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

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

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The reform and subsequent collapse of one-party Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were critical to the end of the Cold War. Despite the huge military arsenals and alliance systems that emerged after 1945, the Cold War was fundamentally a conºict between domestic political systems based on incompatible state socialist and liberal democratic conceptions of political legitimacy. As the Eastern bloc moved away from the ideology and political structures of state socialism in the 1980s, diplomats 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 democratic institutions preceded moves away from the hostile attitudes and con- frontational military postures of the Cold War. Without these domestic political changes, the Cold War could have endured well beyond the late 1980s and certainly would not have been replaced by the political amity between former East and West that emerged in that period. Given the considerable inºuence that Moscow exercised over politics in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, this article focuses on developments in the Soviet Union. Why and how did a peaceful process of democratic change overcome a state socialist regime in the Soviet Union that had long demonstrated its willingness to use force in defense of the status quo? Why did Mikhail Gorbachev not follow Winston Churchill’s famous refusal to preside over the demise of the imperial system that he was chosen to lead? This article rejects claims that these changes resulted simply from the instrumental (and increasingly desper- ate) initiatives of politically conservative elites motivated by concern about the 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 Union by a transnational network of human rights activists and other dissidents.

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Soviet leaders valued these institutions for a variety of instrumental and intrinsic reasons. The article acknowledges the considerable (albeit limited) explanatory power of material pressures for change and shows how material and ideational pressures reinforced each other. The article is divided into four parts. The ªrst part introduces both materialist and ideationalist explanations for the reform and eventual collapse of one-party Communist rule in the Soviet Union and identiªes the limitations of the materialist arguments. The second part demonstrates how exposure to ideas and norms of human rights contributed to Gorbachev’s (and others’) interest in political reform. The third part demonstrates how these same ideas contributed to the escalation of political reform and the demise of one-party rule. Data for these two empirical sections are drawn from translations of newly released Soviet documents, the memoirs of policymakers, and reports from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as newspapers and other secondary sources. The ªnal section evaluates the implications of these ªndings for our understanding of the end of the Cold War and the role of ideas in world politics.

Theoretical Perspectives

Scholarly disputes about material and ideational determinants of the end of the Cold War tend to be rooted in larger rationalist and constructivist approaches to political theory and social science. Rationalist approaches assume that individuals act in ways that appear most likely to help them achieve pre- existing interests, which are generally deªned in material terms. Rationalists treat ideas as epiphenomenal (albeit sometimes convenient) reasons for action that are cited by actors whose preferences are actually determined by material incentives.1 This logic underlies claims that the demise of the Soviet Union resulted from the ºawed efforts of Soviet leaders to improve the productivity, efªciency, and competitiveness of the Soviet economy, and that apparent concessions to human rights ideas were nothing more than tactical maneuvers. In contrast, constructivist approaches assume that actors seek to behave in 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 article emphasizes three causal and constitutive linkages between ideas and

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 Social Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 855–885.

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outcomes: persuasion, rhetorical entrapment, and ideational empowerment.3 Persuasion occurs when actors are exposed to new ideas and convinced of their explanatory power (in the case of ideas about causes and effects) or their moral 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 instrumental reasons then adhere to its logic even when the reasons for adhering to it have been exhausted. They do so in order to avoid the costs of rhetorical inconsistency. Ideational empowerment occurs when the legitimization or en- dorsement of an idea by public ofªcials enables otherwise weak societal actors to challenge those ofªcials to carry out social or political change. Based on this constructivist logic, one could hypothesize that exposure to ideas and norms of human rights that were prevalent in the late 1970s and early 1980s would transform the values and identities of (some) Soviet decision-makers. Given the autocratic and repressive nature of the Soviet party-state, one would expect (some) members of the Soviet leadership who were persuaded by the logic of human rights ideas or compelled by the legitimacy of human rights norms to support policies that would democratize the political system. Over time, reforms they initiated could strengthen societal challenges to the status quo and thus undermine the viability of one-party Communist rule.4 Evaluating these hypotheses empirically is no easy task. Simple evidence of support for political reform would not settle the question of whether this behavior was motivated by persuasion or by the instrumental calculation asso- ciated with the materialist logic. The persistence of key actors’ commitments to political reform would therefore be crucial. One would expect individuals who were genuinely persuaded or entrapped by human rights norms to continue supporting reform long after those with a purely instrumental (i.e., materialist) commitment to reform had reverted to the use of repression to preserve the monopoly position of the party-state.

3. On the relationship between causal and constitutive forms of social explanation, see Alexander Wendt, 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 Friedrich Kratochwil and Rey Koslowski, “Understanding Change in International Politics: The Soviet Union’s Demise 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 Action in 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 the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Robert D. English, “Power, Ideas and New Evidence on the Cold War’s End: A Reply to Brooks and Wohlforth,” International Security, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 70–93.

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Further ambiguities arise with evidence that actors were exposed to human 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 by their prior conversion to human rights ideas would be signiªcant but not con- clusive, given the risk of self-serving rhetoric. In contrast, evidence that actors endorsed the logic of human rights ideas or behaved in a manner consistent with those ideas when shielded from public view would suggest persuasion rather than rhetorical entrapment (or instrumental calculation). Before evaluating the preceding hypotheses, it bears noting that the Soviet Union of the 1980s constitutes a “hard test” for the argument that human rights ideas or norms might help bring about political change. The idea that public authorities should seek to protect the civil rights and political freedom 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 Soviet Union (CPSU), which had long relied on a class-based conception of legitimacy to justify its monopoly of political power. The Soviet secret police (KGB) constantly harassed the small number of people who dared to advocate compliance with human rights norms. Many of the dissidents were sentenced to long prison terms. Within the party-state bureaucracy, individuals who demonstrated any sympathy for “bourgeois” ideas of civil or political rights were likely to be shufºed off to an academic post, or even expelled from the party and arrested. The Soviet Union and its allies were slow to ratify international human rights covenants in the 1960s and 1970s and actively resisted the inclusion of human rights norms in the Helsinki Final Act, which was adopted in 1975 by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). In the following years, Communist authorities made only limited and 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 over political space, and most showed little evidence of having internalized human rights ideas in their conception of legitimacy or self-interest. The Soviet Union controlled a powerful army, a vast network of secret police, a functioning (albeit not internationally competitive) economy, and an effective bureaucracy—the same system that had cracked down hard on domestic unrest and had directed the East European governments to do the same in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Such circumstances would certainly not lead one to expect that the general diffusion of human rights ideas would cause the Soviet authorities to rein in their coercive apparatus, embrace democratic standards of legitimacy, 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 Materialist Explanation

