Human rights in the Soviet Union
Human rights in the Soviet Union were promised in print and denied in practice, and the prisoner Sergei Kovalev heard the proof from a prosecutor. Kovalev remembered the famous article 125 of the Constitution, which listed every basic civil and political right. He and other prisoners tried to use it as the legal basis for their complaints of abuse. Kovalev recalled the prosecutor's answer. "The Constitution was written not for you, but for American Negroes, so that they know how happy the lives of Soviet citizens are."
That answer came from a state that was totalitarian from 1927 until 1953 and remained a one-party state until 1990. Free speech was suppressed, dissent was punished, and citizens could not move freely inside the country or leave it.
How did a government that signed international covenants come to treat rights as gifts it could withdraw? What did that mean for a writer, a scientist, a believer, a voter or a farmer? And who dared to say it aloud, and what did it cost them?
In 1948, the Soviet Union and the other countries of the Soviet Bloc abstained from affirming the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They called it "overly juridical" and said it could infringe on national sovereignty. The Declaration describes rights that belong to every person, from life and liberty to food, work and education.
Soviet legal theory turned that idea around. One formulation held that "it is the government who is the beneficiary of human rights which are to be asserted against the individual". The state was treated as the source of rights, so law became an arm of politics. Courts were agencies of the government, and the secret police received wide powers outside the courtroom.
Theorists such as Andrey Vyshinsky dismissed the rule of law, civil liberties, legal protection and guarantees of property as "bourgeois morality". In practice, the government cut all of them back sharply.
The Soviet Union did eventually sign binding human rights documents. It put its name to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, dated 1966. It also signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1973. Few people living under Communist rule knew these texts existed or could get hold of them. The authorities did not take them seriously.
Where this logic led is clearest in the way Soviet law defined a crime.
Martin Latsis, chief of the secret police in Soviet Ukraine, told investigators not to search the file for proof of rebellion. He meant proof that the accused had risen up against the Soviets with arms or words. They should ask instead "to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession". Those answers, he said, would decide the fate of the accused. In his words, "That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror."
Under this approach a crime was any action that could threaten the Soviet state and society, whether or not it broke a written law. A desire to make a profit could be read as counter-revolutionary activity and punished by death. Some Soviet legal scholars went further and said that "criminal repression" could be applied even where there was no guilt.
Between 1928 and 1931, millions of peasants were liquidated and deported. This was carried out within the terms of the Soviet Civil Code.
Public trials, the Moscow Trials among them, did not exist to find out whether a crime had happened. Party authorities had already settled that. The trial was another stage for political agitation and propaganda, meant to instruct the citizens who watched. Defense lawyers had to be party members, and they were expected to take their client's guilt for granted.
Outside the courtroom, the secret police services OGPU and NKVD practiced political repression widely in the 1930s and 1940s. A broad network of informants, some volunteers and some forcibly recruited, reported suspected dissent. In 1935, under Joseph Stalin, the death penalty was extended to adolescents as young as 12 years old.
Marxist class struggle supplied the theory. Words such as "repression" and "terror" were official working terms, because the dictatorship of the proletariat was meant to crush the resistance of other classes. During the Stalinist terror, the government even proclaimed that class struggle sharpens under socialism. The legal home for all this was Article 58 of the code of the RSFSR, with matching articles in the other Soviet republics.
Samizdat was the name for the secret copying and passing on of writing that the government had banned. It grew out of censorship that was pervasive and strictly enforced. Art, literature, education and science all came under ideological scrutiny, because they were supposed to serve the victorious proletariat.
Socialist realism was one product of that demand, an art built to promote socialism and communism. The humanities and social sciences were checked for strict agreement with historical materialism. The natural sciences were meant to rest on dialectical materialism.
Whole fields suffered. During some periods genetics, cybernetics and comparative linguistics were suppressed and condemned as "bourgeois pseudoscience". At one point, Lysenkoism, which many consider a pseudoscience, was favored in agriculture and biology.
In the 1930s and 1940s, many prominent scientists were declared "wreckers" or enemies of the people and sent to prison. Some of them kept working as prisoners in "Sharashkas", research laboratories inside the Gulag labor camp system.
The Soviet Criminal Code covered anyone who tried to say otherwise. Agitation or propaganda meant to weaken Soviet authority, or the circulation of literature that defamed the state and social system, carried 2-5 years in prison. A second offense raised the term to 3-10 years.
The Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed direct universal suffrage with a secret ballot. Communist ideologists called the system a true democracy, in which workers' councils known as "soviets" spoke for the working class. Practice departed from principle. Communist Party organizations selected every candidate, and that did not change until democratization and the March 1989 elections.
The historian Robert Conquest described the electoral system as "a set of phantom institutions and arrangements which put a human face on the hideous realities". His examples included a model constitution adopted in a worst period of terror. He also pointed to elections with one candidate and 99 percent turnout. Finally came "a parliament at which no hand was ever raised in opposition or abstention".
Workers faced the same pattern. They were not allowed to organize free unions, and every existing union was organized and controlled by the state. Political youth organizations such as the Pioneer movement and Komsomol served to enforce Communist Party policy.
Taking part in an unauthorized political organization could mean imprisonment. Organizing inside the camps could bring the death penalty.
Article 154 of the Penal Code of the USSR defined "speculation", the Russian word being спекуляция. Many forms of private trade for profit fell under it. Punishments included fines, imprisonment, confiscation and corrective labor. Personal property was allowed only with limits, and most real property belonged to the State.
