From Circle to Square

Benjamin Nathans revisits the 1968 suppression of the Prague Spring from the perspective of the Soviet dissident movement.

By Benjamin NathansAugust 11, 2024

• History

• Politics

WHETHER UNDER socialism or capitalism, civil rights inscribed in constitutions don’t implement themselves. To gain force, they have typically required political mobilization in the form of popular resistance to officials jealously clinging to the prerogatives of state power. The debate among Soviet dissidents over how to make rights granted by the Soviet Constitution real, through what techniques and what kind of movement, developed within an eruption of protests, arrests, and trials whose hallmark was its unpredictability. Who would be arrested next, when would protests resurface, and where was it all leading? Within the emerging movement, a fault line was growing between those who wanted the spontaneous chain reaction to continue, attracting more and more individuals willing to follow their moral intuition, and those who saw a need for greater coordination, leadership, and strategic direction.

A further source of tension, but also of hope, was emerging from the outer tier of the Soviet empire, in Czechoslovakia, under the leadership of the Slovakian Communist Party head, Alexander Dubček. In March 1968, Dubček responded to calls for reform by announcing an “Action Program” that included the near-total abolition of censorship, a shift toward a mixed socialist and market economy, the prospect of multiparty elections, and, not least, the reorganization of the country as a federation of autonomous Czech and Slovak republics. Reforms were meant to foster European-style democratic socialism, or, as Dubček famously put it, “socialism with a human face.” It was not a face that leaders of other Soviet-bloc countries wanted their citizens to see. Bulgarian authorities responded by blocking tourist travel to Czechoslovakia even as Czechs and Slovaks gained new freedom of movement; East Germany began jamming radio broadcasts from Prague even as the Czechoslovak government ceased jamming broadcasts by the Voice of America and other Western shortwave radio stations. By May, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin had concluded that developments in Czechoslovakia were “completely abnormal and dangerous.”

In the eyes of Soviet rights activists, the Prague Spring had opened a conversation in Czechoslovakia on burning issues of the day, a conversation that was only beginning to emerge in the USSR and, for the time being, exclusively in samizdat. There, in fact, lay the key difference: in Czechoslovakia, the push for reforms came substantially from within the Communist Party, indeed from the new Party leadership. Some of the most dramatic proposals—including Party member Ludvík Vaculík’s manifesto “Two Thousand Words,” which called for a more democratic and humane socialism—appeared in official newspapers readily available at kiosks across the country. At least one of those newspapers, Rudé právo (Red Truth), could also be purchased at kiosks in Moscow and other major Soviet cities, where selected articles, among them “Two Thousand Words,” were translated and disseminated via samizdat—including by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, an accomplished translator of Czech and Polish. Anxiety over such ideological contamination from abroad caused Leonid Brezhnev to raise the issue during bilateral talks with Czechoslovak leaders in May: “Your newspapers are read also by Soviet citizens,” he warned, “and your radio broadcasts attract listeners in our country as well, which means that all this propaganda affects us just as much as it does you.”

The Prague Spring was more about democracy and decentralization than civil rights or the rule of law. But that hardly diminished its appeal for reform-minded Soviet citizens, for whom experiments with modifying socialism in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were more plausible and more compelling as possible models for the USSR’s future development than the capitalist democracies of Western Europe or the United States. When Petr Grigorenko and a friend met with a pair of Czech visitors in Moscow to learn of the latest developments in Prague, the friend joked, “If only you could figure out how to occupy us!”

Rumors, however, were trending in the opposite direction—namely, of a possible Soviet military occupation to put an end to the Czechoslovak experiment, which the Kremlin was now ominously characterizing as a plot by fascist counterrevolutionaries acting on instructions from Washington and Bonn. Among dissidents, euphoria at what was being born in Prague alternated with dread at the thought that Soviet troops might strangle it.

On July 22, Anatoly Marchenko, whose revelatory account of Soviet forced labor camps, My Testimony, was soon to be published in the West, circulated an open letter addressed to the editors of half a dozen communist newspapers in Czechoslovakia, the USSR, and the West, as well as to the BBC. Soviet leaders, the letter announced, were frightened by what was happening in Czechoslovakia, not because it threatened socialism, but because it could “discredit the principles and methods of leadership that currently dominate the socialist world.” If democratic socialism were to succeed in Czechoslovakia, “then perhaps our workers, peasants, and intelligentsia will wish to have freedom of speech in practice and not only on paper.” “I am ashamed of my country,” Marchenko wrote, “which once again is playing the role of gendarme of Europe.”

