To account for the revolutions across Eastern Europe in 1989, Gale Stokes looks back to 1968 and provides an accessible analysis and a monumental history of events to the present day. He analyses the nature of communist power and the varying forms of opposition to it, telling the story of the rise of Solidarity in Poland and of the movements for change among dissident intellectuals across the region. Stokes demonstrates that Eastern Europe is freer today than it has been previously in the twentieth century.