The exhibition was created on the basis of documents, photographs and interviews collected from 2008 to 2018, by Adam Hradilek, Petr Blazek, Stěpán Černousek, Michaela Stoilova, and staff at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague. The exhibit is intended to serve as a record of the fates of the protestors and as a tribute to their memories.  Adam Hradilek, a historian from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, will open the exhibition followed by a talk with special guest Pavel Litvinov, grandson of Maxim Litvinov Stalin’s foreign minister during the 1930s. Pavel participated in the Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion. 

The exhibit was comprised from a collection of over 20 interviews from citizens of Warsaw pact countries which took part in protests against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Their testimonies, together with documents collected from Soviet, Polish, Hungarian, German, Bulgarian, and Czech secret service and personal archives are the basis of the exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the invasion. 

The exhibition was prepared by the Institute of for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague.


Event Details:

Date/Time: Wednesday, April 4, 2018, 5:30pm - 7:30pm 

Location: Delegation of the European Union to the United States 
2175 K Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20037
(Entrance on 22nd Street)

Doors open at 5:00 pm and close promptly at 6:00 pm. 
  
CLICK HERE to RSVP
The event is free, but reservations are required. It is expected to fill up fast. 
Please note that this event may be filmed or photographed. 

Biographies:

Adam Hradilek (1976) is a historian at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague. Shortly after he assumed his position in 2008, he organized a visit of the 1968 protesters and conducted interviews with them. In 2010, he edited a monograph For Your Freedom and Ours, a collection of interviews and essays on protests against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia in Warsaw Pact countries. From 2013 to 2015, he worked as an oral history project coordinator for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Czech Republic. In his current research, he focuses on the fate of Czechoslovak prisoners in the Soviet Gulag. For the last six years, he has done extensive research on this topic in the newly opened KGB archives in the Ukraine. In 2017, he co-authored the book Czechoslovak Prisoners of the Gulag Camps and Czechoslovak Jewish Refugees in the Gulag during WWII. 
    
Pavel Litvinov (1940) was born in Moscow. He is the grandson of Stalin's foreign minister and ambassador to the US Maxim Litvinov. Following his mathematics studies at Moscow State University, he entered the Academy of Sciences. In the late 1960s, he became one of the leading figures in the Moscow dissent, resulting in his expulsion from the Academy of Sciences in 1967. In the wake of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he was one of the initiators of the demonstration in the Red Square, where he unfurled a banner saying "For your freedom and ours." He was sentenced for this in October 1968 to five years in internal exile. From the Lefortovo Prison, he was escorted all the way to the village of Usugli in Zabaykalsky Krai in Siberia. Shortly after his return from exile, he decided, under KGB pressure, to immigrate to the US, where he taught mathematics at a secondary school in New York State. He remains an active campaigner for human rights and freedom in the Russian Federation and elsewhere in the world.