As intended, the letter struck a nerve. Marchenko was arrested a week later, on July 29, ostensibly for visiting Moscow in violation of the internal passport rules governing former camp inmates. Justice was to be swift: a trial was set for August 21. Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Larisa Bogoraz, Yuri Gerchuk, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Viktor Krasin, Petr Grigorenko, Pavel Litvinov, and Anatoly Yakobson immediately circulated an open letter addressed simply to “Citizens!” “If you do not want to put up with this tyranny in the future,” they pleaded,

if you understand that Marchenko has been fighting for all of us and that all of us must fight for Marchenko, then we ask you to defend him in the way that you yourselves deem necessary. […] Collective responsibility based on fear and servility must give way to collective responsibility based on humanity and civil courage.

Signers included their phone numbers and addresses, inviting readers “to write or telephone any of us if you wish to have additional information.” Bogoraz’s cousin Irina Belogorodskaya, the daughter of an NKVD agent, accidentally left behind a bag containing signed copies of the letter in a taxi, after which the KGB operatives who had been tailing her promptly arrested her for disseminating anti-Soviet slander. The letter’s signatories assumed they would be next. Litvinov began drafting a new letter protesting Belogorodskaya’s arrest. Another cycle of the chain reaction was set in motion.

Litvinov and his wife, Maya Kopeleva (daughter of Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev), stayed at Bogoraz’s apartment on the night of August 20. Marchenko’s trial was set to begin the next morning. There were plans for the usual gathering of supporters outside the courthouse. At 7:00 a.m., Bogoraz was awakened by a telephone call. A sobbing Gorbanevskaya could barely get out the words: “Soviet tanks are in Prague.”

¤

Well before the invasion, in fact before Marchenko’s letter and others warning of possible Soviet military action against Czechoslovakia, Bogoraz, Gorbanevskaya, and Litvinov had begun contemplating what they would do in the event of such an attack. The usual textual repertoire of group letters, petitions, and international appeals seemed an inadequate response to an invasion of a small, progressive, socialist ally by half a million troops, most of them Soviet. Nobody bothered to take notes at Marchenko’s trial on August 21; there was no samizdat transcript recounting the inexorable farce of his conviction and sentencing to a year in a strict-regime camp in Perm (a sentence that would subsequently be extended by two years for “circulating fabrications defaming the Soviet system”). The talk now, at least among advocates of spontaneous, individual, conscience-driven action, was of something more dramatic. There would need to be a demonstration, a spectacle.

Two days later, Bogoraz happened upon a spectacle. On August 23, Czechoslovakian President  Ludvik Svoboda flew to Moscow to meet his country’s occupiers. As Bogoraz was walking from the Lenin Library, she came upon a large crowd along the boulevard where Svoboda’s cavalcade was scheduled to make its way to the Kremlin:

As usual during such ceremonies, Muscovites driven from their workplaces were lining the route of the honored guest, chewing sandwiches, licking ice cream cones, buying glasses of lemonade, and clasping in their free hand the appropriate little flags they had been given for the occasion. The idea was to wave the flags at the limousine as it passed by and then quickly disperse. On this occasion the crowd was getting tired of waiting. The appointed hour had come and gone, and then another hour, and another. The person they were supposed to greet still hadn’t arrived, but neither their bosses nor the police would let them go. Another sandwich, another glass of lemonade. […] I was literally shaking at the sight of this chewing mass, this people [narod] who had just voted “to support and approve” [the invasion]. Here they are, waving flags of the Czechoslovak Soviet Socialist Republic—and no one’s hand is burning from holding that flag. What are they, cretins? Unfeeling cattle?

At last, the open-air limousine approached, moving slowly along the boulevard with its passenger, Svoboda, standing erect and staring straight ahead. His face reminded Bogoraz of the tragic masks worn by actors in the ancient theater:

And they: they put on smiles, called out “hurrah!” and jabbed their flags in the air. I was so ashamed on behalf of this elderly Czech man […] for whom I am sure it was difficult to bear the tragedy and humiliation of his people. I was ready to push my way to the front and scream I don’t know what. But I didn’t. I persuaded myself that I would produce nothing more than a pathetic peep that no one would hear, and even Svoboda wouldn’t notice.

