ABSTRACT

In 1987 Perestroika and glasnost reached the Baltic countries. Not surprisingly, here the consequences of Gorbachev's new political strategy turned out to be totally different from the rest of the Soviet Union. In the very same year the first protests against Soviet rule in the Baltics arose. In 1988, peoples' fronts were established in the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian republics. On 23 August 1989 a queue along the 600 kilometres of the so-called Baltic Way connected more than a million people, aimed at reminding the world that after 50 years of Soviet rule, the Soviet Union had not yet acknowledged the existence of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact concluded on that very same day in 1939. In 1990, the Baltic republics declared their independence from the Soviet Union, which was followed, after the failed putsch in Moscow in August 1991, by their formal recognition by the Russian Federation and the UNO.1