Publisher's Synopsis
What has really been happening in Eastern Europe in the 1980s? Stanislaw Baranczak, a Polish writer in exile, reveals that the answer lies not with the party secretaries but with artists and poets. He turns to his colleagues and their plights, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, to explain why oppressive regimes could not succeed in their attempts to transform the Eastern European into "homo sovieticus".
