The Power of Song scrvcs not only as thc quintcsscntial study ol

what constitutcs thc hcart ol thc rcmarkablc and inspiring movc

mcnts ol thc 8altic pcoplc, it will stand as a distinct contribution
to thc study ol civil rcsistancc movcmcnts ovcrall.
vv:vv ~cxvv:~x, lounding chair ol thc
!ntcrnational Ccntcr on Nonviolcnt Conllict and coauthor
ol Strategic Nonviolent Conflict and A Force More Powerful
Thc nonviolcnt libcration ol thc 8altic countrics rcsultcd lrom
collcctivc scllorganization as thrcc nations mobilizcd thc powcr
ol song. Utilizing his knowlcdgc ol thcir languagcs and culturcs,
Guntis midchcns providcs thc tcxts as wcll as thc contcxts ol
thc music that hclpcd thrcc avids to topplc Goliath.
w~i:vv civ:vxs, prolcssor cmcritus ol political
scicncc at 8oston Univcrsity and associatc at thc avis Ccntcr
lor Russian and urasian Studics at Harvard Univcrsity
An cxccllcnt and thorough work and a signilicant and important
addition to our undcrstanding ol thc rolc that lolklorc and popular
culturc play in shaping political cvcnts.
:i:o:nv :~xcnvviixi, UCLA
A monumcntal study addrcssing a sorcly ncglcctcd aspcct ol
onc ol thc last ccnturys most dramatic gcopolitical uphcavals.
This book will stand, lor ycars and cvcn dccadcs to comc, as thc
standard, authoritativc sourcc on its topic.
xvvix c. x~vxvs, mory Univcrsity
he Power of Song
shows how thc pcoplc
ol stonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania conlrontcd
a military supcrpowcr and
achicvcd indcpcndcncc in thc
8altic Singing Rcvolution.
Vhcn attackcd by Sovict
soldicrs in public displays
ol violcnt lorcc, singing
8alts maintaincd laith in non
violcnt political action. Morc
than ..c choral, rock, and
lolk songs arc translatcd and
intcrprctcd in poctic, cultural,
and historical contcxts.
cux:is s:ibcnvxs
is thc Kazickas Family
ndowcd Prolcssor in 8altic
Studics in thc Scandinavian
studics dcpartmcnt at thc
Univcrsity ol Vashington.
POWER
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New Directions in Scandinavian Studies
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ISBN 9780295993102
smidchens-jacket-UWP.pdf 1 11/1/13 2:52 PM
NEW DIRECTIONS IN SCANDINAVIAN STUDIES
TERJE LEIREN AND CHRISTI NE I NGEBRI TSEN,
SERIES EDI TORS
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NEW DIRECTIONS IN SCANDINAVIAN STUDIES
This series offers interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the Nordic
region of Scandinavia and the Baltic States and their cultural connections
in North America. By redening the boundaries of Scandinavian studies
to include the Baltic States and Scandinavian America, the series presents
books that focus on the study of the culture, history, literature, and politics
of the North.
Small States in International Relations edited by
Christine Ingebritsen, Iver B. Neumann, Sieglinde Gstohl, and Jessica Beyer
Danish Cookbooks: Domesticity and National Identity, 16161901
Carol Gold
Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film, and Social Change
Andrew Nestingen
Selected Plays of Marcus Thrane translated and introduced by
Terje I. Leiren
Munchs Ibsen: A Painters Visions of a Playwright
Joan Templeton
Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance
Monika agar
Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities
in Classical Hollywood Cinema
Arne Lunde
Icons of Danish Modernity: Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen
Julie K. Allen
Danish Folktales, Legends, and Other Stories
Timothy R. Tangherlini
The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture
in the Baltic Singing Revolution
Guntis midchens
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The Power of Song
nonvi ol e nt nat i onal cul t ure
i n the bal t i c s i ngi ng re vol ut i on

Guntis midchens
u ni v e r s i t y of wa s hi ngt on p r e s s Seattle and London
mus e um t us c ul a n um p r e s s Copenhagen
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This publication is supported by a grant from the
Scandinavian Studies Publication Fund and the Baltic
Studies Program at the University of Washington.
