Democracy and Human Rights

  • Stephen White
  • John Gardner
  • George Schöpflin
Chapter

Abstract

Communist states are widely known for their economic and social achievements, such as their generally high rates of economic growth, their low levels of unemployment and inflation, their virtual elimination of illiteracy and their comprehensive provision of health care. There are few, however, who would be inclined to argue that they have made a positive contribution of the same kind to the field of politics, or to the enlargement of human liberty in particular. It had been supposed by Marx that, broadly speaking, once capitalism — the last of the class-divided and exploitative societies — had been abolished, there would be no more need for a separate sphere of political administration, and the state (in Engels’s celebrated phrase) would ‘wither away’ or ‘die out’ (aussterben). In the communist states, however, there has been little sign of a process of this kind (some have unkindly suggested that the only thing that has withered away is the idea that the state should wither away). The communist states, on the contrary, have generally been large, powerful and authoritarian institutions, in which the rights and liberties, of the citizen, at least in Western terms, have been systematically repressed; they are generally regarded, not as having inaugurated a new era of freedom, but as having added a new chapter to the history of dictatorship.

Keywords

Communist Party Cultural Revolution Criminal Code Criminal Procedure Religious Believer 
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Further Reading

  1. There are several worthwhile treatments of the questions of democracy and human rights to which this chapter is addressed: see for instance C. B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (New York, 1972),Google Scholar
  2. Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford, 1977),Google Scholar
  3. Jack Lively, Democracy (Oxford, 1975),Google Scholar
  4. and J. Roland Pennock, Democratic Political Theory (Princeton, N.J., 1979).Google Scholar
  5. On the Soviet theory of democracy more particularly, see L. G. Churchward, Contemporary Soviet Government, 2nd edn (London, 1975), ch. 17,Google Scholar
  6. and M. A. Krutogolov, Talks on Soviet Democracy (Moscow, 1980).Google Scholar
  7. On the Soviet legal system, see E. L. Johnson, An Introduction to the Soviet Legal System (London, 1969),Google Scholar
  8. Donald D. Barry and Harold J. Berman, ‘The jurists’, in H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths (eds.), Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, N. J., 1971),Google Scholar
  9. and Donald D. Barry et al. (eds.), Soviet Law since Stalin, 3 vols. (Leyden, 1977–79).Google Scholar
  10. The RSFSR Criminal Code is translated in Harold J. Berman and James W. Spindler (eds.), Soviet Criminal Laws and Procedures: the RSFSR Codes, 2nd edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1972),Google Scholar
  11. and together with other legal codes in William B. Simons (ed.), The Soviet Codes of Law (Alphen aan den Rijn, 1980).Google Scholar
  12. On religious and political dissenters, see Michael Bordeaux, ‘Religion’, and Peter Reddaway, ‘The development of dissent and opposition’, in Archie Brown and Michael Kaser, (eds.), The Soviet Union since the Fall of Khrushchev, 2nd edn (London, 1978);Google Scholar
  13. Rudolf L. Tökés (ed.), Dissent in the USSR (Baltimore and London, 1975);Google Scholar
  14. F. J. M. Feldbrugge, Samizdat and Political Dissent in the Soviet Union (Leyden, 1975);Google Scholar
  15. Amnesty International, Prisoners of Conscience in the USSR, 2nd edn (London, 1980);Google Scholar
  16. and Marshall S. Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  17. On human rights in Eastern Europe, two works edited by Rudolf Tökés are useful general surveys: Eurocommunism and Detente (Baltimore, 1978)Google Scholar
  18. and Opposition in Eastern Europe (London, 1979).Google Scholar
  19. Opposition movements in the various countries are analysed in Vladimir Kusin, From Dubcek to Charter 77 (Edinburgh, 1978);Google Scholar
  20. Hans-Peter Riese (ed.), Since the Prague Spring (New York, 1979);Google Scholar
  21. A. Ostoja-Ostaszewski et al., Dissent in Poland (London, 1977);Google Scholar
  22. and Gerson Sher, Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Bloomington and London, 1977).Google Scholar
  23. Up-to-date information may be found in the journals Labour Focus on Eastern Europe and Index on Censorship, both published in London; the latter is a valuable source on all questions of censorship, unofficial literature and samizdat. Paul Lendvai, The Bureaucracy of Truth: How Communist Governments Manage the News (London, 1981)Google Scholar
  24. and Gertrude Joch Robinson, Tito’s Maverick Media: the Politics of Mass Communication in Yugoslavia (Urbana, 1977) are both relevant.Google Scholar
  25. On religion, see Bohdan Bociurkiw and John W. Strong (eds.), Religion and Atheism in the USSR and Eastern Europe (London, 1975) and the periodical publication Religion in Communist Lands (London).Google Scholar
  26. A massive study covering major aspects of the legal system in China is Jerome Cohen, The Criminal Process in Communist China (Cambridge, Mass., 1968),Google Scholar
  27. which may be supplemented by Victor Li, ‘The role of law in Communist China’, China Quarterly no. 44 (1970)Google Scholar
  28. and the same author’s study of the police in a Chinese county, ‘The public security bureau in Hui-yang’, in John W. Lewis (ed.), The City in Communist China (Stanford, Calif., 1971).Google Scholar
  29. Ezra Vogel’s ‘Preserving order in the cities’ in the same volume is also useful. Political ‘crime’ is covered in Amnesty International, Political Imprisonment in the People’s Republic of China (London, 1978).Google Scholar
  30. Peter R. Moody, Opposition and Dissent in Contemporary China (New York, 1977) is useful for the Maoist period.Google Scholar
  31. Roderick MacFarquhar covers the views of the 1957 critics in The Hundred Flowers (London, 1960) and provides a detailed study of the background to that movement in The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (London, 1974).Google Scholar
  32. More recent events are well covered in David S. G. Goodman, Beijing Street Voices (London, 1981),Google Scholar
  33. James D. Seymour, The Fifth Modernisation (New York, 1980),Google Scholar
  34. and Roger Garside, Coming Alive (London, 1981).Google Scholar
  35. See also the journal Index on Censorship for February 1980; June Drey er, ‘Limits of the permissible in China’, Problems of Communism XXIX (1980),Google Scholar
  36. and Shao-Chuan Leng, ‘Criminal justice in post-Mao China’, China Quarterly no. 87 (1981).Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Stephen White, John Gardner and George Schöpflin 1982

Authors and Affiliations

  • Stephen White
  • John Gardner
  • George Schöpflin

There are no affiliations available

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