Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End
of the Cold War
Thomas, Daniel C. (Daniel Charles)
Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2005,
pp. 110-141 (Article)
Published by The MIT Press
For additional information about this article
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
Thomas
Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of
Communism, and the End of the Cold War
✣
T
he reform and subsequent collapse of one-party Communist
rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were critical to the end of the
Cold War. Despite the huge military arsenals and alliance systems that
emerged after 1945, the Cold War was fundamentally a conºict between domestic political systems based on incompatible state socialist and liberal democratic conceptions of political legitimacy. As the Eastern bloc moved away
from the ideology and political structures of state socialism in the 1980s, diplomats from East and West found it easier to dismantle the military confrontation that had long divided Europe and the world.
The deepening of respect for human rights and the creation of democratic institutions preceded moves away from the hostile attitudes and confrontational military postures of the Cold War. Without these domestic political changes, the Cold War could have endured well beyond the late 1980s
and certainly would not have been replaced by the political amity between
former East and West that emerged in that period. Given the considerable
inºuence that Moscow exercised over politics in Eastern Europe during the
Cold War, this article focuses on developments in the Soviet Union.
Why and how did a peaceful process of democratic change overcome a
state socialist regime in the Soviet Union that had long demonstrated its willingness to use force in defense of the status quo? Why did Mikhail Gorbachev
not follow Winston Churchill’s famous refusal to preside over the demise of
the imperial system that he was chosen to lead? This article rejects claims that
these changes resulted simply from the instrumental (and increasingly desperate) initiatives of politically conservative elites motivated by concern about
the Soviet Union’s economic decline and lack of strategic competitiveness. Instead, it focuses on the effects of ideas about human rights that were embedded in European institutions and disseminated throughout the Soviet Union
by a transnational network of human rights activists and other dissidents.
Journal of Cold War Studies
Vol. 7, No. 2, Spring 2005, pp. 110–141
© 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
Soviet leaders valued these institutions for a variety of instrumental and intrinsic reasons. The article acknowledges the considerable (albeit limited) explanatory power of material pressures for change and shows how material and
ideational pressures reinforced each other.
The article is divided into four parts. The ªrst part introduces both materialist and ideationalist explanations for the reform and eventual collapse of
one-party Communist rule in the Soviet Union and identiªes the limitations
of the materialist arguments. The second part demonstrates how exposure to
ideas and norms of human rights contributed to Gorbachev’s (and others’) interest in political reform. The third part demonstrates how these same ideas
contributed to the escalation of political reform and the demise of one-party
rule. Data for these two empirical sections are drawn from translations of
newly released Soviet documents, the memoirs of policymakers, and reports
from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as newspapers and
other secondary sources. The ªnal section evaluates the implications of these
ªndings for our understanding of the end of the Cold War and the role of
ideas in world politics.
Theoretical Perspectives
Scholarly disputes about material and ideational determinants of the end of
the Cold War tend to be rooted in larger rationalist and constructivist approaches to political theory and social science. Rationalist approaches assume
that individuals act in ways that appear most likely to help them achieve preexisting interests, which are generally deªned in material terms. Rationalists
treat ideas as epiphenomenal (albeit sometimes convenient) reasons for action
that are cited by actors whose preferences are actually determined by material
incentives.1 This logic underlies claims that the demise of the Soviet Union resulted from the ºawed efforts of Soviet leaders to improve the productivity,
efªciency, and competitiveness of the Soviet economy, and that apparent concessions to human rights ideas were nothing more than tactical maneuvers.
In contrast, constructivist approaches assume that actors seek to behave
in accordance with norms relevant to their identities in particular social contexts.2 By this logic, the creation and diffusion of new ideas may exert autonomous and enduring effects on behavioral and institutional outcomes. This article emphasizes three causal and constitutive linkages between ideas and
1. See Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
2. See John Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social
Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 855–885.
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Thomas
outcomes: persuasion, rhetorical entrapment, and ideational empowerment.3
Persuasion occurs when actors are exposed to new ideas and convinced of their
explanatory power (in the case of ideas about causes and effects) or their
moral or social legitimacy (in the case of ideas about right and wrong). Rhetorical entrapment occurs when actors who have endorsed a particular idea for instrumental reasons then adhere to its logic even when the reasons for adhering
to it have been exhausted. They do so in order to avoid the costs of rhetorical
inconsistency. Ideational empowerment occurs when the legitimization or endorsement of an idea by public ofªcials enables otherwise weak societal actors
to challenge those ofªcials to carry out social or political change.
Based on this constructivist logic, one could hypothesize that exposure
to ideas and norms of human rights that were prevalent in the late 1970s
and early 1980s would transform the values and identities of (some) Soviet
decision-makers. Given the autocratic and repressive nature of the Soviet
party-state, one would expect (some) members of the Soviet leadership who
were persuaded by the logic of human rights ideas or compelled by the legitimacy of human rights norms to support policies that would democratize the
political system. Over time, reforms they initiated could strengthen societal
challenges to the status quo and thus undermine the viability of one-party
Communist rule.4
Evaluating these hypotheses empirically is no easy task. Simple evidence
of support for political reform would not settle the question of whether this
behavior was motivated by persuasion or by the instrumental calculation associated with the materialist logic. The persistence of key actors’ commitments
to political reform would therefore be crucial. One would expect individuals
who were genuinely persuaded or entrapped by human rights norms to continue supporting reform long after those with a purely instrumental (i.e.,
materialist) commitment to reform had reverted to the use of repression to
preserve the monopoly position of the party-state.
3. On the relationship between causal and constitutive forms of social explanation, see Alexander
Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 77–
88.
4. For other constructivist contributions to the literature on the end of the Cold War, see Friedrich
Kratochwil and Rey Koslowski, “Understanding Change in International Politics: The Soviet Union’s
Demise and the International System,” in Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, eds., International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995),
pp. 109–126; Tomas Risse, “The Cold War’s Endgame and German Uniªcation,” International Security, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Spring 1997), pp. 158–185; Thomas Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!’: Communicative Action
in World Politics,” International Organization, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2000), pp. 1–40; Matthew Evangelista,
Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1999); Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the
Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Robert D. English, “Power, Ideas and
New Evidence on the Cold War’s End: A Reply to Brooks and Wohlforth,” International Security,
Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 70–93.
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
Further ambiguities arise with evidence that actors were exposed to
human rights ideas and later acted in a manner consistent with those ideas.
This behavior may have reºected either persuasion or entrapment. Testimonial evidence from the people in question that their choices were shaped by
their prior conversion to human rights ideas would be signiªcant but not conclusive, given the risk of self-serving rhetoric. In contrast, evidence that actors
endorsed the logic of human rights ideas or behaved in a manner consistent
with those ideas when shielded from public view would suggest persuasion
rather than rhetorical entrapment (or instrumental calculation).
Before evaluating the preceding hypotheses, it bears noting that the
Soviet Union of the 1980s constitutes a “hard test” for the argument that human rights ideas or norms might help bring about political change. The idea
that public authorities should seek to protect the civil rights and political freedom of all their citizens, and should be held accountable if they fail to do so,
was incompatible with the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union (CPSU), which had long relied on a class-based conception of legitimacy to justify its monopoly of political power. The Soviet secret police
(KGB) constantly harassed the small number of people who dared to advocate
compliance with human rights norms. Many of the dissidents were sentenced
to long prison terms. Within the party-state bureaucracy, individuals who
demonstrated any sympathy for “bourgeois” ideas of civil or political rights
were likely to be shufºed off to an academic post, or even expelled from the
party and arrested. The Soviet Union and its allies were slow to ratify international human rights covenants in the 1960s and 1970s and actively resisted
the inclusion of human rights norms in the Helsinki Final Act, which was
adopted in 1975 by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
(CSCE). In the following years, Communist authorities made only limited
and largely rhetorical concessions to Helsinki norms.
When Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union in March 1985, Communist parties throughout the Eastern bloc retained a legal monopoly over
political space, and most showed little evidence of having internalized human
rights ideas in their conception of legitimacy or self-interest. The Soviet
Union controlled a powerful army, a vast network of secret police, a functioning (albeit not internationally competitive) economy, and an effective bureaucracy—the same system that had cracked down hard on domestic unrest and
had directed the East European governments to do the same in the late 1970s
and early 1980s. Such circumstances would certainly not lead one to expect
that the general diffusion of human rights ideas would cause the Soviet authorities to rein in their coercive apparatus, embrace democratic standards of
legitimacy, grant unprecedented liberties to independent groups, and encourage similar developments in Eastern Europe, as they did in the late 1980s.
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Thomas
The Power and Limitations of the Materialist
Explanation
Materialist explanations of the demise of one-party Communist rule in the
Soviet Union suggest that it was an inevitable but unintended consequence of
reforms designed to strengthen the Soviet economy. (To the extent that this
motivation is linked to an interest in bolstering the Soviet Union’s position
within an evolving international balance of power, it draws on realist theories
of international relations.) These explanations typically emphasize Soviet
leaders’ efforts to address a looming crisis in economic productivity and technological competitiveness, especially in comparison to the United States.
