Snyder on Adamishin and Schifter, 'Human Rights, Perestroika, and the End of the Cold War'

H-Human-Rights Snyder on Adamishin and Schifter, 'Human Rights, Perestroika, and the End of the Cold War'

Review published on Friday, March 12, 2010

Anatoly L. Adamishin, Richard Schifter. Human Rights, Perestroika, and the End of the Cold War. Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2009. 356 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-60127-040-5.

Reviewed by Sarah Snyder (Department of History, Yale University) Published on H-Human-Rights (March, 2010) Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root

Human Rights and the End of the Cold War: The View from Moscow and Washington

Human Rights, Perestroika, and the End of the Cold War is a memoir written by Anatoly L. Adamishin and Richard Schifter, the two officials most responsible for Soviet-American negotiations over human rights in the late 1980s. Each chapter is divided into two parts, enabling Adamishin and Schifter to present their own recollections and analysis of the years and issues under discussion. Their account is an important resource, in particular, given the obstacles to gaining access to recent diplomatic records for either country. It will therefore be of considerable value to scholars working in a range of fields, especially those studying human rights, Soviet-American relations, and the end of the Cold War; the work also includes sufficient historical background and context to be of use even to nonspecialists.

The authors characterize their work as a joint memoir, which brings to mind another successful attempt at the genre. But, as opposed to A World Transformed (1998), an account by George H. W. Bush and his National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft of their work together in shaping U.S. diplomacy, Schifter and Adamishin were ostensibly adversaries. The former was the American assistant secretary of state for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs and the latter a deputy foreign minister in the Soviet Union; each negotiated on behalf of a global superpower locked in the military, ideological, economic, and political conflict known as the Cold War. Their book is a testament to the significant changes brought by the end of the Cold War and the personal friendship that developed between these two diplomats.

Human Rights, Perestroika, and the End of the Cold Warcontributes to a number of ongoing scholarly debates. First, Adamishin offers a highly laudatory portrayal of Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and emphasizes the extent to which Gorbachev was essential to modifying Soviet policy, portraying him as driving the reform agenda on such issues as emigration. In the debate over the nature of Gorbachev’s reforms, Adamishin characterizes him as a liberal, asserting that Gorbachev declared in an October 1986 politburo meeting, “It is necessary to free political prisoners from jails. They are there for saying the words that I, as the Secretary General, am saying today” (p. 116). Second, Schifter attributes considerable significance to the unintended consequences of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) meetings that followed in contributing to later reform of the Soviet system. In addition, whereas other participants and observers have criticized the approach of Arthur J. Goldberg, U.S. ambassador to the CSCE

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Snyder on Adamishin and Schifter, 'Human Rights, Perestroika, and the End of the Cold War'. H-Human- Rights. 01-10-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6148/reviews/7291/snyder-adamishin-and-schifter-human-rights-perestroika-and-end-cold-war Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Human-Rights

Belgrade Follow-up Meeting (1977-78), Schifter portrays his tenure as a positive development for Helsinki implementation. Fourth, Adamishin describes the evolution of official Soviet attitudes toward human rights and underscores the obstacles to any meaningful human rights dialogue before Gorbachev came to power, writing, “One cannot call mutual reproaches and accusations a dialogue” (p. 43). Furthermore, Adamishin describes how difficult it was to implement changes in Soviet human rights practices: “The Americans usually presented their requests to our ministry, while we, even considering many of them fair, had difficulty obtaining positive answers from our domestic agencies. Those matters were the responsibility of domestic agencies, but the agencies would forward their answers--often unpalatable ones--to us to deliver to foreign representatives. In short, to be involved in human rights issues meant, almost automatically, to be involved in constant disputes with other Soviet government agencies, with little capability to influence them” (p. 94). Fifth, both Schifter and Adamishin highlight the importance of the progress made in Austria and elsewhere over the course of the Vienna CSCE Review Meeting, held from 1986 to 1989, which they characterize as marking the end of the Cold War (pp. 242-243).

Most significantly, the two emphasize the extent to which key Soviet authorities saw human rights reform as in their self-interest by the late 1980s; as Schifter writes, “these Soviet leaders had come to share our concerns about their country’s totalitarian system and favored liberalization for the sake of their own people and not just to accommodate the United States” (p. 132). In mid-1987, Schifter had wanted to press the Soviets further, believing the Soviets would take steps if they saw them as “improving their standing in the West” and “to their material advantage” (pp. 136-137). Adamishin’s chapters make clear that “some people believed that moving forward in the field of human rights was not a concession to the West but an indispensable prerequisite for the country’s development, which needed long-overdue democratic reforms” (p. 153).

Schifter and Adamishin argue that they were able to make significant progress in bilateral human rights negotiations because their superiors wanted the issue to cease to be an obstacle to productive Soviet-American relations. Specifically, the authors detail the contributions of President Ronald Reagan, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Secretary of State George Shultz, and Gorbachev. Gorbachev and Shultz both contributed forewords to the book. The most intensive period of Adamishin and Schifter’s discussions took place between April 1987 and January 1989; in the first half of 1988, they met every six weeks (pp. 144, 149). In Shultz’s view, their dialogue “produced concrete results: an end to abuse of psychiatry, the release of political prisoners, the repeal of laws restricting freedom of expression, an end to the repression of religion, and a fundamental shift in the laws and regulations that governed emigration” (p. xiv).

Given the nature of the work, this reviewer was interested to learn more about Schifter’s personal background, particularly what led to his involvement in human rights work and how his experience of the Holocaust, in which he lost both his parents, shaped his worldview. Adamishin was more introspective about the course that brought him to such a historical juncture, as such, his contributions are also useful to understanding the dynamics of Soviet officialdom and particularly Andrei Gromyko’s Foreign Ministry. This account offers a unique perspective on what Adamishin and Schifter characterize as the centrality of human rights reform to the end of the Cold War.

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Citation: Sarah Snyder. Review of Adamishin, Anatoly L.; Schifter, Richard,Human Rights, Perestroika, and the End of the Cold War. H-Human-Rights, H-Net Reviews. March, 2010.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25909

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.