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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the Endof the Cold War

Thomas, Daniel C. (Daniel Charles)

Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2005,pp. 110-141 (Article)

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ThomasHuman Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War

Human Rights Ideas, the Demise ofCommunism, and the End of the Cold War

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The reform and subsequent collapse of one-party Communistrule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were critical to the end of theCold War. Despite the huge military arsenals and alliance systems thatemerged after 1945, the Cold War was fundamentally a conºict between do-mestic political systems based on incompatible state socialist and liberal dem-ocratic conceptions of political legitimacy. As the Eastern bloc moved awayfrom the ideology and political structures of state socialism in the 1980s, dip-lomats from East and West found it easier to dismantle the military confron-tation that had long divided Europe and the world.

The deepening of respect for human rights and the creation of demo-cratic institutions preceded moves away from the hostile attitudes and con-frontational military postures of the Cold War. Without these domestic polit-ical changes, the Cold War could have endured well beyond the late 1980sand certainly would not have been replaced by the political amity betweenformer East and West that emerged in that period. Given the considerableinºuence that Moscow exercised over politics in Eastern Europe during theCold War, this article focuses on developments in the Soviet Union.

Why and how did a peaceful process of democratic change overcome astate socialist regime in the Soviet Union that had long demonstrated its will-ingness to use force in defense of the status quo? Why did Mikhail Gorbachevnot follow Winston Churchill’s famous refusal to preside over the demise ofthe imperial system that he was chosen to lead? This article rejects claims thatthese changes resulted simply from the instrumental (and increasingly desper-ate) initiatives of politically conservative elites motivated by concern aboutthe Soviet Union’s economic decline and lack of strategic competitiveness. In-stead, it focuses on the effects of ideas about human rights that were embed-ded in European institutions and disseminated throughout the Soviet Unionby a transnational network of human rights activists and other dissidents.

Journal of Cold War StudiesVol. 7, No. 2, Spring 2005, pp. 110–141© 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology

Sherry Massoni

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Soviet leaders valued these institutions for a variety of instrumental and in-trinsic reasons. The article acknowledges the considerable (albeit limited) ex-planatory power of material pressures for change and shows how material andideational pressures reinforced each other.

The article is divided into four parts. The ªrst part introduces both mate-rialist and ideationalist explanations for the reform and eventual collapse ofone-party Communist rule in the Soviet Union and identiªes the limitationsof the materialist arguments. The second part demonstrates how exposure toideas and norms of human rights contributed to Gorbachev’s (and others’) in-terest in political reform. The third part demonstrates how these same ideascontributed to the escalation of political reform and the demise of one-partyrule. Data for these two empirical sections are drawn from translations ofnewly released Soviet documents, the memoirs of policymakers, and reportsfrom non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as newspapers andother secondary sources. The ªnal section evaluates the implications of theseªndings for our understanding of the end of the Cold War and the role ofideas in world politics.

Theoretical Perspectives

Scholarly disputes about material and ideational determinants of the end ofthe Cold War tend to be rooted in larger rationalist and constructivist ap-proaches to political theory and social science. Rationalist approaches assumethat individuals act in ways that appear most likely to help them achieve pre-existing interests, which are generally deªned in material terms. Rationaliststreat ideas as epiphenomenal (albeit sometimes convenient) reasons for actionthat are cited by actors whose preferences are actually determined by materialincentives.1 This logic underlies claims that the demise of the Soviet Union re-sulted from the ºawed efforts of Soviet leaders to improve the productivity,efªciency, and competitiveness of the Soviet economy, and that apparent con-cessions to human rights ideas were nothing more than tactical maneuvers.

In contrast, constructivist approaches assume that actors seek to behavein accordance with norms relevant to their identities in particular social con-texts.2 By this logic, the creation and diffusion of new ideas may exert autono-mous and enduring effects on behavioral and institutional outcomes. This ar-ticle emphasizes three causal and constitutive linkages between ideas and

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Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War

1. See Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press, 1993).

2. See John Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the SocialConstructivist Challenge,” International Organization, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 855–885.

outcomes: persuasion, rhetorical entrapment, and ideational empowerment.3

Persuasion occurs when actors are exposed to new ideas and convinced of theirexplanatory power (in the case of ideas about causes and effects) or theirmoral or social legitimacy (in the case of ideas about right and wrong). Rhetor-ical entrapment occurs when actors who have endorsed a particular idea for in-strumental reasons then adhere to its logic even when the reasons for adheringto it have been exhausted. They do so in order to avoid the costs of rhetoricalinconsistency. Ideational empowerment occurs when the legitimization or en-dorsement of an idea by public ofªcials enables otherwise weak societal actorsto challenge those ofªcials to carry out social or political change.

Based on this constructivist logic, one could hypothesize that exposureto ideas and norms of human rights that were prevalent in the late 1970sand early 1980s would transform the values and identities of (some) Sovietdecision-makers. Given the autocratic and repressive nature of the Sovietparty-state, one would expect (some) members of the Soviet leadership whowere persuaded by the logic of human rights ideas or compelled by the legiti-macy of human rights norms to support policies that would democratize thepolitical system. Over time, reforms they initiated could strengthen societalchallenges to the status quo and thus undermine the viability of one-partyCommunist rule.4

Evaluating these hypotheses empirically is no easy task. Simple evidenceof support for political reform would not settle the question of whether thisbehavior was motivated by persuasion or by the instrumental calculation asso-ciated with the materialist logic. The persistence of key actors’ commitmentsto political reform would therefore be crucial. One would expect individualswho were genuinely persuaded or entrapped by human rights norms to con-tinue supporting reform long after those with a purely instrumental (i.e.,materialist) commitment to reform had reverted to the use of repression topreserve the monopoly position of the party-state.

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3. On the relationship between causal and constitutive forms of social explanation, see AlexanderWendt, 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 FriedrichKratochwil and Rey Koslowski, “Understanding Change in International Politics: The Soviet Union’sDemise and the International System,” in Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, eds., Inter-national 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 Secu-rity, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Spring 1997), pp. 158–185; Thomas Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!’: Communicative Actionin 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 theCold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Robert D. English, “Power, Ideas andNew Evidence on the Cold War’s End: A Reply to Brooks and Wohlforth,” International Security,Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 70–93.

Further ambiguities arise with evidence that actors were exposed tohuman rights ideas and later acted in a manner consistent with those ideas.This behavior may have reºected either persuasion or entrapment. Testimo-nial evidence from the people in question that their choices were shaped bytheir prior conversion to human rights ideas would be signiªcant but not con-clusive, given the risk of self-serving rhetoric. In contrast, evidence that actorsendorsed the logic of human rights ideas or behaved in a manner consistentwith those ideas when shielded from public view would suggest persuasionrather than rhetorical entrapment (or instrumental calculation).

Before evaluating the preceding hypotheses, it bears noting that theSoviet Union of the 1980s constitutes a “hard test” for the argument that hu-man rights ideas or norms might help bring about political change. The ideathat public authorities should seek to protect the civil rights and political free-dom 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 SovietUnion (CPSU), which had long relied on a class-based conception of legiti-macy to justify its monopoly of political power. The Soviet secret police(KGB) constantly harassed the small number of people who dared to advocatecompliance with human rights norms. Many of the dissidents were sentencedto long prison terms. Within the party-state bureaucracy, individuals whodemonstrated any sympathy for “bourgeois” ideas of civil or political rightswere likely to be shufºed off to an academic post, or even expelled from theparty and arrested. The Soviet Union and its allies were slow to ratify interna-tional human rights covenants in the 1960s and 1970s and actively resistedthe inclusion of human rights norms in the Helsinki Final Act, which wasadopted in 1975 by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe(CSCE). In the following years, Communist authorities made only limitedand largely rhetorical concessions to Helsinki norms.

When Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union in March 1985, Com-munist parties throughout the Eastern bloc retained a legal monopoly overpolitical space, and most showed little evidence of having internalized humanrights ideas in their conception of legitimacy or self-interest. The SovietUnion controlled a powerful army, a vast network of secret police, a function-ing (albeit not internationally competitive) economy, and an effective bureau-cracy—the same system that had cracked down hard on domestic unrest andhad directed the East European governments to do the same in the late 1970sand early 1980s. Such circumstances would certainly not lead one to expectthat the general diffusion of human rights ideas would cause the Soviet au-thorities to rein in their coercive apparatus, embrace democratic standards oflegitimacy, grant unprecedented liberties to independent groups, and encour-age similar developments in Eastern Europe, as they did in the late 1980s.

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The Power and Limitations of the MaterialistExplanation

Materialist explanations of the demise of one-party Communist rule in theSoviet Union suggest that it was an inevitable but unintended consequence ofreforms designed to strengthen the Soviet economy. (To the extent that thismotivation is linked to an interest in bolstering the Soviet Union’s positionwithin an evolving international balance of power, it draws on realist theoriesof international relations.) These explanations typically emphasize Sovietleaders’ efforts to address a looming crisis in economic productivity and tech-nological competitiveness, especially in comparison to the United States.

Such arguments are clearly plausible. In contrast to the Soviet Union’sbrisk economic expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, the rate of growth slowedconsiderably in the late 1970s and early 1980s. With each passing year, the in-ability of Brezhnev-style Communism to deliver the consumer goods de-manded by an increasingly urban population became more apparent to somein 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 exacerbatedSoviet leaders’ concerns about the competitiveness of a highly centralizedcommand economy.6 As Gorbachev’s reforms freed Soviet society from manylong-standing controls, nationalist movements and other independent forcesburst onto the scene and wrested political control away from a weakenedparty and state.7

The focus on material incentives for reform does offer a powerful expla-nation for the policy preferences of Soviet leaders who had concluded by theearly 1980s that the productive efªciency and technological competitivenessof the Soviet economy could be improved only by increasing the accountabil-ity of enterprise managers and by introducing market incentives to systems ofproduction and distribution. When the position of CPSU general secretaryopened in 1985, these pressures evidently motivated certain Politburo mem-bers who had never favored radical changes in domestic politics or foreignpolicy (such as Andrei Gromyko and Egor Ligachev, among others) to sup-port Mikhail Gorbachev, who was already known for his desire to ªnd alter-natives to the country’s economic inefªciencies and stagnation. Apparently,

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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 ColdWar: 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-AsiaStudies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 29–45.

these leaders were interested in improving East-West relations primarily to fa-cilitate economic reform and may have calculated early in Gorbachev’s tenurethat limited concessions on human rights could be allowed without jeopardiz-ing the party’s hold on power. Only when it became apparent that more con-servative party and bureaucratic forces were frustrating the “acceleration”(uskorenie) of the economy through administrative reforms did these moder-ate reformers endorse Gorbachev’s proposals for greater social and politicalopenness (glasnost). The materialist argument thus attributes no explanatorypower to human rights ideas, a stance that appears justiªed with respect toGorbachev’s elevation to power.

However, the materialist argument is indeterminate and thus unpersua-sive with respect to the actual policies that caused the collapse of CPSUrule. In particular, the materialist argument is indeterminate with respectto Gorbachev’s decision to pursue radical political reform in the mid- tolate 1980s rather than the alternative policy of marketization-without-democratization that was pursued in China and that was advocated, unsuc-cessfully, by moderate Soviet ofªcials who were concerned about the survivalof the Soviet regime.8 As such, the materialist argument cannot explain whyGorbachev would emphasize social and political reforms over economic re-form after he had consolidated effective control of the CPSU Politburo andCentral 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 andoil prices on the world market, the Soviet Union’s annual increase in GNPhad risen from 2.4 to 3.3 percent, including increases in industrial productionfrom 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 long-term intensive growth, but they did reºect progress toward a restructuring ofthe Soviet economy and would have enabled Gorbachev to embark on re-forms of prices and the services sector. Yet, according to those closest to him,Gorbachev began to speak more about democratization than about economicreform in late 1986.10 In fact, he cited popular frustration as a reason fordeepening social and political reform and replaced a party plenum on pricesplanned for January 1987 with a plenum on democratization. This is hardly

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8. A hardline minority within the party leadership opposed marketization, with or without democrati-zation.

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 Insti-tution Press, 1997), p. 107. Of course, ªgures for one year can be misleading, and economic perfor-mance plummeted in 1987 and continued to deteriorate in each successive year. The harvest in 1986was the result of unusually good weather, not reforms, and the meager industrial growth was pur-chased 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.

the behavior of a leader interested in democratization simply as a means toeconomic reform.

Market reform of a socialist economy requires that consumers and enter-prise managers have greater access to information and that the latter be ac-countable to market incentives. However, the implications of controlled polit-ical liberalization should not be confused with the majoritarian tendencies ofdemocracy: “The introduction of real democracy into a marketizing countrygives power to those most inclined to want to slow the process, and it createsstrong incentives for politicians to develop populist, anti-market programs.”11

It is therefore difªcult to reconcile claims that Gorbachev was motivated pri-marily by the need for economic reform with the fact that he resisted his owngovernment’s plans for price reform while systematically moving from liberal-ization to democratization in social and political affairs.

The argument that Gorbachev sought principally to strengthen the com-petitive position of the Soviet Union is further undermined by his continuedpursuit of political reform after 1987, when it became apparent that glasnostwas threatening not only the sources of inefªciency in the Soviet economy butalso the hegemonic position of the party itself. If the materialist argumentwere correct, one would expect Soviet leaders to use repressive measures oncetheir hold on power was seriously endangered. Yet, rather than heed the mod-erate reformers’ warnings that political reform would undermine the regime,Gorbachev worked systematically after 1987 to marginalize the more cautiousreformers. This, too, is hardly compatible with the simple argument thatSoviet reform was driven purely by a quest for economic gain.

Contemporary claims that a more repressive option was not viable are in-consistent with the perceptions of Soviet policymakers at the time. They alsoare inconsistent with the fact that the entire Soviet Politburo was aware of analternative, politically conservative approach to reform. China’s Communistregime had experimented with market-oriented reforms since the late 1970swithout undermining the political hegemony of the Communist Party. By themid-1980s, the economic reforms in China had produced signiªcant im-provements in agricultural and industrial output, promoted the growth of pri-vate ªrms, sparked new domestic markets for light industrial goods, and be-gun to attract increased foreign investment.12 China achieved these gains even

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11. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 140.

12. On the success of Chinese reforms evident in the early to mid-1980s, see Dwight Perkins andShahid 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 InstitutionPress, 1987); and Bruce L. Reynolds, ed., Chinese Economic Policy: Economic Reform at Midstream(New York: Paragon House, 1988).

though the regime did not hesitate to repress intellectuals and others demand-ing greater freedom of expression in 1978–1979 and 1985–1986.13 In fact,beyond the Chinese case, there is strong comparative evidence that economicliberalization does not require or necessarily even promote greater politicalfreedom.14

For all these reasons, materialist explanations cannot account for one ofthe central determinants of the end of the Cold War—namely, Gorbachev’ssystematic dismantling of monopolistic Communist rule in the Soviet Union.Is a constructivist approach more successful in explaining this key part of theempirical record?

