http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/ricksteves/Estonias-Singing-Revolution.html
"In 1988, 300,000 Estonians gathered at the Song Festival Grounds outside of Tallinn to sing patriotic songs. (Singing has long been a national form of expression in this country; the first Estonian Song Festival was held in 1869, and has been held every five years since then.)
On August 23, 1989—the 50th anniversary of a notorious pact between Hitler and Stalin—the people of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia held hands to make “the Baltic Chain,” a human chain that stretched 360 miles from Tallinn to Vilnius in Lithuania. A Tiananmen Square-type bloodbath was feared, but the country kept singing.
In February 1990, the first free parliamentary elections took place in all three Baltic states, and pro-independence candidates won majorities. In 1991, on the eve of an expected violent crackdown of the Singing Revolution, the makeshift Estonian Parliament declared independence. At that time Moscow was in disarray after hard-line Communists failed in their attempted coup of Mikhail Gorbachev. Suddenly, the USSR was gone, and Estonia was free."
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