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Examining how people negotiated communism and its social expectations in Eastern Europe, this study argues that the distinctive feature of communist rule after Stalinism was that political power was exercised and enforced through ritualized forms of social interaction. Particular forms of cultural practices were crucial to the survival of the system. Alternative cultural practices, sometimes described as the creation of "parallel cultures", derived from an interest in alternative music, literature and fashion, and became a form of resisting the state and the basis of a new civil society. The book offers an alternative to the numerous, mainly political, histories of the region. It develops a new definition of dissidence, and exposes some of the more radical and challenging forms of cultural resistance in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, East Germany and Poland which were not definable as overtly political programmes.