50 years ago today, the Soviet invasion of Prague sparked the first dissident protest in Red Square

Breitbart ^ | Aug 2018 | AFP Moscow

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In a symbolic gesture on August 25, 1968, that launched the political dissident movement, eight people demonstrated on Moscow’s Red Square against the Soviet authorities sending tanks into Prague..

Most of those eight demonstrators — Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pavel Litvinov, Viktor Fainberg, Vladimir Dremlyuga, Konstantin Babitsky, Larisa Bogoraz, Vadim Delaunay and Tatiana Bayeva — paid a high price for their protest.

Gorbanevskaya, a translator and poet, and art critic Fainberg were incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals — she for two years and he for five — and forcibly treated with antipsychotic drugs.

Dremlyuga, an electrician, and Delaunay, a poet, were sentenced to three years in prison camps in the far north and Siberia respectively.

Babitsky and Bogoraz, both linguists, and Litvinov, a physicist, were sent into exile for up to five years in villages in the Urals and Siberia.

Only Bayeva escaped punishment as she was just 21 and the others persuaded her to tell the KGB she had simply been walking past.

Five have since died.

In June, the Czech government handed the remaining three — Litvinov, Bayeva and Fainberg — an award to mark the 50-year anniversary of their protest.

Just months before her death in 2013, Gorbanevskaya, 77, told AFP: “We weren’t heroes or crazy. We simply wanted to act according to our consciences. I didn’t want to feel ashamed later because I had done nothing.”

“At noon, we held up our placards. Almost immediately, KGB agents in plainclothes jumped on us. They hit Fainberg so hard he was bleeding and broke several of his teeth,” she recalled.

“Litvinov also got hit in the face.”

There is no photograph of the Red Square protest — unless one exists in inaccessible KGB archives.

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Family memories

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It is truly sad to hear what happened to the protestors.

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Yuri Andropov, influencer (as KGB chief) of Premier Leonid Brezhnev and eventual Soviet premier himself, had much to do with the stamping out of Czech liberalism in 1968. As the Soviet ambassador to Hungary at the time of the 1956 uprising, he had been strongly affected by seeing Hungarian Communists and secret policemen strung from Budapest lampposts, and held that Soviet gains in influence (if not outright occupation of territory) were to be defended at all costs—including by force.