Soviet mass media declared the “unanimous support” of the Soviet people for the gesture of “fraternal aid” to Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968. On August 25, Gorbanevskaia and seven other protesters gathered on Red Square with homemade signs demonstrating that, at a minimum, support was not unanimous. Photograph #1 shows their most resonant banner: “For your freedom and ours.” This slogan, whose lineage goes back to a demonstration in Warsaw in 1831 to commemorate the Decembrist uprising in Russia six years earlier, and which was subsequently borrowed by the Russian aristocratic socialist Alexander Herzen to express his support of the Polish uprising of 1861, captures an essential quality of the Soviet dissident movement: its faith in the power of transnational public opinion.

The demonstration on Red Square lasted just a few minutes; most of the protesters were beaten and arrested on the spot. Gorbanevskaia, who arrived with a baby carriage containing her son Yosif along with several carefully hidden banners, was sent to a psychiatric prison. Despite the absence of any direct photographic documentation of the event itself, the August 25 demonstration in Red Square achieved world-wide fame.