Materialist explanations of the demise of one-party Communist rule in the Soviet Union suggest that it was an inevitable but unintended consequence of reforms designed to strengthen the Soviet economy. (To the extent that this motivation is linked to an interest in bolstering the Soviet Union’s position within an evolving international balance of power, it draws on realist theories of international relations.) These explanations typically emphasize Soviet leaders’ efforts to address a looming crisis in economic productivity and technological competitiveness, especially in comparison to the United States. Such arguments are clearly plausible. In contrast to the Soviet Union’s brisk economic expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, the rate of growth slowed considerably 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 some in 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 exacerbated Soviet leaders’ concerns about the competitiveness of a highly centralized command economy.6 As Gorbachev’s reforms freed Soviet society from many long-standing controls, nationalist movements and other independent forces burst onto the scene and wrested political control away from a weakened party and state.7 The focus on material incentives for reform does offer a powerful explanation for the policy preferences of Soviet leaders who had concluded by the early 1980s that the productive efªciency and technological competitiveness of the Soviet economy could be improved only by increasing the accountabil- ity of enterprise managers and by introducing market incentives to systems of production and distribution. When the position of CPSU general secretary opened in 1985, these pressures evidently motivated certain Politburo members who had never favored radical changes in domestic politics or foreign policy (such as Andrei Gromyko and Egor Ligachev, among others) to support Mikhail Gorbachev, who was already known for his desire to ªnd alternatives to the country’s economic inefªciencies and stagnation. Apparently,

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 Cold War: 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-Asia Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 29–45.

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these leaders were interested in improving East-West relations primarily to fa- cilitate economic reform and may have calculated early in Gorbachev’s tenure that limited concessions on human rights could be allowed without jeopardiz- ing the party’s hold on power. Only when it became apparent that more conservative party and bureaucratic forces were frustrating the “acceleration” (uskorenie) of the economy through administrative reforms did these moderate reformers endorse Gorbachev’s proposals for greater social and political openness (glasnost). The materialist argument thus attributes no explanatory power to human rights ideas, a stance that appears justiªed with respect to Gorbachev’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 CPSU rule. In particular, the materialist argument is indeterminate with respect to Gorbachev’s decision to pursue radical political reform in the mid- to late 1980s rather than the alternative policy of marketization-without- democratization that was pursued in China and that was advocated, unsuccessfully, by moderate Soviet ofªcials who were concerned about the survival of the Soviet regime.8 As such, the materialist argument cannot explain why Gorbachev would emphasize social and political reforms over economic reform after he had consolidated effective control of the CPSU Politburo and Central 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 and oil prices on the world market, the Soviet Union’s annual increase in GNP had risen from 2.4 to 3.3 percent, including increases in industrial production from 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 of the Soviet economy and would have enabled Gorbachev to embark on reforms of prices and the services sector. Yet, according to those closest to him, Gorbachev began to speak more about democratization than about economic reform in late 1986.10 In fact, he cited popular frustration as a reason for deepening social and political reform and replaced a party plenum on prices planned for January 1987 with a plenum on democratization. This is hardly

8. A hardline minority within the party leadership opposed marketization, with or without democratization. 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 1986 was 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.

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the behavior of a leader interested in democratization simply as a means to economic reform. Market reform of a socialist economy requires that consumers and enterprise managers have greater access to information and that the latter be accountable to market incentives. However, the implications of controlled political liberalization should not be confused with the majoritarian tendencies of democracy: “The introduction of real democracy into a marketizing country gives power to those most inclined to want to slow the process, and it creates strong incentives for politicians to develop populist, anti-market programs.”11 It is therefore difªcult to reconcile claims that Gorbachev was motivated primarily by the need for economic reform with the fact that he resisted his own government’s plans for price reform while systematically moving from liberalization to democratization in social and political affairs. The argument that Gorbachev sought principally to strengthen the competitive position of the Soviet Union is further undermined by his continued pursuit of political reform after 1987, when it became apparent that glasnost was threatening not only the sources of inefªciency in the Soviet economy but also the hegemonic position of the party itself. If the materialist argument were correct, one would expect Soviet leaders to use repressive measures once their hold on power was seriously endangered. Yet, rather than heed the moderate reformers’ warnings that political reform would undermine the regime, Gorbachev worked systematically after 1987 to marginalize the more cautious reformers. This, too, is hardly compatible with the simple argument that Soviet reform was driven purely by a quest for economic gain. Contemporary claims that a more repressive option was not viable are inconsistent with the perceptions of Soviet policymakers at the time. They also are inconsistent with the fact that the entire Soviet Politburo was aware of an alternative, politically conservative approach to reform. China’s Communist regime had experimented with market-oriented reforms since the late 1970s without undermining the political hegemony of the Communist Party. By the mid-1980s, the economic reforms in China had produced signiªcant im- provements in agricultural and industrial output, promoted the growth of private ªrms, sparked new domestic markets for light industrial goods, and begun to attract increased foreign investment.12 China achieved these gains even

11. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 140. 12. On the success of Chinese reforms evident in the early to mid-1980s, see Dwight Perkins and Shahid 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 Institution Press, 1987); and Bruce L. Reynolds, ed., Chinese Economic Policy: Economic Reform at Midstream (New York: Paragon House, 1988).

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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 economic liberalization does not require or necessarily even promote greater political freedom.14 For all these reasons, materialist explanations cannot account for one of the central determinants of the end of the Cold War—namely, Gorbachev’s systematic dismantling of monopolistic Communist rule in the Soviet Union. Is a constructivist approach more successful in explaining this key part of the empirical record?

