Yesterday, twenty years had passed since a human chain of two million people connected the cities of Tallinn in Estonia and Vilnius in Lithuania. On August 23^rd, 1989, half a century after Germany signed Eastern Europe over to Russia in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians joined hands along the 670 km Via Baltica to demand independence.

By any standards, that’s a massive human chain, but it’s only when you consider that there’s just 1.4 million inhabitants in Estonia, 2.3 million in Latvia and 3.5 million in Lithuania, that you realize how eager the people were to get rid of the Soviet Union.

It took another two years for them to be granted independence and the transition was relatively peaceful. So why is it that the people of these three Baltic States are still so concerned about Russia?

If you’re travelling through the Baltic region and you want an answer to that question, good places to start are the countries’ three Occupation Museums.

Museum of Occupations, Tallinn

The fact that this was Estonia’s first ever purpose built museum shows how keen they were to tell their story. There’s lots of newsreel footage, and a wide collection of Soviet memorabilia, including a much sought after and incredibly small Lada. It also gives a great insight into the life of the Forest Brothers, the Estonian partisans, who spent years living in the forest fighting the occupation.

The Museum of Occupation, Riga

The museum in the capital of Latvia, further south along the Via Baltica, was originally built to house the Latvian Red Rifleman Museum. Opened in 1970, on Lenin’s 100^th birthday, it aimed to encourage young Latvian lads to follow the communist route. Now it displays everything from listening bugs found in hotels to letters from prisoners of war. It provides a great chronological record of life under first German and then Soviet regimes. And what’s more, it’s free entry.

Museum of Genocide Victims, Vilnius

The final museum is arguably the most harrowing, simply because it’s housed in the basement of the former KGB office. A prison and a place of execution and torture for dissidents, it has been recreated to look as it was when the KGB left it in August 1991.  The padded torture room, the solitary confinement cell and the execution chamber can all be visited. The museum has several exhibitions charting the history of the occupation with private letters and photos, but it’s the prison that really gets to you. Walking through those cells makes you understand why so many people joined hands in that human chain twenty years ago – and the courage it took for them to do so