2014 by the University of Washington Press
19 18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
University of Washington Press
PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145, USA
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Published in Europe by Museum Tusculanum Press
126 Njalsgade, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
www.mtp.dk ISBN 978-87-635-4148-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smidchens, Guntis, 1963
The power of song : nonviolent national culture in the
Baltic singing revolution / Guntis Smidchens.
pages cm. (New directions in Scandinavian studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-295-99310-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Song festivalsPolitical aspectsBaltic States.
2. Choral singingPolitical aspectsBaltic States.
3. MusicPolitical aspectsBaltic States. I. Title.
ML3917.B37S65 2013
782.4209479dc23 2013029860
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and
meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.481984.
this book is made possible by a collaborative grant
from the andrew w. mellon foundation.
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Lifes greatest moments are so simple. A people singing.
Ivar Ivask
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cont e nts
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Three Nonviolent National Cultures 3
1. Balts Speak to America, July 4, 1998 7
2. Herders Discovery of Baltic Songs 24
3. Three Singing Nations and Their Songs 50
4. Songs of Warrior Nations 107
5. Soviet Power versus Power of the Powerless 135
6. Living within the Truth in Choral Songs 160
7. Living within the Truth in Rock Songs 209
8. Living within the Truth in Folk Songs 261
9. Nonviolent National Singing Traditions 307
Appendix I: Index and Map of Place Names 329
Appendix II: Chronology 333
Appendix III: Song Annotations and Index 339
Notes 357
Bibliography, Discography, and Filmography 409
General Index 435
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acknowl edgments
In writing this book I have had the aid of a number of institutions and
individuals whose role I gratefully acknowledge. The Ralph Rinzler
Folklife Archives and Collections provided copies of sound record-
ings that are at the center of this study. The University of Washington
Libraries ensured access to most published sources quoted here. The
EEVA Digital Text Repository for Older Estonian Literature, the Digi-
tal Collections at the National Library of Latvia, the Lithuanian Folk
Culture Centre website, and Google Books gave easy online access to
rare publications. The National Library of Estonia helped locate numer-
ous songbooks in its collection. In Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, musi-
cians and singers opened their homes and rehearsals to me and invited
me to sing with them. People whom I interviewed in person or by email
gave insights beyond any information found in published sources. Their
names appear in notes, but I wish to emphasize here that their generos-
ity and friendly assistance enriched this work immeasurably.
The University of Washington Department of Scandinavian Stud-
ies provided a Junior Faculty Release Quarter and a Summer Research
Grant, and made possible several expeditions to the Baltic. In 1991
1992 and 1997, my eldwork was supported in part by grants from
the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds
provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United
States Information Agency, and the US Department of State. In 1999
and 2000, travel grants from the Open Society Support Foundation
Group Research Support Scheme allowed me to meet colleagues in
Latvia for valuable discussions about national identity formation. The
UW Chamber Singers and UW Chorale invited me to travel with them
on their Baltic concert tours in 2000, 2005, and 2010, allowing me to
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Acknowledgments x
witness rsthand the power that songs have in creating bridges across
language barriers.
Portions of the manuscript were read and commented on by Geof-
frey Boers, Mimi Daitz, Thomas DuBois, Ulrich Gaier, Heather
MacLaughlin Garbes, Terje Leiren, Lalita Muiniece, ivil Ramo-
kait, and Rimas ilinskas. Kanni Labi offered a particularly inci-
sive reading of several chapters. The entire manuscript was read by
Dace Bula, Kevin Karnes, Violeta Kelertas, Aldis Purs, and Zinta
midchens, whose critique and encouragement were invaluable. Stu-
dents in classes I taught at the University of Washington have pro-
vided a sounding board for ideas and translation attempts. Scandina-
vian Department research assistants Sean Hughes and Axel Thorson
helped index my archive and edit the manuscript. The editors of the
New Directions in Scandinavian Studies Series gave support and sug-
gestions for improvements. Tim Zimmermann, Kerrie Maynes, and
the editors and anonymous readers at the University of Washington
Press helped shape the manuscripts nal version.
Illustrations for this book were possible thanks to the assistance of
the directors and staff at the institutions mentioned in the credits. Sil-
vestras Gaiinas, Ojrs Griis, Ain Haas, Inta Kaepja, Andres Kas-
ekamp, Veiko Lukmann, Angonita Rupyt, Valters erbinskis, and
Aura Valaniauskien also offered critical help in acquiring images
and other resources. Zinta midchens crafted a map of place names
mentioned in this book.