The Role of Human Rights Ideas in the SovietReform Process

Ideas of human rights have a long pedigree in Enlightenment and liberalthought, but they did not become salient within the countries of the Com-munist bloc, or within East-West relations, until the 1970s. Although theSoviet Union and some of its allies had approved of the 1948 Universal Decla-ration of Human Rights and signed the two international human rights cove-nants of 1966, these documents were neither well-known to people living un-der Communist rule nor taken seriously by the Communist authorities.Western governments did not emphasize human rights ideas in the earlydétente period, and the small human rights groups that existed in Moscowand several other cities were not politically signiªcant.

This situation changed dramatically in August 1975 when the WarsawPact countries signed the Helsinki Final Act. Although the Soviet governmenthad tried hard to prevent the inclusion of human rights in the Final Act, it ul-timately accepted a text containing unprecedented commitments that theprotection of human rights was a legitimate part of diplomatic relationsamong the thirty-ªve states participating in the CSCE. In response, dissidentsacross the Communist bloc began to organize independent initiatives to mon-itor their governments’ compliance with the new Helsinki norms. These ini-tiatives included the Moscow Helsinki Watch Committee, Czechoslovakia’s

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13. On the Chinese regime’s harsh response to popular demands for social and political reform in the1970s 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 Uni-versity 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 massacrestiºed demands for political reform without arresting the process of economic liberalization.

Charter 77, and Poland’s Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), a precursor toSolidarity. Before long, the monitoring and publicity efforts of this “Helsinkinetwork” 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 ofªcialsquestioned the basic features of the Soviet system at the time that MikhailGorbachev took power. Most members of the Politburo who electedGorbachev as CPSU general secretary on 11 March 1985 expected him to re-vitalize the Soviet system through a program of economic restructuringguided by a reformed party and state, not to oversee the dismantling of thesystem.16 What they apparently did not recognize was the extent to whichGorbachev and the ofªcials he would gather around him had been affected byexposure to human rights ideas and human rights movements’ critiques ofCommunist rule.

Receptivity to Human Rights Ideas

In addition to Gorbachev’s concerns about the Soviet economy, his social andpolitical agenda reºected the lessons that he and some others within theCPSU had learned from the human rights campaigns of the late 1970s, aswell as their quest for rapprochement with Europe at a time when “Europeanidentity” was understood to include the protection of human rights.

The Dissidents’ Message

Among the supporters of reform, a relatively small group of party leaders andinstitutchiki had been affected by the message and persistence of human rightscampaigners across the bloc and were thus inclined to restructure the SovietUnion’s social and political order as well as its economy. This openness to dis-sident thinking resulted partly from the fact that Gorbachev’s generation hadcome of political age during the tumultuous period from Khrushchev’s de-nunciation of Stalin’s crimes in 1956 to the crackdown on independent voicesin the USSR following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.17 Although

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15. For further information on the sources and negotiation of these norms, as well as the birth of theHelsinki network, see Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, andthe 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-StalinEra (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).

few members of the “thaw generation” rejected the party and became dissi-dents or human rights campaigners even after 1968, ofªcial repression of in-dependent initiatives did not shield party elites from the dissidents’ message.Through seizures and informers, the secret police kept the party leadershipabreast of samizdat publishing and aware of the ease with which such publica-tions circulated through their societies. Even if one assumes that most Sovietofªcials cared only about advancing within the CPSU, some were affectedby the dissidents’ message or by their own participation in the repression ofdissent.

The latter group included Gorbachev, whose study of law at the presti-gious Moscow University set him apart from most senior Soviet ofªcials, whowere trained at engineering or managerial institutes. While rising through theranks of the CPSU in the 1960s, Gorbachev remained in contact with his lawschool friend Zdenèk Mlynár, who in 1968 joined reformist circles within theCzechoslovak Communist Party. During a visit to the Soviet Union in thesummer of 1967, Mlynár stayed with the Gorbachevs in Stavropol, and thetwo men evidently discussed reformist ideas then circulating in Prague. Pre-sumably, Gorbachev’s legal education made him more open than many of hiscolleagues were to debates and discussion about the rule of law and limita-tions on state power.

Gorbachev claims in his memoirs that when the Soviet invasion ofCzechoslovakia provoked a few small protests in the USSR, he was troubledby the forceful crackdown on dissent: “I had qualms of conscience about thecruel and undeserved punishment meted out” to critics of the regime, hewrites, and began to ponder “the underlying causes of many grievous phe-nomena in our domestic and foreign policies.”18 Gorbachev’s questioning ofpolitical repression throughout the bloc could only have been reinforcedwhen he learned that Mlynár had helped found Charter 77 and had openlycriticized the denial of human rights in Czechoslovakia. He was also appar-ently inºuenced by the strong support that Charter 77 and other East-blochuman rights movements received from Italian Communist party leaderEnrico Berlinguer. Speaking at Berlinguer’s funeral in June 1984, Gorbachevfreely confessed: “Dear Enrico, we never will forget your advice about the ne-cessity of democratizing our country.”19 Six months later, at a conference inMoscow on ideological work, Gorbachev delivered a major speech that, whileframed in terms of perfecting socialism, introduced nearly all of the keythemes that he developed during his later reforms: acceleration, decentraliza-tion, glasnost, equality before the law, perestroika, democratization, and the

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18. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 83.


priority of the “human factor.” The fact that he delivered the speech despitereceiving a last-minute cautionary message from CPSU General SecretaryKonstantin 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 exposureto the human rights movement. Among these was Aleksandr Yakovlev, whosecriticisms of Russian nationalism in the early 1970s had cost him his job asacting 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 inde-pendent and samizdat materials on human rights conditions in the SovietUnion.21 In 1983, Gorbachev used his inºuence to bring Yakovlev back fromOttawa to direct the inºuential Institute of World Economy and Interna-tional Relations.

By all indications dissident materials, including those of the Helsinki net-work, were read and discussed quite openly at several of the top policy-oriented research institutes in Moscow. As a result, says Georgii Arbatov, thefounding 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 InternationalDepartment until Gorbachev appointed him a senior adviser, “Gorbachev’spreparation for a break with the primitive, falsiªed, ofªcial Party version ofSoviet history was his reading of samizdat and tamizdat literature as well as re-stricted ‘Progress’ publications for the elite.”23 Reºecting on his own experi-ence, Chernyaev claims that dissident literature seized him “by the throat.”24

When Gorbachev was elected CPSU general secretary in 1985, heappointed many of these individuals to inºuential positions in governmentand the media. He also rehabilitated “semi-dissidents” like Len Karpinskii and

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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 onCommunism, see Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, eds., Voices of Glasnost: Interviewswith Gorbachev’s Reformers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. 33–75; Alexander Yakovlev, TheFate 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 Eliza-beth 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.

Roy Medvedev, who had developed extensive contacts with independent ac-tivists after being expelled from the party for their unconventional thinkingduring the early Brezhnev era.25 What was signiªcant about all these moveswas not Gorbachev’s attempt to establish his own power base within the re-gime but that he did so by empowering or rehabilitating individuals with suchheterodox ideas.26

For other state and party ofªcials, it was the experience of direct partici-pation in the repression of dissent that caused them to question the statusquo.27 For example, a KGB agent assigned to eavesdrop on Soviet humanrights groups concluded privately that the dissidents were telling thetruth: “The chaos and ªlth; the fact that we put people in jail who only wantgood for this country—it was all true!”28 Before the agent was arrested him-self, he warned dissidents Yurii Orlov, Aleksandr Podrabinek, and AnatoliiShcharansky that the KGB was planning a wave of searches and arrests, in-cluding at least a dozen targeted just at Podrabinek and his family. Nonethe-less, says Karpinskii, most of those who “wanted a more efªcient and humanesystem . . . knew they had to wait until their time came, remain in the appara-tus, develop their ideas, seek out like-minded people, and be ready when theirhour struck.”29

One of the most important of these was Eduard Shevardnadze, whoclaims that his experiences as party boss and interior minister in his native re-public of Georgia prompted him to question the Soviet Union’s social and po-litical order. “I knew many of the people in the dissident movement in Geor-gia quite well [and] spoke with them a number of times,” he says in hismemoirs. Though admittedly not yet prepared “either inwardly—psychologi-cally—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 out-look: “This struggle, along with my knowledge of the true state of affairs in

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25. Cohen and Vanden Heuvel, eds., Voices of Glasnost, p. 294. See also Roy Medvedev and GiuliettoChiesa, 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, seeBrown, 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 seriouslyenough to stop. It is beyond the scope of this essay to determine why some individuals do so and oth-ers do not.