Such arguments are clearly plausible. In contrast to the Soviet Union’s
brisk economic expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, the rate of growth slowed
considerably in the late 1970s and early 1980s. With each passing year, the inability of Brezhnev-style Communism to deliver the consumer goods demanded by an increasingly urban population became more apparent to some
in the party leadership.5 The increase in U.S. military spending in the 1980s,
the advent of the digital age, and the globalization of production exacerbated
Soviet leaders’ concerns about the competitiveness of a highly centralized
command economy.6 As Gorbachev’s reforms freed Soviet society from many
long-standing controls, nationalist movements and other independent forces
burst onto the scene and wrested political control away from a weakened
party and state.7
The focus on material incentives for reform does offer a powerful explanation for the policy preferences of Soviet leaders who had concluded by the
early 1980s that the productive efªciency and technological competitiveness
of the Soviet economy could be improved only by increasing the accountability of enterprise managers and by introducing market incentives to systems of
production and distribution. When the position of CPSU general secretary
opened in 1985, these pressures evidently motivated certain Politburo members who had never favored radical changes in domestic politics or foreign
policy (such as Andrei Gromyko and Egor Ligachev, among others) to support Mikhail Gorbachev, who was already known for his desire to ªnd alternatives to the country’s economic inefªciencies and stagnation. Apparently,
5. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon, expanded ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991).
6. Stephen G. Brooks, and William C. Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization and the End of the Cold
War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas,” International Security, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Winter 2000/
2001), pp. 5–53.
7. See for example Rasma Karklins, “Explaining Regime Change in the Soviet Union,” Europe-Asia
Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 29–45.
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
these leaders were interested in improving East-West relations primarily to facilitate economic reform and may have calculated early in Gorbachev’s tenure
that limited concessions on human rights could be allowed without jeopardizing the party’s hold on power. Only when it became apparent that more conservative party and bureaucratic forces were frustrating the “acceleration”
(uskorenie) of the economy through administrative reforms did these moderate reformers endorse Gorbachev’s proposals for greater social and political
openness (glasnost). The materialist argument thus attributes no explanatory
power to human rights ideas, a stance that appears justiªed with respect to
Gorbachev’s elevation to power.
However, the materialist argument is indeterminate and thus unpersuasive with respect to the actual policies that caused the collapse of CPSU
rule. In particular, the materialist argument is indeterminate with respect
to Gorbachev’s decision to pursue radical political reform in the mid- to
late 1980s rather than the alternative policy of marketization-withoutdemocratization that was pursued in China and that was advocated, unsuccessfully, by moderate Soviet ofªcials who were concerned about the survival
of the Soviet regime.8 As such, the materialist argument cannot explain why
Gorbachev would emphasize social and political reforms over economic reform after he had consolidated effective control of the CPSU Politburo and
Central Committee and after his uskorenie program had begun to bear fruit.
In late 1986, after just a year of initial reforms, and despite falling gas and
oil prices on the world market, the Soviet Union’s annual increase in GNP
had risen from 2.4 to 3.3 percent, including increases in industrial production
from 3.4 to 4.4 percent, and agricultural production from 0.2 to 5.3 percent.9
These developments did not immediately improve the conditions for longterm intensive growth, but they did reºect progress toward a restructuring of
the Soviet economy and would have enabled Gorbachev to embark on reforms of prices and the services sector. Yet, according to those closest to him,
Gorbachev began to speak more about democratization than about economic
reform in late 1986.10 In fact, he cited popular frustration as a reason for
deepening social and political reform and replaced a party plenum on prices
planned for January 1987 with a plenum on democratization. This is hardly
8. A hardline minority within the party leadership opposed marketization, with or without democratization.
9. Vadim Medvedev, V komande Gorbacheva: Vzglyad iznutri (Moscow: Bylina, 1994), cited in Jerry F.
Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), p. 107. Of course, ªgures for one year can be misleading, and economic performance plummeted in 1987 and continued to deteriorate in each successive year. The harvest in 1986
was the result of unusually good weather, not reforms, and the meager industrial growth was purchased at the price of a budget deªcit that increased to 2 percent of gross domestic product.
10. Financial Times, 11 October 1986, cited in Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 126.
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Thomas
the behavior of a leader interested in democratization simply as a means to
economic reform.
Market reform of a socialist economy requires that consumers and enterprise managers have greater access to information and that the latter be accountable to market incentives. However, the implications of controlled political liberalization should not be confused with the majoritarian tendencies of
democracy: “The introduction of real democracy into a marketizing country
gives power to those most inclined to want to slow the process, and it creates
strong incentives for politicians to develop populist, anti-market programs.”11
It is therefore difªcult to reconcile claims that Gorbachev was motivated primarily by the need for economic reform with the fact that he resisted his own
government’s plans for price reform while systematically moving from liberalization to democratization in social and political affairs.
The argument that Gorbachev sought principally to strengthen the competitive position of the Soviet Union is further undermined by his continued
pursuit of political reform after 1987, when it became apparent that glasnost
was threatening not only the sources of inefªciency in the Soviet economy but
also the hegemonic position of the party itself. If the materialist argument
were correct, one would expect Soviet leaders to use repressive measures once
their hold on power was seriously endangered. Yet, rather than heed the moderate reformers’ warnings that political reform would undermine the regime,
Gorbachev worked systematically after 1987 to marginalize the more cautious
reformers. This, too, is hardly compatible with the simple argument that
Soviet reform was driven purely by a quest for economic gain.
Contemporary claims that a more repressive option was not viable are inconsistent with the perceptions of Soviet policymakers at the time. They also
are inconsistent with the fact that the entire Soviet Politburo was aware of an
alternative, politically conservative approach to reform. China’s Communist
regime had experimented with market-oriented reforms since the late 1970s
without undermining the political hegemony of the Communist Party. By the
mid-1980s, the economic reforms in China had produced signiªcant improvements in agricultural and industrial output, promoted the growth of private ªrms, sparked new domestic markets for light industrial goods, and begun to attract increased foreign investment.12 China achieved these gains even
11. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 140.
12. On the success of Chinese reforms evident in the early to mid-1980s, see Dwight Perkins and
Shahid Yusuf, Rural Development in China (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984);
Dwight Perkins, China: Asia’s Next Economic Giant (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986);
Harry Harding, China’s Second Revolution: Reform after Mao (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution
Press, 1987); and Bruce L. Reynolds, ed., Chinese Economic Policy: Economic Reform at Midstream
(New York: Paragon House, 1988).
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
though the regime did not hesitate to repress intellectuals and others demanding greater freedom of expression in 1978–1979 and 1985–1986.13 In fact,
beyond the Chinese case, there is strong comparative evidence that economic
liberalization does not require or necessarily even promote greater political
freedom.14
For all these reasons, materialist explanations cannot account for one of
the central determinants of the end of the Cold War—namely, Gorbachev’s
systematic dismantling of monopolistic Communist rule in the Soviet Union.
Is a constructivist approach more successful in explaining this key part of the
empirical record?
The Role of Human Rights Ideas in the Soviet
Reform Process
Ideas of human rights have a long pedigree in Enlightenment and liberal
thought, but they did not become salient within the countries of the Communist bloc, or within East-West relations, until the 1970s. Although the
Soviet Union and some of its allies had approved of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and signed the two international human rights covenants of 1966, these documents were neither well-known to people living under Communist rule nor taken seriously by the Communist authorities.
Western governments did not emphasize human rights ideas in the early
détente period, and the small human rights groups that existed in Moscow
and several other cities were not politically signiªcant.
This situation changed dramatically in August 1975 when the Warsaw
Pact countries signed the Helsinki Final Act. Although the Soviet government
had tried hard to prevent the inclusion of human rights in the Final Act, it ultimately accepted a text containing unprecedented commitments that the
protection of human rights was a legitimate part of diplomatic relations
among the thirty-ªve states participating in the CSCE. In response, dissidents
across the Communist bloc began to organize independent initiatives to monitor their governments’ compliance with the new Helsinki norms. These initiatives included the Moscow Helsinki Watch Committee, Czechoslovakia’s
13. On the Chinese regime’s harsh response to popular demands for social and political reform in the
1970s and 1980s, see Andrew Nathan, Chinese Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986); and Merle Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
14. Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, “Modernization: Theories and Facts,” World Politics,
Vol. 49, No. 2 (January 1997), pp. 155–183. Note also how the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre
stiºed demands for political reform without arresting the process of economic liberalization.
