People of the Revolution and the USSR

Dissident 1941–

The dissident architect who walked out of a Soviet prison camp and opened Estonia's political road to independence

On 23 August 1987 at noon, Hirvepark stood empty until the stroke of twelve, when two to five thousand people suddenly filled it. Parek recalled: 'Unbelievable! Something had to be done.'

The daughter of an Estonian officer, she was deported to Siberia at seven and spent four years in exile. Working as an architect, she was arrested in 1983 for anti-Soviet samizdat activity and imprisoned for four years; seven months after her release she co-founded the MRP-AEG and organised the Hirvepark rally of August 1987. That rally became the starting point of the Baltic independence movement, and the following year she was elected chair of the ERSP, Estonia's first non-communist party. After independence she served as interior minister in the first post-Soviet government, resigning in the 1993 Pullapää crisis, and later converted to Catholicism, living at Pirita Convent while leading the drive to build a memorial to the victims of Stalinism.

Dissident 1950–2021 ○ Natural causes

The Estonian dissident who helped break the silence at Hirvepark

At Hirvepark, Madisson called for the secret protocols to be published and their consequences liquidated.

Tiit Madisson was an Estonian dissident and writer who spent 1980–1986 as a political prisoner. After his release, he founded MRP-AEG and helped organise the 1987 Hirvepark meeting, which demanded publication of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocols and the liquidation of their consequences. The rally became a key moment in the return of public political action in late Soviet Estonia, and the authorities forced him into exile in Sweden. After returning, he took part in Estonia's restoration politics and nationalist organisations; his later writings also drew criticism for Holocaust denial.

Dissident 1956–

Estonian former political prisoner who survived the Soviet camps and co-organized the first open rally of the Baltic independence movement

The Hirvepark demonstration, Ahonen said, 'broke open the path for the expression of opinion,' an historic turn he called 'the icebreaker effect.'

Heiki Ahonen was born in 1956 in Pärnu, Estonia. His grandfather was shot by the NKVD, his father imprisoned in the camps, and his mother deported to Siberia: every member of his family was repressed. Joining the underground resistance in 1977, he distributed samizdat and fed information on Soviet human rights violations to Western journalists; convicted of anti-Soviet agitation in 1983, he served five years in the Perm labour camps. Released in early 1987, he co-organised the Hirvepark rally that August, the first open mass demonstration demanding disclosure of the Nazi-Soviet pact's secret protocols, breaking the dam for the Baltic independence movement; then was forcibly expelled by the KGB, spent a decade in exile, and came home as the founding director of the Museum of Occupations.