When Czechoslovak student protester Jan Palach set himself alight in 1969, Jara Moserova-Davidova was one of the specialists who treated him. Now head of UNESCO in the Czech Republic she has lived under Nazi and communist oppression-and seen both systems collapse. She talks to Mary Lean.

Eastern Europe came a little closer for hundreds of British pupils as a result of a chance encounter between Mariana Zaharieva and school-teacher Howard Grace last summer. Mariana and her husband Angel Zahariev from Bulgaria were attending a conference on `Shaping the New Europe' in Caux, Switzerland, when they met Grace. He had been taking a play he had written to schools around Britain, to encourage sixth-formers to think beyond themselves.

As former Eastern bloc nations roll back 70 years of Marxist economics, Michael Smith looks at the struggle to avoid the unacceptable face of capitalism.

Polish journalist Boguslaw Chrabota is a spokesman for the Krakow Industrial Society. He writes:

The fatal division of `us' and `them' is still alive, without us realizing that there is no `them.

What made the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister take on the power of the Kremlin? Bryan Hamlin and Michael Brown describe the education and struggle of a dissident with an unlikely pedigree.

In Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, John Williams finds that the 'smiling revolution' was built on an uncompromising search for truth.