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Thomas
Charter 77, and Poland’s Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), a precursor to
Solidarity. Before long, the monitoring and publicity efforts of this “Helsinki
network” made human rights a prominent (albeit not universally welcomed)
issue in the countries of the East bloc and in East-West relations.15
Despite these new ideational currents, no high-ranking CPSU ofªcials
questioned the basic features of the Soviet system at the time that Mikhail
Gorbachev took power. Most members of the Politburo who elected
Gorbachev as CPSU general secretary on 11 March 1985 expected him to revitalize the Soviet system through a program of economic restructuring
guided by a reformed party and state, not to oversee the dismantling of the
system.16 What they apparently did not recognize was the extent to which
Gorbachev and the ofªcials he would gather around him had been affected by
exposure to human rights ideas and human rights movements’ critiques of
Communist rule.
Receptivity to Human Rights Ideas
In addition to Gorbachev’s concerns about the Soviet economy, his social and
political agenda reºected the lessons that he and some others within the
CPSU had learned from the human rights campaigns of the late 1970s, as
well as their quest for rapprochement with Europe at a time when “European
identity” was understood to include the protection of human rights.
The Dissidents’ Message
Among the supporters of reform, a relatively small group of party leaders and
institutchiki had been affected by the message and persistence of human rights
campaigners across the bloc and were thus inclined to restructure the Soviet
Union’s social and political order as well as its economy. This openness to dissident thinking resulted partly from the fact that Gorbachev’s generation had
come of political age during the tumultuous period from Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes in 1956 to the crackdown on independent voices
in the USSR following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.17 Although
15. For further information on the sources and negotiation of these norms, as well as the birth of the
Helsinki network, see Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and
the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), chs. 1–2, 4.
16. Egor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin: The Memoirs of Yegor Ligachev, trans. by Catherine A.
Fitzpatrick (New York: Pantheon, 1993), ch. 1.
17. See Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin
Era (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
few members of the “thaw generation” rejected the party and became dissidents or human rights campaigners even after 1968, ofªcial repression of independent initiatives did not shield party elites from the dissidents’ message.
Through seizures and informers, the secret police kept the party leadership
abreast of samizdat publishing and aware of the ease with which such publications circulated through their societies. Even if one assumes that most Soviet
ofªcials cared only about advancing within the CPSU, some were affected
by the dissidents’ message or by their own participation in the repression of
dissent.
The latter group included Gorbachev, whose study of law at the prestigious Moscow University set him apart from most senior Soviet ofªcials, who
were trained at engineering or managerial institutes. While rising through the
ranks of the CPSU in the 1960s, Gorbachev remained in contact with his law
school friend Zdenèk Mlynár, who in 1968 joined reformist circles within the
Czechoslovak Communist Party. During a visit to the Soviet Union in the
summer of 1967, Mlynár stayed with the Gorbachevs in Stavropol, and the
two men evidently discussed reformist ideas then circulating in Prague. Presumably, Gorbachev’s legal education made him more open than many of his
colleagues were to debates and discussion about the rule of law and limitations on state power.
Gorbachev claims in his memoirs that when the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia provoked a few small protests in the USSR, he was troubled
by the forceful crackdown on dissent: “I had qualms of conscience about the
cruel and undeserved punishment meted out” to critics of the regime, he
writes, and began to ponder “the underlying causes of many grievous phenomena in our domestic and foreign policies.”18 Gorbachev’s questioning of
political repression throughout the bloc could only have been reinforced
when he learned that Mlynár had helped found Charter 77 and had openly
criticized the denial of human rights in Czechoslovakia. He was also apparently inºuenced by the strong support that Charter 77 and other East-bloc
human rights movements received from Italian Communist party leader
Enrico Berlinguer. Speaking at Berlinguer’s funeral in June 1984, Gorbachev
freely confessed: “Dear Enrico, we never will forget your advice about the necessity of democratizing our country.”19 Six months later, at a conference in
Moscow on ideological work, Gorbachev delivered a major speech that, while
framed in terms of perfecting socialism, introduced nearly all of the key
themes that he developed during his later reforms: acceleration, decentralization, glasnost, equality before the law, perestroika, democratization, and the
18. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 83.
19. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 74.
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Thomas
priority of the “human factor.” The fact that he delivered the speech despite
receiving a last-minute cautionary message from CPSU General Secretary
Konstantin Chernenko reºects his commitment to these themes.20
After being elevated to full membership on the CPSU Politburo in 1980,
Gorbachev had pursued contacts with an informal circle of intellectuals and
“in-system” dissidents whose thinking had also had been shaped by exposure
to the human rights movement. Among these was Aleksandr Yakovlev, whose
criticisms of Russian nationalism in the early 1970s had cost him his job as
acting head of the CPSU Propaganda Department. But when Yakovlev was in
“exile” as Soviet ambassador to Canada, he was exposed to a great deal of independent and samizdat materials on human rights conditions in the Soviet
Union.21 In 1983, Gorbachev used his inºuence to bring Yakovlev back from
Ottawa to direct the inºuential Institute of World Economy and International Relations.
By all indications dissident materials, including those of the Helsinki network, were read and discussed quite openly at several of the top policyoriented research institutes in Moscow. As a result, says Georgii Arbatov, the
founding director of the Institute of the United States and Canada, many
“institutchiki” began to see the Communist system through “dissident” eyes.22
According to Anatolii Chernyaev, deputy head of the CPSU International
Department until Gorbachev appointed him a senior adviser, “Gorbachev’s
preparation for a break with the primitive, falsiªed, ofªcial Party version of
Soviet history was his reading of samizdat and tamizdat literature as well as restricted ‘Progress’ publications for the elite.”23 Reºecting on his own experience, Chernyaev claims that dissident literature seized him “by the throat.”24
When Gorbachev was elected CPSU general secretary in 1985, he
appointed many of these individuals to inºuential positions in government
and the media. He also rehabilitated “semi-dissidents” like Len Karpinskii and
20. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 78–80, 125–
126.
21. Valery Boldin, Ten Years That Shook the World: The Gorbachev Era as Witnessed by His Chief of Staff,
trans. by Evelyn Rossiter (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 73. For Yakovlev’s evolving views on
Communism, see Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, eds., Voices of Glasnost: Interviews
with Gorbachev’s Reformers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. 33–75; Alexander Yakovlev, The
Fate of Marxism in Russia, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993); and Alexander Yakovlev, Striving for Law in a Lawless Land: Memoirs of a Russian Reformer
(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996).
22. Georgii Arbatov, The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Times Books, 1992),
p. 237.
23. Anatoly S. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. and ed. by Robert D. English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 138.
24. Robert D. English, “Introduction,” in Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, p. xxi.
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
Roy Medvedev, who had developed extensive contacts with independent activists after being expelled from the party for their unconventional thinking
during the early Brezhnev era.25 What was signiªcant about all these moves
was not Gorbachev’s attempt to establish his own power base within the regime but that he did so by empowering or rehabilitating individuals with such
heterodox ideas.26
For other state and party ofªcials, it was the experience of direct participation in the repression of dissent that caused them to question the status
quo.27 For example, a KGB agent assigned to eavesdrop on Soviet human
rights groups concluded privately that the dissidents were telling the
truth: “The chaos and ªlth; the fact that we put people in jail who only want
good for this country—it was all true!”28 Before the agent was arrested himself, he warned dissidents Yurii Orlov, Aleksandr Podrabinek, and Anatolii
Shcharansky that the KGB was planning a wave of searches and arrests, including at least a dozen targeted just at Podrabinek and his family. Nonetheless, says Karpinskii, most of those who “wanted a more efªcient and humane
system . . . knew they had to wait until their time came, remain in the apparatus, develop their ideas, seek out like-minded people, and be ready when their
hour struck.”29
One of the most important of these was Eduard Shevardnadze, who
claims that his experiences as party boss and interior minister in his native republic of Georgia prompted him to question the Soviet Union’s social and political order. “I knew many of the people in the dissident movement in Georgia quite well [and] spoke with them a number of times,” he says in his
memoirs. Though admittedly not yet prepared “either inwardly—psychologically—or politically” to protest the system’s treatment of dissent,
Shevardnadze argues that his role in each of these encounters provoked a
“difªcult internal struggle.” Over time, such experiences transformed his outlook: “This struggle, along with my knowledge of the true state of affairs in
25. Cohen and Vanden Heuvel, eds., Voices of Glasnost, p. 294. See also Roy Medvedev and Giulietto
Chiesa, Time of Change: An Insider’s View of Russia’s Transformation (New York: Pantheon Books,
1989).
26. For a more extensive discussion of the reformists whom Gorbachev cultivated and consulted, see
Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, ch. 4; as well as various contributions to Cohen and Vanden Heuvel,
Voices of Glasnost.
27. Obviously, most agents of repression do not question their involvement, at least not seriously
enough to stop. It is beyond the scope of this essay to determine why some individuals do so and others do not.
28. Quoted in Yevgenia Albats, The State within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia—Past, Present, and Future, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994),
pp. 213–217.
