Singing Revolution

Yesterday I saw the documentary Singing Revolution about how the Estonian national pastime of singing helped to free them from Soviet rule. While the singing didn't have as much direct impact as their title implies it was still a compelling story. Back in 1869 (I think) Estonia started a national song festival. Sometime along the way they built a festival stage to hold the 30,000 singers (plus lots of room for spectators on a grassy hillside). During the Nazi and Soviet eras they still regularly held the festival, but sang mostly socialist songs -- at least for the first 2 days of the 3 day festival. They put up with singing that so they could sing Estonian music on the last day. There was a lot of discussion and videos of what life from WWII onward was like. Things got interesting in 1985 when Gorbachev started his Glasnost policy and Estonians said if you are granting freedom of speech we are going to start by talking about how you suppressed Estonian history over the last 50 years.

There were two impressive moments in the film. The first was a human chain that was created one day that went from the southern border of Lithuania to the northern coast of Estonia -- 600 kilometers long. The second was when the Russian people sent there to make the population more Russian (and loyal to Moscow) got upset with possible Estonian independence and tried to storm the government buildings. A freedom worker got on the radio and told about what was happening and soon a huge crowd of Estonians surrounded the Russians. This had all the ingredients for the start of a riot -- but the Estonians kept their cool and no blood was shed. Sometime after that a call went out to gather at the festival grounds for a celebration -- and 300,000 people showed up (a third of the Estonian population). The soundtrack would sound glorious, though perhaps a tad repetitive.