They say history does not know ifs: what would have been if... Nevertheless I will take the liberty to speculate that we would have to pay with much bigger blood for the regaining of Latvia's independence if during the barricades January the Democratic Russia would not have taken side of the brake-away Latvia. This was the name of the political movement headed in Moscow by the first-wave democrates, members of Council of the Inter-regional deputy group.

The legendary group was created at the First Congress of the people's deputies of the USSR in June 1989 and four people were elected as members of the ruling council: academician Andrei Sakharov, the then-Head of the Committee on building and architecture of the USSR Supreme Soviet Boris Yeltsin, rector of Moscow State institute of history and archives academician Juri Afanasyev and the deputy from Estonia, department head at Tartu state university academician Victor Palm. The core of the group was comprised of other politicians, who soon would become widely known throughout the world: Gavriil Popov, Sergei Stankevich, Galina Starovoitova (later killed at the enterance to her apartment building in Saint Petersburg), Anatoly Sobchak...

By the time of the tragic events of January 1991 in Lithuania and Latvia all these politicians were de-facto deputies of two parliaments at the same time: USSR and Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic parliaments, since its own parliament was created in Russia only in 1990. When first blood of peaceful civilians was spilled in Vilnius and in Riga the People's Front called on its supporters to build barricades, many cities in Russia saw a wave of spontaneous meetings in support of the Baltic republics' right for self-determination. The initiators of these meetings were mainy Democratic Russia activists.

The largest meeting (in which according to different estimates two to five hundred thousand people took part in) was held in Moscow on Manezhnaya square on January 20th 1991. On the same exact day when in Riga OMON stormed the Interior Ministry of the Republic of Latvia and five people lost their lives: two film operators, two policemen resisting OMON and a school student hit by a stray bullet.

The Moscow meeting commenced under the slogan "Hands off Baltics!" Then-chairman of the USSR KGB V.Krychkov tried to ban it from being held. He warned the Democratic Russia leadership that force will be used to disban the meeting. And indeed, as I was told then by my Latvian deputy-corps colleague in Kremlin Andrei Eizans, who personally took an active part in the meeting, all streets, leading to Manezhnaya square, were filled with busses with curtains drawn blindly on their windows. In the busses OMON fighters waited for the order to storm the crowds. However the order never came. Because across the perimeter of the huge square, with their parliament ids showing there stood opposition deputies of the two parliaments - USSR and the Russian one - ready to defend freedom of the Baltic republics.

January 1991. Deputies are still considered untouchable in Soviet Russia and KGB ends up not daring to attack the deputies forming a live chain. Perhaps some day Latvian historians will take a look at the events of January 20th 1991 that took place near the Interior Ministry in Riga also through the prism of this, Moscow meeting, regretfully already forgotten today.