Rein Taagepera on the anniversaries of the Baltic Chain and the Baltic Appeal

On 23 August 1989 roughly two million people formed a chain from Estonia across Latvia to Lithuania to mark the 50th anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which put an end to the independence of the three Baltic states. Rein Taagepera points out in the daily Eesti Päevaleht that as early as 1979 forty-five people made use of the period of thaw and penned the "Baltic Appeal": "Ten years after the Appeal we stood hand in hand from Tallinn to Vilnius. But what would the human chain have been without the Appeal? Of course you can say of almost every event that failing it history would still have run its course, and perhaps we would even have recovered our independence without the Baltic Chain. But taken as a whole the sequence started with people speaking out in the seventies. Then when the chance finally came communism was done away with once and for all. Favourable circumstances are not always taken advantage of before meeting resistance, but the Baltic Appeal was one such time of common action - and its 30th anniversary, like the 20th anniversary of the Baltic Chain, are today both cause for commemoration."

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