In practice, the Soviet government significantly curbed the very powerful rule of law, civil liberties, protection of law and guarantees of property,[6][7] which were considered examples of "bourgeois morality" by Soviet legal theorists such as Andrey Vyshinsky.[8] The Soviet Union signed legally-binding human rights documents, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1973, but they were neither widely known or accessible to people living under Communist rule, nor were they taken seriously by the Communist authorities.[9]:117 Human rights activists in the Soviet Union were regularly subjected to harassment, repressions and arrests.
The USSR and other countries in the Soviet Bloc had abstained from affirming the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), saying that it was "overly juridical" and potentially infringed on national sovereignty.[14]:167–169 The Soviet Union later signed legally-binding human rights documents, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1973 (and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), but they were neither widely known or accessible to people living under Communist rule, nor were they taken seriously by the Communist authorities.[9]:117Sergei Kovalev recalled "the famous article 125 of the Constitution which enumerated all basic civil and political rights" in the Soviet Union. But when he and other prisoners attempted to use this as a legal basis for their abuse complaints, their prosecutor's argument was that "the Constitution was written not for you, but for American Negroes, so that they know how happy the lives of Soviet citizens are".[15]
Crime was determined not as the infraction of law, instead, it was determined as any action which could threaten the Soviet state and society. For example, a desire to make a profit could be interpreted as a counter-revolutionary activity punishable by death.[13]The liquidation and deportation of millions of peasants in 1928–31 was carried out within the terms of the Soviet Civil Code.[13] Some Soviet legal scholars even said that "criminal repression" may be applied in the absence of guilt.[13]Martin Latsis, chief of Soviet Ukraine's secret police explained: "Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror."[16]
The purpose of public trials was "not to demonstrate the existence or absence of a crime – that was predetermined by the appropriate party authorities– but to provide yet another forum for political agitation and propaganda for the instruction of the citizenry (see Moscow Trials for example). Defense lawyers, who had to be party members, were required to take their client's guilt for granted..."[13]
In the 1930s and 1940s, political repression was practiced by the Soviet secret police services, OGPU and NKVD.[17] An extensive network of civilian informants – either volunteers, or those forcibly recruited – was used to collect intelligence for the government and report cases of suspected dissent.[18]
Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced.[19] This gave rise to Samizdat, a clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature. Art, literature, education, and science were placed under strict ideological scrutiny, since they were supposed to serve the interests of the victorious proletariat. Socialist realism is an example of such teleologically oriented art that promoted socialism and communism. All humanities and social sciences were tested for strict accordance with historical materialism.
According to the Soviet Criminal Code, agitation or propaganda carried on for the purpose of weakening Soviet authority, or circulating materials or literature that defamed the Soviet State and social system were punishable by imprisonment for a term of 2–5 years; for a second offense, punishable for a term of 3–10 years.[20]
According to communist ideologists, the Soviet political system was a true democracy, where workers' councils ("soviets") represented the will of the working class. In particular, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed direct universal suffrage with a secret ballot.[21] Practice, however, departed from principle. For example, all candidates were selected by Communist Party organizations, until democratization and the March 1989 elections. Historian Robert Conquest described the Soviet electoral system as "a set of phantom institutions and arrangements which put a human face on the hideous realities: a model constitution adopted in a worst period of terror and guaranteeing human rights, elections in which there was only one candidate, and in which 99 percent voted; a parliament at which no hand was ever raised in opposition or abstention."[22]
Personal property was allowed with limitations. Real property mostly belonged to the State.[23] Many forms of private trade with the intent of gaining profit were considered "speculation" (Russian: спекуляция) and banned as a criminal offense to be punished with fines, imprisonment, confiscation and/or corrective labor. "Speculation" was specifically defined in article 154 of the Penal Code of the USSR.[24] Health, housing, education, and nutrition were formally guaranteed through the provision of full employment and economic welfare structures,[23] but these guarantees were rarely met in practice. For instance, over five million people lacked adequate nutrition and starved to death during the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, one of several Soviet famines.[25] The 1932–33 famine was caused primarily by Soviet-mandated collectivization,[26] although the famine in part was also caused by natural conditions.[27][28] In response to frequent shortages, massive second economy existed for all categories of goods and services.[29]
Freedoms of assembly and association
Workers were not allowed to organize free unions. All existing unions were organized and controlled by the state.[30] All political youth organizations, such as Pioneer movement and Komsomol served to enforce the policies of the Communist Party. Participation in unauthorized political organizations could result in imprisonment.[20] Organizing in camps could bring the death penalty.[20][need quotation to verify]
Freedom of religion
St. Vladimir's Cathedral in Astrakhan, which served as a bus station in Soviet times.
