The year 1989 was simultaneously a moment of grandeur and one of sublime finale for Central and Eastern European intellectuals. For more than four decades, they could be described as belonging in a particular sociological and political category. They shared characteristics that made them distinct from their peers in the West: affirming the existence of moral values, reluctant to endorse utopian chiliasm, skeptical redemptive paradigms, and rejecting collectivism in any of its varieties. In many cases, politics as such was regarded as a degrading exercise in hypocrisy. I speak here, of course, of those intellectuals who resisted and/or subverted the region’s Leninist regimes. I am mainly thinking of those who fuelled democratic anti-communist culture and revisionism, those individuals who ultimately created the dissident movement.