In August 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, a small group of students and writers in Moscow organised a protest in solidarity with the people of Czechoslovakia. The poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya and seven other dissidents sat down in Moscow’s Red Square and unfurled banners with slogans that have a chilling resonance today: “We are Losing Our Friends”; “Shame on Occupiers”; “For Your Freedom and Ours”; and “Long Live a Free and Independent Czechoslovakia”.
This extraordinary act of courage was met with customary brutality. The activists were arrested and most served long sentences in penal colonies. Gorbanevskaya was sent to a psychiatric hospital.
