On August 23, 1989, the people of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia organized a protest against the Soviet Union (of which the three nations were then a part). Two million people, constituting approximately one third of the population of the Baltic nations, joined hands to form a 600-kilometer-long human chain (about 370 miles long) called the Baltic Way, which spanned from Vilnius, Lithuania, to Tallinn, Estonia, via Riga, Latvia. The date of the demonstration was chosen specifically to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in which Nazi Germany…