29. Cohen and Vanden Heuvel, eds., Voices of Glasnost, p. 299.
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Thomas
our country, has led me to conclude that the root of existing evils is not the individual people, but in the system. And if some people seethe with hatred for
the system, that is only because the system is ruthless toward the individual,”
he concluded.30
For others, the simple fact of having remained within the Brezhnev
regime despite its repression of dissent was a strong motivation to work for
reform in the late 1980s. As Yuri Afanas’ev explained:
Even those of us who did not personally persecute or harm anyone, and who sincerely wanted changes in the country, bear a heavy responsibility for having been
silent. Unlike people like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Roy
Medvedev, we did not openly or actively ªght against what was happening in
our country. Therefore, we—and I include myself—must repent for our responsibility.31
Thus, although many of Gorbachev’s initial supporters were interested solely
in economic reform, some were determined to act on what they had long
been hearing from the dissidents—that “the country’s economic malaise
was intrinsically linked to a deeper moral, social and cultural crisis.”32 In
the winter of 1984, a full year before Gorbachev became general secretary,
Shevardnadze reportedly told him: “Everything’s rotten. It has to be
changed.”33 Such comments suggest that by the mid-1980s support was growing within the CPSU for political reforms “much more radical than the Soviet
political establishment realized.”34
Even those within the party leadership who were not sympathetic to the
human rights critique of Communist rule could not deny the abundant evidence of popular sympathy for human rights movements across the Communist bloc. On May Day 1985, three-and-a-half years after Poland’s declaration
of martial law, ªfteen thousand pro-Solidarity demonstrators ªlled the streets
of Warsaw.35 In Czechoslovakia, the Interior Ministry claimed that up to two
million people might have signed the Charter 77 human rights manifesto if
they had not been afraid.36 Within the Soviet Union, the persistence of inde30. Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New
York: Free Press, 1991), p. 37.
31. Cohen and Vanden Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost, p. 100.
32. John M. Battle, “Uskorenie, Glasnost and Perestroika: The Pattern of Reform under Gorbachev,”
Soviet Studies, Vol. 40, No. 3 (July 1988), p. 370.
33. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 37.
34. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, p. 81.
35. Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of
the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994), p. 225.
36. Vladimir V. Kusin, “Challenge to Normalcy: Political Opposition in Czechoslovakia, 1968–77,”
in Rudolf L. Tokes, ed., Opposition in Eastern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1979), p. 52.
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
pendent initiatives for human rights and national self-determination, despite
the KGB’s massive efforts at repression, were testament to the party’s illegitimacy. Soviet Politburo members who were otherwise not inclined to support
Gorbachev’s initiatives understood the signiªcance of his argument that if political reforms had been initiated earlier in Poland, “there would have been no
1980”—an argument that underscored the necessity of bold reforms in the
Soviet Union.37
The Soviet Union as a “European” State
The new thinking about human rights was closely linked to Gorbachev’s conception of Europe, a conception that was far less instrumental than the ideas
that guided Brezhnev and his Politburo colleagues when they launched the
CSCE. When Gorbachev and his advisers were considering alternatives to the
centralization and repressiveness of the status quo, they saw in Western Europe not only the resources necessary to modernize the Soviet economy but
also inspiration for the type of democratic socialism they hoped to achieve
within the Soviet Union and a shared cultural heritage denied by conservative
Russophiles and Communists alike.38 “Europe for Gorbachev was something
that had a meaning of its own,” explains one of his closest advisers.39
Though inchoate at ªrst, and impeded by divisions within the Kremlin,
Gorbachev’s rethinking of the Soviet Union as a “European” state began early
in his rule: “Reºecting on the goals to set for our new foreign policy, I found
it increasingly difªcult to see the multicolored patchwork of Europe’s political
map as I used to see it before. I was thinking about the common roots of this
multiform and yet fundamentally indivisible European civilization . . .”40
Although the Soviet Union did not belong to the Council of Europe or the
European Community (EC), Gorbachev and his colleagues were well aware of
the centrality of human rights norms in both organizations. The Council of
37. Anatolii Chernyaev’s Notes from the Politburo Session, 11 July 1986, in Vladislav Zubok et al.,
eds., Understanding the End of the Cold War: Reagan/Gorbachev Years: A Compendium of Declassiªed
Documents and Chronology of Events (n.p., 1998) n.p. (hereinafter referred to as Zubok et al, eds.,
Compendium of Declassiªed Documents). The Compendium was prepared by the National Security Archive, Washington, DC, and the Cold War International History Project, Washington, DC, for “Understanding the End of the Cold War, 1980–87” oral history conference, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, 7–10 May 1998. See also Gorbachev, Memoirs,
p. 478.
38. For more, see English, Russia and the Idea of the West.
39. Anatolii Chernyaev (comments presented at “Understanding the End of the Cold War, 1980–87”
oral history conference, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI,
7–10 May 1998), in conference transcript, ed. by Nina Tannenwald (hereinafter referred to as
Tannenwald, ed., “Understanding the End of the Cold War”), p. 235.
40. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 428.
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Thomas
Europe’s rigorous human rights regime, including a supranational court, had
been functioning since the early 1950s. During the CSCE negotiations in the
early 1970s, it was the EC that overcame strong Soviet resistance to the inclusion of human rights in the Helsinki Final Act.41 In the 1973 Copenhagen
Declaration, the EC heads-of-state had deªned “democracy, the rule of law,
and respect for human rights” as the core elements of “European identity.”
Gorbachev’s reºection on these matters resulted, says Shevardnadze, in a
commitment to overcome the existing political and geostrategic division of
Europe.42 As Gorbachev explained in an April 1987 speech in Prague,
“Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals is also a historical and cultural category in a high, spiritual sense. Here world civilization has been enriched with
the ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. . . . European culture,
which has many faces, yet forms a single entity.”43 This complex interest in
rapprochement with Europe reinforced Gorbachev’s motivation to expand
human rights protections within the Soviet Union.
The new Soviet leader and his aides thus set out to strengthen the CSCE,
the one institution that already transcended the European divide. But it was
not simply the geographic reach of the CSCE that was signiªcant. By the
mid-1980s, the CSCE had become synonymous with the idea that European
unity could not be separated from respect for human rights. Gorbachev apparently recognized as much, saying that he was attracted to “the potential opportunities for a pan-European policy which lay in the ‘spirit of Helsinki,’ a
unique achievement in itself.”44
In July 1985, soon after Shevardnadze was appointed foreign minister, he
traveled to Helsinki to attend the CSCE’s commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Final Act. Although Shevardnadze was too new on the job to
launch any initiatives, he listened to the litany of reciprocal criticisms and
grew concerned that the Helsinki process was “running down.” Back in Moscow, he and Gorbachev deliberated on how to “breathe life” into the CSCE
and thus advance the Soviet Union’s rapprochement with the rest of Europe.45
This desire for greater contact with Europe and the reinvigoration of the
CSCE was reºected ªrst in new public rhetoric. Gorbachev writes in his
memoirs that at a press conference in Paris in October 1985 during his ªrst
foreign visit as CPSU general secretary, he tried “to drive home to the
41. On the EC’s struggle with the USSR over the content of the Helsinki Final Act, see Thomas, The
Helsinki Effect, chs. 1–2.
42. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 112.
43. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 195.
44. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 429.
45. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 112.
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
French—and to others as well—that compliance with the Final Act would
improve the climate in Europe and dispel the clouds.” In response to a question, he repeated a view that he had ªrst expressed to the British Parliament
less than a year earlier: “Europe is our common home.”46
The majority of Gorbachev’s meetings with foreign heads-of-state in
1987 and 1988 were with West Europeans.47 These were more than just opportunities for new political initiatives; they were also opportunities for learning. Gorbachev held numerous long conversations about the meaning of socialism and democracy with former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt,
French President François Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, and especially Spanish Premier Felipe González, whom he described as “a true democrat.”48 As a result of these conversations, as well as his
own experiences within the Soviet Union, Gorbachev “increasingly came to
believe . . . that West European ‘democratic socialists’—and, for that matter,
liberals—had done a far superior job of putting into practice the ideals of socialism than had his Soviet predecessors.”49
Gorbachev also set out to persuade those within the Soviet leadership and
bureaucracy who did not share his identiªcation with Europe and acceptance
of human rights norms. During an address to the staff of the Soviet Foreign
Ministry on 23 May 1986, he speciªcally argued that Europe should not be
seen “through the prism of its relations with the United States of America.”50
Furthermore, he explained,
The very words “human rights” are put in quotation marks and we speak of socalled human rights, as if our own revolution had nothing to do with human
rights. . . . But would there even have been a revolution if such rights had been
observed in the old society? We need to reject decisively this outdated approach
to the problem . . . and view it more broadly.51
That same year, he announced a radical break from the ideology of class
conºict: “The interests of societal development and all-human values,” he declared, “take precedence over the interests of any particular class.”52 After discussing issues of democracy and self-determination with Margaret Thatcher
in Moscow in the spring of 1987, Gorbachev told the Politburo: “Maybe I’m
wrong, but I believe we haven’t studied Europe enough and don’t know it very
46. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 428.
47. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, p. 244.
48. Ibid., pp. 116, 117, 119, 242–243.
49. Ibid., p. 119.
50. Ibid., p. 242.
51. English, Russia and the Idea of the West, p. 220.
52. Ibid., p. 223.
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Thomas
well. We have to get up to speed on it ourselves and educate our people.”53
The following year, a new institute for the study of Europe was established in
Moscow.
This does not mean that Gorbachev and his inner circle of advisers foresaw from the beginning how far their new thinking would take them. When
Gorbachev ªrst took ofªce, he believed that the Soviet Union needed to be
modernized within the framework of the Communist system. According to
Chernyaev, when Gorbachev began to speak about the need to “work in democratic conditions,” he understood democracy as an instrument that “the
Party could employ in restructuring society. But not yet as an underlying
principle of the very existence of society, not yet as a universal human
value.”54 Over time, though, Gorbachev’s “mind was undergoing a sweeping
de-ideologization.”55
In sum, despite the evident need for economic reform in the early to mid1980s, considerable evidence exists that the diffusion of human rights ideas
and norms had persuaded Gorbachev and a number of others within the
Soviet elite to pursue a program of political reform that was more extensive
than the moderate economic reformers considered prudent.
The Implementation of Human Rights Ideas
How, then, did the advocates of political reform gain cooperation from others
within the Soviet elite, even when such reform threatened to undermine the
Communist system? Part of the answer to this question is rhetorical entrapment. Since 1975, the Soviet leadership had portrayed the Helsinki Final Act
as a major accomplishment of Soviet foreign policy. Moscow’s rhetorical support of the Helsinki norms was well established. A tacit alliance thus developed between political reformers around Gorbachev, human rights activists
across the Soviet bloc, and Western critics, who together used Helsinki human rights norms to persuade moderate Communists, whose main concern
was economic reform, to support the cause of social and political liberalization. These same activists, as well as nationalists in several of the non-Russian
republics, then used the Soviet government’s commitment to human rights
ideas as an opportunity to mobilize for ever more radical reforms.
As discussed above, the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev as CPSU general
secretary in February 1985 reºected strong but not unanimous support in the
53. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, p. 105.
54. Ibid., p. 95.
55. Ibid., p. 67.
126
Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
Politburo and Central Committee for reforms to revitalize the Soviet economy. This shaky pro-reform consensus did not extend, however, to transforming the social and political order of the Soviet Union or its East European
neighbors. Even among those in the leadership who believed that the CPSU
should allow greater space for independent voices and interests, few favored
the type of political liberalization generally equated with “human rights.”56
Hence, before Gorbachev and his inner circle could implement even limited
political reforms, they had to overcome strong resistance from Communist
party conservatives and the coercive apparatus of the state.
Soon after Gorbachev took ofªce, he assigned two reform-minded advisers to draft a program for the Central Committee plenum in April. Upon
reading their proposal, however, he crossed out all references to political reform, explaining: “That’s for later. . . . First we’ll have to maneuver.”57 As expected, party conservatives strongly contested ideological reformulations that
Gorbachev and his allies proposed in late 1985 for the upcoming 27th Party
Congress. It is thus hardly surprising that during Gorbachev’s ªrst year in
ofªce, independent organizations remained illegal, dissidents were still arrested, applications for emigration were denied, and religious believers were
harassed. On the other hand, dissidents and human rights campaigners from
the late 1970s reemerged and regrouped during this period. By linking their
cause to the trans-European CSCE that Gorbachev’s advisers valued so highly
and by refusing to accept limited reforms, they greatly extended the bounds of
political debate and social mobilization within the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe.
The International Normative Environment
By this time, the international normative environment had made it almost
impossible for the Soviet Union to improve its relations with the West without ªrst improving its human rights record. The European Community’s
commitment to linking trans-European rapprochement to respect for human
rights had not weakened since the negotiation of the Helsinki Final Act in the
early 1970s, while the U.S. government’s commitment was now far stronger
than it had been in those years, thanks to the lobbying successes of “Helsinki
network” activists in New York and Washington. Human rights activists
across the Communist bloc were also skilled at exploiting the CSCE’s busy
schedule of diplomatic meetings, as well as other international forums, to en56. Ibid., p. 71.
57. Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the
Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 57.
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Thomas
sure that any attempt to create a Potemkin village of superªcial reforms would
be exposed at home and abroad. Respect for human rights was thus a legitimate and irrevocable part of the diplomatic agenda among CSCE states by
the mid-1980s.
For example, as CSCE diplomats gathered to observe the Final Act’s
tenth anniversary, the Solidarity-afªliated Helsinki Committee in Poland declared: “The Helsinki Final Act and the Final Document of the Madrid Conference continue to be a valuable foundation for the aspirations of Eastern European peoples. The accords broaden the number of activists engaged in the
struggle for human rights. They bring an awareness of citizens’ rights to the
everyday confrontations with the government.”58 Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77
announced: “We must keep ªghting, we must continually point to the Helsinki Accords and say ‘You signed this, you must honour this.’”59 Likewise,
Hungarian dissidents used the occasion of the CSCE Cultural Forum, held in
Budapest in October 1985, to organize a parallel meeting in private apartments of writers, artists, and intellectuals from across Europe.60
Western media and governmental attention thus remained focused on
political repression in the East. At a special CSCE meeting of human rights
“experts” held in Ottawa just two months after Gorbachev took ofªce, Western governments pushed hard (but ultimately unsuccessfully) for stronger
measures to protect non-governmental monitoring of compliance with Helsinki norms.61 Two months later, at the CSCE’s tenth anniversary meeting in
Helsinki, Secretary of State George Shultz challenged the new government in
Moscow: “My country and most other countries represented . . . believe that
the truest tests of political intentions are actual steps to improve co-operation
among States, to enhance contacts among people and to strengthen respect
for individual rights.”62 Similar calls for expanded protections of human
rights were heard at the Budapest Cultural Forum and at the CSCE Meeting
on Human Contacts, held in Bern, Switzerland the following spring.63 Mean58. U.S. Congress, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Human Rights and the Helsinki Process in Eastern Europe: Hearings, 99th Cong., 2nd Sess., 25 February 1986; and U.S. Congress,
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Human Rights and the CSCE Process in the Soviet
Union: Hearings, 99th Cong., 2nd Sess., 27 February 1986, p. 101.
59. Reuters newswire item, Vienna, 26 July 1985.
60. Report on the Cultural Symposium: Budapest, October 1985 (Vienna: International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, 1986).
61. U.S. Congress, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, The Ottawa Human Rights
Experts Meeting and the Future of the Helsinki Process: Hearings, 97th Cong., 1st Sess., 25 June 1985.
62. Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Tenth Anniversary Meeting, Helsinki, Verbatim Record, 30 July–1 August 1985, CSCE/TAM/VR.2, p. 41.
63. See Michael Novak, Taking Glasnost Seriously: Toward an Open Soviet Union (Washington, DC:
American Enterprise Institute Press, 1988).
128
Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
while, editorial writers in Western newspapers continued to insist on linkage
between implementation of the CSCE’s human rights norms and improved
East-West relations in other issue areas.64 Police interference with the dissident symposium in Budapest also attracted widespread criticism in the international press.65
For the reasons discussed earlier, Gorbachev was personally sympathetic
to some of these critiques of the Soviet record. Just weeks after his Paris declaration that “Europe is our common home,” he told U.S. Secretary of State
George Shultz that he was willing to discuss human rights at the upcoming
Soviet-American summit in Geneva.66 At that meeting, he recalls, “I myself
spent time trying to fend off accusations of human rights abuses, even though
I was not always convinced that these were not justiªed.”67 Five months later,
he met with the co-chair of the U.S. congressional Helsinki Commission,
Representative Dante Fascell, who stressed that East-West relations could not
improve without human rights reforms in the Soviet Union, including freedom of emigration and the release of Andrei Sakharov from internal exile. Senior foreign policy advisor Anatolii Chernyaev recalls that Gorbachev’s meeting with Fascell “hardened [the Soviet leader’s] already existing resolve to end
‘the Sakharov affair.’”68
The international normative environment nonetheless ensured that the
“common European home” valued by some in Moscow as a means to secure
economic resources and by others as an alternative to cultural isolation could
be built only on concrete steps to comply with human rights norms, including those in the Helsinki Final Act. The reformers’ conclusion that the continued denial of basic human rights was both morally unacceptable and politically unsustainable thus coincided with a broader recognition among party
leaders that rapprochement with Western Europe required greater respect for
human rights and self-determination in Eastern Europe. In this environment,
the dissidents’ critiques could neither be ignored nor openly challenged. The
moderate reformers were trapped by their own rhetorical commitment to
human rights.
