What I think may be hard from people outside of the region to appreciate is how remarkable it was that those events transpired without any overt violence. Emotions during those years ran incredibly high on both sides. After four centuries of Soviet occupation and repression, many people in countries like the Baltic states or Moldova, which had only come under Soviet occupation after their forced annexation at the start of the Second World War, now finally felt as though they had a chance to express their right to chart their own future, by choosing leaders that represented their own interests and aspirations, rather than apparatchiks imposed from Moscow.

These changes were viewed with great resentment by the Russophone minorities, which had enjoyed a privileged status during this period, and who in some ways constituted a colonist-like presence with a characteristic colonist mentality of disdain towards the indigenous population. The new freedoms enjoyed by the peoples of the Western republics now threatened this privileged status that they had taken for granted and they fought back. And they fought back with the characteristic insolence (the Russian word наглость fits here better) of a privileged group who had become accustomed to receiving protection from the state. Their stupid look on the faces of the protestors who had broken into Estonia's government offices with such arrogance, once they found themselves surrounded by the Estonian citizenry is a rich metaphor for the sudden loss of status that suddenly hit the Russophone minority.

In any case, in light of these bitter tensions, I think it's easy to see how under different circumstances the Russian protest might have ended with a much more painful result than a humiliating retreat. It is a testament to the Estonian citizens who came to defend their state that they refrained from violence and allowed events to unravel peacefully. It is also a testament to Estonia's wisdom that the new government did not automatically grant citizenship to the Russophone immigrants who had arrived in Estonia while it was under Soviet occupation, but made the acquisition of citizenship contingent on learning the Estonian language and Estonian history. Such a move was vital in forcing the (immigrant) Russophone minority to come to grips with reality if they wanted to participate in Estonia as full citizens.