Introduction

This remarkable collection of essays has for some time deserved translation and a wider readership for two sorts of reasons. On the one hand, these essays are important historical documents. They are evidence of great interest to the historian and observer of contemporary communism in Czechoslovakia and within the Soviet bloc as a whole. More importantly, they are valuable texts in their own right. They are essays of interpretation, argument and analysis that shed light not only upon the nature of contemporary communism but, more widely, on some basic political questions that arise in the West no less than in the East. Moreover, they address these questions in a fresh and challenging way.