Samizdat and an independent society in Central and Eastern Europe /

Skilling (emeritus, University of Toronto), author of numerous works on Eastern Europe, analyzes the scope and structure of independent activities in East-bloc states. Part 1 is a brief survey of samizdat (unofficial publishing) in the USSR, China, and central Europe since the 1960s. The bulk of the study (Part 2) is devoted to independent tendencies in Czechoslovakia--Charter 77, samizdat production, and independent communications and culture. Part 3 proposes a theoretical framework conceptualizing the "second society/economy/polity" as the unofficial part of a "dual society" with blurred internal boundaries. While the revolutionary events in Hungary, Poland, the GDR, and Czechoslovakia in the latter half of 1989 are sweeping away the foundations of this dualism, Skilling's analysis remains a rich and extremely useful account of an important element in their prehistory. It is particularly interesting to note that the mostly marginal and sometimes explicitly apolitical activities in Eastern Europe's "second societies" described by the author hardly pointed to the imminent collapse of these regimes. General readers, undergraduate and graduate students. -A. Pickel, York University