The unofficial and banned Polish journal Zapis, mouthpiece of the writers and intellectuals who paved the way for the liberalisation in Poland, is published by Index. A translation of the Czechoslovak Charter 77 manifesto drafted by Václav Havel and others is also published this year.

Tom Stoppard’s play, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, is first performed with the London Symphony Orchestra. It is set in a Soviet mental institution and is inspired by the personal account of former detainee Victor Fainberg and Clayton Yeo’s expose of the use of psychiatric abuse in the USSR, published in Index on Censorship in 1975. Stoppard becomes a member of the advisory board the following year and remains a patron of Index.