Lihuania Awakening (RARE FIND)

August 23, 1988. Streams of people were flowing into Vingis Park on the west side of Vilnius, the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, for a massive commemoration of the Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, signed on August 23, 1939. We all realized that this would be a momentous occasion, a memorial to the fate that the Nazi-Soviet pact had forced on Lithuania. A secret protocol to that pact had divided up Eastern Europe between the two parties "in the event of territorial and political rearrangement"; a week later, on September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland. In October 1939 the Soviet Union forced the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to accept Soviet troops within their frontiers. In the summer of 1940, under pressure from Moscow, the three republics installed new governments that quickly led them into the Soviet state as the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Author: Alfred Erich Senn