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Fostering Baltic Freedom
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15839 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1989 |
2,335 Words |
| Author
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Ojars Kalnins
Ojars Kalnins is public relations director of the American
Latvian Association. |
On August 23, 1988, during a Latvian nationalist rally in Riga, an open letter to the Baltic people signed by 28 U.S. senators was read to the crowd of more than 60,000 people. It included the following passage:
Sadly, your struggle for universal human rights and self-
determination, won with such singular courage seven decades
ago, has not ended. As members of the United States
Senate, we want you to know that our support for these
noble goals continues as well.
The public reading of the letter, like the rally itself, was part of a continuing series of remarkable events in the Soviet-occupied Baltic states. Over the last two years, Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost, restructuring, and democratization have unleashed a massive display of long-suppressed national feeling in once independent Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Longing to regain control over homelands that were forcibly occupied and annexed by Stalin's Soviet Union in 1940, the Baltic peoples are testing the limits of Gorbachev's reform-minded Soviet Union of 1988. Former national flags, banned under Stalin, now fly proudly over the three Baltic capitals. Popular fronts, boasting hundreds of thousands of followers, have proposed radical programs calling for a wide-ranging autonomy that falls just short of total independence. Some Balts, emboldened by the euphoria of recent events, even talk of outright secession from the Soviet Union.
The words of support from the U.S.
... (1996 of 14325 Characters)
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