Timothy Snyder
American historian of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust; author of Bloodlands and On Tyranny.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
The reason why I am so fond of Homage to Catalonia, and see it as an even more relevant precursor to dissent, is that in it you can see a man of the Left learning to make the distinction that breaks down the Left with a big L into lots of little lefts.
on fivebooks.com · 25 Jan 2012
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera was of course not really a dissident, but this book gets across the heartfelt reality of Stalinist faith.
on fivebooks.com · 25 Jan 2012
The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz
Milosz tried to explain – as the title suggests – how thinking people could accept communism from inside the communist system.
on fivebooks.com · 25 Jan 2012
The Church and the Left by Adam Michnik
In The Church and the Left Michnik argues for an untraditional alliance. He says that the left has to talk to the Polish Catholic Church, especially after the Vatican's internal reform [in 1965].
on fivebooks.com · 25 Jan 2012
The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel
In the end I think Havel will be remembered as the outstanding East European dissident writer, and he will be remembered as such above all for this essay.
on fivebooks.com · 25 Jan 2012
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