On the dot of 7pm families and strangers took each other's hands and stepped into the main road, some carrying flags, others with lapel badges showing the swastika beside the hammer and sickle. Organisers claimed a million and a half were taking part, but from where I stood in a Lithuanian field on a sunlit evening 20 years ago this Sunday, the mood was as impressive as the numbers.
Defiance and solidarity were uppermost, as well as delight that so many people had turned out. Most were on their first political demonstration. Public protests were springing up all over the Soviet Union and its eastern European empire in 1989, but in one swoop the Baltic Way, as the vast human chain was called, had trumped the others by its size and quiet dignity.
It stretched from the Estonian capital Tallinn via Riga in Latvia to Lithuania's Vilnius. The aim was to denounce an event exactly half a century earlier, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, in which Hitler and Stalin publicly agreed not to attack each other, while adding secret clauses that carved up central Europe, paving the way for the Nazis to move into western Poland while Stalin took most of the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and parts of Romania.
The human chain was primarily intended to show Moscow and the world the strength of the Baltic independence drive. But it was also a protest over the suppression of history. The Soviet authorities were still denying the secret clauses' existence, although they had been discovered by western forces in Berlin in 1945 and were widely known.
Soon after the Baltic Way Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming Soviet leader, conceded the point and published the Soviet version. Yet, 20 years on, the issue is still a political football, marked by a resolution which the European parliament passed this spring to declare 23 August "a Europe-wide Remembrance Day for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes".
In the arcane way these things are done in the European parliament, the resolution was a watered-down version of a "declaration" it passed last September which wanted to make 23 August a day to remember "victims of Stalinism and Nazism". Individual EU governments take the ultimate decision, and few have nominated 23 August as a special day. But the issue matters as it marks an unpleasant effort by many Baltic and central European politicians to equate Stalinism and Nazism or claim Stalinism was worse. In part concerned by the continuing strength of former Communist parties in the region, they use the Nazi-Soviet "equation" as a device to smear any party of the left. (The draft resolution was watered down by left groups in the European parliament.) It is also a barely disguised attempt to maintain extreme wariness, if not outright hostility, to contemporary Russia.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact certainly showed Stalin to be as cynical as Hitler. But to jump from that to equate the two men's record or ideology does not accord with reality. Nor does it take account of the fact that Soviet policy evolved after Stalin's death so that political activity, let alone ordinary family life, in the two decades under Brezhnev was not subject to arbitrary terror. Rightwing Baltic politicians have a point in saying most other Europeans are unaware of Stalin's mass deportations from the Baltics. Perhaps 100,000 people were sent to Siberia after 1939 or when the Red Army defeated the Nazis and re-entered the region. But to believe that western Europeans did not know about the Gulag ignores the massive influence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn after his books were translated into every European language in the 1970s.
There is always more to learn, and historians are always trying to re-interpret. One of the biggest areas which remains to be explored is the extent of local civilian participation in the Nazis' central European killing fields. In The Continuities of German History, the American historian Helmut Walser Smith recently pointed out that the Auschwitz-based image of the Holocaust as faceless, conveyor-belt, industrial murder is distorted. Most Jews died in archaic and primitive ways, shot at close range on the edge of pits and trenches, or gassed from exhaust pipes. These massacres were witnessed, shared in, or known about by huge numbers of local people as well as of Germans.
In recent issues of the New York Review of Books another US historian, Tim Snyder, made similar points while summing up the latest scholarship on Hitler's and Stalin's killing. "By the end of 1941 the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war," he wrote. When it comes to numbers, Hitler's record is dominant. He killed almost twice as many people as Stalin. Snyder lists the number of European Jews murdered under German auspices at 5.7 million, German starvation of Soviet citizens at about 4 million and mass reprisal killings against civilians, mainly for actual or suspected partisan activity, as at least 750,000. Stalin killed about 5.5 million Soviet citizens by starvation and had about 700,000 people shot in the prewar Great Terror.
There is a difference between memory and history, Snyder's first essay concluded – a point which he had to concede against himself later when a reader pointed out his failure to mention Hitler's murder of Roma, proportionately almost as massive as that of Europe's Jews. The issue could be repeated in connection with Andrzej Wajda's film about Katyn, now being shown in Britain, and the way Poles were forced for decades to censor themselves. But, important though it is to be reminded how the Soviet authorities (until 1989) blamed their 1940 massacre of imprisoned Polish officers on the Nazis, one should not forget that in Operation Tannenberg the Nazis killed a comparable number of Polish intellectuals a few months earlier.
Is there a moral? The Baltic Way's commemoration of Molotov-Ribbentrop sent a particular message in August 1989 by breaking a 50-year taboo and expressing a widespread demand for independence. But what was right in one part of Europe at a special moment should not be extended across the continent for ever. History is too complex and sensitive to be left to politicians. First they manipulate anniversaries, then they move to textbooks, and the slide gathers speed.