The momentous events of 1989, bringing the disintegration of Stalin's empire in Eastern Europe, were the culmination of a long revolution against the post-war Yalta settlement. This book is in part a dramatic chronicle of that long process, in part a commentary on it. Its authors were themselves entangled in the history they describe until their forced emigration from Hungary. As commentators since, their reflections have never been solely adademic. Written between 1979 and 1989 the essays which make up this book recount the chapters of the great drama as it occurred. In assessing the events as they took place, Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher made many predictions since proved correct by recent uprisings. They were, for example, the first to hail the Hungarian revolution of 1956 as a supreme effort to destroy a totalitarian regime from within; they foresaw in 1979 that the 1980s would be the decade revolution in Eastern Europe, with Poland at the centre of the storm; and amid vehement protests they pointed to the awakening of German nationalism and predicted the drive for unification.