Abstract
Governments in both East and West approached the Helsinki process with considerable cynicism; even at the moment of signing the Final Act in August 1975 most Western representatives could not have expected the humanitarian principles of ’Basket Three’ to be observed in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The decade which followed proved these fears justified, and review meetings frequently deteriorated into propaganda warfare and mutual recriminations. Yet the records of East and West are very different. Western governments are responsive to democratic pressures in a way that those of the ‘socialist community’ are not. However, the public debate stimulated by the Helsinki process benefits democracy rather than authoritarian systems, and the very fact that such a debate was possible, gave a little hope that the second decade of follow-up meetings might bring some change for the better.
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Notes
Pravda, 26 February 1986.
Rights and Freedoms in the Capitalist World, Moscow 1985.
Pravda, 9 March 1986.
International Herald Tribune, 17 February 1986.
The Position of Soviet Jewry, 1985.
Source: Updated from figures provided by Professor Sidney Heitman for the Fifth International Sakharov Hearing (The Fifth International Sakharov Hearing: Proceedings, London: Andre Deutsch, 1986, p. 76.) and drawn from Jewish, German, and Armenian organisations. Also from US and West German government statistics. Figures do not include several thousand ethnic Germans who resettled in East Germany, some of whom have re-emigrated to West Germany. Most Armenians who have emigrated went to the USA. Those who settled elsewhere are not included in the above figures. For a breakdown of the 1140 Jews who emigrated on Israeli visas in 1985, showing former place of residence, see Vesti iz SSSR, No. 3, 1986.
Sobranie Postanovlenii Pravitelstva SSSR no. 31, resolution no. 1064, dated 28 August 1986.
Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1 November 1986.
Komsomolskaya Pravda, 1 November 1986.
Pravda Vostoka, 3 October 1986.
Pravda, 1 March 1986.
Political Abuse of Psychiatry: A List of Victims (Working Group on the Internment of Dissenters in Mental Hospitals, 17A Norland Square, London W11).
1 August 1985.
Pravda, 1 August 1975.
John J. Maresca, To Helsinki (Durham, North Carlina: Duke University Press, 1985) p.45.
Pravda and Izvestiya published the text in full on .2 August, but the other major dailies in the USSR devoted a whole page to the first two baskets, and one dismissive sentence to Basket Three.
The Times, 23 July 1985.
See, for example, the speeches of the US Ambassador at the Madrid conference, Max M. Kampelman, in Three Years at the East-West Divide (New York: Freedom House, 1983).
Peter Reddaway, ‘Soviet Policies on Dissent and Emigration: the Radical Change of Course since 1979’, Kennan Institute Occasional Paper, Washington 1984; also ‘Dissent in the Soviet Union’, in Problems of Communism, November-December 1983.
Nauchny kommunizm: Slovar (Moscow: Politizdat, 1980).
The Truth about Afghanistan, Moscow 1986, and several earlier editions under the same title, all produced and distributed by Novosti in several languages.
UN Commission on Human Rights, Document E/CN4/1985/21, 19 February 1985.
K. R. M. Short (ed.) Western Broadcasting over the Iron Curtain (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
‘Education of the New Man’ in Soviet Union: Political and Economic Reference Book, compiled by V A Golikov and some thirty leading ideologists (Moscow, 1977).
International Covenants on Human Rights and Soviet Legislation (Moscow, 1986) compiled by Academician V. Kudravtsev and a team of lawyers from the Institute of the State and Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Ibid, p. 6.
Ibid, p. 112.
Pravda, 6 November 1986.
Pravda, 30 November 1986.
Jonathan Luxmoore, The Helsinki Agreement: Dialogue or Delusion? (London: Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1986) p. 17.
Soviet Analyst, vol. 15, no. 24.
Soviet Analyst, vol. 15, no. 11.
‘Gegenkonferenz zum Berner KSZE-Treffen’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 15 April 1986, pp. 1, 2 and 34.
Yury Kashlev, ‘The Lessons of Bern — Who is against Contacts’, International Affairs no. 10, Moscow, 1986.
Sovetskaya Rossiya, 4 November 1986.
The Times, 26 November 1986.
The Times, 16 March 1987.
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© 1989 Dilys M. Hill
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Elliot, I. (1989). The Helsinki Process and Human Rights in the Soviet Union. In: Hill, D.M. (eds) Human Rights and Foreign Policy. Southampton Studies in International Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09334-2_6
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