On one hand it's pretty amazing to experience the story via this documentary and various interviews and points made by the narrator in the English version. It's some curious historical scenes and news segments and the documentary is never even close to boring. This is very entertaining. On the other hand it's a giant mess. It focuses largely on Estonia so we miss a ton of the overview and crucial stuff happening in Moscow and other places. They don't even mention the name "Ukraine" or most other countries that got their independence right after Estonia. They only focus on Estonia and Baltikum. Yeltsin is a side character. Gorbachev is largely presented in 1 single meeting. The documentary makers are extreme excited about this Estonian recording of Gorbachev and proclaim it an amazing historical recording in the documentary. They then show it about 8 times, again and again in various places. Not really figuring that just because they recorded it doesn't mean it's more important than the various historical documents and deals made during these events. They could have cut out these 10 minutes and replaced them with more news segments.
They present the Polish independence movement and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. A pact Estonia got cancelled via the USSR parliament. Not telling anyone they planned to cancel it to gain independence. They then beg Gorbachev to gain economic independence. They are a high IQ population with higher goals than Russia. They then create their own money. The doc also shows some skirmishes with USSR and various country rebel groups in capitals. The USSR forces kill many people fighting for independence. But finally the president of Russia signs the Estonian independence deal. Gorbachev, the leader of USSR, is weak at that point. A communist coup just took place. They tried to stop Gorbachev from creating too many liberal laws as they feared USSR would collapse. The coup fails and Yeltsin uses it to gain positive PR and more power. Gorbachev is weak, but before Yeltsin can take over the leadership of USSR Baltikum forces an independence vote. Of course Yeltsin supports it. He is president of Russia that is overall ruled by Gorbachev and gaining Russia's independence would make Yeltsin a proper president. He later picks Putin as the president/dictator of Russia and Putin is now trying to recreate USSR with himself as the powerful dictator ruling it all. So basically Russia is trying to regain the countries they themselves wanted to become independent back then.
Unfortunately the doc just jumps from place to place and we never quite figure who did what. Because they reuse that one footage we never quite understand the bloody civil wars or how many people Gorbachev killed by these means or who even won the battles. We also never see how Estonians tackle independence. It's just mentioned they gained independence not if they love it or what media appeared when it became its own country. Did their culture expand or remain small? What happened to all these politicians? How is Russia looking at Estonia now? What are the plans for Estonia? What do the old Russians living in Estonia think about all of this? Without telling us the point of independence it's hard to understand how they feel about it. It just feels like it's a small club wanting to run itself. Not a country trying to regain their old culture. The VHS quality to the doc unfortunately drags it down as it doesn't give us enough numbers, charts, maps, news segments. It just uses whatever recordings it could find on video. Which is not a ton.
