Where there's a will, there's a Baltic Way
This morning, Edgars Rinkēvičs and Alar Karis, the presidents of Latvia and Estonia, met at the Unguriņi-Lilli border crossing point to remember that 35 years ago today, on 23 August 1989, two million people from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania stood hand in hand - literally. It lasted for 15 minutes, from Toompea in Tallinn, through Riga, to the Gediminas Tower in Vilnius. This over 600km long human chain, known as the Baltic Way, became a powerful symbol of unity and resistance, as it drew the world's attention to the illegal Soviet annexation of the Baltic States following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
This non-aggression pact was signed exactly 50 years earlier, on 23 August 1939, by Soviet and German foreign ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. It contained secret protocols, in which the two powers illegally divided the territories of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania between them. It was one of the factors that led to the start of World War II in September 1939, with Nazi Germany's attack on Poland, and to the Soviet invasion of the Baltics in June 1940. The Baltic Way put pressure on the Soviet power to acknowledge the existence of the secret protocols and to declare them null and void.
The Baltic Way was not only a massive peaceful protest, it is also deeply woven into the lives of the two million people who made history together – view some of them collected by the Latvian Public Broadcaster. A highly memorable event that left its mark on everyone. Whether they stood hand-in-hand with a loved one, got caught in traffic trying to join, or watched from home, everyone in the Baltic countries remembers where they were on that day. Despite differing worldviews, the shared belief in independence brought people together in a moment of extraordinary unity.