28. Quoted in Yevgenia Albats, The State within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia—Past, Pres-ent, 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.

our country, has led me to conclude that the root of existing evils is not the in-dividual people, but in the system. And if some people seethe with hatred forthe 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 Brezhnevregime despite its repression of dissent was a strong motivation to work forreform in the late 1980s. As Yuri Afanas’ev explained:

Even those of us who did not personally persecute or harm anyone, and who sin-cerely wanted changes in the country, bear a heavy responsibility for having beensilent. Unlike people like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and RoyMedvedev, we did not openly or actively ªght against what was happening inour country. Therefore, we—and I include myself—must repent for our respon-sibility.31

Thus, although many of Gorbachev’s initial supporters were interested solelyin economic reform, some were determined to act on what they had longbeen hearing from the dissidents—that “the country’s economic malaisewas intrinsically linked to a deeper moral, social and cultural crisis.”32 Inthe winter of 1984, a full year before Gorbachev became general secretary,Shevardnadze reportedly told him: “Everything’s rotten. It has to bechanged.”33 Such comments suggest that by the mid-1980s support was grow-ing within the CPSU for political reforms “much more radical than the Sovietpolitical establishment realized.”34

Even those within the party leadership who were not sympathetic to thehuman rights critique of Communist rule could not deny the abundant evi-dence of popular sympathy for human rights movements across the Commu-nist bloc. On May Day 1985, three-and-a-half years after Poland’s declarationof martial law, ªfteen thousand pro-Solidarity demonstrators ªlled the streetsof Warsaw.35 In Czechoslovakia, the Interior Ministry claimed that up to twomillion people might have signed the Charter 77 human rights manifesto ifthey had not been afraid.36 Within the Soviet Union, the persistence of inde-

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30. Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (NewYork: 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 ofthe 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.

pendent initiatives for human rights and national self-determination, despitethe KGB’s massive efforts at repression, were testament to the party’s illegiti-macy. Soviet Politburo members who were otherwise not inclined to supportGorbachev’s initiatives understood the signiªcance of his argument that if po-litical reforms had been initiated earlier in Poland, “there would have been no1980”—an argument that underscored the necessity of bold reforms in theSoviet Union.37

The Soviet Union as a “European” State

The new thinking about human rights was closely linked to Gorbachev’s con-ception of Europe, a conception that was far less instrumental than the ideasthat guided Brezhnev and his Politburo colleagues when they launched theCSCE. When Gorbachev and his advisers were considering alternatives to thecentralization and repressiveness of the status quo, they saw in Western Eu-rope not only the resources necessary to modernize the Soviet economy butalso inspiration for the type of democratic socialism they hoped to achievewithin the Soviet Union and a shared cultural heritage denied by conservativeRussophiles and Communists alike.38 “Europe for Gorbachev was somethingthat 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 earlyin his rule: “Reºecting on the goals to set for our new foreign policy, I foundit increasingly difªcult to see the multicolored patchwork of Europe’s politicalmap as I used to see it before. I was thinking about the common roots of thismultiform and yet fundamentally indivisible European civilization . . .”40

Although the Soviet Union did not belong to the Council of Europe or theEuropean Community (EC), Gorbachev and his colleagues were well aware ofthe centrality of human rights norms in both organizations. The Council of

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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 DeclassiªedDocuments 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 Ar-chive, Washington, DC, and the Cold War International History Project, Washington, DC, for “Un-derstanding the End of the Cold War, 1980–87” oral history conference, Watson Institute for Interna-tional 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 asTannenwald, ed., “Understanding the End of the Cold War”), p. 235.

40. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 428.

Europe’s rigorous human rights regime, including a supranational court, hadbeen functioning since the early 1950s. During the CSCE negotiations in theearly 1970s, it was the EC that overcame strong Soviet resistance to the inclu-sion of human rights in the Helsinki Final Act.41 In the 1973 CopenhagenDeclaration, 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 acommitment to overcome the existing political and geostrategic division ofEurope.42 As Gorbachev explained in an April 1987 speech in Prague,“Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals is also a historical and cultural cate-gory in a high, spiritual sense. Here world civilization has been enriched withthe ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. . . . European culture,which has many faces, yet forms a single entity.”43 This complex interest inrapprochement with Europe reinforced Gorbachev’s motivation to expandhuman 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 wasnot simply the geographic reach of the CSCE that was signiªcant. By themid-1980s, the CSCE had become synonymous with the idea that Europeanunity could not be separated from respect for human rights. Gorbachev ap-parently recognized as much, saying that he was attracted to “the potential op-portunities for a pan-European policy which lay in the ‘spirit of Helsinki,’ aunique achievement in itself.”44

In July 1985, soon after Shevardnadze was appointed foreign minister, hetraveled to Helsinki to attend the CSCE’s commemoration of the tenth anni-versary of the Final Act. Although Shevardnadze was too new on the job tolaunch any initiatives, he listened to the litany of reciprocal criticisms andgrew concerned that the Helsinki process was “running down.” Back in Mos-cow, he and Gorbachev deliberated on how to “breathe life” into the CSCEand thus advance the Soviet Union’s rapprochement with the rest of Europe.45

This desire for greater contact with Europe and the reinvigoration of theCSCE was reºected ªrst in new public rhetoric. Gorbachev writes in hismemoirs that at a press conference in Paris in October 1985 during his ªrstforeign visit as CPSU general secretary, he tried “to drive home to the

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41. On the EC’s struggle with the USSR over the content of the Helsinki Final Act, see Thomas, TheHelsinki Effect, chs. 1–2.





French—and to others as well—that compliance with the Final Act wouldimprove the climate in Europe and dispel the clouds.” In response to a ques-tion, he repeated a view that he had ªrst expressed to the British Parliamentless than a year earlier: “Europe is our common home.”46

The majority of Gorbachev’s meetings with foreign heads-of-state in1987 and 1988 were with West Europeans.47 These were more than just op-portunities for new political initiatives; they were also opportunities for learn-ing. Gorbachev held numerous long conversations about the meaning of so-cialism and democracy with former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt,French President François Mitterrand, British Prime Minister MargaretThatcher, and especially Spanish Premier Felipe González, whom he de-scribed as “a true democrat.”48 As a result of these conversations, as well as hisown experiences within the Soviet Union, Gorbachev “increasingly came tobelieve . . . that West European ‘democratic socialists’—and, for that matter,liberals—had done a far superior job of putting into practice the ideals of so-cialism than had his Soviet predecessors.”49

Gorbachev also set out to persuade those within the Soviet leadership andbureaucracy who did not share his identiªcation with Europe and acceptanceof human rights norms. During an address to the staff of the Soviet ForeignMinistry on 23 May 1986, he speciªcally argued that Europe should not beseen “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 so-called human rights, as if our own revolution had nothing to do with humanrights. . . . But would there even have been a revolution if such rights had beenobserved in the old society? We need to reject decisively this outdated approachto the problem . . . and view it more broadly.51

That same year, he announced a radical break from the ideology of classconºict: “The interests of societal development and all-human values,” he de-clared, “take precedence over the interests of any particular class.”52 After dis-cussing issues of democracy and self-determination with Margaret Thatcherin Moscow in the spring of 1987, Gorbachev told the Politburo: “Maybe I’mwrong, but I believe we haven’t studied Europe enough and don’t know it very

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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.