The Soviet Union promoted Marxist-Leninist atheism and persecuted religion. Toward that end, the Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools. Actions toward particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, and most organized religions were never outlawed outright.
Practicing Orthodox Christians were restricted from prominent careers and membership in communist organizations (e.g. the party and the Komsomol). Anti-religious propaganda was openly sponsored and encouraged by the government, to which the Church was not given an opportunity to publicly respond. Seminaries were closed down, and the church was restricted from publishing materials. Atheism was propagated through schools, communist organizations, and the media. Organizations such as the Society of the Godless were created.
Emigration and any travel abroad were not allowed without explicit permission from the government. People who were not allowed to leave the country and campaigned for their right to leave in the 1970s were known as "refuseniks". In the Soviet Criminal Code, a refusal to return from abroad was treason, punishable by imprisonment for a term of 10–15 years, or by death with confiscation of property.[20]
The passport system in the Soviet Union restricted migration of citizens within the country through the "propiska" (residential permit/registration system) and the use of internal passports. For a long period of Soviet history, peasants did not have internal passports, and could not move into towns without permission. Many former inmates received "wolf tickets" and were only allowed to live a minimum of 101 km away from city borders. Travel to closed cities and to the regions near USSR state borders was strongly restricted. An attempt to illegally escape abroad was punishable by imprisonment for 1–3 years.[20]
Human rights activists in the Soviet Union were regularly subjected to harassment, repressions and arrests. In several cases, only the public profile of individual human rights campaigners such as Andrei Sakharov helped prevent a complete shutdown of the movement's activities.
A more organized human rights movement in the USSR grew out of the current of dissent of the late 1960s and 1970s known as "rights defenders (pravozashchitniki).[37] Its most important samizdat publication, the Chronicle of Current Events,[38] circulated its first number in April 1968, after the United Nations declared that it would be the International Year for Human Rights (20 years since Universal Declaration was issued), and continued for the next 15 years until closed down in 1983.
The eight member countries of the Warsaw Pact signed the Helsinki Final Act in August 1975. The "third basket" of the Final Act included extensive human rights clauses.[41]:99–100 In the years 1976–77, several "Helsinki Watch Groups" emerged in the USSR, to monitor the Soviet Union's compliance with the Helsinki Final Act.[42] The first group was the Moscow Helsinki Group, followed by groups in Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Armenia.[43]:159–194 They succeeded in unifying different branches of the human rights movement.[41]:159–166 Similar initiatives began in Soviet satellite states, such as Charter 77 in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
Over the next two years the Helsinki Groups would be harassed and threatened by the Soviet authorities and eventually forced to close down their activities, as leading activists were arrested, put on trial and imprisoned or pressured into leaving the country. By 1979, all had ceased to function.
The period from April 1985 to December 1991 witnessed dramatic change in the USSR.
In February 1987 KGB Chairman Victor Chebrikov reported to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that 288 people were serving sentences for offenses committed under Articles 70, 190-1 and 142 of the RSFSR Criminal Code; a third of those convicted were being held in psychiatric hospitals.[44] Most were released during the course of the year, spurred on by the death in prison of veteran dissident Anatoly Marchenko in December 1986.[45] Soon ethnic minorities, confessional groups and entire nations were asserting their rights, respectively, to cultural autonomy, freedom of religion and, led by the Baltic states, to national independence.
Just as glasnost did not represent "freedom of speech", so attempts by activists to hold their own events and create independent associations and political movements met with disapproval and obstruction from Gorbachev and his Politburo. Early in December 1987 Shevardnadze, Yakovlev and Chebrikov reported on a proposed human rights seminar to be held in Moscow on 10–14 December 1987 with guests from abroad, and suggested ways of undermining, restricting and containing the event organised by former Soviet dissidents.[46] The reaction to a similar proposal seven months later was much the same.[47] As they conceded more and more of the rights over which the Communists had established their monopoly in the 1920s, events and organisations not initiated or overseen by the regime were frowned on and discouraged by the supposedly liberal authorities of the brief and ambivalent period of perestroika and official glasnost.
In the remaining two and a half years the rate of change accelerated. The Congress of People's Deputies held its second autumnal session in 1989 during a nationwide miners' strike. One consequence was the abolition in March 1990 of Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution (1977), which had explicitly established the primacy of the Communist Party within the Soviet State, a hitherto unspoken but all-pervasive dominance of the system.