All of these institutions and people have improved my work consid-
erably, but I alone remain responsible for this books content. I thank
the four teachers who opened up Baltic worlds for me: Violeta Keler-
tas, Lalita Muiniece, Harri Mrk, and Toivo Raun, and my father,
who sang with his children to pass the time on long car trips.
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The Power of Song
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3
Introduction
Three Nonviolent National Cultures
A nation who makes its revolution by singing and smiling should be
a sublime example to all, wrote the Estonian journalist Heinz Valk,
in the June 1988 editorial whose title, Singing Revolution, gave the
nonviolent Baltic independence movement its name. It is impossible
to even imagine in Estonias city streets the riots, barricades, burning
automobiles and similar features of mass revolt by large nations. This
is not our way!
1
The Baltic way had begun a year earlier when cou-
rageous Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians publicly broke through
Soviet restrictions on free speech and assembly. It gained force as atten-
dance at political meetings grew from handfuls to hundreds of thou-
sands. It culminated in the election of the three governments that in
spring of 1990 declared independence from the Soviet Union and estab-
lished civilian-based defense as the means of liberation. The movements
nonviolent foundations were tested from January to August 1991, when
Soviet soldiers killed people in public displays of violent force. Esto-
nia, Latvia, and Lithuania nevertheless sustained policies based on non-
violence, and achieved their goal of political independence when they
established diplomatic relations with the Russian Federation from July
29 to August 24, 1991. At this great moment, the power of nonviolent
political action was reconrmed. What Estonians, Latvians, and Lithua-
nians did, exclaims a leading scholar of nonviolence, stands as a major
milestone in the history of the modern world.
2
Why did the struggle for Baltic independence come to be called the
Singing Revolution? What did they sing? And what role did singing
play in the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian campaigns of political
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Introduction 4
mobilization and nonviolent action? Many scholars have documented
and analyzed the events that led to Baltic independence; most have
focused on the parliamentary processes by which nonformal Baltic
citizens groups created the three governments that severed ties with
Moscow.
3
Some have studied the movements nonviolent tactics and
expanded the Singing Revolutions history to include events that took
place many decades or even a century earlier.
4
Few, however, have
gone to the heart of Baltic nonviolent political action in the late twen-
tieth century: the songs and singing that gave the movement its name.
5
At public gatherings, Balts sang. This book offers a small selection
of their choral, rock, and folk songs in English translation. Follow-
ing traditions of thick description in folklore studies, song texts are
presented in their historical, cultural, and poetic context.
6
The goal
is to interpret meanings as Balts themselves may have imagined them
when they sang, or, following the lead of Anthony David Smith, to
enter the participants inner world.
7
Ideally, Estonians, Latvians,
and Lithuanians should be allowed to speak for themselves, select-
ing, performing, and commenting on their own songs. This is why the
sixteen songs in the books rst chapter carry particular weight. They
were documented at the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, in a con-
cert in which native participants remembered their Singing Revolu-
tion.
8
Songs presented in later chapters, too, were usually rst selected
by persons other than the author. At some point in national history,
each of the one hundred and twelve songs in this book was identied
by an Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian, or in some cases by an out-
side observer, as a key text, worthy of inclusion in the discourse on
national identity. Some songs, for example, were foregrounded by per-
sons who placed them rst or last in a songbook or a concert program,
or by audiences who enthusiastically requested encores. Some songs
were selected because they entered national tradition, to be quoted
and adapted by poets and songwriters in new, popular songs. Many
of the songs in this book were sung during the Singing Revolution.
Documentary lmmakers and memoir authors have quoted them as a
means of capturing the movements spirit.
In 1998 at the Smithsonian festival, my job as interpreter for Baltic
singers and speakers as they performed on stage was to convey to the
English-speaking American audience, within a split-second, a sense of
what the singers were singing. On paper, there is more time to ponder
and translate each word, but the sounds of the singing and the faces
of the singers are gone. The written words on this books pages are
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Introduction 5
voices from the past, textual shards of a once-living work of verbal
art, removed by decades from their original performances, transcribed
and translated into a language and cultural context very different from
their own.