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 inMoscow.

This does not mean that Gorbachev and his inner circle of advisers fore-saw from the beginning how far their new thinking would take them. WhenGorbachev ªrst took ofªce, he believed that the Soviet Union needed to bemodernized within the framework of the Communist system. According toChernyaev, when Gorbachev began to speak about the need to “work in dem-ocratic conditions,” he understood democracy as an instrument that “theParty could employ in restructuring society. But not yet as an underlyingprinciple of the very existence of society, not yet as a universal humanvalue.”54 Over time, though, Gorbachev’s “mind was undergoing a sweepingde-ideologization.”55

In sum, despite the evident need for economic reform in the early to mid-1980s, considerable evidence exists that the diffusion of human rights ideasand norms had persuaded Gorbachev and a number of others within theSoviet elite to pursue a program of political reform that was more extensivethan the moderate economic reformers considered prudent.

The Implementation of Human Rights Ideas

How, then, did the advocates of political reform gain cooperation from otherswithin the Soviet elite, even when such reform threatened to undermine theCommunist system? Part of the answer to this question is rhetorical entrap-ment. Since 1975, the Soviet leadership had portrayed the Helsinki Final Actas a major accomplishment of Soviet foreign policy. Moscow’s rhetorical sup-port of the Helsinki norms was well established. A tacit alliance thus devel-oped between political reformers around Gorbachev, human rights activistsacross the Soviet bloc, and Western critics, who together used Helsinki hu-man rights norms to persuade moderate Communists, whose main concernwas economic reform, to support the cause of social and political liberaliza-tion. These same activists, as well as nationalists in several of the non-Russianrepublics, then used the Soviet government’s commitment to human rightsideas as an opportunity to mobilize for ever more radical reforms.

As discussed above, the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev as CPSU generalsecretary in February 1985 reºected strong but not unanimous support in the

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53. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, p. 105.

54. Ibid., p. 95.

55. Ibid., p. 67.

Politburo and Central Committee for reforms to revitalize the Soviet econ-omy. This shaky pro-reform consensus did not extend, however, to transform-ing the social and political order of the Soviet Union or its East Europeanneighbors. Even among those in the leadership who believed that the CPSUshould allow greater space for independent voices and interests, few favoredthe type of political liberalization generally equated with “human rights.”56

Hence, before Gorbachev and his inner circle could implement even limitedpolitical reforms, they had to overcome strong resistance from Communistparty conservatives and the coercive apparatus of the state.

Soon after Gorbachev took ofªce, he assigned two reform-minded advis-ers to draft a program for the Central Committee plenum in April. Uponreading their proposal, however, he crossed out all references to political re-form, explaining: “That’s for later. . . . First we’ll have to maneuver.”57 As ex-pected, party conservatives strongly contested ideological reformulations thatGorbachev and his allies proposed in late 1985 for the upcoming 27th PartyCongress. It is thus hardly surprising that during Gorbachev’s ªrst year inofªce, independent organizations remained illegal, dissidents were still ar-rested, applications for emigration were denied, and religious believers wereharassed. On the other hand, dissidents and human rights campaigners fromthe late 1970s reemerged and regrouped during this period. By linking theircause to the trans-European CSCE that Gorbachev’s advisers valued so highlyand by refusing to accept limited reforms, they greatly extended the bounds ofpolitical debate and social mobilization within the Soviet Union and EasternEurope.

The International Normative Environment

By this time, the international normative environment had made it almostimpossible for the Soviet Union to improve its relations with the West with-out ªrst improving its human rights record. The European Community’scommitment to linking trans-European rapprochement to respect for humanrights had not weakened since the negotiation of the Helsinki Final Act in theearly 1970s, while the U.S. government’s commitment was now far strongerthan it had been in those years, thanks to the lobbying successes of “Helsinkinetwork” activists in New York and Washington. Human rights activistsacross the Communist bloc were also skilled at exploiting the CSCE’s busyschedule of diplomatic meetings, as well as other international forums, to en-

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56. Ibid., p. 71.

57. Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of theSoviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 57.

sure that any attempt to create a Potemkin village of superªcial reforms wouldbe exposed at home and abroad. Respect for human rights was thus a legiti-mate and irrevocable part of the diplomatic agenda among CSCE states bythe mid-1980s.

For example, as CSCE diplomats gathered to observe the Final Act’stenth anniversary, the Solidarity-afªliated Helsinki Committee in Poland de-clared: “The Helsinki Final Act and the Final Document of the Madrid Con-ference continue to be a valuable foundation for the aspirations of Eastern Eu-ropean peoples. The accords broaden the number of activists engaged in thestruggle for human rights. They bring an awareness of citizens’ rights to theeveryday confrontations with the government.”58 Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77announced: “We must keep ªghting, we must continually point to the Hel-sinki Accords and say ‘You signed this, you must honour this.’”59 Likewise,Hungarian dissidents used the occasion of the CSCE Cultural Forum, held inBudapest in October 1985, to organize a parallel meeting in private apart-ments of writers, artists, and intellectuals from across Europe.60

Western media and governmental attention thus remained focused onpolitical repression in the East. At a special CSCE meeting of human rights“experts” held in Ottawa just two months after Gorbachev took ofªce, West-ern governments pushed hard (but ultimately unsuccessfully) for strongermeasures to protect non-governmental monitoring of compliance with Hel-sinki norms.61 Two months later, at the CSCE’s tenth anniversary meeting inHelsinki, Secretary of State George Shultz challenged the new government inMoscow: “My country and most other countries represented . . . believe thatthe truest tests of political intentions are actual steps to improve co-operationamong States, to enhance contacts among people and to strengthen respectfor individual rights.”62 Similar calls for expanded protections of humanrights were heard at the Budapest Cultural Forum and at the CSCE Meetingon Human Contacts, held in Bern, Switzerland the following spring.63 Mean-

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58. U.S. Congress, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Human Rights and the Hel-sinki 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 SovietUnion: 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 Federa-tion for Human Rights, 1986).

61. U.S. Congress, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, The Ottawa Human RightsExperts 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, Verba-tim 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).

while, editorial writers in Western newspapers continued to insist on linkagebetween implementation of the CSCE’s human rights norms and improvedEast-West relations in other issue areas.64 Police interference with the dissi-dent symposium in Budapest also attracted widespread criticism in the inter-national press.65

For the reasons discussed earlier, Gorbachev was personally sympatheticto some of these critiques of the Soviet record. Just weeks after his Paris decla-ration that “Europe is our common home,” he told U.S. Secretary of StateGeorge Shultz that he was willing to discuss human rights at the upcomingSoviet-American summit in Geneva.66 At that meeting, he recalls, “I myselfspent time trying to fend off accusations of human rights abuses, even thoughI 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 notimprove without human rights reforms in the Soviet Union, including free-dom of emigration and the release of Andrei Sakharov from internal exile. Se-nior foreign policy advisor Anatolii Chernyaev recalls that Gorbachev’s meet-ing 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 secureeconomic resources and by others as an alternative to cultural isolation couldbe built only on concrete steps to comply with human rights norms, includ-ing those in the Helsinki Final Act. The reformers’ conclusion that the con-tinued denial of basic human rights was both morally unacceptable and polit-ically unsustainable thus coincided with a broader recognition among partyleaders that rapprochement with Western Europe required greater respect forhuman rights and self-determination in Eastern Europe. In this environment,the dissidents’ critiques could neither be ignored nor openly challenged. Themoderate reformers were trapped by their own rhetorical commitment tohuman rights.

