Abstract

Every year the deeds of Central European dissidents fade further away from living memory. In the rip-roaring power plays that followed 1989, new regimes trumpeted the myth of heroic anti-socialists who sacrificed their well-being for the sake of “democratic” capitalism. Since there was obviously nothing heroic about the deeds of the new elites—privatizing into their own pockets, giving the rest of public property to foreign firms, throwing workers out of work and the unemployed onto the streets, and so on—it was important to remind the public that this was all the endpoint of a grand struggle whose righteousness few could..