They Were Heroes, But They Didn't Know It

55 years ago, eight Soviet citizens took to Red Square in protest.

What did the dead man say before he died? Or maybe it's a double, and the deceased is safe and sound? Or are they all doubles, and the Kremlin has gone to Mars, where it lives and thrives? There is no way out of this viscosity of information, everyone and anyone will be discussing the plane with Prigozhin. I am not going to join the chorus, because I want to remind everyone that today is a significant date, which, unlike the momentary dead freaks, will remain forever in history.

Exactly 55 years ago, on 25 August 1968, eight Soviet citizens marched to Moscow's Red Square and unfurled placards reading "For your and our freedom", "Hands off the CSSR" and "Shame on the occupiers". This was their personal response to the occupation of Czechoslovakia. These eight people stood for five minutes. Actually, there were nine of them - the poet Natalia Gorbanevskaya came to the square with a pram in which baby Osya was sleeping peacefully. Natalia was holding not a placard but a Czechoslovakian flag, as had been agreed in advance, in the hope that the mother and baby in the pram would not be disturbed.

Five minutes later the KGB officers and the police arrived. Then there was Lefortovo prison, a court full of faceless people in civilian clothes, and the sentences. Then there was exile, camps, mental clinics. And after that, all sorts of things. The brilliant linguist Konstantin Babitsky, who specialised in transformational grammar, was expelled from the pure ranks of Soviet science and worked as a carpenter and labourer. Larisa Bogoraz made puppets for the Tyumen Puppet Theatre. Vadim Delone died of heart failure at the age of 35.

Today there are two survivors - Pavel Litvinov and Tatyana Baeva. A few days ago I spoke to Litvinov, and he remembered 25 August. And do you know what surprised me the most? The complete lack of patheticness. I kept asking him questions, the answers to which implied something pathetic - about courage, dignity, the impossibility of living in a state of eternal compromise, of fighting for truth and justice. Litvinov, the heroic dissident of the sixties, said nothing of the sort to me. Because, from their point of view, there was nothing special about their march to the square. They just decided to do it because they couldn't live any other way. And no musketeer oaths, no "one for all and all for one", no pleas to meet in this place after their release.

They gathered at the trial of the dissident Anatoly Marchenko on the day the troops invaded Czechoslovakia and decided that they weren't going to be silent about it. After the camps and the exiles, they all met, of course. But there were no solemn speeches or long toasts. And they did not deliberately gather around the same table. They only met because they were like-minded, they travelled the same roads and went to the same houses. They were heroes, but they didn't know it. Until the Velvet Revolution took place, Václav Havel came to power and the Czech and Slovak state awards poured down on all eight of them, they generally thought of this demonstration as just one of many stories that had happened in their lives.

Probably every normal person who happened to live in a totalitarian country should have their own square. Different generations shout, shake hands, write letters, send messages - from 1968 to the present day. Natalia Gorbanevskaya, who left for France after being imprisoned and forcibly treated in a psychiatric hospital, came to Minsk in 2011 to support the prisoners of Square 2010. And in 2013 she came back to Red Square in Moscow - for the action of remembrance. 12 people unfurled the same banner with the inscription "For your and our freedom" on the same steps near Lobnoe Square.

And this is the answer to the question "Why are there so few?" The number does not matter. In 1968 there could have been five or two, not eight. Even if there was only one. But when the banner "For our and your freedom" is unfurled - even by one person, even for a minute, even without any hope of a better future - it makes sense. Simply because this naive act justifies the very existence of humanity. In every situation, in every hell, there will be one person who will make all the others not ashamed to live.

So when we talk about us - with all our hundreds of thousands on the streets, with our millions of boots trampling the squares over the last two decades, with thousands of square kilometres of absorbent cotton for posters and tens of thousands of metres of fabric for white-red-white flags - it is not all in vain.

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org

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