Two million people linked hands across three nations
On this day · 23 August 1989
On a single evening in 1989, people across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands in a 600-kilometer human chain demanding freedom from Soviet rule.
At 7 p.m. on 23 August 1989, roughly two million people across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stepped outside and joined hands. The result was the Baltic Way — an unbroken human chain stretching about 600 kilometers from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius, one of the longest ever formed.
The date was deliberate. It marked 50 years since the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the secret 1939 deal between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that had carved up the Baltic states and led to their annexation.
Organizers mapped the route town by town so the chain would not break — and it didn’t.
The protest was peaceful, vast and impossible to ignore. Within seven months Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare independence, and all three states soon regained their freedom. Today, 23 August is marked across Europe as a day of remembrance for the victims of totalitarian regimes.
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