9
Space restrictions do not allow inclusion of musical notation
or texts in the original languages; these sources may nowadays be easily
retrieved online, or found in the publications listed in notes. This book
needs to stand alone, too. It should contain poetry that might, albeit dis-
tantly, recreate the feelings of the people who once sang it. My English
translations attempt to use sounds and rhythms that might help a reader
hear them, perhaps, as a native might experience them in Estonian,
Latvian, Lithuanian, German, or Russian. Some of the translations fol-
low the original meter precisely, others retain some poetic form but are
not singable, while still others sacrice poetic form to reproduce con-
tent or intertextual connections. Together, these texts make up a web
of songs and performances in cultural and historical context, recreating
meanings beyond the sum total of individual texts.
The chapters of this book offer some pieces in the puzzle of the
Singing Revolution. Why were songs particularly resonant symbols of
national identity and political action? The story begins in chapter 2 with
the eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who iden-
tied songs as symbols of heritage and as models for effective poetry,
and used them as rhetorical tools that would bring about social change.
How did these ideas diffuse to the masses of the three nations? Chap-
ter 3 sketches out the transition from Herders philosophical interest
in folk poetry to the nineteenth-century construction of Baltic national
cultures, and to the birth of singing nations in song festival traditions.
Singing traditions established a fundamental means of nonviolent politi-
cal change, but parallel strands of violent national military songs also
emerged; these are engaged in chapter 4. Chapter 5 introduces the ideo-
logically charged traditions of Soviet mass culture that were imposed
upon the Baltic under Stalinism, and presents a mechanism by which
individuals could maintain non-Soviet identities, most notably by sing-
ing songs that did not follow the ofcially prescribed rules of Soviet
socialist realism. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 outline non-Soviet singing that
emerged in three styles: choral, rock/pop, and folk. All of these tradi-
tions converged in the Singing Revolution.
This book aims to expand our knowledge of Baltic national cul-
tures and nationalism. It also contributes to our understanding of
nonviolent political movements. In the international study of nonvio-
lence, many books have been devoted to political tactics, and to the
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Introduction 6
biographies and moral and philosophical writings of movement lead-
ers.
10
The past two decades have produced many ethnographic descrip-
tions of conict resolution in peaceful societies.
11
We know less,
however, about the shared texts and traditions through which large
masses of individuals assumed ownership of tactical and philosophi-
cal principles and joined these movements to give them their people
power.
12
Singing is often overlooked. The standard history of non-
violence by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force More Power-
ful, a companion volume to the six-part PBS broadcast, lists in its
index many key words related to nonviolent struggle: ahimsa, armed
struggle, boycotts, Catholic Church, civil disobedience, doctors, elec-
tions, nancial sanctions, general strikes, hunger strikes, Internet, leaf-
lets, marches, media, negotiating, noncooperation, petitions, refusal
to work, resignations, self-rule, sit-ins, strikes, (withholding) taxes,
underground press, violence, work stay-awaysbut no singing, and
no songs. A case study of the Baltic Singing Revolution may help add
these key words to the study of nonviolence.
Because the Baltic independence movement combined nationalist
and nonviolent ideologies, this book engages a well-known problem,
the question of whether it is possible to reconcile nonviolent prin-
ciples with a pursuit of nationalist power.
13
In the Baltic, Mark Beiss-
inger nds that non-violence and passionate ethnic identity need not
be incompatible, and argues that the emotional bonds created by
nationalism were a resource for peaceful mass politics.
14
The three
national cultures provided Baltic activists with much more than ethnic
solidarity. They contained a powerful arsenal of symbols that could
inspire and sustain faith in nonviolent struggle. Connections between
the ideology of nonviolence and Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian
national identities reach back two centuries, drawing deep strands
from the nineteenth-century works of native Baltic nation builders.
In 1873, the Latvian national poet Auseklis exclaimed, The power
of songs drove away war! Ausekliss poem passed into the national
choral canon, and resurfaced a century later at the national song fes-
tival of 1990. In the Baltic, nonviolence and the struggle for national
political independence were not merely compatiblethey merged in a
powerful, unied current of songs. To be Estonian, Latvian, or Lithu-
anian in 198891 meant to be politically nonviolent. True to Heinz
Valks assertion quoted above, Ausekliss song and many other songs
of the Baltic Singing Revolution offer inspiration to the nonviolent
people and nations of our world.
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