It was a double humiliation: first the attack against a peaceful ally and then, closer to home, over and over again, the relentless lie that the Soviet people unanimously endorsed the invasion. Newspaper headlines declared “The Will of the Soviet People Is Unified and Unshakeable,” “All Soviet People Firmly and Decisively Support the Action to Defend the Cause of Socialism and Peace,” “The Soviet People Fulfills Its International Duty,” or simply “We Approve!” As the sociologist Yuri Levada, the preeminent analyst of public opinion in post-Soviet Russia, wrote in his memoirs, “No one was supposed to know that somebody disagreed.” Even worse was the willingness of so many Soviet citizens to actually endorse the invasion. It was a matter of feeling “insulted by your inferiors,” Alexeyeva wrote, “humiliated so deeply that your entire being rebels, you want to stand up and do something—anything—to separate yourself from that thing called ‘the masses.’”

Alexeyeva and Bogoraz may have persuaded themselves that popular approval was coerced, bought, or otherwise insincere—which hardly diminished their fury at the “cretins”—but there is now good evidence that most of the Soviet population, however well or poorly informed, was perfectly willing to go along with the invasion, as most populations are wont to do in the first flush of their country’s military engagements abroad. Many patriotic Soviet citizens resented what they perceived as a lack of gratitude from the Czechoslovaks for their liberation by the Red Army, which suffered significant casualties in the process of driving Nazi forces out of Eastern Europe.

Gorbanevskaya, who had Czech friends and a long-standing love of Czech literature, was determined to puncture the unbearable lie of Soviet propaganda. “If even one person doesn’t approve of the ‘fraternal assistance,’” she reasoned, “then the approval stops being unanimous.” The “whole nation minus one” was no longer the whole nation. This was the “arithmetic of atonement” that made it possible to “cleanse one’s conscience” and “atone for part of the historical guilt of one’s people.” It was an arithmetic shaped by the legacy of the USSR’s participatory dictatorship, now in the form of a lip-service state that demanded explicit consent not from a majority of the governed but from everyone, the entire collective. The only escape from shared responsibility for the state’s actions was public disassociation from those actions. “We were defending ourselves,” Gorbanevskaya wrote, “from the unavoidable feeling—had we remained silent—of participating in a crime.”

Andrei Amalrik learned of the invasion at Marchenko’s trial. Afterward, Litvinov mentioned to him the idea of staging a protest of some kind. Amalrik reacted negatively, pointing out that any such protest stood zero chance of reversing the occupation and would be suicidal for participants, who could expect long prison sentences—or worse. Litvinov was trespassing once again on issues of foreign relations, an arena the Kremlin regarded as its exclusive prerogative. “Besides,” Amalrik added in his usual unsentimental manner, “as history teaches, the Czechs themselves will work out a compromise.” Why sacrifice yourself in the name of moral principles when the victims were open to accommodation?

It was precisely this sort of cost-benefit analysis that Litvinov, Bogoraz, and Gorbanevskaya rejected. No one, Gorbanevskaya wrote, was under the illusion that “the Kremlin gates would fly open and the entire Politburo would rush out to express its gratitude, sobbing, ‘guys, thank you for opening our eyes; we’re such idiots, we didn’t understand what we were doing.’” Whether out of frustration with negative reactions to their planned protest or from a desire to prevent the plan from becoming too widely known, they stopped talking with other people about it after settling on Sunday, August 25, at noon, in Red Square.

It was important to avoid placing moral pressure on anyone to participate in an action that was sure to lead to arrest and imprisonment. Each person needed to follow his or her own conscience: “Whoever feels like it, whoever wants to come, let them come.”

As a result, it was unclear who knew about the protest and who, if anyone, would take part in it. There was never a meeting of organizers or an announcement via samizdat; news traveled by word of mouth (telephoning was out of the question). At one point, Bogoraz told Litvinov that if he wanted to cancel the whole thing, that was fine; she would protest alone. But then they learned that Konstantin Babitsky, a researcher in linguistics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, had told someone he was going, and since they had no way to reach him, they decided they needed to proceed with the plan.

