For most Americans, the tragedies wrought by Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other tyrants are mere abstractions that we glimpse on the History Channel while we’re searching for “reality” TV. But for a reader from Shiloh, Ill., a documentary about Estonia called “The Singing Revolution” (which is currently playing at the Tivoli) was a chapter from his life story.

On the voice mail he left for me, the gentleman did not reveal his name; but the accent and the emotion in his voice convinced me his story was genuine. He said when hwas a student, the Soviets who had wrested Estonia from the Nazis–and would occupy it for sixty years–labeled him a capitalist sympathizer and sent him to a series of concentration camps in Siberia. (His family’s problems with Russians started earlier, when his uncle’s shoes were stolen at gunpoint by Josef Stalin’s father.)

The man was back in Estonia during the so-called Singing Revolution of the late ’80s, when large public gatherings were galvanized by patriotic folk songs. The film suggests that as the numbers swelled and Soviet tanks rolled into the Baltic nations, the people responded with non-violentl resistance.

I said in my review that the film was one-sided, because surely there were deeply felt beliefs and angry resentments on both sides of the struggle. In America in the ’60s, the anti-war movement that started with folk songs led to outbreaks of violence, from both cops and protesters.

Yet maybe there really is such a thing as heroic pacifism, and the will of the people can’t be stopped when they unite behind their principles.

We’ll test that idea in November.