The Role of Human Rights Ideas in the Soviet Reform Process

Ideas of human rights have a long pedigree in Enlightenment and liberal thought, but they did not become salient within the countries of the Com- munist bloc, or within East-West relations, until the 1970s. Although the Soviet Union and some of its allies had approved of the 1948 Universal Decla- ration of Human Rights and signed the two international human rights covenants of 1966, these documents were neither well-known to people living under Communist rule nor taken seriously by the Communist authorities. Western governments did not emphasize human rights ideas in the early détente period, and the small human rights groups that existed in Moscow and several other cities were not politically signiªcant. This situation changed dramatically in August 1975 when the Warsaw Pact countries signed the Helsinki Final Act. Although the Soviet government had tried hard to prevent the inclusion of human rights in the Final Act, it ultimately accepted a text containing unprecedented commitments that the protection of human rights was a legitimate part of diplomatic relations among the thirty-ªve states participating in the CSCE. In response, dissidents across the Communist bloc began to organize independent initiatives to mon- itor their governments’ compliance with the new Helsinki norms. These initiatives included the Moscow Helsinki Watch Committee, Czechoslovakia’s

13. On the Chinese regime’s harsh response to popular demands for social and political reform in the 1970s 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 massacre stiºed demands for political reform without arresting the process of economic liberalization.

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Charter 77, and Poland’s Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), a precursor to Solidarity. Before long, the monitoring and publicity efforts of this “Helsinki network” 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 ofªcials questioned the basic features of the Soviet system at the time that Mikhail Gorbachev took power. Most members of the Politburo who elected Gorbachev as CPSU general secretary on 11 March 1985 expected him to revitalize the Soviet system through a program of economic restructuring guided by a reformed party and state, not to oversee the dismantling of the system.16 What they apparently did not recognize was the extent to which Gorbachev and the ofªcials he would gather around him had been affected by exposure to human rights ideas and human rights movements’ critiques of Communist rule.

Receptivity to Human Rights Ideas

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

The Dissidents’ Message Among the supporters of reform, a relatively small group of party leaders and institutchiki had been affected by the message and persistence of human rights campaigners across the bloc and were thus inclined to restructure the Soviet Union’s social and political order as well as its economy. This openness to dissident thinking resulted partly from the fact that Gorbachev’s generation had come of political age during the tumultuous period from Khrushchev’s de- nunciation of Stalin’s crimes in 1956 to the crackdown on independent voices in the USSR following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.17 Although

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

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few members of the “thaw generation” rejected the party and became dissidents or human rights campaigners even after 1968, ofªcial repression of independent initiatives did not shield party elites from the dissidents’ message. Through seizures and informers, the secret police kept the party leadership abreast of samizdat publishing and aware of the ease with which such publications circulated through their societies. Even if one assumes that most Soviet ofªcials cared only about advancing within the CPSU, some were affected by the dissidents’ message or by their own participation in the repression of dissent. The latter group included Gorbachev, whose study of law at the presti- gious Moscow University set him apart from most senior Soviet ofªcials, who were trained at engineering or managerial institutes. While rising through the ranks of the CPSU in the 1960s, Gorbachev remained in contact with his law school friend Zdenèk Mlynár, who in 1968 joined reformist circles within the Czechoslovak Communist Party. During a visit to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1967, Mlynár stayed with the Gorbachevs in Stavropol, and the two men evidently discussed reformist ideas then circulating in Prague. Pre- sumably, Gorbachev’s legal education made him more open than many of his colleagues were to debates and discussion about the rule of law and limitations on state power. Gorbachev claims in his memoirs that when the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia provoked a few small protests in the USSR, he was troubled by the forceful crackdown on dissent: “I had qualms of conscience about the cruel and undeserved punishment meted out” to critics of the regime, he writes, and began to ponder “the underlying causes of many grievous phe- nomena in our domestic and foreign policies.”18 Gorbachev’s questioning of political repression throughout the bloc could only have been reinforced when he learned that Mlynár had helped found Charter 77 and had openly criticized the denial of human rights in Czechoslovakia. He was also apparently inºuenced by the strong support that Charter 77 and other East-bloc human rights movements received from Italian Communist party leader Enrico Berlinguer. Speaking at Berlinguer’s funeral in June 1984, Gorbachev freely confessed: “Dear Enrico, we never will forget your advice about the necessity of democratizing our country.”19 Six months later, at a conference in Moscow on ideological work, Gorbachev delivered a major speech that, while framed in terms of perfecting socialism, introduced nearly all of the key themes that he developed during his later reforms: acceleration, decentraliza- tion, glasnost, equality before the law, perestroika, democratization, and the

18. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 83. 19. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 74.

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priority of the “human factor.” The fact that he delivered the speech despite receiving a last-minute cautionary message from CPSU General Secretary Konstantin 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 exposure to the human rights movement. Among these was Aleksandr Yakovlev, whose criticisms of Russian nationalism in the early 1970s had cost him his job as acting 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 independent and samizdat materials on human rights conditions in the Soviet Union.21 In 1983, Gorbachev used his inºuence to bring Yakovlev back from Ottawa to direct the inºuential Institute of World Economy and Interna- tional Relations. By all indications dissident materials, including those of the Helsinki network, were read and discussed quite openly at several of the top policy- oriented research institutes in Moscow. As a result, says Georgii Arbatov, the founding 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 International Department until Gorbachev appointed him a senior adviser, “Gorbachev’s preparation for a break with the primitive, falsiªed, ofªcial Party version of Soviet history was his reading of samizdat and tamizdat literature as well as re- stricted ‘Progress’ publications for the elite.”23 Reºecting on his own experience, Chernyaev claims that dissident literature seized him “by the throat.”24 When Gorbachev was elected CPSU general secretary in 1985, he appointed many of these individuals to inºuential positions in government and the media. He also rehabilitated “semi-dissidents” like Len Karpinskii and

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 on Communism, see Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, eds., Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. 33–75; Alexander Yakovlev, The Fate 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.

