1968 Red Square Demonstration

The 1968 Red Square Demonstration was an act of public dissent against the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and its bloody suppression of the Prague Spring. Its eight participants were arrested almost immediately and sentenced to prison. The account gives the protest both a political meaning and a particular human consequence through Vadim Delaunay, one of the demonstrators, whose later life the narrator connects to a missed chance to meet again.

Background and Protest

In August 1968, a few months after the narrator’s lunch with a French cultural attaché, Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring. Eight dissidents then staged a demonstration on Red Square, an unusually audacious act of protest in the Soviet capital. The account records all eight by name: Larisa Bogoraz, Pavel Litvinov, Vladimir Dremliuga, Tatiana Baeva, Viktor Fainberg, Konstantin Babitsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, and Vadim Delaunay. Gorbanevskaya arrived pushing her baby in a carriage, while Delaunay carried a placard bearing the words FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS. The small group made a direct appeal for freedom that joined opposition to the invasion with a claim of solidarity beyond the protesters themselves.

Arrest and Consequences

The demonstration ended in arrest. The participants received prison sentences of varying lengths; Delaunay was sentenced to two and a half years. After his release, further entanglements with the KGB preceded his emigration to Paris. The rapid sequence—from a public protest to prison and then exile—shows the personal cost attached to this brief act of dissent. The episode does not describe the other demonstrators’ individual sentences, but makes clear that all were condemned.

Afterlife in the Narrative

Delaunay’s fate carries the event beyond the moment of protest. The narrator recalls having spoken happily with him about Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and later realizes that he could have seen him again in Paris had he known Delaunay was there. Delaunay died in 1983, aged thirty-five. The recollection thus turns a well-defined act of collective resistance into a story of a particular life: a young dissident survives imprisonment and exile, only for the narrator to understand too late that another meeting had been possible.