MRP-AEG (Estonian Group for the Disclosure of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact)

Founding and composition

MRP-AEG was the first organised attempt to exploit the narrow opening that early-perestroika glasnost provided. Initiator Lagle Parek was a former political prisoner and later Estonia's interior minister; Tiit Madisson had signed the 1980 Letter of 40 Intellectuals. The founding members included Jüri Mikk, Heiki Ahonen, Ilse Heinsalu, and Mati Kiirend, while imprisoned dissidents Mart Niklus and Enn Tarto were named honorary members. Membership grew to only 19 in its one-year existence, but its influence far exceeded those numbers.

The Hirvepark meeting

On 23 August 1987, the 48th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, MRP-AEG organised the Hirvepark meeting, the first large open dissident demonstration in Estonia. Denied its original venue at Town Hall Square by a last-minute permit revocation, the rally moved to Hirvepark, where roughly 7,000 people gathered under the cameras of KGB officers. Speakers demanded not only disclosure of the secret protocols but also self-determination for the Baltic states and abolition of the pact itself; some carried posters equating the hammer and sickle with the swastika. The official press branded participants as thieves, crooks, and fascists distorting history, and organisers faced KGB reprisals. Tiit Madisson was subsequently forced to emigrate to Sweden.

Successor: the ERSP

On 20 August 1988 MRP-AEG's core figures founded the Estonian National Independence Party (ERSP) at Pilistvere, the first non-communist political party in the Soviet Union. While the moderate Popular Front (Rahvarinne), formed the same year, sought autonomy within the Soviet system, MRP-AEG and the ERSP demanded full restoration of independence from the outset, a qualitatively different stance. The ERSP went on to play the radical wing's role in the independence process and is counted among the forces that laid the political groundwork for the restoration of independence on 20 August 1991.

Historical significance

MRP-AEG was the organisation that first brought to the streets the demand raised by the 1979 Baltic Appeal of 45 citizens: that the secret protocols' existence and consequences be confronted. Given that the USSR acknowledged and annulled the protocols only in December 1989, MRP-AEG's activity was a pre-emptive challenge to the official Soviet historical narrative. Scholars assess MRP-AEG and the Hirvepark meeting as the starting point of the Singing Revolution and the moment when Estonia's legal-continuity argument, that the 1940 annexation was void from the start, passed from dissident circles into a mass movement.