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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFreedom and Democracy in Russia, Then and Now
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Cathy Young 🇺🇦
@CathyYoung63
New from me at @BulwarkOnline: Former Soviet dissident Pavel Litvinov, one of 8 who protested the USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia on Red Square in 1968, on the Soviet dissident movement & its historical role, #Ukraine, Putin, Zelensky, Trump & more
thebulwark.com
Freedom and Democracy in Russia, Then and Now
Pavel Litvinova Soviet dissident who was exiled to Siberia for his role in the 1968 Red Square demonstrationdiscusses Putins Ukraine invasion.
8:27 AM · Mar 30, 2022
Cathy Young 🇺🇦
@CathyYoung63
New from me at @BulwarkOnline: Former Soviet dissident Pavel Litvinov, one of 8 who protested the USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia on Red Square in 1968, on the Soviet dissident movement & its historical role, #Ukraine, Putin, Zelensky, Trump & more
thebulwark.com
Freedom and Democracy in Russia, Then and Now
Pavel Litvinova Soviet dissident who was exiled to Siberia for his role in the 1968 Red Square demonstrationdiscusses Putins Ukraine invasion.
8:27 AM · Mar 30, 2022
https://www.thebulwark.com/pavel-litvinov-freedom-and-democracy-in-russia-1968-and-2022/
Among the Americans watching the Russian assault on Ukraine with horror and hope is one 81-year-old retired math and physics teacher for whom these events resonate in a very personal way. More than half a century ago, Pavel Litvinovthen a Soviet citizen living in Moscowwas one of eight brave people, out of a population of more than 230 million, who publicly protested the Soviet Unions invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring of liberalization. The groups protest in Red Square lasted less than five minutes before they were hauled away by plainclothes KGB agents.
The parallels to todays situation are eerie. Once again, a despotic regime in the Kremlin, fearful of freedom and change, has ordered the invasion of a nearby country that has chosen a liberal course. Once again, it takes courage for Russians to protestthough the consequences arent nearly as dire. Today, most protesters who are detained get off with a fine or a few days of detention. In 1968, Litvinov was tried and sentenced to five years of internal exile in Siberia; two his codefendants were also exiled, two others served time in labor camps, and two were forcibly confined to psychiatric hospitals. (The eighth participant, 21-year-old Tatiana Bayeva, avoided criminal charges because both she and her fellow protesters claimed that she was not involved but had only come to watch; she was still expelled from college and later remained an active dissident.)
Litvinovwho spoke to me in Russian last week by video chat from his home in Fort Lee, New Jerseyis struck by the similarities between the Kremlins war on Ukraine in 2022 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In both cases, he says, the real goal was to neutralize a threat from the country next door. But the fear is not of a military threat. The fear is: How can it be that these people on whom we look down a little, who cant even speak proper Russian, will become a European country? That means death to the entire Soviet and imperial Russian tradition. Brezhnev knew that. He might not have been able to speak two coherent words, but he knew it in his gut and never doubted it. And today, Putin knows it too. There are many reasons why Ukraine and why now, but the main cause is that a free country cannot coexist with an unfree one next to itespecially when the two countries relationship is as close as that of Russia and Ukraine. Litvinov points out that about half of Ukrainians have relatives in Russia and numerous Ukrainians work in Russia in seasonal jobs. The thought that these people, these Ukrainian laborers, will suddenly become free, will be associated with the word Europethat was intolerable, he says.
The West had begun to take liberal democracy for granted. Then came the Russian invasion
While such routine intermingling did not exist between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the cultural ties were still close enough to be concerning to Soviet authorities. Because Czechoslovakia was a fellow member of the Eastern bloc of peoples democracies, many Soviet professionals, scientists, scholars, and artists had extensive contacts with their Czech counterparts. Whats more, Czech newspapers and magazines sold freely in Moscow shortly after publication. Litvinov, who speaks of those distant events as if they happened last month, recalls that he and his friends, young intellectuals and artists who had come of age during the post-Stalin thaw and hungered for more freedom, routinely picked up day-old Czech papers at the kiosk at daybreak and read them in rapid-response Russian translation provided by members of their circle who were specialists in Slavic languages.
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