On paper, health, housing, education and nutrition were guaranteed through full employment and welfare structures. These guarantees were rarely met. During the Soviet famine of 1932-1933, more than five million people starved to death, and it was only one of several Soviet famines. It was caused primarily by Soviet-mandated collectivization, though natural conditions played a part. Frequent shortages gave rise to a massive second economy in goods and services of every kind.
Religion met a different kind of pressure. The Soviet Union promoted Marxist-Leninist atheism. The regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers and taught atheism in schools. Which faiths were targeted depended on the interests of the State, and most organized religions were never outlawed outright.
Against Orthodox priests and believers, actions included torture, prison camps, labour camps, mental hospitals and execution. Many Orthodox believers, along with people of other faiths, faced psychological punishment and experimentation intended to force them to abandon their convictions. Practicing Orthodox Christians were kept out of prominent careers and out of the party and Komsomol. Seminaries were closed, the church could not publish, and groups such as the Society of the Godless were founded. The Church was given no chance to answer the propaganda in public.
Movement was rationed too. The "propiska", a residential permit and registration system, and internal passports limited where citizens could live. For a long period, peasants held no internal passports and could not move into towns without permission. Many former inmates received "wolf tickets", which allowed them to live no closer than 101 km from city borders. Closed cities and regions near the state border were strictly off limits. An attempt to escape abroad illegally could bring 1-3 years in prison.
The first number of the Chronicle of Current Events circulated in April 1968. The United Nations had declared that year the International Year for Human Rights, twenty years after the Universal Declaration was issued. The Chronicle became the most important samizdat publication of a current of dissent known as the "rights defenders", or pravozashchitniki. It continued for 15 years before it was closed down in 1983.
Organized groups followed. The Action Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR went public in May 1969. It made an appeal to the UN Human Rights Committee. The Committee on Human Rights in the USSR was established in 1970, and a Soviet section of Amnesty International appeared in 1973. The groups wrote appeals, collected signatures for petitions and attended trials.
Harassment, repression and arrest were regular experiences for these activists. In several cases only the public profile of a campaigner such as Andrei Sakharov kept the movement's work from being shut down completely.
The seven Warsaw Pact member countries signed the Helsinki Final Act in August 1975, and its "third basket" included extensive human rights clauses. In 1976-77, Helsinki Watch Groups appeared in the USSR to monitor whether Moscow complied. The Moscow Helsinki Group came first, followed by groups in Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Armenia. They managed to unify different branches of the human rights movement. Similar efforts began in satellite states, such as Charter 77 in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
The authorities harassed and threatened the Helsinki Groups over the next two years. Leading activists were arrested, tried and imprisoned, or pressured into leaving the country. By 1979, every group had ceased to function.
In February 1987, KGB Chairman Victor Chebrikov sent a report to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. It said that 288 people were serving sentences under Articles 70, 190-1 and 142 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. A third of those convicted were being held in psychiatric hospitals. Most were released during the year, spurred on by the death in prison of the veteran dissident Anatoly Marchenko in December 1986.
Release did not mean freedom of speech, and glasnost, the official policy of openness, did not mean it either. In early December 1987, Shevardnadze, Yakovlev and Chebrikov reported on a human rights seminar. It was proposed for Moscow from the 10th to the 14th of December 1987. Former dissidents were organizing it, with guests from abroad. The three officials suggested ways to undermine, restrict and contain it. A similar proposal seven months later drew much the same reaction.
Meanwhile, ethnic minorities, religious groups and entire nations began asserting their own rights. They asked for cultural autonomy and freedom of religion. Led by the Baltic states, some asked for national independence. The period of perestroika, meaning restructuring, ran from April 1985 to December 1991. In its last two and a half years the pace of change quickened.
The Congress of People's Deputies held its second autumn session in 1989, during a nationwide miners' strike. One consequence came in March 1990, when Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution of 1977 was abolished. That article had explicitly established the primacy of the Communist Party within the Soviet State.
The authorities formed OMON units of riot police to handle the growing protests and rallies. Demonstrations in Lithuania, Tbilisi, Baku and Tajikistan were suppressed, and many protesters died. In January 1991, a vast demonstration in Moscow denounced the actions of Gorbachev and his administration.
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Common questions
Did the Soviet Union sign international human rights agreements?
Yes. The Soviet Union and other Soviet Bloc countries abstained from affirming the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It later signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1973, along with the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Few people under Communist rule knew of these documents, and the authorities did not take them seriously.
What was samizdat?
Samizdat was the clandestine copying and distribution of literature that the government had suppressed. It arose because censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced. The Chronicle of Current Events, which began circulating in April 1968, was the human rights movement's most important samizdat publication.
What were the Helsinki Watch Groups?
After the Helsinki Final Act was signed in August 1975, groups emerged in 1976-77 to monitor Soviet compliance with its human rights clauses. The Moscow Helsinki Group came first, followed by groups in Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Armenia. Harassment, arrests and pressure to leave the country meant that by 1979 all of them had stopped functioning.
What did the Soviet Union mean by speculation?
Speculation was the label for many forms of private trade carried out to make a profit. Article 154 of the Penal Code of the USSR defined it as a criminal offense. Punishments included fines, imprisonment, confiscation and corrective labor.
What changed for human rights during perestroika?
Between April 1985 and December 1991, most prisoners convicted under three articles of the RSFSR Criminal Code were released in 1987. Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which established the primacy of the Communist Party, was abolished in March 1990. Even so, officials tried to contain independent events such as a human rights seminar planned for Moscow in December 1987.
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