Instead, abandoning Marxist vocabulary and the revisionist debates of earlier decades, they made a virtue of their circumstances and espoused deliberately ‘un-political’ themes. Of these, thanks to the Helsinki Accords, ‘rights’ were by far the most accessible. All Soviet bloc constitutions paid formal attention to the rights and duties of the citizen; the package of additional and quite specific rights agreed to at Helsinki thus furnished Communism’s domestic critics with a strategic opening. As the Czech historian Petr Pithart noted, the point was not to demand some rights as yet
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