For your freedom and ours

For your freedom and ours is the slogan carried by Vadim Delaunay at an August 1968 demonstration on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the Prague Spring. The placard’s words turn a protest against a specific act of repression into a declaration of solidarity: the freedom at stake belongs not only to those directly confronting Soviet power, but also to those whose cause they publicly defend.

The slogan in the demonstration

The demonstration brought eight dissidents to Red Square after the invasion. Delaunay bore a placard inscribed “FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS.” The author records the names of all eight participants, including Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who arrived pushing a baby carriage. Against the scale of the Soviet response to the Prague Spring, the small group’s public appearance was an act of deliberate defiance.

Meaning and political force

The slogan’s paired freedoms resist separating the fate of Czechoslovakia from that of the protesters themselves. Its compact wording makes solidarity the point: opposing the invasion is presented not as a distant observer’s gesture, but as a defense of a freedom shared across political boundaries. In the scene, the placard gives that principle a visible form, carried into the public square by one of the demonstrators.

Repression and the cost of speaking

The demonstrators were arrested and sentenced to prison terms of varying lengths; Delaunay received two and a half years. After his release, further entanglements with the KGB preceded his emigration to Paris. The phrase therefore stands in the account beside the consequences of voicing dissent: the placard’s brief appeal to freedom is followed by imprisonment, renewed conflict with the authorities, and departure from the country. Delaunay died in 1983, aged thirty-five.