On the evening of August 24, Litvinov and his wife, Maya Kopeleva, were at her parents’ apartment, where the popular bard Alexander Galich was trying out a new song called “Petersburg Romance,” about the famed Decembrist revolt of 1825 in Senate Square, in Russia’s imperial capital:

We repeat their whispers,
We repeat their steps:
Experience has saved no one,
So far, from disaster!

Just so, no simpler
Our epoch tests us:
Will you go out to the square?!
Dare you go out to the square?!
Dare you go out to the square?!
Will you go out to the square
When the hour strikes?

Galich seemed to be glancing at Litvinov, who felt an overwhelming urge to tell those present about the demonstration planned for the following day. Beneath the question “Dare you go out to the square?” of course was another: “Are you willing to go to prison?” Litvinov kept his mouth shut.

The plan was to show up at Lobnoe Mesto, the circular platform on Red Square adjacent to St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin, at noon. It was going to be a “sit-down demonstration,” an idea borrowed from the American Civil Rights Movement, which had received extensive coverage in the Soviet press. By sitting, protesters might at least be less likely to be charged with hooliganism.

For sheer historical resonance, nothing could match Red Square, the epicenter of the Soviet universe. Here was Lenin’s mausoleum, patrolled round the clock by goose-stepping honor guards; here annual parades commemorated the USSR’s greatest triumphs, the Bolshevik Revolution and the victory over Nazi Germany. Red Square was the preeminent space of the Soviet Union’s official public sphere, an arena designed less for citizens to articulate and exchange ideas and interests than to participate in the representation of state power.

Choosing this space to challenge that power was therefore itself an acute form of dissent. According to KGB surveillance records, Litvinov had alerted foreign journalists about the planned demonstration, urging them to take photographs of the protesters “as representatives of the progressive part of the Soviet intelligentsia” opposed to the occupation of “freedom-loving Czechoslovakia.” The journalists, according to the report, had in turn advised Litvinov to stage the protest with St. Basil’s Cathedral in the background, with its iconic multicolored onion domes, so that Western newspaper readers would instantly grasp the event’s extraordinary setting. No one had ever seen a photograph of a dissident protest in the USSR, let alone on Red Square.

They wouldn’t see this one either. Somewhere between Litvinov or Bogoraz and the Dutch journalist Henk Wolzak, whose Russian was shaky at best, information about the timing of the protest got garbled. Foreign journalists arrived at 11:00 a.m., rather than 12:00 p.m. Tired of waiting, all but one departed before protesters arrived at noon. As Litvinov made his way to the square, tailed by a KGB operative, he had no idea who besides Bogoraz would join him. Gorbanevskaya arrived with her three-month-old son, Yosif, in a baby carriage, similarly uncertain whether anyone else would show up. Hidden under the sleeping Yosif was a small Czechoslovak flag (presumably a leftover from the crowds marshaled to welcome Svoboda two days earlier) and homemade cloth banners reading “Hands off the ČSSR,” “Long live free and independent Czechoslovakia” (in Czech), and “For your freedom and ours.” The last banner, Gorbanevskaya later noted, reproduced “the slogan of Russian democrats who came to understand in the course of the previous century that a people that oppresses others cannot itself be free.”

Five other individuals arrived as well. In addition to Babitsky, there was Vadim Deloné, a young poet and grandson of a prominent Russian mathematician, who had learned of the demonstration only hours before; Vladimir Dremlyuga, who had been expelled from Leningrad State University and had attended several “visiting days” at Litvinov’s apartment (he brought two homemade banners of his own: “Down with the occupiers” and “Freedom for Dubček”); Tatyana Bayeva, a friend of Irina Yakir (Petr Yakir’s daughter) and, like her, the daughter of a Gulag survivor; and Viktor Fainberg, who had just graduated from Leningrad State University with an undergraduate thesis on Holden Caulfield, the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye who rebels against everything “phony.”

Gorbanevskaya handed banners to her fellow protesters and the eight sat down silently at the chosen spot, holding the banners over their heads. Curious onlookers began to approach the group, but before they could get close enough to read the slogans, a group of roughly 10 plainclothes officials—presumably police or KGB employees—rushed in, seized the banners and the flag, and began pummeling those seated, yelling “They’re all yids!” “Beat the anti-Soviets!” “Stomping on, that’s what they need!” and “The whore’s got herself a child—now she comes to Red Square!” According to an eyewitness, someone—it wasn’t clear whether it was a bystander or one of the plainclothes officials—called out, “You hooligans, what are you sitting here for?” Gorbanevskaya replied, “In 20 years or so, you too will understand and then you’ll be ashamed.”