The 27th Party Congress in early 1986 approved a decision to replace the
Soviet Union’s ideological commitment to class struggle, which had long been
invoked to justify repression at home and in allied states, with a new doctrine
64. “Helsinki: The Second Act,” The Times (London), 3 August 1985, p. 11; and F. Stephen Larrabee,
“The West Is Hardly the Loser,” International Herald Tribune (Paris), 3 August 1985, p. 4.
65. See articles reprinted in Report on the Cultural Symposium.
66. George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner
and Sons, 1993), pp. 589–594.
67. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 406.
68. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, p. 58.
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Thomas
emphasizing the priority of “universal human values,” including human rights
and self-determination. Speaking to a Politburo meeting in mid-summer
1986, Gorbachev explained:
A vital component of perestroika is democratization. We are giving real rights to
people. But who is going to use them? Are there people capable and bold enough
for that? The ways of democracy were drummed out of them. . . . What happened in this country is that a rigid system was created and then life was herded
into it. And the system was always the highest priority! . . . It’s no sin to revisit
the system’s fundamentals again. . . . Don’t be afraid of democracy, of questions,
problems, discussions on any level, from the Politburo to the smallest collectives
and the family.69
Later that summer, he added, “Up till now we have been talking about democracy, now it’s time to implement it and respect it. Those who try to break
people, to push them around as they please, cannot work with us. We shouldn’t be afraid of our own people.”70
Gorbachev also began to take steps, such as relaxing the power of the censor’s ofªce, to democratize Soviet society and alleviate popular fear of the
party-state. Though limited at ªrst to greater press freedoms and tolerance of
“non-threatening group activity,” such steps represented a radical step into the
political unknown that would be hard to imagine if Gorbachev and his close
allies had not already been affected by human rights ideas and shielded by human rights norms.71 As shown below in more detail, they used the idea of a
“common European home” and Western pressures for Helsinki compliance to
justify the partial lifting of repression that they favored but that conservatives
opposed. Shevardnadze later claimed: “It was clear to me that both the
changes in Eastern Europe and the prospects for building a united continent
without blocs . . . would directly reverberate in domestic walls and cause
cracks.”72
The Vienna phase of the CSCE that opened in the autumn of 1986
reafªrmed the international normative preconditions for improved East-West
relations, empowering reformers in Moscow and encouraging local movements for political change across the Communist bloc. By the time the
Vienna phase ended in early 1989, the CSCE had “shaken the Iron Curtain,”
Shevardnadze argues.73 At the preparatory talks, held on 23 September–
69. Ibid., p. 67.
70. Ibid., p. 69.
71. See Hough, Democratization and Revolution, ch. 5.
72. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 118.
73. Vojtech Mastny, ed., The Helsinki Process and the Reintegration of Europe, 1986–1991 (London:
Pinter, 1992), p. 18.
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
6 October 1986, Western and neutral delegations made clear that any major
improvement of relations would require concrete progress on human rights in
the East. Meanwhile, nationalist and human rights activists in the nonRussian republics of the Soviet Union—many of whom had been active in the
Helsinki-focused movements of the late 1970s—began to reassert their
claims. In Latvia, activists created the group Helsinki ’86 to organize protests
against the Soviet occupation and violations of human rights.74 Zviad
Gamsakhurdia, co-founder of the Georgian Helsinki Union in 1977,
launched a new movement for the independence of Georgia.
Such pressure from below and abroad could not have failed to impress
those within Gorbachev’s governing coalition who viewed the Helsinki process in terms of its potential impact on domestic economic reform. For
Shevardnadze and other Soviet reformers, however, the Vienna meeting offered a crucial opportunity to advance their political agenda. As Shevardnadze
later recalled: “I was convinced that the conference was essential to show
the country and the world how far we intended to go and, beyond that, to
provide an impetus for democratization and the perestroika of legislation in
everything related to human affairs.”75
At Gorbachev’s behest, the Politburo began to discuss the release of large
numbers of political prisoners—far more than the small numbers proposed by
George Shultz before the October 1986 Reykjavik summit.76 These proposals
provoked a stormy reaction from conservatives who preferred to continue divorcing rhetoric from action: “It is one thing to make declarations, but let
Andrei Sakharov and other prisoners of conscience serve out their sentences,”
they argued.77 Gorbachev disagreed and told the Politburo: “We need to work
out a conception of human rights, both at home and abroad, and to put an
end to the routine. It only produces dissidents.”78 At another Politburo meeting that autumn, he declared: “On human rights, let us see what we can do.
We need to open a way back to the Soviet Union for the thousands of emigrants, to move this current in the opposite direction.”79 Although informed
by the KGB that Soviet dissidents were beginning to “connect their statements” to the political changes of perestroika, Gorbachev decided to release
74. “Documents: Helsinki ‘86 Group,” Voice of Solidarity, Nos. 131–132 (July/August 1987), pp. 31–
33.
75. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 86.
76. Pavel Palazchenko, My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), p. 53.
77. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 86.
78. Chernyaev’s Notes from the Politburo Session, 13 November 1986, in Zubok et al., eds., A Compendium of Declassiªed Documents.
79. Chernyaev’s Notes from the Politburo Session, 8 October 1986, in ibid.
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80 of the 240 political prisoners then being held, and to free 120 more at a
later date.80 In so doing, he both prepared to answer Western demands on human rights and expanded the domestic constituency that was pressuring for
further reforms.
Just over a month later, Shevardnadze surprised the diplomats assembled
for the opening session in Vienna by proposing that a special CSCE conference on humanitarian concerns be held in Moscow. No matter how carefully
prepared this initiative was within the Politburo, it was truly radical in
the CSCE context. In the past, Soviet delegations had always opposed any
discussion of human rights. The Vienna newspaper Die Presse likened
Shevardnadze’s proposal to the convocation of a meeting of chickens in a fox
den.81 Even as Gorbachev and Shevardnadze praised the CSCE as a means to
create a “common European home” in which shared norms would replace
mutual hostility, Western governments and human rights groups insisted on
more and more concrete evidence of political reform.
Andrei Sakharov and the Neformaly
On 1 December 1986, Gorbachev informed the Politburo of his intention to
release physicist Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s most famous political
prisoner, from internal exile in Gorky.82 Two weeks later, in a widely publicized move, Gorbachev personally telephoned Sakharov and invited him to
return to Moscow. Jerry Hough described the implications of this event: “Because Sakharov had said and written many things that seemed deliberately designed to provoke arrest, his release implied there would be few types of political statements that would lead to arrest in the future, at least aside from those
promoting republican separatism in the USSR.”83 As Gorbachev must have
expected, Sakharov began to campaign publicly for the release of more dissidents as soon as he returned to Moscow, and he openly criticized the limitations of existing reforms.
Soon thereafter, Soviet leaders ordered an end to the jamming of transmissions by the British Broadcasting Corporation to the Soviet Union, and
they also subsequently ceased jamming the Voice of America and Deutsche
Welle.84 Moreover, the Soviet government began to show unprecedented
80. Transcript, Meeting of Politburo of CPSU, 25 September 1986, in ibid.
81. Mastny, The Helsinki Process and the Reintegration of Europe, p. 11.
82. Chernyaev’s Notes from the Politburo Session, 1 December 1986, in Zubok et al., eds., Compendium of Declassiªed Documents, n.p.; and Chernyaev, in Tannenwald, ed., “Understanding the End of
the Cold War,” pp. 196–197.
83. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 144.
84. Matlock, Autopsy of an Empire, p. 106.
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
ºexibility in its willingness to accept international monitoring of compliance
with human rights norms. Soviet ofªcials started by agreeing to host foreign
judges, prosecutors, and psychiatrists who wanted to focus on human rights.85
In mid-1987 the Soviet delegation at Vienna agreed that the CSCE should establish a new “human dimension mechanism” by which participating states
could request information and bilateral consultations on apparent violations
of human rights. As a last resort, states could convene a special CSCE meeting
to address their concerns.86
In September, the Soviet ambassador to the CSCE, Yurii Kashlev, announced that the Soviet government had accepted a request from the nongovernmental International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHFHR)
to visit the Soviet Union.87 Soviet leaders had long accused this organization,
which linked Helsinki monitoring groups in the East and West, of interfering
in the USSR’s internal affairs. During a weeklong visit in January 1988, the
IHFHR delegation met with dozens of human rights and opposition activists,
as well as senior Soviet ofªcials, to press for even greater openness.88 After the
meetings, the Soviet authorities announced the creation of a new ofªcial
Commission on Humanitarian Affairs and International Cooperation to
oversee Soviet implementation of CSCE norms.
