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Dissidentism combines open, nonviolent acts of domestic political dissent with transnational circulation, which gives the defiant opponents of authoritarian regimes an international audience and potential support. However, Stalinist regimes used repression and denunciation as tools that thwarted dissent, and closed borders blocked transnational circulation. Only the move to a post-totalitarian system following Stalin's death enabled first open acts of dissent. This chapter first describes the mechanics of Stalinism, and the early attraction of left-liberal intellectual "neophytes' for Communism, to explain the significance of 1956 across Central Europe. Many former neophytes become the first open dissenters—heretics from the Communist "faith" in the spirit of revisionism. Emphasizing the importance of the Open Letter to the Party by Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, the move from internal heresy to democratic dissidence is described, and the chapter concludes with the events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia and Poland, marking the end of hopes for revisionist heresy.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-22613-8_3

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