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Roy Medvedev, who had developed extensive contacts with independent activists after being expelled from the party for their unconventional thinking during the early Brezhnev era.25 What was signiªcant about all these moves was not Gorbachev’s attempt to establish his own power base within the regime but that he did so by empowering or rehabilitating individuals with such heterodox ideas.26 For other state and party ofªcials, it was the experience of direct participation in the repression of dissent that caused them to question the status quo.27 For example, a KGB agent assigned to eavesdrop on Soviet human rights groups concluded privately that the dissidents were telling the truth: “The chaos and ªlth; the fact that we put people in jail who only want good for this country—it was all true!”28 Before the agent was arrested himself, he warned dissidents Yurii Orlov, Aleksandr Podrabinek, and Anatolii Shcharansky that the KGB was planning a wave of searches and arrests, including at least a dozen targeted just at Podrabinek and his family. Nonethe- less, says Karpinskii, most of those who “wanted a more efªcient and humane system...knewthey had to wait until their time came, remain in the apparatus, develop their ideas, seek out like-minded people, and be ready when their hour struck.”29 One of the most important of these was Eduard Shevardnadze, who claims 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 political 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 his memoirs. 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 outlook: “This struggle, along with my knowledge of the true state of affairs in

25. Cohen and Vanden Heuvel, eds., Voices of Glasnost, p. 294. See also Roy Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa, 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, see Brown, 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 seriously enough to stop. It is beyond the scope of this essay to determine why some individuals do so and others 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.

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our country, has led me to conclude that the root of existing evils is not the individual people, but in the system. And if some people seethe with hatred for the 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 Brezhnev regime despite its repression of dissent was a strong motivation to work for reform 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 been silent. Unlike people like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Roy Medvedev, we did not openly or actively ªght against what was happening in our country. Therefore, we—and I include myself—must repent for our responsibility.31 Thus, although many of Gorbachev’s initial supporters were interested solely in economic reform, some were determined to act on what they had long been hearing from the dissidents—that “the country’s economic malaise was intrinsically linked to a deeper moral, social and cultural crisis.”32 In the winter of 1984, a full year before Gorbachev became general secretary, Shevardnadze reportedly told him: “Everything’s rotten. It has to be changed.”33 Such comments suggest that by the mid-1980s support was growing within the CPSU for political reforms “much more radical than the Soviet political establishment realized.”34 Even those within the party leadership who were not sympathetic to the human rights critique of Communist rule could not deny the abundant evidence of popular sympathy for human rights movements across the Commu- nist bloc. On May Day 1985, three-and-a-half years after Poland’s declaration of martial law, ªfteen thousand pro-Solidarity demonstrators ªlled the streets of Warsaw.35 In Czechoslovakia, the Interior Ministry claimed that up to two million people might have signed the Charter 77 human rights manifesto if they had not been afraid.36 Within the Soviet Union, the persistence of inde-

30. Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, trans. by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: 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 of the 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.

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pendent initiatives for human rights and national self-determination, despite the KGB’s massive efforts at repression, were testament to the party’s illegiti- macy. Soviet Politburo members who were otherwise not inclined to support Gorbachev’s initiatives understood the signiªcance of his argument that if political reforms had been initiated earlier in Poland, “there would have been no 1980”—an argument that underscored the necessity of bold reforms in the Soviet Union.37

The Soviet Union as a “European” State The new thinking about human rights was closely linked to Gorbachev’s conception of Europe, a conception that was far less instrumental than the ideas that guided Brezhnev and his Politburo colleagues when they launched the CSCE. When Gorbachev and his advisers were considering alternatives to the centralization and repressiveness of the status quo, they saw in Western Eu- rope not only the resources necessary to modernize the Soviet economy but also inspiration for the type of democratic socialism they hoped to achieve within the Soviet Union and a shared cultural heritage denied by conservative Russophiles and Communists alike.38 “Europe for Gorbachev was something that 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 early in his rule: “Reºecting on the goals to set for our new foreign policy, I found it increasingly difªcult to see the multicolored patchwork of Europe’s political map as I used to see it before. I was thinking about the common roots of this multiform and yet fundamentally indivisible European civilization...”40 Although the Soviet Union did not belong to the Council of Europe or the European Community (EC), Gorbachev and his colleagues were well aware of the centrality of human rights norms in both organizations. The Council of

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 Declassiªed Documents 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 as Tannenwald, ed., “Understanding the End of the Cold War”), p. 235. 40. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 428.

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Europe’s rigorous human rights regime, including a supranational court, had been functioning since the early 1950s. During the CSCE negotiations in the early 1970s, it was the EC that overcame strong Soviet resistance to the inclusion of human rights in the Helsinki Final Act.41 In the 1973 Copenhagen Declaration, 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 a commitment to overcome the existing political and geostrategic division of Europe.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 with the ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. ...European culture, which has many faces, yet forms a single entity.”43 This complex interest in rapprochement with Europe reinforced Gorbachev’s motivation to expand human 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 was not simply the geographic reach of the CSCE that was signiªcant. By the mid-1980s, the CSCE had become synonymous with the idea that European unity could not be separated from respect for human rights. Gorbachev apparently recognized as much, saying that he was attracted to “the potential opportunities for a pan-European policy which lay in the ‘spirit of Helsinki,’ a unique achievement in itself.”44 In July 1985, soon after Shevardnadze was appointed foreign minister, he traveled to Helsinki to attend the CSCE’s commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Final Act. Although Shevardnadze was too new on the job to launch any initiatives, he listened to the litany of reciprocal criticisms and grew concerned that the Helsinki process was “running down.” Back in Mos- cow, he and Gorbachev deliberated on how to “breathe life” into the CSCE and thus advance the Soviet Union’s rapprochement with the rest of Europe.45 This desire for greater contact with Europe and the reinvigoration of the CSCE was reºected ªrst in new public rhetoric. Gorbachev writes in his memoirs that at a press conference in Paris in October 1985 during his ªrst foreign visit as CPSU general secretary, he tried “to drive home to the

41. On the EC’s struggle with the USSR over the content of the Helsinki Final Act, see Thomas, The Helsinki Effect, chs. 1–2. 42. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 112. 43. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 195. 44. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 429. 45. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 112.

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French—and to others as well—that compliance with the Final Act would improve the climate in Europe and dispel the clouds.” In response to a question, he repeated a view that he had ªrst expressed to the British Parliament less than a year earlier: “Europe is our common home.”46 The majority of Gorbachev’s meetings with foreign heads-of-state in 1987 and 1988 were with West Europeans.47 These were more than just opportunities for new political initiatives; they were also opportunities for learn- ing. Gorbachev held numerous long conversations about the meaning of socialism and democracy with former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, French President François Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and especially Spanish Premier Felipe González, whom he described as “a true democrat.”48 As a result of these conversations, as well as his own experiences within the Soviet Union, Gorbachev “increasingly came to believe...that West European ‘democratic socialists’—and, for that matter, liberals—had done a far superior job of putting into practice the ideals of socialism than had his Soviet predecessors.”49 Gorbachev also set out to persuade those within the Soviet leadership and bureaucracy who did not share his identiªcation with Europe and acceptance of human rights norms. During an address to the staff of the Soviet Foreign Ministry on 23 May 1986, he speciªcally argued that Europe should not be seen “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 human rights....Butwould there even have been a revolution if such rights had been observed in the old society? We need to reject decisively this outdated approach to the problem . . . and view it more broadly.51

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

46. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 428. 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.

