The Prague Spring reform movement ended in violent suppression when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The narrative connects that reversal to a rare act of public defiance in Moscow: eight dissidents protested on Red Square, were arrested, and received prison sentences. The fate of Vadim Delaunay, who carried the demonstration’s most memorable placard, gives the episode a personal aftermath extending beyond prison and into exile.

Invasion and Suppression

In August 1968, a few months after the narrator’s lunch with the French cultural attaché, Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia and bloodily crushed the Prague Spring. The account supplies no detailed chronology of the reform movement or military intervention; its emphasis falls on the invasion’s immediate political meaning and on the dissidents who dared to protest it in the Soviet capital.

The Red Square Demonstration

Eight people staged the demonstration: Larisa Bogoraz, Pavel Litvinov, Vladimir Dremliuga, Tatiana Baeva, Viktor Fainberg, Konstantin Babitsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, and Vadim Delaunay. Gorbanevskaya came pushing her baby in a carriage. Delaunay carried a placard bearing the words FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS, making solidarity with the Czechoslovak cause the demonstration’s explicit message. The narrator stresses the protest’s audacity: it was a small gathering, but one that openly challenged the invasion on Red Square itself.

Arrests and Aftermath

The demonstrators were arrested as soon as the protest began 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 narrator notes that he could have seen Delaunay again there, had he known where he was; Delaunay died in 1983, aged thirty-five. His later life makes the cost of the protest visible beyond the sentences imposed immediately after the arrests: release did not restore the life he had had before, and emigration became part of its aftermath.