The great 1989 “human chain” stretching between Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn, known as the Baltic Way, was a milestone in the process of restoring Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia’s independence. So powerful a milestone that, in many history books, it has overshadowed the term by which those countries named their uprising: the Singing Revolution. The idea was promoted by activists who, between 1987 and 1991—perestroika’s culminating years—organized concerts where forgotten popular songs and prohibited hymns were sung along with a repertoire of rock music, both hard and soft, inspired by Metallica, Supertramp, Dire Straits, AC/DC, and Iron Maiden.
Behind the concerts—some well-organized, others improvised—there was a mobilized citizenry willing to capitalize on the breakdown of the Soviet Union in order to halt the russification, imposed since 1945, and regain the independence they lost to Stalin and Hitler. The activists moved in a crowd that even now, in a post-Soviet world, is known as the intelligentsia. Educated people—members of writers’, musicians’, or artists’ unions—with a compromise to further human rights. People who, since 1975, defied the Soviet hegemony and dared to adhere to the Helsinki Declaration, reluctantly signed and published by the Kremlin in 1975.
Gorbachev’s democratic reforms of 1987 and 1988, the glasnost (transparency) in particular, gave rise to hundreds of so-called informal discussion and debate groups in the Baltic States. These civic centers coalesced into a single organization, a popular front that attracted the more intelligent and pro-reform sectors of the Communist Party, aware that they were facing an unstoppable and historical change.
Called Popular Front in Latvia and Estonia, and Sajūdis (Movement) in Lithuania, all three raised a new batch of social leaders and politicians—a mixture of nationalists, liberals, and social-democrats—who took advantage of the March of 1989 elections, the first to feature multiple candidates in the USSR since 1917, to take a handful of seats in the Soviet Congress.
A movement that creates leaders.
Unlike what has happened in our country, in the Baltic States the citizenry doesn’t have to rouse the political class to action precisely because it is the social movement that begets the leadership. From the Baltic representation in Moscow emerge names like Edgar Savisaar, Vytautas Landsbergis, Algirdas Brazauskas, and Ivars Godmanis. They would later become heads of state, but first they organized the Baltic Way on the 23rd of August 1989. A few months later, on March of 1990, they achieved a supermajority in the legislative elections of all three republics.
Immediately, the republics’ Parliaments issued declarations of sovereignty, claiming judicial and legal power, and setting the dates for their self-determination referendums: 9th of February 1991 for Lithuania, the 3rd of March of that same year for Latvia and Estonia. A few weeks prior—from the 13th of January 1991 and onwards—Soviet paratroopers and armored vehicles acting without Gorbachev’s control tried to cut short the process by occupying Lithuania’s television network and the Latvian Ministry of Home Affairs, killing fourteen civilian activists in the process.
The military intervention failed to postpone the referendums, in which “Yes” won with a 76% in Lithuania, a 74% in Latvia, and a 78% in Estonia. The final tally ended, after four years, the Singing Revolution. Six months later, on August of 1991, after the failed military coup against Gorbachev, the three Baltic Republics issued unilateral declarations of independence, availing themselves of international laws. Three months later, the Soviet Union was no more.
Llibert Ferri
Between 1987 and 2007 he served as a special envoy for TV3 in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the former Soviet Union.
0 comentaris:
Publica un comentari a l'entrada