The Communist Manifesto New York City. However, by the mid 1870s the "Communist Manifesto" remained Marx and Engels' only work to be even moderately well-known. Over the next forty years, as social-democratic parties rose across Europe and parts of the world, so did the publication of the "Manifesto" alongside them, in hundreds of editions in thirty languages. Marx and Engels wrote a new preface for the 1882 Russian edition, translated by Georgi Plekhanov in Geneva. In it they wondered if Russia could directly become a communist society, or if she would become capitalist first like other European countries. After Marx's death in 1883,
The Power of the Powerless It became a manifesto for dissent in Czechoslovakia, Poland and other communist regimes. Under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, there was an omnipresent pressure exerted by the political apparatus on culture. Various methods were utilized to pressure citizens into compliance. Havel's philosophical mentor, Jan Patočka, who was also the co-spokesman of the human rights petition, Charter 77, died of a stroke in March 1977, after an eleven-hour interrogation by the Czechoslovak secret police regarding his involvement in the Charter. After the launch of Charter 77, which coincided with the release of "The Power of the Powerless", Havel was put under