On June 14, 1987, for the first time since the end of World War II, several thousand Latvians publicly commemorated the infamous Soviet deportations of innocent civilians to Siberia which had occurred fortysix years earlier, on June 14, 1941. The Helsinki '86 organizers wanted to reclaim Latvian history and reclaim the truth about the period of Soviet occupation and its officially expurgated “blank spots.” This demonstration was a probe of the boundaries of glasnost and of the reaction of the forces of repression. The event became a major catalyst of the Latvian reawakening and emboldened other Baits to mark the next, and even more sensitive date, August 23, 1939 when the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact with its secret protocols divided the Baltic and Eastern Europe into spheres of Nazi and Soviet control.

Latvians were the first to openly confront Communist authorities in the Baltic in 1987. They were the first to pick up the torch in a unique political relay race. While they were the trailblazers in 1987, the following year the Estonians took over leadership in testing and expanding the boundaries of glasnost and in confounding the system of repression. The Lithuanians appeared to be slow off the mark. But then, in 1989, Lithuanian dissent exploded, carrying that country to an unconditional declaration of separation from the USSR in March 1990, a declaration which, however, it partially retracted in the summer of that year.