In 1986, while working as an amber craftsman in Liepāja, he co-founded Helsinki-86 and helped to organize the first commemoration of the victims of the June 1941 Soviet deportations since the Second World War at Riga's Freedom Monument in 1987, filming the events and sending the tape outside the USSR. He was then arrested by Soviet authorities and later allowed to go into exile to West Germany in 1987. From there he supported other activists of the Third Latvian National Awakening by supplying them with audio and video recording equipment scarcely available in the USSR.