Filed Under: Print > Journalism > Human Chain Across the Baltic Republics

Human Chain Across the Baltic Republics

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On 23 August 1989, hundreds of thousands of residents of the Baltic Republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia created a human chain (Russian: zhivaia tsep’) over a 600-kilometer stretch of territory from Tallinn to Vilnius. The date was significant: it marked the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of Nonaggression between the USSR and Nazi Germany in 1939, which stated that, should Germany go to war against Poland, the Soviet Union would not declare war on Germany. Additionally, secret provisions of the Treaty included agreements about territorial acquisitions. Should Germany invade Poland, the Nazis would lay claim to the western portion of the state, while the Soviet Union would occupy parts of current-day Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. When Nazi forces invaded Poland in September 1939, all protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were put into action, resulting in the USSR’s de facto annexation of the Baltic states.
 
The issue of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact erupted in a very public way in May-June 1989 at the First USSR Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow. Every minute of the proceedings was broadcast live on television, while newspapers offered comprehensive coverage of plenary discussions. In the Fifth Session on 29 May 1989, Lithuanian delegate E.B. Bichkauskas raised the question of the Pact, demanding that the entire document be made public for the benefit of all Soviet citizens. Previously and even for a time at the Congress, Soviet leaders had denied having any hard copies of the Pact. This line was difficult to sustain, though, because the West German government had made them public much earlier. By the end of the Congress, Gorbachev promised to release the document to the public. 
 
Official acknowledgment of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by the Soviet government weakened claims of legitimate control over the Baltic States. It transpired that the Soviet governments in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had not been created through popular elections, as the Soviet narrative went, but by annexation. Yet the question of Soviet sovereignty in the Baltics was already a fraught issue before the First USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. On 16 November 1988, Estonia had been the first Soviet republic to declare independence from the Soviet government. After the release of official copies of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the independence of all three Baltic states seemed increasingly inevitable. 
 
The Human Chain of 23 August 1989 constituted a masterful, peaceful protest against the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the years of oppression and secrecy it stood for. The coverage of the event in Pravda, the press organ of the Soviet Communist Party and still one of the main national Soviet daily newspapers, hardly did justice to the significance of the event on a national or global scale. Coverage appeared the next day on page 6 of the newspaper, without any photographs. And yet, even this article, in this publication, did not mince words and did not criticize or undermine the protest, which attests to how much more open the Soviet press (especially those media organs controlled by the state) had become in the course of perestroika. 
 
A comparison to the coverage of protests in Tbilisi, Georgia on 9 April 1989 lays bare the inequities in the distribution of violence along geographic lines—protests in the Caucasus were met with more violence than protests in the Baltics, which bordered Western Europe. The comparison also shows how much the central government, and especially the press, had changed over the course just of 1989.