The 27th Party Congress in early 1986 approved a decision to replace theSoviet Union’s ideological commitment to class struggle, which had long beeninvoked to justify repression at home and in allied states, with a new doctrine

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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 Scribnerand Sons, 1993), pp. 589–594.


68. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, p. 58.

emphasizing the priority of “universal human values,” including human rightsand self-determination. Speaking to a Politburo meeting in mid-summer1986, Gorbachev explained:

A vital component of perestroika is democratization. We are giving real rights topeople. But who is going to use them? Are there people capable and bold enoughfor that? The ways of democracy were drummed out of them. . . . What hap-pened in this country is that a rigid system was created and then life was herdedinto it. And the system was always the highest priority! . . . It’s no sin to revisitthe system’s fundamentals again. . . . Don’t be afraid of democracy, of questions,problems, discussions on any level, from the Politburo to the smallest collectivesand the family.69

Later that summer, he added, “Up till now we have been talking about de-mocracy, now it’s time to implement it and respect it. Those who try to breakpeople, to push them around as they please, cannot work with us. We should-n’t be afraid of our own people.”70

Gorbachev also began to take steps, such as relaxing the power of the cen-sor’s ofªce, to democratize Soviet society and alleviate popular fear of theparty-state. Though limited at ªrst to greater press freedoms and tolerance of“non-threatening group activity,” such steps represented a radical step into thepolitical unknown that would be hard to imagine if Gorbachev and his closeallies had not already been affected by human rights ideas and shielded by hu-man rights norms.71 As shown below in more detail, they used the idea of a“common European home” and Western pressures for Helsinki compliance tojustify the partial lifting of repression that they favored but that conservativesopposed. Shevardnadze later claimed: “It was clear to me that both thechanges in Eastern Europe and the prospects for building a united continentwithout blocs . . . would directly reverberate in domestic walls and causecracks.”72

The Vienna phase of the CSCE that opened in the autumn of 1986reafªrmed the international normative preconditions for improved East-Westrelations, empowering reformers in Moscow and encouraging local move-ments for political change across the Communist bloc. By the time theVienna phase ended in early 1989, the CSCE had “shaken the Iron Curtain,”Shevardnadze argues.73 At the preparatory talks, held on 23 September–

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69. Ibid., p. 67.

70. Ibid., p. 69.

71. See Hough, Democratization and Revolution, ch. 5.


73. Vojtech Mastny, ed., The Helsinki Process and the Reintegration of Europe, 1986–1991 (London:Pinter, 1992), p. 18.

6 October 1986, Western and neutral delegations made clear that any majorimprovement of relations would require concrete progress on human rights inthe East. Meanwhile, nationalist and human rights activists in the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union—many of whom had been active in theHelsinki-focused movements of the late 1970s—began to reassert theirclaims. In Latvia, activists created the group Helsinki ’86 to organize protestsagainst the Soviet occupation and violations of human rights.74 ZviadGamsakhurdia, 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 impressthose within Gorbachev’s governing coalition who viewed the Helsinki pro-cess in terms of its potential impact on domestic economic reform. ForShevardnadze and other Soviet reformers, however, the Vienna meeting of-fered a crucial opportunity to advance their political agenda. As Shevardnadzelater recalled: “I was convinced that the conference was essential to showthe country and the world how far we intended to go and, beyond that, toprovide an impetus for democratization and the perestroika of legislation ineverything related to human affairs.”75

At Gorbachev’s behest, the Politburo began to discuss the release of largenumbers of political prisoners—far more than the small numbers proposed byGeorge Shultz before the October 1986 Reykjavik summit.76 These proposalsprovoked a stormy reaction from conservatives who preferred to continue di-vorcing rhetoric from action: “It is one thing to make declarations, but letAndrei Sakharov and other prisoners of conscience serve out their sentences,”they argued.77 Gorbachev disagreed and told the Politburo: “We need to workout a conception of human rights, both at home and abroad, and to put anend to the routine. It only produces dissidents.”78 At another Politburo meet-ing 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 emi-grants, to move this current in the opposite direction.”79 Although informedby the KGB that Soviet dissidents were beginning to “connect their state-ments” to the political changes of perestroika, Gorbachev decided to release

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74. “Documents: Helsinki ‘86 Group,” Voice of Solidarity, Nos. 131–132 (July/August 1987), pp. 31–33.


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.


78. Chernyaev’s Notes from the Politburo Session, 13 November 1986, in Zubok et al., eds., A Com-pendium of Declassiªed Documents.

79. Chernyaev’s Notes from the Politburo Session, 8 October 1986, in ibid.

80 of the 240 political prisoners then being held, and to free 120 more at alater date.80 In so doing, he both prepared to answer Western demands on hu-man rights and expanded the domestic constituency that was pressuring forfurther reforms.

Just over a month later, Shevardnadze surprised the diplomats assembledfor the opening session in Vienna by proposing that a special CSCE confer-ence on humanitarian concerns be held in Moscow. No matter how carefullyprepared this initiative was within the Politburo, it was truly radical inthe CSCE context. In the past, Soviet delegations had always opposed anydiscussion of human rights. The Vienna newspaper Die Presse likenedShevardnadze’s proposal to the convocation of a meeting of chickens in a foxden.81 Even as Gorbachev and Shevardnadze praised the CSCE as a means tocreate a “common European home” in which shared norms would replacemutual hostility, Western governments and human rights groups insisted onmore and more concrete evidence of political reform.

Andrei Sakharov and the Neformaly

On 1 December 1986, Gorbachev informed the Politburo of his intention torelease physicist Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s most famous politicalprisoner, from internal exile in Gorky.82 Two weeks later, in a widely publi-cized move, Gorbachev personally telephoned Sakharov and invited him toreturn to Moscow. Jerry Hough described the implications of this event: “Be-cause Sakharov had said and written many things that seemed deliberately de-signed to provoke arrest, his release implied there would be few types of politi-cal statements that would lead to arrest in the future, at least aside from thosepromoting republican separatism in the USSR.”83 As Gorbachev must haveexpected, Sakharov began to campaign publicly for the release of more dissi-dents as soon as he returned to Moscow, and he openly criticized the limita-tions of existing reforms.

Soon thereafter, Soviet leaders ordered an end to the jamming of trans-missions by the British Broadcasting Corporation to the Soviet Union, andthey also subsequently ceased jamming the Voice of America and DeutscheWelle.84 Moreover, the Soviet government began to show unprecedented

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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., Compen-dium of Declassiªed Documents, n.p.; and Chernyaev, in Tannenwald, ed., “Understanding the End ofthe Cold War,” pp. 196–197.


84. Matlock, Autopsy of an Empire, p. 106.

ºexibility in its willingness to accept international monitoring of compliancewith human rights norms. Soviet ofªcials started by agreeing to host foreignjudges, prosecutors, and psychiatrists who wanted to focus on human rights.85

In mid-1987 the Soviet delegation at Vienna agreed that the CSCE should es-tablish a new “human dimension mechanism” by which participating statescould request information and bilateral consultations on apparent violationsof human rights. As a last resort, states could convene a special CSCE meetingto address their concerns.86

In September, the Soviet ambassador to the CSCE, Yurii Kashlev, an-nounced that the Soviet government had accepted a request from the non-governmental 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 interferingin the USSR’s internal affairs. During a weeklong visit in January 1988, theIHFHR delegation met with dozens of human rights and opposition activists,as well as senior Soviet ofªcials, to press for even greater openness.88 After themeetings, the Soviet authorities announced the creation of a new ofªcialCommission on Humanitarian Affairs and International Cooperation tooversee Soviet implementation of CSCE norms.

