 Rätsep and Viiding would remain close friends until Viiding's suicide in 1995.Their last performance together, "Kallis õhtu", took place in 1994 at the café of Rakvere Theatre.In October 1980, Rätsep was a signatory of the Letter of 40 Intellectuals, a public letter in which forty prominent Estonian intellectuals defended the Estonian language and protested the Russification policies of the Kremlin in Estonia.