1. Footage of this speech can be seen in Antra Cilinska and Raitis Valters, Directors, Barricades for Freedom (Riga, Latvia: Jura Podnieka Studija, 2001). The figure of “over 500,000” is from Olgerts Eglitis, Nonviolent Action in the Liberation of Latvia (Cambridge, Mass.: Albert Einstein Institution, 1993), 33. Other estimates claim as high as 700,000.
2. The appellation “Singing Revolution” was coined by Estonian journalist Heinz Valk. It first appeared in the June 17, 1988, issue of the newspaper Sirp ja Vasar (Sickle and Hammer). See Rein Taagepera, Estonia: Return to Independence (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), 136. In Latvia, it also was sometimes referred to as the “Revolution of Songs and Flowers” during the movement.
3. Interview, Kārlis Streips, Jan. 22, 2004. Inta Brikše, Dace Dūze, and Ilze Šulmane likewise attest to the immense popularity of journalists in “Latvia: From the Singing Revolution to the 1993 Elections” in Svennik Høyer, Epp Lauk, and Peeter Vihalemm, eds. Towards a Civic Society: The Baltic Media's Long Road to Freedom (Tartu, Estonia: Baltic Association for Media Research, 1993), 240.
4. This research paradigm rested on the assumption of a transition that would accompany communism's collapse with Soviet and East European societies and their media growing into Western types. The transition model has been criticized by numerous researchers as triumphalist, ideological, overly optimistic, overly simplistic, and decontextualized, and Stephen Kotkin went so far as to call the notion “silly.” See Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 7.