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Throughout the 1950s, popular, and in particular, worker oppostion to Russian-imposed dictatorship in the states of Eastern Europe took extreme and violent form, incited by economic deprivation and political repression - most spectacularly in Hungary in 1956. The tradition of active hostility to the totalitarian state continued in Poland, culminating in the formation of the massed-based Solidarity movement. The latter was the most highly developed form of autonomous labor activism in Eastern Europe (and perhaps anywhere else) from the end of World War II to the fall of Communism. In East Germany however, although the proletariat remained disaffected from the state socialist order, in later years working class opposition appeared to retreat from formal confrontation to more individual concerns and accomodations.The final collapse of Communism in Poland and the successful transition from statism to democracy was mainly the result of the initiative of the industrial rank and file in creating an independent and powerful civil entity subversive of the dictatorial state, a virtual alternative society, a true counter-culture. East German workers, on the other hand, while welcoming the demise of their own Stalinist regime, had developed no such militant organization. Their opposition to the Communist government, though real, remained relatively passive - their attitude to change and reform, often halfhearted and uncertain.This paper attempts to explain the differences in behavior between East German and Polish industrial workers by considering, along with the influences of national history and culture, their very different experiences under totalitarian Communism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]