The authorities formed units of riot police OMON to deal with the mounting protests and rallies across the USSR. In Moscow, these culminated in a vast demonstration in January 1991, denouncing the actions of Gorbachev and his administration. The demonstrations in Lithuania, Tbilisi, Baku and Tajikistan have been suppressed resulting in deaths of many protesters [48][49]
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology that became the largest faction of the communist movement in the world in the years following the October Revolution. It was the predominant ideology of most communist governments throughout the 20th century. It was developed in Russia by Joseph Stalin and drew on elements of Bolshevism, orthodox Marxism, and Leninism. It was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, Soviet satellite states in the Eastern Bloc, and various countries in the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World during the Cold War, as well as the Communist International after Bolshevization.
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. It was a successor state to the Russian Empire that was nominally organized as a federal union of fifteen national republics, the largest and most populous of which was the Russian SFSR; in practice both its government and economy were highly centralized until its final years. As a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it was a flagship communist state.
Stalinism is the totalitarian means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by dictator Joseph Stalin. Stalin had previously made a career as a gangster and robber, working to fund revolutionary activities, before eventually becoming General Secretary of the Soviet Union. Stalinism included the creation of a one man totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, forced collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which Stalinism deemed the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev Thaw, a period of de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin's ideology to begin to wane in the USSR.
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was a Soviet politician who was the sixth leader of the Soviet Union and the fourth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, taking office in 1982 and serving until his death in 1984.
The Great Purge, or the Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to consolidate power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet state. The purges also sought to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky. The term great purge, an allusion to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror.
Memorial is an international human rights organisation, founded in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union to study and examine the human rights violations and other crimes committed under Joseph Stalin's reign. Subsequently, it expanded the scope of its research to cover the entire Soviet period.
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky was a Russian-born British human rights activist and writer. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, he was a prominent figure in the Soviet dissident movement, well known at home and abroad. He spent a total of twelve years in the psychiatric prison-hospitals, labour camps, and prisons of the Soviet Union during Brezhnev rule.
An index of articles related to the former nation known as the Soviet Union. It covers the Soviet revolutionary period until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This list includes topics, events, persons and other items of national significance within the Soviet Union. It does not include places within the Soviet Union, unless the place is associated with an event of national significance. This index also does not contain items related to Soviet Military History.
The Law of the Soviet Union was the law as it developed in the Soviet Union (USSR) following the October Revolution of 1917. Modified versions of the Soviet legal system operated in many Communist states following the Second World War—including Mongolia, the People's Republic of China, the Warsaw Pact countries of eastern Europe, Cuba and Vietnam.
There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called "psychopathological mechanisms" of dissent.
Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (ASA) was a criminal offence in the Soviet Union. Initially, the term was interchangeably used with counter-revolutionary agitation. The latter term was in use immediately after the October Revolution of 1917. The offence was codified in criminal law in the 1920s, and revised in the 1950s in two articles of the Russian SFSR Criminal Code. The offence was widely used against Soviet dissidents.
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, tens of millions of people suffered political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution. It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist during the "Khrushchev Thaw", followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents during the Brezhnev era, and it did not cease to exist until late in Mikhail Gorbachev's rule when it was ended in keeping with his policies of glasnost and perestroika.
Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term dissident was used in the Soviet Union (USSR) in the period from the mid-1960s until the Fall of Communism. It was used to refer to small groups of marginalized intellectuals whose challenges, from modest to radical to the Soviet regime, met protection and encouragement from correspondents, and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities. Following the etymology of the term, a dissident is considered to "sit apart" from the regime. As dissenters began self-identifying as dissidents, the term came to refer to an individual whose non-conformism was perceived to be for the good of a society. The most influential subset of the dissidents is known as the Soviet human rights movement.
The actions by governments of communist states have been subject to criticism across the political spectrum. Communist party rule has been especially criticized by anti-communists and right-wing critics, but also by other socialists such as anarchists, democratic socialists, libertarian socialists, orthodox Marxists, and Trotskyist communists. Ruling communist parties have also been challenged by domestic dissent. According to the critics, rule by communist parties has often led to totalitarianism, political repression, restrictions of human rights, poor economic performance, and cultural and artistic censorship.
Author and publisher Valery Nikolaevich Chalidze was a Soviet dissident and human rights activist, deprived of his USSR citizenship in 1972 while on a visit to the US.
Mass killings under communist regimes occurred through a variety of means during the 20th century, including executions, famine, deaths through forced labour, deportation, starvation, and imprisonment. Some of these events have been classified as genocides or crimes against humanity. Other terms have been used to describe these events, including classicide, democide, red holocaust, and politicide. The mass killings have been studied by authors and academics and several of them have postulated the potential causes of these killings along with the factors which were associated with them. Some authors have tabulated a total death toll, consisting of all of the excess deaths which cumulatively occurred under the rule of communist states, but these death toll estimates have been criticized. Most frequently, the states and events which are studied and included in death toll estimates are the Holodomor and the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, the Great Chinese Famine and the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China, and the Cambodian genocide in Democratic Kampuchea.
