The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 crushed the Prague Spring reform movement and provoked an unusually public act of dissent in the Soviet capital: eight people demonstrated on Red Square. In Emmanuel Carrère’s retrospective account, the protest is both a response to military repression abroad and a concrete measure of the danger faced by those who challenged it at home. The demonstrators were arrested almost immediately and sentenced to prison; the episode’s personal aftermath follows Vadim Delaunay from prison to emigration and an early death.

Invasion and protest

A few months after the narrator’s lunch with a French cultural attaché, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and bloodily crushed the Prague Spring. The account turns from that act of state violence to the dissidents who dared to protest it on Red Square. Their demonstration was extravagant not because it involved a large crowd, but because even a small public gathering against the invasion defied the Soviet authorities in a highly visible place.

The eight demonstrators were 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, a detail that places an ordinary domestic presence within the scene of political protest. Delaunay carried a placard bearing the words FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS. Its wording made the demonstration more than an objection to Soviet action in Czechoslovakia: it linked the freedom of those resisting intervention abroad to the freedom of those living under Soviet rule.

Arrests and personal consequences

The authorities arrested the demonstrators as soon as the protest was over. They received prison sentences of varying lengths; Delaunay was sentenced to two and a half years. The rapid movement from a handful of people on the square to criminal punishment makes the state’s response part of the event itself: the protest was brief, but its consequences extended well beyond the moment of arrest.

After his release, Delaunay had further difficulties with the KGB and emigrated. He moved to Paris, where the narrator might have seen him again but did not know he was there. Delaunay died in 1983, aged thirty-five. That compressed sequence—demonstration, imprisonment, renewed pressure, emigration, and death—gives the episode a human chronology beyond the political fact of the invasion.

The later politics of dissent

The book places this protest alongside later disputes over who could claim the language of courage, democracy, and opposition. In a collection of Anna Politkovskaya’s articles, the narrator discovers her defense of forty National Bolshevik Party militants sentenced after occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices. They had shouted for Vladimir Putin to go; Politkovskaya described them as courageous people of integrity who could give hope to their country’s moral future. Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov, also supported them, despite reservations about the party’s name. The narrator’s surprise at these endorsements shows how the meaning of dissent could cross boundaries he had assumed were fixed.

A later account of the National Bolshevik movement describes a different repertoire of protest: militants tagged trains, unfurled banners on hard-to-reach monuments, and threw tomatoes at a governor during official events. In the teacher’s view, such actions could be immature yet courageous, because conduct that might bring only a fine in Western Europe could result in prison in Russia. Still later, Eduard Limonov’s Strategy 31 movement invoked the constitutional right to demonstrate, gathering on Triumfalnaya Square on months with thirty-one days; police outnumbered the demonstrators and arrested some of them. These later episodes are not consequences of the 1968 demonstration, but they return the narrative to its central problem: how public protest acquires meaning when the state can make its cost immediate.

Narrative significance

The Red Square protest is narrated retrospectively, through the fate of one of its participants and through the narrator’s later attempts to understand political opposition. Delaunay’s placard supplies the event with a principle that is both international and personal: freedom cannot be defended as an abstraction while denied to those who speak against their own government. The subsequent prison sentences give that principle a price, while Delaunay’s later emigration shows that release did not necessarily end the pressure exerted on dissenters.

The event also establishes a contrast that recurs in the book’s later political episodes. A small group can make a public claim against a much larger power, but the act does not settle who will later be recognized as a defender of democracy or moral integrity. By naming all eight demonstrators and recording Delaunay’s fate, the narrator preserves the protest as more than a passing image of resistance: it becomes a remembered instance of dissent whose significance is repeatedly reconsidered.