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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 in Moscow. 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. When Gorbachev ªrst took ofªce, he believed that the Soviet Union needed to be modernized within the framework of the Communist system. According to Chernyaev, when Gorbachev began to speak about the need to “work in democratic conditions,” he understood democracy as an instrument that “the Party could employ in restructuring society. But not yet as an underlying principle of the very existence of society, not yet as a universal human value.”54 Over time, though, Gorbachev’s “mind was undergoing a sweeping de-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 ideas and norms had persuaded Gorbachev and a number of others within the Soviet elite to pursue a program of political reform that was more extensive than the moderate economic reformers considered prudent.

The Implementation of Human Rights Ideas

How, then, did the advocates of political reform gain cooperation from others within the Soviet elite, even when such reform threatened to undermine the Communist system? Part of the answer to this question is rhetorical entrapment. Since 1975, the Soviet leadership had portrayed the Helsinki Final Act as a major accomplishment of Soviet foreign policy. Moscow’s rhetorical support of the Helsinki norms was well established. A tacit alliance thus developed between political reformers around Gorbachev, human rights activists across the Soviet bloc, and Western critics, who together used Helsinki human rights norms to persuade moderate Communists, whose main concern was economic reform, to support the cause of social and political liberalization. These same activists, as well as nationalists in several of the non-Russian republics, then used the Soviet government’s commitment to human rights ideas as an opportunity to mobilize for ever more radical reforms. As discussed above, the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev as CPSU general secretary in February 1985 reºected strong but not unanimous support in the

53. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, p. 105. 54. Ibid., p. 95. 55. Ibid., p. 67.

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Politburo and Central Committee for reforms to revitalize the Soviet economy. This shaky pro-reform consensus did not extend, however, to transforming the social and political order of the Soviet Union or its East European neighbors. Even among those in the leadership who believed that the CPSU should allow greater space for independent voices and interests, few favored the type of political liberalization generally equated with “human rights.”56 Hence, before Gorbachev and his inner circle could implement even limited political reforms, they had to overcome strong resistance from Communist party conservatives and the coercive apparatus of the state. Soon after Gorbachev took ofªce, he assigned two reform-minded advisers to draft a program for the Central Committee plenum in April. Upon reading their proposal, however, he crossed out all references to political reform, explaining: “That’s for later....First we’ll have to maneuver.”57 As expected, party conservatives strongly contested ideological reformulations that Gorbachev and his allies proposed in late 1985 for the upcoming 27th Party Congress. It is thus hardly surprising that during Gorbachev’s ªrst year in ofªce, independent organizations remained illegal, dissidents were still arrested, applications for emigration were denied, and religious believers were harassed. On the other hand, dissidents and human rights campaigners from the late 1970s reemerged and regrouped during this period. By linking their cause to the trans-European CSCE that Gorbachev’s advisers valued so highly and by refusing to accept limited reforms, they greatly extended the bounds of political debate and social mobilization within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The International Normative Environment By this time, the international normative environment had made it almost impossible for the Soviet Union to improve its relations with the West without ªrst improving its human rights record. The European Community’s commitment to linking trans-European rapprochement to respect for human rights had not weakened since the negotiation of the Helsinki Final Act in the early 1970s, while the U.S. government’s commitment was now far stronger than it had been in those years, thanks to the lobbying successes of “Helsinki network” activists in New York and Washington. Human rights activists across the Communist bloc were also skilled at exploiting the CSCE’s busy schedule of diplomatic meetings, as well as other international forums, to en-

56. Ibid., p. 71. 57. Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 57.

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sure that any attempt to create a Potemkin village of superªcial reforms would be exposed at home and abroad. Respect for human rights was thus a legitimate and irrevocable part of the diplomatic agenda among CSCE states by the mid-1980s. For example, as CSCE diplomats gathered to observe the Final Act’s tenth anniversary, the Solidarity-afªliated Helsinki Committee in Poland declared: “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 the struggle for human rights. They bring an awareness of citizens’ rights to the everyday confrontations with the government.”58 Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 announced: “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 in Budapest 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 on political 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 stronger measures to protect non-governmental monitoring of compliance with Hel- sinki norms.61 Two months later, at the CSCE’s tenth anniversary meeting in Helsinki, Secretary of State George Shultz challenged the new government in Moscow: “My country and most other countries represented . . . believe that the truest tests of political intentions are actual steps to improve co-operation among States, to enhance contacts among people and to strengthen respect for individual rights.”62 Similar calls for expanded protections of human rights were heard at the Budapest Cultural Forum and at the CSCE Meeting on Human Contacts, held in Bern, Switzerland the following spring.63 Mean-

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 Soviet Union: 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 Rights Experts 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).

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while, editorial writers in Western newspapers continued to insist on linkage between implementation of the CSCE’s human rights norms and improved East-West relations in other issue areas.64 Police interference with the dissident symposium in Budapest also attracted widespread criticism in the international press.65 For the reasons discussed earlier, Gorbachev was personally sympathetic to some of these critiques of the Soviet record. Just weeks after his Paris declaration that “Europe is our common home,” he told U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz that he was willing to discuss human rights at the upcoming Soviet-American summit in Geneva.66 At that meeting, he recalls, “I myself spent time trying to fend off accusations of human rights abuses, even though I 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 not improve without human rights reforms in the Soviet Union, including freedom of emigration and the release of Andrei Sakharov from internal exile. Se- nior foreign policy advisor Anatolii Chernyaev recalls that Gorbachev’s meeting 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 secure economic resources and by others as an alternative to cultural isolation could be built only on concrete steps to comply with human rights norms, including those in the Helsinki Final Act. The reformers’ conclusion that the continued denial of basic human rights was both morally unacceptable and politically unsustainable thus coincided with a broader recognition among party leaders that rapprochement with Western Europe required greater respect for human rights and self-determination in Eastern Europe. In this environment, the dissidents’ critiques could neither be ignored nor openly challenged. The moderate reformers were trapped by their own rhetorical commitment to human rights. The 27th Party Congress in early 1986 approved a decision to replace the Soviet Union’s ideological commitment to class struggle, which had long been invoked to justify repression at home and in allied states, with a new doctrine

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 Scribner and Sons, 1993), pp. 589–594. 67. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 406. 68. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, p. 58.

