The Baltic Nations, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, emerged on the world news scene in 1989 as if from nowhere. For 50 years they had literally disappeared from the map, subsumed into the monochromatic zone of the USSR. On August 23, 1989 people in the Baltics formed a human chain stretching 430 miles through all three Baltic nations. This massive demonstration, called the Baltic Chain, told the world that they existed as nations yearning to be masters of their own destiny. Independence was finally obtained in 1991, and although the years of Soviet oppression changed much of the traditional life of these Baltic peoples, their strength of conviction and consciousness of themselves bound them together, tied them to their lands, and retained their traditions. National song festivals, the first occuring before the turn of the 20th century, built ethnic awareness and national pride in all three countries, through periods of independence as well as occupation. By the 1980's folk ensembles and the grassroots folklife movement became an integral part of the massive "Singing Revolution", a form of nonviolent resistance against the occupying regime, consisting of peaceful meetings and national song festivals with attendence numbering in the hundreds of thousands.