Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (152 page)

79
. Red Army cavalry enters Tallinn. The forces of the Soviet Union occupied Estonia twice, in 1940–41 and for a second time between 1945 and 1991.

80
. A Latvian battalion of the Waffen SS marches through Tallinn. The forces of the Third Reich occupied Estonia from July 1941 to September 1944.

CCCP

81
. The Baltic Chain, 23 August 1989, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: two million protesters link hands over the 350 miles from Estonia to Latvia and Lithuania.

82
. Moscow, August 1991: Mikhail Gorbachev, secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party and president of the USSR, is publicly berated by Boris Yeltsin, president of the RSFSR (Soviet Russia). Fifteen Soviet republics, including Russia, were starting out on their road to sovereign independence, and the Soviet Union was about to vanish.