Western governments also pressed at the Vienna conference and in bilat-eral forums for the Soviet Union to release all its political prisoners. FedorBurlatskii, the chairman of the new Commission on Humanitarian Affairs,echoed their call. In 1987 and 1988, more than six hundred political prison-ers were freed. Although the releases were conditional on signing a pledge notto participate in political activity, the mere admission that Soviet jails actuallyheld “political prisoners” further undermined the regime. Most of the releasedprisoners quickly resumed their political activities, and the publication ofsamizdat increased still further. By late 1988, the number of political prison-ers had fallen to unprecedented low levels—as few as 11, according to Sovietofªcials, and 140, according to Amnesty International.89

In the meantime, Soviet diplomats in Vienna resumed their effort to gainWestern acceptance of Shevardnadze’s earlier offer to host a CSCE conference

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85. David K. Shipler, “Dateline USSR: On the Human Rights Track,” Foreign Policy, No. 75 (Summer1989), 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 September1987, 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.

in Moscow, arguing that the prospect of such a conference was needed to sup-port the advocates of democratization in the Soviet Union. Once again, West-ern diplomats held out, using this issue and progress on conventional arms re-ductions to win further human rights reforms from the Soviet Union,including greater freedom of travel and information and the establishment ofjoint U.S.-Soviet working groups to address Soviet human rights abuses.90

In October 1988 the Moscow Television Service broadcast excerpts froma speech Ronald Reagan delivered to Soviet dissidents during a summit inMoscow ªve months earlier. The broadcast was followed by an unprecedentedcommentary that acknowledged human rights problems in the Soviet Unionand implicitly accepted an American president’s legitimate interest in such is-sues.91 Bit by bit, the regime was losing both the means and the justiªcationfor maintaining its monopoly hold on power.

Gorbachev’s reformist agenda and the linkage to international norms cre-ated space for the mobilization of independent media and political move-ments that overwhelmed the Politburo’s original intentions. The organiza-tional and philosophical descendants of the Helsinki movement reemerged inMoscow and Leningrad as independent associations and quasi-political par-ties. Veteran human rights activists in Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine estab-lished new Helsinki committees to press for the release of additional politicalprisoners and for greater freedoms in the republics. “The evocation of Hel-sinki in their name was important not just because it provided a link with thepast, but also because it plugged the new movement into an international dip-lomatic and juridical process.” In January 1988, the three groups formed anInternational Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, whose pro-gram of national liberation helped give birth the following year to partiesseeking national independence.92

Veteran human rights activists also played a leading role in the establish-ment of samizdat newspapers and weekly discussion groups that agitated formore fundamental reforms. In July 1987, former human rights activists andeditors of samizdat journals such as Glasnost and Referendum created the Mos-cow Press Club-Glasnost to promote discussion of human rights and politicaltopics. Another dissident, Aleksandr Podrabinek, established Express Chroni-cle, which followed the 1970s-era underground journal Chronicle of CurrentEvents as an independent source of reports on human rights violations acrossthe Soviet Union and as a means for dissidents and radical reformers to ex-press their views. By April 1988, copies were being distributed in ªfty-three

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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.

towns beyond Moscow. In eleven of them, the paper was retyped and distrib-uted to additional destinations.93 Meanwhile thousands of new activistsjoined or created informal groups—neformaly—whose numbers increasedfrom approximately one hundred at the time of Sakharov’s release to a fewthousand by September 1987, and perhaps as many as 35,000 by the late1980s.94 Ofªcial media began to concede that many of the dissidents’ long-standing critiques were correct.95

The Soviet Union’s ªrst opposition political party, the DemocraticUnion, was created in May 1988 by the merger of two independent groups,Perestroika ‘88 and the Democracy and Humanism Seminar. Reºecting theinºuence of members once active in the human rights movements of the1970s, the Democratic Union called for a multiparty parliamentary system,free trade unions, full civil liberties, a free press, and a national right to self-determination.96 Although still illegal, and often harassed by the KGB, thenew party organized public demonstrations in Moscow on 21 August 1988to mark the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and on10 December that same year to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Uni-versal Declaration of Human Rights.97

The political signiªcance of these initiatives should not be underesti-mated. As two Western observers later wrote: “Stepping beyond the bounds ofperestroika, both ideologically and tactically, the Democratic Union wasshunned 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 reverber-ated throughout the other informal discussion groups.”98 Human rights activ-ists in the neformaly and the Democratic Union thus helped push the mobili-zation for reform beyond what many in the party elite considered desirable.99

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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 Contextof 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 MichaelMcFaul and Sergei Markov, The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities and Pro-grams (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, “Revolu-tion 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 WatchCommittee, 1990); Judith B. Sedaitis and Jim Butterªeld, eds., Perestroika from Below: Social Move-ments 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.

The social mobilization and open debate that emerged in 1986–1988,and the conservative reaction that ensued, also appear to have pushed some ofGorbachev’s closest advisers from a reformist to a revolutionary vision ofchange. As Aleksandr Yakovlev later explained: “At some point in 1987, I per-sonally realized that a society based on violence and fear could not be re-formed and that we faced a momentous historical task of dismantling the en-tire social and political system with all its ideological, economic, and politicalroots.”100 Gorbachev also appears to have broadened the limited commitmentto “democratization” he ªrst enunciated in 1986. Chernyaev later wrote:“Gorbachev was talking about it ªrst in terms of the democratization of so-cialism, 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 weunderstand it today is above all the idea of freedom.”102 The neformaly and in-dependent media unleashed by Gorbachev’s policies and pronouncementssigniªcantly radicalized the political debate in Moscow, Leningrad, and theoutlying republics.103

These developments provoked a crisis in the CPSU, and the outcome ofthat crisis demonstrates, once again, the indeterminacy of materialist explana-tions of the demise of Communism. The crisis emerged out of debates be-tween moderate reformers (i.e., those who favored purely economic reform)led by Ligachev and the radical reformers (i.e., those who favored democraticpolitical reforms) led by Yakovlev. On 13 March 1988, a letter condemningradical reform as inimical to socialism and a threat to the USSR was publishedin a hardline party organ, Sovetskaya Rossiya, while Gorbachev was out oftown. Although the letter was signed by Nina Andreeva, a chemistry teacherfrom Leningrad, its publication was clearly an attempt to curtail further polit-ical reforms, which many party members still believed would harm thechances for economic progress. The Andreeva broadside was reinforced by anarticle in Pravda expressing concern that “the slogans of democratization,glasnost, and increased human rights and freedoms are increasingly being ma-

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Hosking, Jonathan Aves, and Peter J. S. Duncan, The Road to Post-Communism: Independent PoliticalMovements 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: Oppo-sition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); andTimothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1996).

nipulated by various groups of people who, while passing themselves off asadvocates of perestroika, are in fact its vicious opponents.”104 But this short-lived backlash came to an end when Gorbachev returned to Moscow. Ratherthan siding with Ligachev and setting a clear limit on political change,Gorbachev removed him from the post of second secretary, a post that had en-titled him to chair meetings of the CPSU Secretariat when Gorbachev himselfwas not present. This crucial decision to marginalize those who were resistingpolitical reform and who were calling for a narrower focus on economic re-structuring can hardly be explained strictly by materialist incentives.

