(Excerpted from my book...Our Summer in Estonia...Amazon.com) As Communist Party control began to unravel when Gorbachev loosened the reins, Estonians tested their strength, timidly at first, and then with growing courage. It was a s though the jailor left the door open, but prisoners were unsure of their next move. Should they take a step out and see what happens, then another? Then run, run, run. The Estonian people turned to song to begin testing their new limits. In September 1988, not a festival year and a year before the Berlin Wall came down, some 300,000 people, a quarter of the adult population, gathered at the song festival grounds to sing Estonian national songs, show the formerly forbidden Estonian flag and listen, for the first time, for calls for independence. Just two years later, in 1990,
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