ON the dot of 7pm families and strangers took each other's hands and stepped into the main road, some carrying flags, others with lapel badges showing the swastika beside the hammer and sickle. Organisers claimed a million and a half were taking part, but from where I stood in a Lithuanian field on a sunlit evening 20 years ago this Sunday, the mood was as impressive as the numbers.

Defiance and solidarity were uppermost, as well as delight that so many people had turned out. Most were on their first political demonstration. Public protests were springing up all over the Soviet Union and its eastern European empire in 1989, but in one swoop the Baltic Way, as the vast human chain was called, had trumped the others by its size and quiet dignity.

It stretched from the Estonian capital Tallinn via Riga in Latvia to Lithuania's Vilnius. The aim was to denounce an event exactly half a century earlier, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, in which Hitler and Stalin publicly agreed not to attack each other, while adding secret clauses that carved up central Europe, paving the way for the Nazis to move into western Poland while Stalin took most of the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and parts of Romania.

The human chain was primarily intended to show Moscow and the world the strength of the Baltic independence drive. But it was also a protest over the suppression of history. The Soviet authorities were still denying the secret clauses' existence, although they had been discovered by western forces in Berlin in 1945 and were widely known.

Soon after the Baltic Way Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming Soviet leader, conceded the point and published the Soviet version. Yet, 20 years on, the issue is still a political football, marked by a resolution which the European parliament passed this spring to declare Aug 23 “a Europe-wide Remembrance Day for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes”.

In the arcane way these things are done in the European parliament, the resolution was a watered-down version of a “declaration” it passed last September which wanted to make Aug 23 a day to remember “victims of Stalinism and Nazism”.

Individual EU governments take the ultimate decision, and few have nominated Aug 23 as a special day. But the issue matters as it marks an unpleasant effort by many Baltic and central European politicians to equate Stalinism and Nazism or claim Stalinism was worse.

In part concerned by the continuing strength of former communist parties in the region, they use the Nazi-Soviet “equation” as a device to smear any party of the left. (The draft resolution was watered down by left groups in the European parliament.) It is also a barely disguised attempt to maintain extreme wariness, if not outright hostility, to contemporary Russia.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact certainly showed Stalin to be as cynical as Hitler. But to jump from that to equate the two men's record or ideology does not accord with reality.

Nor does it take account of the fact that Soviet policy evolved after Stalin's death so that political activity, let alone ordinary family life, in the two decades under Brezhnev was not subject to arbitrary terror. Rightwing Baltic politicians have a point in saying most other Europeans are unaware of Stalin's mass deportations from the Baltics.

— The Guardian, London