The Baltic Way: 35 years since 2 million protest for freedom from Soviets
This Friday marks the 35th anniversary of the Baltic Way, a mass demonstration on August 23, 1989 in which two million people formed a more than 670-kilometer human chain across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, protesting the ongoing Soviet occupation and bringing worldwide attention to their fight for freedom.
On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty, widely known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (MRP). The pact's secret protocols divided Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania up between them, which would lead to the occupation and annexation of the Baltics by the Soviet Union less than a year later.
In the 1980s, August 23 began to be observed as Black Ribbon Day on the initiative of affected refugee and diaspora communities and organizations in Canada and other countries in the West.