Western governments also pressed at the Vienna conference and in bilateral forums for the Soviet Union to release all its political prisoners. Fedor
Burlatskii, the chairman of the new Commission on Humanitarian Affairs,
echoed their call. In 1987 and 1988, more than six hundred political prisoners were freed. Although the releases were conditional on signing a pledge not
to participate in political activity, the mere admission that Soviet jails actually
held “political prisoners” further undermined the regime. Most of the released
prisoners quickly resumed their political activities, and the publication of
samizdat increased still further. By late 1988, the number of political prisoners had fallen to unprecedented low levels—as few as 11, according to Soviet
ofªcials, and 140, according to Amnesty International.89
In the meantime, Soviet diplomats in Vienna resumed their effort to gain
Western acceptance of Shevardnadze’s earlier offer to host a CSCE conference
85. David K. Shipler, “Dateline USSR: On the Human Rights Track,” Foreign Policy, No. 75 (Summer
1989), p. 164.
86. Mastny, The Helsinki Process and the Reintegration of Europe, pp. 14–15.
87. Judy Dempsey, “Rights Group to Have Moscow Talks,” Financial Times (London), 23 September
1987, p. 48.
88. On Speaking Terms: An Unprecedented Human Rights Mission to the Soviet Union, January 25–31,
1988 (Vienna: International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, 1988).
89. Richard Sakwa, Gorbachev and His Reforms 1985–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990), pp. 218, 226.
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in Moscow, arguing that the prospect of such a conference was needed to support the advocates of democratization in the Soviet Union. Once again, Western diplomats held out, using this issue and progress on conventional arms reductions to win further human rights reforms from the Soviet Union,
including greater freedom of travel and information and the establishment of
joint U.S.-Soviet working groups to address Soviet human rights abuses.90
In October 1988 the Moscow Television Service broadcast excerpts from
a speech Ronald Reagan delivered to Soviet dissidents during a summit in
Moscow ªve months earlier. The broadcast was followed by an unprecedented
commentary that acknowledged human rights problems in the Soviet Union
and implicitly accepted an American president’s legitimate interest in such issues.91 Bit by bit, the regime was losing both the means and the justiªcation
for maintaining its monopoly hold on power.
Gorbachev’s reformist agenda and the linkage to international norms created space for the mobilization of independent media and political movements that overwhelmed the Politburo’s original intentions. The organizational and philosophical descendants of the Helsinki movement reemerged in
Moscow and Leningrad as independent associations and quasi-political parties. Veteran human rights activists in Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine established new Helsinki committees to press for the release of additional political
prisoners and for greater freedoms in the republics. “The evocation of Helsinki in their name was important not just because it provided a link with the
past, but also because it plugged the new movement into an international diplomatic and juridical process.” In January 1988, the three groups formed an
International Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, whose program of national liberation helped give birth the following year to parties
seeking national independence.92
Veteran human rights activists also played a leading role in the establishment of samizdat newspapers and weekly discussion groups that agitated for
more fundamental reforms. In July 1987, former human rights activists and
editors of samizdat journals such as Glasnost and Referendum created the Moscow Press Club-Glasnost to promote discussion of human rights and political
topics. Another dissident, Aleksandr Podrabinek, established Express Chronicle, which followed the 1970s-era underground journal Chronicle of Current
Events as an independent source of reports on human rights violations across
the Soviet Union and as a means for dissidents and radical reformers to express their views. By April 1988, copies were being distributed in ªfty-three
90. Mastny, The Helsinki Process and the Reintegration of Europe, pp. 15–16.
91. Shipler, “Dateline USSR,” pp. 165.
92. Hosking et al., The Road to Post-Communism, p. 4.
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
towns beyond Moscow. In eleven of them, the paper was retyped and distributed to additional destinations.93 Meanwhile thousands of new activists
joined or created informal groups—neformaly—whose numbers increased
from approximately one hundred at the time of Sakharov’s release to a few
thousand by September 1987, and perhaps as many as 35,000 by the late
1980s.94 Ofªcial media began to concede that many of the dissidents’ longstanding critiques were correct.95
The Soviet Union’s ªrst opposition political party, the Democratic
Union, was created in May 1988 by the merger of two independent groups,
Perestroika ‘88 and the Democracy and Humanism Seminar. Reºecting the
inºuence of members once active in the human rights movements of the
1970s, the Democratic Union called for a multiparty parliamentary system,
free trade unions, full civil liberties, a free press, and a national right to selfdetermination.96 Although still illegal, and often harassed by the KGB, the
new party organized public demonstrations in Moscow on 21 August 1988
to mark the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and on
10 December that same year to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.97
The political signiªcance of these initiatives should not be underestimated. As two Western observers later wrote: “Stepping beyond the bounds of
perestroika, both ideologically and tactically, the Democratic Union was
shunned by Russia’s liberal intelligentsia still hoping for reform from above.
But the shock value of the DU’s open deªance of the Soviet regime reverberated throughout the other informal discussion groups.”98 Human rights activists in the neformaly and the Democratic Union thus helped push the mobilization for reform beyond what many in the party elite considered desirable.99
93. Ibid., pp. 6–7.
94. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 169. The possibility that “30,000–35,000” neformaly
(informal activist and discussion groups) had been created by the late 1980s is from Walter D.
Connor, “Soviet Society, Public Attitudes, and the Perils of Gorbachev’s Reforms: The Social Context
of the End of the USSR,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Fall 2003), p. 72.
95. Medvedev and Chiesa, Time of Change, p. 170.
96. Sowka, Gorbachev and His Reforms, pp. 207–208.
97. Vera Tolz, The USSR’s Emerging Multiparty System (New York: Praeger, 1990); and Michael
McFaul and Sergei Markov, The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities and Programs (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1993), chs. 1–2.
98. McFaul and Markov, The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy, p. 4.
99. For more discussion of these “informal” groups and proto-parties, see Vladimir Brovkin, “Revolution from Below: Informal Political Associations in Russia, 1988–89,” Soviet Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2
(April 1990), pp. 233–258; Nyeformaly: Civil Society in the USSR (New York: U.S. Helsinki Watch
Committee, 1990); Judith B. Sedaitis and Jim Butterªeld, eds., Perestroika from Below: Social Movements in the Soviet Union (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); Nicolai N. Petro, “Perestroika from Below:
Voluntary Sociopolitical Associations in the RSFSR,” in Alfred J. Rieber and Alvin Z. Rubinstein,
eds., Perestroika at the Crossroads (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), pp. 102–135; and Geoffrey A.
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The social mobilization and open debate that emerged in 1986–1988,
and the conservative reaction that ensued, also appear to have pushed some of
Gorbachev’s closest advisers from a reformist to a revolutionary vision of
change. As Aleksandr Yakovlev later explained: “At some point in 1987, I personally realized that a society based on violence and fear could not be reformed and that we faced a momentous historical task of dismantling the entire social and political system with all its ideological, economic, and political
roots.”100 Gorbachev also appears to have broadened the limited commitment
to “democratization” he ªrst enunciated in 1986. Chernyaev later wrote:
“Gorbachev was talking about it ªrst in terms of the democratization of socialism, but over time the socialism part actually got smaller and smaller.”101
As Communist rule collapsed across most of Eastern Europe in late 1989,
Gorbachev revealed the extent of his rethinking: “The idea of socialism as we
understand it today is above all the idea of freedom.”102 The neformaly and independent media unleashed by Gorbachev’s policies and pronouncements
signiªcantly radicalized the political debate in Moscow, Leningrad, and the
outlying republics.103
These developments provoked a crisis in the CPSU, and the outcome of
that crisis demonstrates, once again, the indeterminacy of materialist explanations of the demise of Communism. The crisis emerged out of debates between moderate reformers (i.e., those who favored purely economic reform)
led by Ligachev and the radical reformers (i.e., those who favored democratic
political reforms) led by Yakovlev. On 13 March 1988, a letter condemning
radical reform as inimical to socialism and a threat to the USSR was published
in a hardline party organ, Sovetskaya Rossiya, while Gorbachev was out of
town. Although the letter was signed by Nina Andreeva, a chemistry teacher
from Leningrad, its publication was clearly an attempt to curtail further political reforms, which many party members still believed would harm the
chances for economic progress. The Andreeva broadside was reinforced by an
article in Pravda expressing concern that “the slogans of democratization,
glasnost, and increased human rights and freedoms are increasingly being maHosking, Jonathan Aves, and Peter J. S. Duncan, The Road to Post-Communism: Independent Political
Movements in the Soviet Union, 1985–1991 (London: Pinter, 1992).
100. Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia, p. 227.
101. Chernyaev, in Tannenwald, ed., “Understanding the End of the Cold War,” p. 196.
102. “Sotsialisticheskaya ideya i revolyutsionnaya perestroika,” Pravda (Moscow), 26 November 1989,
pp. 1–3, cited in Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, p. 119.
103. In addition to the works cited in n. 99 above, see M. Steven Fish, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and
Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996).
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
nipulated by various groups of people who, while passing themselves off as
advocates of perestroika, are in fact its vicious opponents.”104 But this shortlived backlash came to an end when Gorbachev returned to Moscow. Rather
than siding with Ligachev and setting a clear limit on political change,
Gorbachev removed him from the post of second secretary, a post that had entitled him to chair meetings of the CPSU Secretariat when Gorbachev himself
was not present. This crucial decision to marginalize those who were resisting
political reform and who were calling for a narrower focus on economic restructuring can hardly be explained strictly by materialist incentives.
