Prague Spring

The Prague Spring enters the book not as a sustained account of reform in Czechoslovakia but through its aftermath: the Soviet invasion, the Red Square protest against it, and the punishments imposed on those who took part. That compressed episode establishes a human scale for dissent under Soviet power. Later, the book returns to questions the protest makes urgent—who may claim to speak for the country, what makes opposition legitimate, and how resistance changes when the political setting changes—without suggesting that later movements simply continue the same struggle.

Invasion and the Red Square protest

In August 1968, a few months after the narrator’s lunch with a French cultural attaché, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring. The response described in the book was a demonstration on Red Square, staged by eight dissidents in protest. The narrator records their names: Larisa Bogoraz, Pavel Litvinov, Vladimir Dremliuga, Tatiana Baeva, Viktor Fainberg, Konstantin Babitsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, and Vadim Delaunay. The list makes the protest more than an anonymous act of defiance; it preserves the identities of people whom the state quickly arrested.

The demonstrators’ arrest was followed by prison sentences of varying lengths. Vadim Delaunay received two and a half years. Natalya Gorbanevskaya had brought her baby in a carriage, an ordinary detail set against the extraordinary risk of appearing in the square. Delaunay carried a placard bearing the words FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS. Its appeal linked opposition to the invasion with a wider claim to freedom, but the immediate consequence was imprisonment.

Personal aftermath and the work of remembrance

The book follows Delaunay beyond the demonstration, but only in brief strokes: after his release, he became entangled in further conflicts with the KGB and emigrated. He moved to Paris, where the narrator says they might have met again had the narrator known he was there. Delaunay died in 1983, aged thirty-five. The movement’s history is thus carried partly by a life that continued in exile and ended young, and partly by the narrator’s later regret at a meeting that never took place.

The act of naming is itself emphasized. The narrator explains that he makes a point of recording the eight protesters’ names. That insistence matters in a book attentive to the state’s power to punish dissent and to suppress or reshape its memory. The placard’s appeal survives alongside the sentence, the later emigration, and the premature death: the protest is not reduced to the fact of its defeat.

Opposition in a changed political landscape

Later episodes in the book revisit dissent under circumstances that differ sharply from 1968. Anna Politkovskaya, writing about the trial of forty National Bolshevik Party militants, defended the accused after they were charged with occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices and shouting for Vladimir Putin to leave. They received lengthy prison sentences. Politkovskaya presented them as courageous young people of integrity who offered hope for the country’s moral future. Yelena Bonner likewise supported the National Bolsheviks, while noting the troubling associations of their name. The narrator is startled by these judgments because he had regarded Eduard Limonov as a fascist leading skinheads. The episode shows how the meaning of opposition could be disputed even among people the narrator regarded as moral authorities.

The same instability appears during the 1993 confrontation around the White House. Several thousand patriots gathered outside a building that two years earlier had symbolized the triumph of Boris Yeltsin and the democrats. Some, though not all, were fascists; now they presented themselves as defenders of the constitutional order against a possible dictatorship. Ruslan Khasbulatov and Alexander Rutskoy, who had stood alongside Yeltsin two years before, led the rebellion against him. The dissolved parliament declared its dissolution unconstitutional, removed Yeltsin, installed Rutskoy as president, and occupied the building. Limonov joined the crowd and spent the night moving among meetings as its members debated, shouted, drank, wrote communiqués, and formed a new government.

At three in the morning, Limonov gained an audience with Rutskoy, whom he addressed as president. When Western governments declared their support for Yeltsin, Limonov argued that the conflict was not a coup but an elected parliament resisting dictatorship, and that Western countries would have to accept this in the name of their own values. The scene sharply contrasts with 1968: there, the protest was against a Soviet invasion and the demonstrators were swiftly arrested; here, rival camps claimed the constitutional legitimacy of the state, while Limonov urged the rebel side toward a fight. The book places these episodes beside one another as changing and contested forms of dissent, not as equivalent acts.

Parties, protest, and the limits of political opportunity

The National Bolshevik Party’s later development further complicates any single account of opposition. At a convention attended by several hundred delegates from across Russia, Limonov celebrated the party’s growth from years of distributing its newspaper to train stations. The party had about seven thousand adherents. Its followers were not the martial ideal Alexander Dugin had imagined, but provincial adolescents who, in the book’s description, found a sense of purpose, style, and ideal in the movement. Limonov told them that the time was not ripe to take power, while proposing a campaign on the periphery of the former Soviet Union in support of Russian populations and separatist republics. A hundred hands rose when he invited volunteers for a tour of Central Asia.

The party’s repertoire included actions such as tagging trains, unfurling banners on hard-to-reach monuments, and throwing tomatoes at a governor during official events. A former teacher in Zakhar Prilepin’s novel Sankya sees these as immature, potentially excusable acts of courage, while worrying about the movement’s language of national greatness and sacred purpose. In Russia, the book observes, actions that might bring only a fine in Western Europe could bring prison sentences, which the activists served proudly. The contrast recalls the stakes of the 1968 protest—where public dissent met state punishment—while also showing a later movement whose provocations and nationalist politics were very different.

The state eventually denied the National Bolshevik Party the right to exist. Limonov met with the minister responsible and argued that the party had seven thousand adherents, unlike many of the 130 registered parties he described as phantom organizations. He warned that forcing an active party underground could push young people toward extremism and terrorism. The minister refused authorization. Years later, after the coalition The Other Russia had ceased to exist, Limonov created Strategy 31, named for the constitutional right to demonstrate. Its supporters gathered on Triumfalnaya Square on the thirty-first of months with that many days. Typically about a hundred demonstrators faced five times as many police; officers arrested dozens, and Limonov regularly spent a couple of days in prison. The small, repeated protest stands far from the dramatic occupation of Red Square in 1968, but the book again depicts public opposition as a confrontation shaped by state control and the possibility of arrest.

The later struggle over Soviet memory

The book’s later political landscape also changes what resistance means. Five years after Yeltsin declared the Communist Party illegal, voters were ready, according to the polls described, to support it in large numbers. Gennady Zyuganov campaigned less on restoring the Gulag or the Berlin Wall than on opposing corruption, affirming national pride, and invoking Russian Orthodoxy. The account presents this shift as a response to disillusionment with democracy, the market, and the injustice accompanying them—not as a return to the political conditions of the Prague Spring.

Vladimir Putin’s rise brings the dispute over the Soviet past into the present. Limonov wrote pamphlets portraying Putin as tyrannical and mediocre, while the narrator argues that Putin’s appeal also lay in his defense of the dignity people attached to Soviet lives, beliefs, and sacrifices. This leaves Limonov in an incongruous position: a dissident aligned with honest democrats and human-rights activists, despite his contempt for the values they defend. The book’s account of the Prague Spring therefore resonates beyond 1968, but not as a simple origin story. It supplies an early, stark example of dissent punished by the state; the later episodes show how the identities of dissidents, the grounds on which they claim legitimacy, and the political meanings attached to their actions can all be transformed.