Why did the Baltic Way take place?

In 1940 the Baltic states were occupied by the Soviet Union which had previously agreed upon it with Nazi Germany. The agreement was entered into on 23 August 1939 in Moscow and was entirely secret. This document is called the Hitler–Stalin Pact or the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (by the surnames of the signatories: the USSR Minister for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov and the German Minister for Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop).

At the end of the 1980s the effects of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were still sharply present in the Baltic states. The occupation continued but the USSR denied the existence of the Pact and continuously asserted that the Baltic states had voluntarily joined the Soviet Union. On 23 August 1989, the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the inhabitants of the three Baltic states demanded public acknowledgement of the Pact’s secret protocols and the renewal of the independence of the Baltic states.

How did the Baltic Way take place?

At 19:00 on 23 August 1989 approximately two million inhabitants of the Baltic states joined hands forming a human chain from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. The Baltic Way was organised by the national movements of the Baltic states: the Estonian Rahvarinne, the Latvian Popular front of Latvia and the Lithuanian Sajūdis. The participants gathered in the cities and villages where the campaign was to take place or drove to the less inhabited Baltic territories where the Baltic Way was to wind through.

According to the news agency Reuters, the campaign gathered 700 000 people in Estonia, 500 000 in Latvia and 1 000 000 in Lithuania. According to the official information of the USSR provided by the news agency TASS, the campaign gathered 300 000 people from Estonia and 500 000 people from Lithuania. No information about the number of participants from Latvia was published. The exact number of participants cannot be determined due to the various information sources and the different number of participants in cities and rural areas.

Solidarity demonstrations supporting the Baltic Way took place in Berlin, Leningrad, Moscow, Melbourne, Stockholm, Tbilisi, Toronto and elsewhere in the world.