A Chain of Freedom

Vabadus! Vabadus! Vabadus! With interlocking hands held high, Estonians joined together in lines four and six deep in Tallinn to chant a single word: "Freedom!" The invocation was echoed last week all along a human chain, formed by an estimated 2 million people, that stretched from the Estonian capital of Tallinn across Latvia and into neighboring Lithuania to end at Gediminas Tower in Vilnius, some 400 miles from the starting point.

The protesters linked hands to mark the 50th anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, which included secret protocols that cleared the way for the annexation of the Baltics by the U.S.S.R. during World War II. In a sharply worded declaration, a coalition of popular-front leaders denounced the Soviet occupation and demanded the right to "restore independent statehood." The day before, a special commission of the Lithuanian parliament had declared that the U.S.S.R.'s annexation of the republic in 1940 was invalid, flatly contradicting Moscow's denial that the protocols had any bearing on absorption of the Baltics.

The increasingly defiant tone of the nationalists has provoked the ire of hard-liners in the Soviet leadership. In a harsh blast read over national television, the Communist Party Central Committee denounced the protests as an attempt "to incite the peoples of the Baltic republics to secede from the Soviet Union." The Central Committee criticized local party leaders for "playing up to nationalist sentiments," and called for "resolute, urgent measures to cleanse the Baltic republics of extremism and destructive and harmful tendencies."

The statement did not urge any specific steps for bringing the Baltic states into line, but its ominous tone came as a shock to Soviet liberals. With Mikhail Gorbachev out of Moscow on vacation last week, many wondered if the virulent anti-Baltic onslaught was yet another maneuver by conservative forces to discredit the Soviet leader's political reforms.