ABSTRACT
The partly concealed, partly visible infrastructure for human rights activism was already in place in Eastern Europe when Gorbachev launched his reform program in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The East Germans, Czechs, and Slovaks are responding to the Soviet impetus more rapidly than are their regimes; the Hungarian leadership is struggling to stay abreast of unofficial groups espousing reform; and the Jaruzelski regime in Poland is trying, perhaps vainly, to catch up with its own public, many of whose members have lived within a subterranean civil society of considerable sophistication since the imposition of martial law in late 1981. The imperatives of perestroika combined with the impetus of the summits has significantly accelerated the emergence of civic alternatives to official reality in the USSR. The Gorbachev regime has progressively indicated that it is prepared to come to terms with large parts of the contra-system.