Gorbachev’s decision to favor Yakovlev’s direction over that of Ligachev
probably sealed the fate of Communist rule in the Soviet Union and across
Eastern Europe. From June 1989 to January 1990, Soviet troops stayed in
their barracks while democratic movements committed to human rights overturned Communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. These revolutions, and more limited changes in Bulgaria and a violent rebellion in Romania, accelerated the crisis of the Soviet regime.105 On
4 February 1990, more than 100,000 people demonstrated against the Communist Party in the streets of Moscow. Three days later, the CPSU renounced
its constitutionally-guaranteed “leading role” in society, a change that was implemented the following month. In mid-March, opposition parties won semifree local elections in Moscow and Leningrad. Meanwhile, protests against
Soviet occupation and human rights violations that had begun in Latvia under the auspices of the Helsinki ‘86 movement spread across Lithuania and
Estonia as well.106 Gorbachev repeatedly contemplated repressive measures to
hold the Soviet Union together, but except for a large-scale incursion into
Azerbaijan in January 1990, he ultimately drew back from authorizing decisive shows of force.107 Although scholars continue to debate how fully
Gorbachev was aware of or involved in the planning for crackdowns by security forces in several of the Soviet republics (Tbilisi in April 1989 and Vilnius
104. Sakwa, Gorbachev and His Reforms, pp. 213, 228.
105. For extensive evidence of this point, see Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 1),” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5,
No. 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 178–256; Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the
Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 2),” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. , No. (Fall 2004),
pp. 3–64; and Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions
within the Soviet Union (Part 3),” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 3–97.
106. See Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the Path to Independence, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); and Rasma Karklins, Ethnopolitics and Transition to Democracy: The Collapse of the USSR and Latvia (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center
Press, 1994).
107. Amy Knight, “The KGB, Perestroika, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold War
Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 67–93.
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Thomas
and Riga in January 1991), the limited number and limited scope of such operations conªrm Gorbachev’s unwillingness to attempt to retain power
through force—even though the Chinese Communist Party had done just
that in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.108 Conservatives counterattacked
with an attempted coup in August 1991 but failed to gain popular or institutional support, and their prompt retreat hastened the banning of the Communist Party and the ªnal breakup of the Soviet Union.109
Conclusions
Conventional materialist explanations of Soviet change emphasize the failure
of tactical responses to the inefªciencies of central planning and the military
and technological prowess of the West. But although it is true that Soviet
leaders were concerned about economic productivity and competitiveness,
and that they implemented reforms to address these challenges, such arguments cannot explain why Gorbachev opted for radical democratization
rather than an authoritarian strategy of economic liberalization and continued political repression. Without such radical political reforms, neither the
structural rigidities of the Soviet regime nor the competitive limitations of
central planning nor generational changes in the Soviet leadership would have
brought about the largely peaceful and rights-protective political transitions
of 1989–1991. As Jerry Hough put it, “Mikhail Gorbachev was not riding an
uncontrollable tiger.”110 In the end, material pressures are indeterminate, and
thus insufªcient, in explaining why Gorbachev decided to pursue radical
democratic and rights-protective reforms.
In contrast, ideational persuasion and rhetorical entrapment offer powerful explanations of the political decisions that so clearly threatened to undermine Communist rule. The diffusion of human rights ideas and their
institutionalization as formal international norms induced key party elites to
reject political repression as a legitimate instrument of Soviet policy and to
question the monopoly position of the party. These norms changed the beliefs
and strategies of CPSU elites, the outlook and organization of independent
108. Although some observers credit this outcome to the Soviet Army’s reluctance to be involved in
internal policing, the logic of this essay suggests that Gorbachev’s ideas about human rights and political legitimacy may also have been crucial. For the former interpretation, see Brian D. Taylor, “The Soviet Military and the Disintegration of the USSR,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter
2003), pp. 17–66.
109. John B. Dunlop, “The August 1991 Coup and Its Impact on Soviet Politics,” Journal of Cold War
Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 94–127.
110. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 490.
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
activists who refused to settle for cosmetic reforms, and the political conditions for normalized relations with the West. This combination of persuasion
and rhetorical entrapment spurred Soviet leaders to initiate political reforms
that, in turn, empowered independent activists who were pressing for ever
greater democratization. The resulting interaction of top-down reform and
bottom-up social mobilization was instrumental in the collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet Union.
The case of Soviet change nonetheless conªrms that the causal effect of
ideas and norms depends on political agency.111 The initial emergence of human rights ideas within Soviet political discourse was attributable to the efforts of dissidents and independent activists who struggled in the 1970s to
hold the Soviet regime accountable, both domestically and internationally, for
its violations of international human rights norms, especially those established by the Helsinki Final Act.112 Human rights ideas and norms achieved
even greater purchase on the Soviet political system with Gorbachev’s ascendance to power in 1985. Both his rhetoric and his policy choices suggest that
he was increasingly committed to political reform for its own merits—initially
by allowing greater freedoms and space for societal initiative and later by embarking on a fundamental democratization of Soviet society. If human rights
ideas had not been embraced by the highest leader in the USSR, they could
not have had a transformative effect on the Soviet system.
The policy of glasnost thus appears to have been driven both by an instrumental desire to weaken resistance to economic reform within the bureaucracy and by an intrinsic desire to weaken resistance to democratization
within the party leadership. At several points, the weakening of conservative
forces by glasnost and by changes in party personnel seems actually to have reinforced Gorbachev’s support for fundamental social and political reforms.
His refusal to endorse a series of radical but economically sensible plans for
price reform in 1987–1988, at the same time that he implemented ever
deeper political reforms (increased freedom of expression and assembly, followed by semi-free elections), suggests that he may even have begun to care
more about democracy and human rights than about economic reform.113
111. On the critical role of ideational entrepreneurs, see Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Martha Finnemore and Kathryn
Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” International Organization, Vol. 52,
No. 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 887–917.
112. For discussion of social mobilization for human rights in the pre-Gorbachev era, see Thomas,
The Helsinki Effect, chs. 3–6; and Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985).
113. On Gorbachev’s resistance to price reform, see Hough, Democratization and Revolution, pp. 123–
135.
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Even after Gorbachev took power, however, the impact of human rights
ideas was ampliªed by the reemergence and demands of civil society actors
who had been dormant since the post-Helsinki mobilizations of the previous
decade. Some of these activists were intrinsically committed to human rights
ideas, whereas others used the idea as a means to undermine Communist
rule. Their critiques of the limits of glasnost and perestroika, including their
monitoring of actual human rights conditions within the Soviet Union,
were crucial to transforming a controlled program of reform into a recipe for
revolution.
The case of Soviet change thus provides further support to the nowfamiliar observation that “ideas do not ºoat freely.”114 Ironically, this dependence on certain political agents explains a related puzzle: the contemporary
challenge of protecting human rights in Chechnya and other parts of the former Soviet Union.115 Gorbachev failed to anchor human rights ideas ªrmly
within Soviet law, and those ideas have never been satisfactorily institutionalized in Russia and most of the other former Soviet states. At the same time,
outside advocates of human rights have been distracted by events elsewhere in
the world or marginalized by other international priorities. It is thus not surprising that in the post-Soviet period, perceived security interests and ideologies have often trumped ideas of human rights. This on-going challenge does
not, however, detract in any way from the contribution that human rights
ideas and norms made to ending the Cold War by undermining one-party
Communist rule in the Soviet Union.
Although human rights ideas have had some comparable effects in other
countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, this does not mean that human rights ideas will always contribute so signiªcantly to the reform or overthrow of repressive regimes.116 Four factors were conducive to the effectiveness
of human rights ideas in the Soviet Union of the mid-1980s: the ideas were
salient (they were advocated by political actors at home and abroad); legitimate (they were reºected in an international agreement signed by the Soviet
Union and its allies); relevant (they concerned the appropriate relationship between state power and individual liberties at a time of growing pressure for reform); and resonant (they ªt with the new leadership’s understanding of the
cultural heritage and political destiny of the Soviet Union). Without these
114. Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Ideas Do Not Float Freely: Transnational Coalitions, Domestic Structures, and the End of the Cold War,” in Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, eds., International Relations and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 87–
122.
115. Sarah E. Mendelson, “Russians’ Rights Imperiled: Has Anybody Noticed?” International Security,
Vol. 26, No. 4 (Spring 2002), pp. 36–69.
116. See case studies in Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War
four conditions in place, it is difªcult to imagine that human rights ideas
would have had much impact on the Soviet political system. The nonresonance of human rights norms among Chinese leaders, perhaps because
of lessons they derived from the Soviet case, may thus help to explain the
Chinese regime’s dismissal of appeals for democratic reforms.
141