declared a public holiday.

  Before the event, organisers estimated attendance of around 1,500,000 people, predicting a turnout of 25 to 30 percent among the native population. For the chain to be physically unbroken, at least approximately 200,000 people were needed in each of the three states. The day would exceed all of it.

• 4. 23 August, 19:00

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  Video footage taken from airplanes and helicopters that evening showed something close to a continuous line of people stretching across the Baltic countryside. The demonstrators joined hands for 15 minutes at 19:00 local time, or 16:00 GMT. Then, as the chain dissolved, people gathered in smaller groups across the three countries for local ceremonies that lasted into the night.

  In Vilnius, about 5,000 people assembled in the Cathedral Square. They held candles and sang national songs, including Tautiška giesmė. Elsewhere, priests held masses or rang church bells. On the border between Estonia and Latvia, leaders of the two Popular Fronts held a symbolic funeral ceremony in which a giant black cross was set alight. Across the protests, participants carried pre-war national flags and black ribbons in memory of Forest Brothers, deportees to Siberia, and others classified as enemies of the people under Soviet rule.

  The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, which had also been affected by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, saw an estimated 13,000 people demonstrate in different cities. Baltic emigres and German sympathizers gathered in front of the Soviet embassy in Bonn. In Moscow's Pushkin Square, riot police were deployed when a few hundred people tried to stage a sympathy demonstration. TASS, the Soviet state news agency, reported that 75 people were detained.

  Western estimates put total participation between one and two million. Reuters reported the following day that about 700,000 Estonians and 1,000,000 Lithuanians had joined. The Latvian Popular Front estimated approximately 400,000 Latvians participated. The Soviet Union's own figures, also from TASS, put the number at 300,000 in Estonia and nearly 500,000 in Lithuania.

• 5. Moscow's Reaction

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  Three days after the Baltic Way, on the 26th of August, Soviet television's main evening news programme Vremya opened with a 19-minute pronouncement from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The statement described the pro-independence movements as "nationalist, extremist groups" pursuing "anti-socialist and anti-Soviet" agendas. It accused them of discriminating against ethnic minorities and terrorising those loyal to Soviet ideals. The Baltic Way was called a "nationalist hysteria." The statement warned that such developments would lead to an "abyss" and "catastrophic" consequences, and it called on workers and peasants to defend Soviet ideals.

  The message was deliberately mixed. It implied the possibility of force while also leaving room for diplomacy. Analysts interpreted this ambiguity as a sign that the Central Committee had not settled on a course of action. The appeal to pro-Soviet masses suggested Moscow still believed it had a significant constituency in the Baltic republics. The sharp criticism of Baltic Communist Parties was read as a signal that Moscow intended to replace their leadership.

  But almost immediately after the broadcast, the tone from Moscow began to soften. No threats were followed through. Historian Alfred Erich Senn later assessed that the statement became a source of embarrassment for the Soviet authorities. Meanwhile, the leaders of two major Western powers weighed in. U.S. President George H. W. Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl both called for peaceful reforms and criticised the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

  On the 31st of August, Baltic activists sent a joint declaration to Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, describing themselves as under threat of aggression and requesting an international monitoring commission. In September, East Germany's leader Erich Honecker and Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu had already offered Moscow military assistance if it chose to use force. Moscow did not take them up on it.

• 6. What Followed

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  In December 1989, the Congress of People's Deputies accepted Alexander Yakovlev's commission report condemning the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and Mikhail Gorbachev signed it. In February 1990, the first free democratic elections to the Supreme Soviets were held across all three Baltic states. Pro-independence candidates won majorities in each.

  On the 11th of March 1990, within seven months of the Baltic Way, Lithuania declared independence from the Soviet Union, becoming the first Soviet republic to do so. The independence of all three Baltic states was recognised by most Western countries before the end of 1991, the same year the Soviet Union itself dissolved.

  Activist Vytautas Landsbergis and others used the visibility generated by the Baltic Way to frame the independence question in moral rather than purely political terms. They argued that restoring independence would constitute the restoration of historical justice and the end of Stalinism. The protest also demonstrated how far the pro-independence movements had shifted in a single year, from seeking greater autonomy within the Soviet Union to demanding full national independence.

  The event's influence spread well beyond the Baltic states. Human chains modelled on the Baltic Way were later organised in countries across Eastern Europe and in regions of the Soviet Union. In 2009, documents recording the Baltic Way were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. On the 30th anniversary of the event, a 30-mile human chain called the Hong Kong Way was formed during the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests. In 2013, footprint monuments designed by sculptor Gitenis Umbras were installed in all three Baltic capitals to mark the 25th anniversary of the demonstration.