RIGA (AFP) — The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are seeking some anti-recession relief as they mark the heady days of 1989, when two million people linked hands to oppose Soviet rule.

Latvian Inga Bruvere can’t recall where she stood in the 600-kilometre (375-mile) human chain that stretched from the Estonian capital Tallinn, via Riga in her homeland and south to Vilnius in Lithuania.

But she has never forgotten that Wednesday, August 23.

“It felt like I was asleep during the Soviet years, and someone offered to wake me up,’’ Bruvere, 46, told AFP.

Estonian Ulo Nugis, 65, said he stood with colleagues after marching to the chain with a factory band.

“The feeling of solidarity in the Baltic chain was extraordinary, something you remember forever,’’ said Nugis, who as a lawmaker in 1990-1992 steered Estonia to freedom.

Both will be among the crowds Saturday and Sunday commemorating the watershed in the Balts’ drive for independence from Moscow — finally achieved as the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991.

Participants won’t re-enact the actual chain — mustering two million people from a total seven million is a tall order — but events include a 24-hour relay along the route.

Runners will include Latvia’s President Valdis Zatlers, 54.

“Twenty years ago, the people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands to dream the dream of freedom,’’ Zatlers said this week.

“The strength of unity among the three nations meant that the whole world heard us. The event was recalled as a unique testimony of the Singing Revolution,’’ he said.

The “Singing Revolution’’ began in 1987, rooted in the region’s vibrant choral tradition. Hundreds of thousands massed to sing banned, patriotic hymns.

Footage of the human chain was this year inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, a list of 193 archives of global significance. August 23, 1989 was deeply symbolic.

It was the 50th anniversary of the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression deal the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a week before World War II.

The pact — which many Russian historians argue was essential because the West failed repeatedly to stand up to Nazi expansion — included secret protocols carving up Poland and allotting the Baltic states to the Soviets.

Berlin and Moscow invaded Poland in September 1939. In 1940 the Soviets annexed the Baltic trio, which had only been independent since Tsarist Russia’s demise during World War I.