After the Empire — A Soviet-Legacy Tour

The Vilnius KGB Museum is small and uncompromising. Your historian-guide is Rasa, who started research here in 1995 and has interviewed survivors continuously since. The cells are kept as they were left in August 1991. We give you space — there is a sitting area outside the basement for the breath you may need. The TV Tower in the evening is a different register: a memorial in the form of a working broadcast tower, with the pavement marks where the unarmed gathered to face the tanks.

On 23 August 1989, two million people held hands across the three Baltic states from Vilnius to Tallinn. The Baltic Way was the largest peaceful demonstration in human history, and it went largely unreported in Western media that day. Forty-six years on, every village along the route remembers exactly where the chain ran. We carry a printed map of the original sectors and stop where the markers still stand.

The Corner House (Stūra māja) was the operational nerve centre for KGB Latvia from 1940 onward. The building was returned to the Museum of Occupation in 2014 and the original interrogation rooms, the corridor of dread, and the basement cells were left untouched. The dissident encounter on Day 3 has been a fixture of this itinerary since 2018 — usually with Mavriks Vulfsons's circle, sometimes with a former member of the Helsinki-86 group. We always confirm the day before.

The Riga-Tallinn road in 1989 had three internal checkpoints — internal because the borders between Soviet republics were administrative, not international. Today the border is invisible (Schengen) but the bunkers and watchtowers are still there in the pine forest. We stop at three of them; one has been preserved as an open-air memorial.