The Foreign Policy of Internal Politics: The Reagan Administration and Human Rights in the Soviet Union

When Ronald Reagan entered the White House, the Kremlin looked forward to a period of realism in US foreign policy. Reagan, the Kremlin noted, had never made human rights a core aspect of his foreign policy—a marked difference from his predecessor, Jimmy Carter.

Reagan in office, the Soviet leadership soon learned, differed a great deal from Reagan on the campaign trail. In fact, his administration frequently used the idea of human rights as a Cold War weapon against Moscow. Focusing on several high-profile cases, such as Anatoliĭ Shcharanskiĭ, Andreĭ Sakharov, and the so-called Siberian Seven (a group of Pentecostals who took refuge in the US embassy in Moscow), the Reagan White House used human rights as a means of discrediting the Soviet system in public statements. But the administration’s stance on human rights could scarcely be called consistent: while Reagan (often cynically) trumpeted human rights in the Soviet Union, he ignored similar concerns in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere.

This paper explores the uneven application of human rights ideas by the Reagan administration and how the Reagan White House saw human rights as an instrument of leverage in its prosecution of the Cold War. It demonstrates that the Reagan administration recognized its own vulnerability to critique on the same grounds, and sought to shape the international discourse on human rights to serve its own Cold War ends. Making extensive use of recently declassified Russian, Ukrainian, Czechoslovak, and East German archival materials on the 1980s, this paper also illustrates how the Eastern bloc attempted to subvert and refute Washington’s claims, challenging the United States’ right to set international norms and involve itself in others’ internal affairs. The result is an international history of the contested and appropriated idea of human rights at the end of the Cold War.