Kaido and Virve Krass
Kaido Krass (born in 1951) and Virve Krass (nee Virve Aasorg, 1944) are passionate about fishing. They also fight against the pollution of the waters in Järva County. Among the many hundreds of thousands of Estonians, they, too, stood on the Baltic Way.
Kaido Krass remembers: “23 August 1989 is forever etched in my memory. I worked at the time in the warehouse of the Mechanised Construction Brigade in Paide. On this memorable day a bus-load of people, all with glowing faces, gathered in the courtyard of that enterprise, in order to take a seat in a bus and to drive to a place called Taikse in Järva County. The driver of the Ikarus, the most modern of buses in those times, was Heino Pajula, a down-to-earth man, short in stature but big in heart, who never got tired of encouraging and entertaining this group of about fifty people. Taikse on the territory of the collective farm “Estonia” had been designated as our section in the human chain, which ran over 600 kilometres, was made up of 2 million participants, and which symbolised the unity of the Soviet Baltics - the unity of the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian SSRs. The Baltic Way demonstrated our will to free ourselves from the yoke of Soviet occupation, our will to start an independent existence as sovereign, new democratic republics.
This was, frankly, an action of protest against the red terror, as the dissidents and the more sensible people at the top had laid the ground for separating us from the nightmarish shackles of the USSR. Freedom beamed as a lustrous sun on the horizon.
The spirits were fantastically high, the feeling indescribable. I felt like a blind person who had got his eyesight back, or as if the half-century-old shackles had fallen from the prison gates of my soul and my pain. Standing on the Baltic Way on this warm, windy summer day, with a bit of cloudiness, hands united, left an unforgettable feeling, impossible to cast into words, because the emotion attached to it was stronger than that experienced in all other moments of happiness in my life before.”
- Estonian SSR
- Latvian SSR
- Lithuanian SSR
- Russian SSR
- Byelorussian SSR
- Ukrainian SSR
- People´s Republic of Poland
- German Democratic Republic
- Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
- People's Republic of Hungary
- Socialist Republic of Romania
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- The Moldavian SSR
- The People´s Republic of Bulgaria