In the Soviet Union, systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place and was based on the interpretation of political dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called "psychopathological mechanisms" of dissent.
The Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes was an offshoot of the Moscow Helsinki Group and a key source of information on psychiatric repression in the Soviet Union.
In 1965 a human rights movement emerged in the USSR. Those actively involved did not share a single set of beliefs. Many wanted a variety of civil rights — freedom of expression, of religious belief, of national self-determination. To some it was crucial to provide a truthful record of what was happening in the country, not the heavily censored version provided in official media outlets. Others still were "reform Communists" who thought it possible to change the Soviet system for the better.
Estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the Soviet revolutionary and dictator Joseph Stalin vary widely. The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants.
↑ Rutland, Peter (1993). The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union: The Role of Local Party Organs in Economic Management. Cambridge University Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-521-39241-9. "after 1953 ...This was still an oppressive regime, but not a totalitarian one.".
↑ Krupnik, Igor (1995). "4. Soviet Cultural and Ethnic Policies Towards Jews: A Legacy Reassessed". In Ro'i, Yaacov (ed.). Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-714-64619-0. "The era of 'social engineering' in the Soviet Union ended with the death of Stalin in 1953 or soon after; and that was the close of the totalitarian regime itself.".
↑ von Beyme, Klaus (2014). On Political Culture, Cultural Policy, Art and Politics. Springer. p. 65. ISBN 978-3-319-01559-0. "The Soviet Union after the death of Stalin moved from totalitarianism to authoritarian rule.".
↑ Lambelet, Doriane. "The Contradiction Between Soviet and American Human Rights Doctrine: Reconciliation Through Perestroika and Pragmatism." 7 Boston University International Law Journal. 1989. pp. 61–62.
↑ Mary Ann Glendon (2001). A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York. ISBN9780375760464.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
↑ Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia – Past, Present, and Future, 1994. ISBN0-374-52738-5.
↑ "Ukrainian Famine". Ibiblio public library and digital archive. Retrieved 2011-04-21.
↑ Davies, Robert W.; Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (2009). The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931–1933. Palgrave Macmillan. p.xv. doi:10.1057/9780230273979. ISBN9780230238558.
↑ Nove, Alec (1952). An Economic History of the USSR 1917–1951. Penguin Books. pp.373–375.
↑ Adrian Cioroianu, Pe umerii lui Marx. O introducere în istoria comunismului românesc ("On the Shoulders of Marx. An Incursion into the History of Romanian Communism"), Editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest, 2005
↑ Horvath, Robert (2005). "The rights-defenders". The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia. London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon. pp.70–129. ISBN9780203412855.
1 2 Thomas, Daniel C. (2001). The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN9780691048598.
↑ Thomas, Daniel C. (2001). The Helsinki effect: international norms, human rights, and the demise of communism. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0691048581.
Boim, Leon (1976). "Human rights in the USSR". Review of Socialist Law. 2 (1): 173–187. doi:10.1163/157303576X00157.
Chalidze, Valeriĭ (1971). Important aspects of human rights in the Soviet Union; a report to the Human Rights Committee. New York: American Jewish Committee. OCLC317422393.
Daniel, Thomas (2001). The Helsinki effect: international norms, human rights, and the demise of communism. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN9780691048598.
Dean, Richard (January–March 1980). "Contacts with the West: the dissidents' view of Western support for the human rights movement in the Soviet Union". Universal Human Rights. 2 (1): 47–65. doi:10.2307/761802. JSTOR761802.
Johns, Michael (Fall 1987). "Seventy years of evil: Soviet crimes from Lenin to Gorbachev". Policy Review: 10–23.
Khlevniuk, Oleg & Kozlov, Vladimir (2004) The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Annals of Communism Series) Yale University Press. ISBN0-300-09284-9.
Samatan, Marie (1980). Droits de l'homme et répression en URSS: l'appareil et les victimes[Human rights and repression in the USSR: mechanism and victims] (in French). Paris: Seuil. ISBN978-2020057059.
Pipes, Richard (2001) Communism Weidenfled and Nicoloson. ISBN0-297-64688-5
Pipes, Richard (1994) Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. Vintage. ISBN0-679-76184-5.
Rummel, R.J. (1996) Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. Transaction Publishers. ISBN1-56000-887-3.
Szymanski, Albert (1984). Human rights: the USA and the USSR compared. Lawrence Hill & Co. ISBN978-0882081588.
Yakovlev, Alexander (2004). A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Yale University Press. ISBN0-300-10322-0.
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