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emphasizing the priority of “universal human values,” including human rights and self-determination. Speaking to a Politburo meeting in mid-summer 1986, Gorbachev explained:

A vital component of perestroika is democratization. We are giving real rights to people. But who is going to use them? Are there people capable and bold enough for 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 herded into it. And the system was always the highest priority! ...It’snosintorevisit the system’s fundamentals again. ...Don’tbeafraid of democracy, of questions, problems, discussions on any level, from the Politburo to the smallest collectives and the family.69

Later that summer, he added, “Up till now we have been talking about democracy, now it’s time to implement it and respect it. Those who try to break people, 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 the party-state. Though limited at ªrst to greater press freedoms and tolerance of “non-threatening group activity,” such steps represented a radical step into the political unknown that would be hard to imagine if Gorbachev and his close allies had not already been affected by human rights ideas and shielded by human rights norms.71 As shown below in more detail, they used the idea of a “common European home” and Western pressures for Helsinki compliance to justify the partial lifting of repression that they favored but that conservatives opposed. Shevardnadze later claimed: “It was clear to me that both the changes in Eastern Europe and the prospects for building a united continent without blocs...would directly reverberate in domestic walls and cause cracks.”72 The Vienna phase of the CSCE that opened in the autumn of 1986 reafªrmed the international normative preconditions for improved East-West relations, empowering reformers in Moscow and encouraging local movements for political change across the Communist bloc. By the time the Vienna phase ended in early 1989, the CSCE had “shaken the Iron Curtain,” Shevardnadze argues.73 At the preparatory talks, held on 23 September–

69. Ibid., p. 67. 70. Ibid., p. 69. 71. See Hough, Democratization and Revolution, ch. 5. 72. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 118. 73. Vojtech Mastny, ed., The Helsinki Process and the Reintegration of Europe, 1986–1991 (London: Pinter, 1992), p. 18.

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6 October 1986, Western and neutral delegations made clear that any major improvement of relations would require concrete progress on human rights in the East. Meanwhile, nationalist and human rights activists in the non- Russian republics of the Soviet Union—many of whom had been active in the Helsinki-focused movements of the late 1970s—began to reassert their claims. In Latvia, activists created the group Helsinki ’86 to organize protests against the Soviet occupation and violations of human rights.74 Zviad Gamsakhurdia, 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 impress those within Gorbachev’s governing coalition who viewed the Helsinki process in terms of its potential impact on domestic economic reform. For Shevardnadze and other Soviet reformers, however, the Vienna meeting of- fered a crucial opportunity to advance their political agenda. As Shevardnadze later recalled: “I was convinced that the conference was essential to show the country and the world how far we intended to go and, beyond that, to provide an impetus for democratization and the perestroika of legislation in everything related to human affairs.”75 At Gorbachev’s behest, the Politburo began to discuss the release of large numbers of political prisoners—far more than the small numbers proposed by George Shultz before the October 1986 Reykjavik summit.76 These proposals provoked a stormy reaction from conservatives who preferred to continue di- vorcing rhetoric from action: “It is one thing to make declarations, but let Andrei Sakharov and other prisoners of conscience serve out their sentences,” they argued.77 Gorbachev disagreed and told the Politburo: “We need to work out a conception of human rights, both at home and abroad, and to put an end to the routine. It only produces dissidents.”78 At another Politburo meeting 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 informed by the KGB that Soviet dissidents were beginning to “connect their statements” to the political changes of perestroika, Gorbachev decided to release

74. “Documents: Helsinki ‘86 Group,” Voice of Solidarity, Nos. 131–132 (July/August 1987), pp. 31– 33. 75. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 86. 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. 77. Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, p. 86. 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.

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80 of the 240 political prisoners then being held, and to free 120 more at a later date.80 In so doing, he both prepared to answer Western demands on human rights and expanded the domestic constituency that was pressuring for further reforms. Just over a month later, Shevardnadze surprised the diplomats assembled for the opening session in Vienna by proposing that a special CSCE conference on humanitarian concerns be held in Moscow. No matter how carefully prepared this initiative was within the Politburo, it was truly radical in the CSCE context. In the past, Soviet delegations had always opposed any discussion of human rights. The Vienna newspaper Die Presse likened Shevardnadze’s proposal to the convocation of a meeting of chickens in a fox den.81 Even as Gorbachev and Shevardnadze praised the CSCE as a means to create a “common European home” in which shared norms would replace mutual hostility, Western governments and human rights groups insisted on more and more concrete evidence of political reform.

Andrei Sakharov and the Neformaly On 1 December 1986, Gorbachev informed the Politburo of his intention to release physicist Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s most famous political prisoner, from internal exile in Gorky.82 Two weeks later, in a widely publi- cized move, Gorbachev personally telephoned Sakharov and invited him to return to Moscow. Jerry Hough described the implications of this event: “Be- cause Sakharov had said and written many things that seemed deliberately designed to provoke arrest, his release implied there would be few types of political statements that would lead to arrest in the future, at least aside from those promoting republican separatism in the USSR.”83 As Gorbachev must have expected, Sakharov began to campaign publicly for the release of more dissidents as soon as he returned to Moscow, and he openly criticized the limitations 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, and they also subsequently ceased jamming the Voice of America and Deutsche Welle.84 Moreover, the Soviet government began to show unprecedented

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 of the Cold War,” pp. 196–197. 83. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 144. 84. Matlock, Autopsy of an Empire, p. 106.