Gorbachev’s decision to favor Yakovlev’s direction over that of Ligachevprobably sealed the fate of Communist rule in the Soviet Union and acrossEastern Europe. From June 1989 to January 1990, Soviet troops stayed intheir barracks while democratic movements committed to human rights over-turned Communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czecho-slovakia. These revolutions, and more limited changes in Bulgaria and a vio-lent rebellion in Romania, accelerated the crisis of the Soviet regime.105 On4 February 1990, more than 100,000 people demonstrated against the Com-munist Party in the streets of Moscow. Three days later, the CPSU renouncedits constitutionally-guaranteed “leading role” in society, a change that was im-plemented the following month. In mid-March, opposition parties won semi-free local elections in Moscow and Leningrad. Meanwhile, protests againstSoviet occupation and human rights violations that had begun in Latvia un-der the auspices of the Helsinki ‘86 movement spread across Lithuania andEstonia as well.106 Gorbachev repeatedly contemplated repressive measures tohold the Soviet Union together, but except for a large-scale incursion intoAzerbaijan in January 1990, he ultimately drew back from authorizing deci-sive shows of force.107 Although scholars continue to debate how fullyGorbachev was aware of or involved in the planning for crackdowns by secu-rity forces in several of the Soviet republics (Tbilisi in April 1989 and Vilnius

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104. Sakwa, Gorbachev and His Reforms, pp. 213, 228.

105. For extensive evidence of this point, see Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Commu-nism 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 theRepercussions 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 Repercussionswithin 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 Independ-ence, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); and Rasma Karklins, Ethnopolitics and Transi-tion to Democracy: The Collapse of the USSR and Latvia (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson CenterPress, 1994).

107. Amy Knight, “The KGB, Perestroika, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold WarStudies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 67–93.

and Riga in January 1991), the limited number and limited scope of such op-erations conªrm Gorbachev’s unwillingness to attempt to retain powerthrough force—even though the Chinese Communist Party had done justthat in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.108 Conservatives counterattackedwith an attempted coup in August 1991 but failed to gain popular or institu-tional support, and their prompt retreat hastened the banning of the Com-munist Party and the ªnal breakup of the Soviet Union.109

Conclusions

Conventional materialist explanations of Soviet change emphasize the failureof tactical responses to the inefªciencies of central planning and the militaryand technological prowess of the West. But although it is true that Sovietleaders were concerned about economic productivity and competitiveness,and that they implemented reforms to address these challenges, such argu-ments cannot explain why Gorbachev opted for radical democratizationrather than an authoritarian strategy of economic liberalization and contin-ued political repression. Without such radical political reforms, neither thestructural rigidities of the Soviet regime nor the competitive limitations ofcentral planning nor generational changes in the Soviet leadership would havebrought about the largely peaceful and rights-protective political transitionsof 1989–1991. As Jerry Hough put it, “Mikhail Gorbachev was not riding anuncontrollable tiger.”110 In the end, material pressures are indeterminate, andthus insufªcient, in explaining why Gorbachev decided to pursue radicaldemocratic and rights-protective reforms.

In contrast, ideational persuasion and rhetorical entrapment offer power-ful explanations of the political decisions that so clearly threatened to under-mine Communist rule. The diffusion of human rights ideas and theirinstitutionalization as formal international norms induced key party elites toreject political repression as a legitimate instrument of Soviet policy and toquestion the monopoly position of the party. These norms changed the beliefsand strategies of CPSU elites, the outlook and organization of independent

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108. Although some observers credit this outcome to the Soviet Army’s reluctance to be involved ininternal policing, the logic of this essay suggests that Gorbachev’s ideas about human rights and politi-cal legitimacy may also have been crucial. For the former interpretation, see Brian D. Taylor, “The So-viet Military and the Disintegration of the USSR,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter2003), pp. 17–66.

109. John B. Dunlop, “The August 1991 Coup and Its Impact on Soviet Politics,” Journal of Cold WarStudies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 94–127.


activists who refused to settle for cosmetic reforms, and the political condi-tions for normalized relations with the West. This combination of persuasionand rhetorical entrapment spurred Soviet leaders to initiate political reformsthat, in turn, empowered independent activists who were pressing for evergreater democratization. The resulting interaction of top-down reform andbottom-up social mobilization was instrumental in the collapse of Commu-nist rule in the Soviet Union.

The case of Soviet change nonetheless conªrms that the causal effect ofideas and norms depends on political agency.111 The initial emergence of hu-man rights ideas within Soviet political discourse was attributable to the ef-forts of dissidents and independent activists who struggled in the 1970s tohold the Soviet regime accountable, both domestically and internationally, forits violations of international human rights norms, especially those estab-lished by the Helsinki Final Act.112 Human rights ideas and norms achievedeven greater purchase on the Soviet political system with Gorbachev’s ascen-dance to power in 1985. Both his rhetoric and his policy choices suggest thathe was increasingly committed to political reform for its own merits—initiallyby allowing greater freedoms and space for societal initiative and later by em-barking on a fundamental democratization of Soviet society. If human rightsideas had not been embraced by the highest leader in the USSR, they couldnot have had a transformative effect on the Soviet system.

The policy of glasnost thus appears to have been driven both by an instru-mental desire to weaken resistance to economic reform within the bureau-cracy and by an intrinsic desire to weaken resistance to democratizationwithin the party leadership. At several points, the weakening of conservativeforces by glasnost and by changes in party personnel seems actually to have re-inforced Gorbachev’s support for fundamental social and political reforms.His refusal to endorse a series of radical but economically sensible plans forprice reform in 1987–1988, at the same time that he implemented everdeeper political reforms (increased freedom of expression and assembly, fol-lowed by semi-free elections), suggests that he may even have begun to caremore about democracy and human rights than about economic reform.113

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111. On the critical role of ideational entrepreneurs, see Martha Finnemore, National Interests in Inter-national Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Martha Finnemore and KathrynSikkink, “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 Na-tional, 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.

Even after Gorbachev took power, however, the impact of human rightsideas was ampliªed by the reemergence and demands of civil society actorswho had been dormant since the post-Helsinki mobilizations of the previousdecade. Some of these activists were intrinsically committed to human rightsideas, whereas others used the idea as a means to undermine Communistrule. Their critiques of the limits of glasnost and perestroika, including theirmonitoring of actual human rights conditions within the Soviet Union,were crucial to transforming a controlled program of reform into a recipe forrevolution.

The case of Soviet change thus provides further support to the now-familiar observation that “ideas do not ºoat freely.”114 Ironically, this depend-ence on certain political agents explains a related puzzle: the contemporarychallenge of protecting human rights in Chechnya and other parts of the for-mer Soviet Union.115 Gorbachev failed to anchor human rights ideas ªrmlywithin Soviet law, and those ideas have never been satisfactorily institutional-ized 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 inthe world or marginalized by other international priorities. It is thus not sur-prising that in the post-Soviet period, perceived security interests and ideolo-gies have often trumped ideas of human rights. This on-going challenge doesnot, however, detract in any way from the contribution that human rightsideas and norms made to ending the Cold War by undermining one-partyCommunist rule in the Soviet Union.

Although human rights ideas have had some comparable effects in othercountries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, this does not mean that hu-man rights ideas will always contribute so signiªcantly to the reform or over-throw of repressive regimes.116 Four factors were conducive to the effectivenessof human rights ideas in the Soviet Union of the mid-1980s: the ideas weresalient (they were advocated by political actors at home and abroad); legiti-mate (they were reºected in an international agreement signed by the SovietUnion and its allies); relevant (they concerned the appropriate relationship be-tween state power and individual liberties at a time of growing pressure for re-form); and resonant (they ªt with the new leadership’s understanding of thecultural heritage and political destiny of the Soviet Union). Without these

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114. Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Ideas Do Not Float Freely: Transnational Coalitions, Domestic Struc-tures, and the End of the Cold War,” in Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, eds., Interna-tional 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 Hu-man Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

four conditions in place, it is difªcult to imagine that human rights ideaswould have had much impact on the Soviet political system. The non-resonance of human rights norms among Chinese leaders, perhaps becauseof lessons they derived from the Soviet case, may thus help to explain theChinese regime’s dismissal of appeals for democratic reforms.

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