Those Who Speak for Themselves

Noon

On 25th August 1968 a slight woman is coming to Red Square in Moscow. She is pushing a pram with her three-month-old son. There is a hand-written banner under the baby blanket. It says For Your Freedom and Ours. The woman is sitting down on the pavement together with seven other people. They are spreading their banners just when the clock at Spassky Tower is striking noon.

The performance is based on the book of the same name by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who was one of these “Brave eight”. Together with Konstantin Babicky, a linguist, Vadim Delon, a poet, Vladimir Dremlyuga, a worker, Viktor Fainberg, a specialist in English philology, Pavel Litvinov, a physicist, Larisa Bogoraz, a linguist, and Tatyana Baeva, a student, she demonstrated peacefully on the Red Square against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Treaty armies. The demonstration was dispersed in a few minutes by undercover agents of the State Security Service and its participants were arrested. After that they were questioned, tried, imprisoned, sent to exile, labour camps or psychiatric prison-hospitals.

An impulse for dealing with this topic originated in August 2013 when about ten people were held by security services in Red Square in Moscow on 25th August 2013 because they came there to recall the protest against the occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

Pavel Štourač, an artistic director of Continuo Theatre, stood up for those unlawfully detained in public, he addressed some of them including Natalya Gorbanevskaya and initiated a petition For Your Freedom and Ours, which was sent to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in the Czech Republic.

Before the authors started to prepare the performance, they did an extensive research, they studied historical documents and they consulted both Czech and foreign historians as well as living participants of the demonstration, their children and other Soviet dissidents of that time.