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ºexibility in its willingness to accept international monitoring of compliance with human rights norms. Soviet ofªcials started by agreeing to host foreign judges, prosecutors, and psychiatrists who wanted to focus on human rights.85 In mid-1987 the Soviet delegation at Vienna agreed that the CSCE should establish a new “human dimension mechanism” by which participating states could request information and bilateral consultations on apparent violations of human rights. As a last resort, states could convene a special CSCE meeting to address their concerns.86 In September, the Soviet ambassador to the CSCE, Yurii Kashlev, announced 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 interfering in the USSR’s internal affairs. During a weeklong visit in January 1988, the IHFHR delegation met with dozens of human rights and opposition activists, as well as senior Soviet ofªcials, to press for even greater openness.88 After the meetings, the Soviet authorities announced the creation of a new ofªcial Commission on Humanitarian Affairs and International Cooperation to oversee Soviet implementation of CSCE norms. Western governments also pressed at the Vienna conference and in bilateral forums for the Soviet Union to release all its political prisoners. Fedor Burlatskii, the chairman of the new Commission on Humanitarian Affairs, echoed their call. In 1987 and 1988, more than six hundred political prisoners were freed. Although the releases were conditional on signing a pledge not to participate in political activity, the mere admission that Soviet jails actually held “political prisoners” further undermined the regime. Most of the released prisoners quickly resumed their political activities, and the publication of samizdat increased still further. By late 1988, the number of political prisoners had fallen to unprecedented low levels—as few as 11, according to Soviet ofªcials, and 140, according to Amnesty International.89 In the meantime, Soviet diplomats in Vienna resumed their effort to gain Western acceptance of Shevardnadze’s earlier offer to host a CSCE conference

85. David K. Shipler, “Dateline USSR: On the Human Rights Track,” Foreign Policy, No. 75 (Summer 1989), 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 September 1987, 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.

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in Moscow, arguing that the prospect of such a conference was needed to support 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 of joint U.S.-Soviet working groups to address Soviet human rights abuses.90 In October 1988 the Moscow Television Service broadcast excerpts from a speech Ronald Reagan delivered to Soviet dissidents during a summit in Moscow ªve months earlier. The broadcast was followed by an unprecedented commentary that acknowledged human rights problems in the Soviet Union and implicitly accepted an American president’s legitimate interest in such issues.91 Bit by bit, the regime was losing both the means and the justiªcation for maintaining its monopoly hold on power. Gorbachev’s reformist agenda and the linkage to international norms created space for the mobilization of independent media and political movements that overwhelmed the Politburo’s original intentions. The organiza- tional and philosophical descendants of the Helsinki movement reemerged in Moscow and Leningrad as independent associations and quasi-political parties. Veteran human rights activists in Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine established new Helsinki committees to press for the release of additional political prisoners 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 the past, but also because it plugged the new movement into an international diplomatic and juridical process.” In January 1988, the three groups formed an International Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, whose program of national liberation helped give birth the following year to parties seeking national independence.92 Veteran human rights activists also played a leading role in the establishment of samizdat newspapers and weekly discussion groups that agitated for more fundamental reforms. In July 1987, former human rights activists and editors of samizdat journals such as Glasnost and Referendum created the Mos- cow Press Club-Glasnost to promote discussion of human rights and political topics. Another dissident, Aleksandr Podrabinek, established Express Chroni- cle, which followed the 1970s-era underground journal Chronicle of Current Events as an independent source of reports on human rights violations across the Soviet Union and as a means for dissidents and radical reformers to express their views. By April 1988, copies were being distributed in ªfty-three

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.

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towns beyond Moscow. In eleven of them, the paper was retyped and distributed to additional destinations.93 Meanwhile thousands of new activists joined or created informal groups—neformaly—whose numbers increased from approximately one hundred at the time of Sakharov’s release to a few thousand by September 1987, and perhaps as many as 35,000 by the late 1980s.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 Democratic Union, was created in May 1988 by the merger of two independent groups, Perestroika ‘88 and the Democracy and Humanism Seminar. Reºecting the inºuence of members once active in the human rights movements of the 1970s, 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, the new party organized public demonstrations in Moscow on 21 August 1988 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and on 10 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 of perestroika, both ideologically and tactically, the Democratic Union was shunned 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 activists in the neformaly and the Democratic Union thus helped push the mobilization for reform beyond what many in the party elite considered desirable.99

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 Context of 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 Michael McFaul 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 Watch Committee, 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.

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The social mobilization and open debate that emerged in 1986–1988, and the conservative reaction that ensued, also appear to have pushed some of Gorbachev’s closest advisers from a reformist to a revolutionary vision of change. As Aleksandr Yakovlev later explained: “At some point in 1987, I personally realized that a society based on violence and fear could not be reformed and that we faced a momentous historical task of dismantling the entire social and political system with all its ideological, economic, and political roots.”100 Gorbachev also appears to have broadened the limited commitment to “democratization” he ªrst enunciated in 1986. Chernyaev later wrote: “Gorbachev was talking about it ªrst in terms of the democratization of socialism, 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 we understand it today is above all the idea of freedom.”102 The neformaly and independent media unleashed by Gorbachev’s policies and pronouncements signiªcantly radicalized the political debate in Moscow, Leningrad, and the outlying republics.103 These developments provoked a crisis in the CPSU, and the outcome of that crisis demonstrates, once again, the indeterminacy of materialist explanations of the demise of Communism. The crisis emerged out of debates between moderate reformers (i.e., those who favored purely economic reform) led by Ligachev and the radical reformers (i.e., those who favored democratic political reforms) led by Yakovlev. On 13 March 1988, a letter condemning radical reform as inimical to socialism and a threat to the USSR was published in a hardline party organ, Sovetskaya Rossiya, while Gorbachev was out of town. Although the letter was signed by Nina Andreeva, a chemistry teacher from Leningrad, its publication was clearly an attempt to curtail further political reforms, which many party members still believed would harm the chances for economic progress. The Andreeva broadside was reinforced by an article in Pravda expressing concern that “the slogans of democratization, glasnost, and increased human rights and freedoms are increasingly being ma-

Hosking, Jonathan Aves, and Peter J. S. Duncan, The Road to Post-Communism: Independent Political Movements 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); and Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

