Two Million Link Hands to Protest Soviet Baltic Rule : People in 3 Republics Form Chain

At least 2 million Baltic residents linked hands today to form a human chain across their tiny homelands, a defiant repudiation of Soviet rule on the 50th anniversary of their lost sovereignty.

Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians took up spots along a 370-mile route from the Gulf of Finland south to the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius to demand that Moscow admit that it annexed their republics by force and to call for more freedom.

After decades of denials, Soviet officials have admitted that a secret deal with Adolf Hitler’s Germany deeded control of the Baltic states to the Kremlin. But they still maintain the nations voluntarily renounced their independence and were not forced to join the Soviet Union.

In Vilnius, about 5,000 people gathered in Cathedral Square, holding candles to commemorate Josef Stalin’s victims and singing the song that was Lithuania’s national anthem until Stalin’s tanks rolled into Lithuania and the other Baltic states in 1940.

Grazina Staniute, a 15-year-old Lithuanian student from Kaunas, said the candles “symbolize those who died in exile. When we light the candles, they will be with us.”

1,222,660 Repressed

Brone Surzilate, 58, one of those exiled under Stalin as the Communists set up a Soviet regime, held a card with the number 1,222,660. She said that was the number of Lithuanians that activists estimate have suffered repression under 50 years of Soviet rule.

1.5 Million Expected

Organizers said they had expected 1.5 million people, about one-fifth of the Baltic republics’ 8 million residents, eventually to link hands along the route in a show of solidarity. But by late in the day the count had grown to 2 million.

The line began in this coastal city, the capital of Estonia, and snaked southward through several cities, including the Latvian capital of Riga, and ended in the Lithuanian capital.

The human chain climaxed a series of protests marking the anniversary of the Aug. 23, 1939, non-aggression treaty between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which in a secret annex gave the Soviets a green light for absorbing the Baltic mini-states the next year.

Organizers said the human chain would symbolize the Baltic peoples’ solidarity in their struggle for more autonomy--and possibly eventual independence--from Moscow.