Human Rights Under Authoritarian Rule

Soviet dissidents in the making: the “involuntary protagonists” (clockwise from upper left) Larisa Bogoraz, Marina Domshlak-Gerchuk, Maria Rozanova, Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuri Gerchuk, and Yuli Daniel, in the early 1960s. Memorial Society in Moscow.

This module explores how people have deployed the language of human rights to resist authoritarian regimes.

The setting is the Soviet Union in the 1970s.  As Professor Benjamin Nathans explains, the Soviet dissident movement emerged in 1965 to ensure the Soviet Union never returned to the dark days of Stalinist terror.  Acting on guarantees of free speech and freedom of the press in the Soviet constitution, they were nonetheless subject to punishment and harassment by the Soviet security police. In the early 1970s Soviet dissidents began to establish contact with leading international human rights groups like Amnesty International and turned to the language of human rights to present their critiques of the Soviet state. The primary source is a message Soviet dissents sent to delegates at the annual meeting of Amnesty International in September 1973 with the intention of becoming the first local chapter of the organization behind the Iron Curtain. The message begins with phrases largely drawn from Soviet domestic discourse, but it quickly turns to the international language of human rights in making its claims. The teaching plan helps students see the complexities of appropriating and reworking global human rights norms for domestic opponents of authoritarian regimes.  Nathans provides a set of exercises that unpack how dissidents made sense of such global human rights vocabularies as “conscience,” “dignity” and “conviction” in the Soviet context. As part of Authoritarianism 101, this module enables teachers to explore the themes of challenges to authoritarian rule and limits to authoritarian control.