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nipulated by various groups of people who, while passing themselves off as advocates of perestroika, are in fact its vicious opponents.”104 But this short- lived backlash came to an end when Gorbachev returned to Moscow. Rather than 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 himself was not present. This crucial decision to marginalize those who were resisting political reform and who were calling for a narrower focus on economic restructuring can hardly be explained strictly by materialist incentives. Gorbachev’s decision to favor Yakovlev’s direction over that of Ligachev probably sealed the fate of Communist rule in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe. From June 1989 to January 1990, Soviet troops stayed in their 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 On 4 February 1990, more than 100,000 people demonstrated against the Com- munist Party in the streets of Moscow. Three days later, the CPSU renounced its constitutionally-guaranteed “leading role” in society, a change that was implemented the following month. In mid-March, opposition parties won semi- free local elections in Moscow and Leningrad. Meanwhile, protests against Soviet occupation and human rights violations that had begun in Latvia under the auspices of the Helsinki ‘86 movement spread across Lithuania and Estonia as well.106 Gorbachev repeatedly contemplated repressive measures to hold the Soviet Union together, but except for a large-scale incursion into Azerbaijan in January 1990, he ultimately drew back from authorizing deci- sive shows of force.107 Although scholars continue to debate how fully Gorbachev was aware of or involved in the planning for crackdowns by security forces in several of the Soviet republics (Tbilisi in April 1989 and Vilnius

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 the Repercussions 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 Repercussions within 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 Center Press, 1994). 107. Amy Knight, “The KGB, Perestroika, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 67–93.

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and Riga in January 1991), the limited number and limited scope of such op- erations conªrm Gorbachev’s unwillingness to attempt to retain power through force—even though the Chinese Communist Party had done just that in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.108 Conservatives counterattacked with an attempted coup in August 1991 but failed to gain popular or institutional 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 failure of tactical responses to the inefªciencies of central planning and the military and technological prowess of the West. But although it is true that Soviet leaders were concerned about economic productivity and competitiveness, and that they implemented reforms to address these challenges, such arguments cannot explain why Gorbachev opted for radical democratization rather than an authoritarian strategy of economic liberalization and continued political repression. Without such radical political reforms, neither the structural rigidities of the Soviet regime nor the competitive limitations of central planning nor generational changes in the Soviet leadership would have brought about the largely peaceful and rights-protective political transitions of 1989–1991. As Jerry Hough put it, “Mikhail Gorbachev was not riding an uncontrollable tiger.”110 In the end, material pressures are indeterminate, and thus insufªcient, in explaining why Gorbachev decided to pursue radical democratic and rights-protective reforms. In contrast, ideational persuasion and rhetorical entrapment offer powerful explanations of the political decisions that so clearly threatened to undermine Communist rule. The diffusion of human rights ideas and their institutionalization as formal international norms induced key party elites to reject political repression as a legitimate instrument of Soviet policy and to question the monopoly position of the party. These norms changed the beliefs and strategies of CPSU elites, the outlook and organization of independent

108. Although some observers credit this outcome to the Soviet Army’s reluctance to be involved in internal policing, the logic of this essay suggests that Gorbachev’s ideas about human rights and political 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 (Winter 2003), pp. 17–66. 109. John B. Dunlop, “The August 1991 Coup and Its Impact on Soviet Politics,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 94–127. 110. Hough, Democratization and Revolution, p. 490.

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activists who refused to settle for cosmetic reforms, and the political conditions for normalized relations with the West. This combination of persuasion and rhetorical entrapment spurred Soviet leaders to initiate political reforms that, in turn, empowered independent activists who were pressing for ever greater democratization. The resulting interaction of top-down reform and bottom-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 of ideas and norms depends on political agency.111 The initial emergence of human rights ideas within Soviet political discourse was attributable to the efforts of dissidents and independent activists who struggled in the 1970s to hold the Soviet regime accountable, both domestically and internationally, for its violations of international human rights norms, especially those established by the Helsinki Final Act.112 Human rights ideas and norms achieved even greater purchase on the Soviet political system with Gorbachev’s ascen- dance to power in 1985. Both his rhetoric and his policy choices suggest that he was increasingly committed to political reform for its own merits—initially by allowing greater freedoms and space for societal initiative and later by em- barking on a fundamental democratization of Soviet society. If human rights ideas had not been embraced by the highest leader in the USSR, they could not have had a transformative effect on the Soviet system. The policy of glasnost thus appears to have been driven both by an instrumental desire to weaken resistance to economic reform within the bureaucracy and by an intrinsic desire to weaken resistance to democratization within the party leadership. At several points, the weakening of conservative forces by glasnost and by changes in party personnel seems actually to have reinforced Gorbachev’s support for fundamental social and political reforms. His refusal to endorse a series of radical but economically sensible plans for price reform in 1987–1988, at the same time that he implemented ever deeper political reforms (increased freedom of expression and assembly, followed by semi-free elections), suggests that he may even have begun to care more about democracy and human rights than about economic reform.113

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 Kathryn Sikkink, “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.

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Even after Gorbachev took power, however, the impact of human rights ideas was ampliªed by the reemergence and demands of civil society actors who had been dormant since the post-Helsinki mobilizations of the previous decade. Some of these activists were intrinsically committed to human rights ideas, whereas others used the idea as a means to undermine Communist rule. Their critiques of the limits of glasnost and perestroika, including their monitoring of actual human rights conditions within the Soviet Union, were crucial to transforming a controlled program of reform into a recipe for revolution. 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 contemporary challenge of protecting human rights in Chechnya and other parts of the former Soviet Union.115 Gorbachev failed to anchor human rights ideas ªrmly within 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 in the world or marginalized by other international priorities. It is thus not surprising that in the post-Soviet period, perceived security interests and ideolo- gies have often trumped ideas of human rights. This on-going challenge does not, however, detract in any way from the contribution that human rights ideas and norms made to ending the Cold War by undermining one-party Communist rule in the Soviet Union. Although human rights ideas have had some comparable effects in other countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, this does not mean that human rights ideas will always contribute so signiªcantly to the reform or over- throw of repressive regimes.116 Four factors were conducive to the effectiveness of human rights ideas in the Soviet Union of the mid-1980s: the ideas were salient (they were advocated by political actors at home and abroad); legitimate (they were reºected in an international agreement signed by the Soviet Union and its allies); relevant (they concerned the appropriate relationship between state power and individual liberties at a time of growing pressure for reform); and resonant (they ªt with the new leadership’s understanding of the cultural heritage and political destiny of the Soviet Union). Without these

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., ThePowerofHu- man Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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

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