Defiant Voices [antikvár]

As Chairman and Co-Chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, established to monitor and encourage compliance with the Helsinki Final Act, we are pleased to see the publication of Defiant Voices, a collection of writingsfrom Hungary's "second public opinion."This volume of samizdat, or"self-published" material, is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Hungary. Those who publish samizdat in Hungary, orinany country where it is published, doso because they feel the need to make known to a potentially interested but somewhat isolated public those views and ideas that cannot be disseminated in the official média. To use the words of the editors of one of Hungary's major samizdat journals, their aim is to help "the quietly rumbling masses of people, about whom the two tiny minorities of the country's leadership and the opposition are engaged in loud argments, to form a better picture of itself." While these independent writers and publishers have made important progress to this end, this volume of samizdat essays will make equally important progress in helping to educate another audience, the West, on the situation in Hungary. Western attention, particularly here in the United States, frequently passes over what is happening in Hungary and the other communist countries of East and East/Central Europe, focusing instead on events concerning the Soviet Union. This is unfortunate, because these other countries are a much greater factor in East-West relationsthan iscommonly thought. By notgiving issuessuch as those discussed in this collection proper attention, either in the média or government, we may well be missing important opportunities to press effectively for improvements in the lives of many people as well as to affect overall East-West relations in a positive way. To the extent that these countries are examined, they often are characterized solely by the ways in which they differ from each other, an approach that can lead to many misperceptions and distorted views. For example, popular images of Hungary - where store shelves are not empty, writers and artists have gained more latitude, citizenscan travel abroad, believers have access to Bibles and other religious materials, and dissidents are not imprisoned and can even study in the West - dispute the more common image of a communist system, which is usually perceived to be closed to the outside world, facing chronic shortages, and subject to cruel and totally uncaring rule by