Jackson Diehl, Washington Post Foreign Service

Adam Michnik has spent most of the 1980s in a prison cell, a symbol both of Poland's defiant opposition movement and the intolerance of its communist government.

Now, only 10 months after being released in an amnesty, he finds himself grappling with the issue of whether the system that jailed him is moving toward real change under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The question is one that is facing a generation of opposition activists and intellectuals in Eastern Europe who have spent their lives struggling against Soviet-backed communist rule.

And it is one for which Michnik, as a renowned theoretician of Poland's democratic opposition, has a particular standing of authority.

So far, Michnik says, he is counseling that Gorbachev's reform drive be stimulated rather than dismissed.

"One shouldn't say that nothing changes in Russia," he says. "One should up the ante."

At the same time, this charismatic 40-year-old historian leaves no doubt about the criteria by which he believes Gorbachev should be judged. "The only real measure of change," he says, pacing up and down a room with a gait learned from prison, "is improvement in human rights. If Gorbachev really wants to show that he rejects militarism and imperialism, then he must allow people to live freely in their own societies."