Independent citizens' initiatives, independent culture, independent church structures, and so on, represent a radically new phenomenon which in the past twelve years has become a part of the Czechoslovak reality that cannot be overlooked. Even if much of what we would include in this category — a wide range of cultural activity, for instance — has a pre-history of its own, it is undeniable that the declaration of Charter 77 in January 1977 was the decisive impulse towards independent activity of all kinds. In Czechoslovak society — which at that time had been controlled by a Communist regime for almost thirty years and had been paralysed since the late 1960s by the "normalisation process' — the emergence of the Charter was extremely important: it meant the restoration of a certain public space that was independent of the ruling power and unmanipulated by it. A "parallel polis" was constituted within a society that had been formed by totalitarianism.