The Singing Revolution

Adrift in Estonia

It was 1990 and I was a stringer for what was left of UPI, before half of it went Tango Uniform and the other half got absorbed into the AP. While standing at an East Berlin curry wurst stand, I'd heard a rumor about something called the "The Singing Revolution" in Estonia and since the wall had come down and the parties had run their course, I figured it was time to move on.

I bought passage on an Interflug Tu-134 non-stop to Tallinn and made sure I had plenty of Tri-X for my cameras.

About a week after arriving in Tallinn, a new drinking buddy of mine tells me that some of the muckety-mucks of both the Soviets and the Estonian independence movement are going to meet up just south of Mustvee, on the shores of Lake Piepus to hammer out an accord and the he can get me there, if I'm willing to give him a camera.

So, I gave him my Nikon F3, kept my Leica M4-P and hopped into his ZIS-6 truck and made off for the shores of Lake Piepus.

A couple of days of hard driving and random debauchery later, we met up with the leader of the independence movement, Mario Damien Lang, son of an East German bureaucrat and an Estonian physician. Lang explained that we'd have to walk the rest of the way. And so we did, with Lang carrying the table that the first official Estonian independence accords would be hammered out and signed on and me carrying my Leica with a Soviet-made Jupiter-8 lens half-welded on by the cold.

I got one photo before the Soviets spooked and and chased me and my drinking buddy back to town, but it's a hell of a picture and it's not every day you get to capture someone walking directly toward freedom for an entire nation.