Litvinov, who like other protesters offered no resistance to the attackers, was bleeding profusely from his head; four of Fainberg’s front teeth were knocked out. An official grabbed a camera from the lone foreign journalist who had waited long enough to catch the protest and ripped out the film. Within minutes, three cars pulled up to transport the protesters to a nearby police station. A female plainclothes officer handed Gorbanevskaya her baby and pushed her into a car. Lowering the window, Gorbanevskaya shouted to the crowd of stunned onlookers, “Long live free Czechoslovakia!” at which point the official slapped her mouth. Undeterred, Gorbanevskaya called out again, and this time the woman punched her in the face. “How dare you hit me,” she cried. “Who hit you?” came the reply. “Nobody hit you.”

The entire episode was over by a quarter past noon. At 4:00 p.m., as the protesters sat in jail waiting to be interrogated, the first BBC report on the incident was broadcast to listeners in the Soviet Union and around the world.

¤

The August 1968 demonstration in Red Square became the most celebrated 15 minutes in the history of the Soviet dissident movement. It captured what US Senator Thomas Dodd, who, like the Soviet judge Lev Smirnov, had served on the Allied prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials, had in mind when he invoked the “sublime courage” of those who “take a stand for freedom under the totalitarian Soviet regime.”

Dodd wasn’t the only one in awe. Joan Baez recorded a song called “Natalia” celebrating Gorbanevskaya; Adrienne Rich dedicated the poem “For a Sister” to her. Ivy Litvinov, widow of Stalin’s foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, sent a letter to a friend in her native England referring proudly (but anonymously) to “the hero” in the family—her imprisoned grandson Pavel. Writing from exile in West Germany in the early 1980s, Raisa Orlova spoke for many dissident Soviet intellectuals inside and outside the country: “If humanity does not perish, this event will take pride of place in textbooks on twentieth-century Russian history.” Amalrik insisted (also with hindsight and from exile),

It was historically necessary that someone say an emphatic ‘no’ to Soviet imperialism. Perhaps in the final accounting that decisive “no” from seven people in Red Square [Amalrik was either unaware that Bayeva had participated in the demonstration or wished to shield her from persecution] will prove weightier than the indifferent “yes” from 70 million people at “meetings of the toilers.”

The demonstration on Red Square completely overshadowed several dozen other protest actions against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, many of them by lone individuals and altogether involving some 160 people in Moscow and other cities, virtually unknown to contemporaries. The August 25 demonstration has been reenacted in situ on several of its post-Soviet anniversaries, once with Gorbanevskaya herself taking part. More than any other single event, it has contributed to the canonization of the Soviet dissident movement in general and seven individual protesters in particular.

The demonstration on August 25, 1968, illuminates one of the great enigmas of the Soviet dissident movement—namely, its persistent claim that it was apolitical. The eight protesters that day—three women and five men—had no illusions of influencing Soviet foreign policy. Their protest was an act conceived beyond the realm of political calculus, an act of care for the self designed to show that there are always moral alternatives, even under conditions of seemingly eternal Soviet power. Learning to conduct yourself like a free person meant living with an authentic version of yourself; doing so in an unfree country required a willingness to live, indefinitely, at odds with your own world.

The demonstration marked, ironically, the end of the three-year chain reaction of arrests, protests, trials, protests about trials, new arrests, and so on. There were no massive letter-signing campaigns on behalf of the protesters in Red Square and only a handful of detentions of suspected accomplices. The demonstration also put an end to dissident debates between those who favored spontaneous, conscience-driven forms of engagement and those eager for greater organization, strategic planning, and division of labor. It wasn’t that the latter side won the argument; rather, the arrests of Bogoraz, Litvinov, and eventually Gorbanevskaya removed three of the most forceful proponents of voluntarism and minimal structure. For all its morally sublime qualities, the Red Square protest revealed the enormous price of acting on conscience alone. From now on, the debate was not whether to organize the movement, but how.

¤

This is an excerpt from the author’s new book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, which will be published on August 13 by Princeton University Press.