Subversive Activities: Soviet Establishment Responses to International Human Rights Groups, 1975–91

Drawing on Soviet archival documents as well as memoirs and the press, this paper will examine the impact of international human rights groups on figures within establishment Soviet society, including these groups’ influence on proposals for state-sponsored human rights activities. In addition to public pronouncements on international rights groups, the paper will discuss attitudes towards them in the world of mid-to-high level Soviet policy specialists, such as diplomats, scholars, and participants in Soviet “public diplomacy” initiatives. Establishment responses to international rights NGOs shifted from open vilification in the late 1970s to calculated attempts at engagement in the Gorbachev era, particularly under the auspices of Fyodor Burlatsky’s Public Commission for International Cooperation on Humanitarian Questions and Human Rights. In addition, the late 1980s saw a gradual transformation of attitudes towards non-governmental organizations as interlocutors in the CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) process, culminating in the 1991 Moscow session of the Conference on the Human Dimension. As the Cold War context of “ideological struggle” gave way to a more ideologically flexible concern with improving the USSR’s international image, increased openness to foreign contacts coexisted in Party directives with lingering suspicion of those groups, such as Amnesty International and the International Helsinki Federation, which had historically been most critical of Soviet government, as well as with continued interest in message control regarding the USSR’s rights record. This paper will demonstrate how, in a changing domestic political context, the same image concerns which motivated early attempts at “unmasking” international rights organizations ultimately provided a crucial lever for opening the USSR to their activities.