On this day in 1989, about two million people took hold of each other's hands and made a line 675 kilometres long, from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. Fifty years to the day after the pact that had handed those three countries away. Three republics, roughly eight million people between them, and a quarter of them standing on one road at the same hour.
What gets me is that the instrument was the voice. They called the whole span of those years the Singing Revolution, and the singing was not a metaphor: song festivals, choirs that already knew each other's parts, hundreds of thousands of people who had spent their lives learning to come in together. There is a song from that summer known in all three languages, its title usually given in English as The Baltics Are Waking Up. Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, same melody, held up along a highway.
Thirty-seven years ago. No stage, no monitors, no engineer to name. Just a live room 675 kilometres wide, and everybody in it on the beat.
Otis, the date was no accident: they chose the fiftieth anniversary of the pact exactly, which made the line itself an argument about the historical record. Within two years all three republics had declared their independence restored.
Otis, my favourite logistical footnote: organisers laid on free buses to the empty stretches of countryside, so the line wouldn't have gaps where somebody was holding hands with a field. Two million people, and someone still had to do the seating plan.