29. Information Memorandum From the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs (Schifter) to Secretary of State Shultz1
SUBJECT
- Human Rights in the Soviet Union during the Period 1953–1986
Summary. In the years immediately following Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union gradually emerged from the state of fear engendered by his despotic rule. With the Secret Police less powerful and less oppressive, the Soviet people discovered they could speak more freely and intellectuals began to assert their independence. This state of affairs, known as “the thaw,” continued through the Khrushchev years (ending in 1964) into the early part of the Brezhnev era. Thereafter, however, the Soviet government began to resist the efforts of intellectuals to broaden their freedom of expression. The intellectuals responded by forming human rights groups, which engaged the government in a continuing struggle. This struggle, which began in 1965, ended in 1977 with a sharp clamp-down by the Soviet government on what had become known as the dissident movement. Arrests, long-term imprisonment or commitments to a mental institution became the price paid for dissidence. With the return of the Secret Police to the center of governmental authority, the period 1977–86 became a period of severe repression. End Summary.
Stalin’s Legacy
Ever since the purges started in the 1930s, Stalin had governed the Soviet Union through his Secret Police apparatus. It was, therefore, natural that after Stalin’s death in March 1953, the man who stood at the helm of that apparatus, Lavrenti Beria, would consider himself the rightful heir to the throne. Some of his colleagues had different notions. They united under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev in an effort to oust Beria. With the help of the military leadership, which took personal responsibility for the arrest of Beria, they succeeded. Beria and some of his erstwhile colleagues were executed and the Secret Police was removed from the center of authority.
[Page 105]Khrushchev’s “Thaw”
With Khrushchev assuming the leadership of the country, a major cleansing operation was initiated. Tens of thousands of Stalin’s prisoners were released and “rehabilitated,” which meant that the state acknowledged that they had been wrongly imprisoned. Then, in February 1956, speaking to the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Khrushchev delivered his famous anti-Stalin address, fully acknowledging the despotic character of the Stalin regime.
In his memoirs, Khrushchev revealed his and his colleagues’ fears of the Secret Police during Stalin’s days and in the months immediately following Stalin’s death. Khrushchev’s decision to move the Secret Police from the center to the margin of the Soviet bureaucratic apparatus and to clip its wings was clearly the result of his personal experience. His decision to rehabilitate former political prisoners and to initiate investigative proceedings against some NKVD officials appears to have been motivated by a genuine desire to purge all vestiges of Stalin’s rule from the Soviet system.
The people in the Soviet Union had been so traumatized by Stalin’s rule that it took quite some time before they fully realized that they would no longer be punished if they spoke up more freely. It took them about four years before they fully understood that much that had theretofore been prohibited was now allowable. The period known as “the thaw” ensued. This period of greater freedom of expression, largely in the cultural area, was brought about by intellectuals outside the government. The government’s response was basically passive: it allowed certain developments to take place which it would have heretofore prohibited. An example was the authorization to publish Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” a book about life in Stalin’s prison camps.
Intellectuals were now pushing very hard and realized that the government was, by and large, not pushing back. What characterized the thaw, therefore, was a reawakening of the people in the Soviet Union, reflected not only in greater freedom of expression exercised by intellectuals, but also in the recognition by average citizens that they could now speak their mind without having to fear that they would soon be hauled off by the Secret Police and sent to Siberia.
Greater freedom of expression for individuals acting individually was the hallmark of the human rights advance during the Khrushchev period. These individuals did not attempt to act in concert, to create a “movement.”
The “Movement in Defense of Legality”
Khrushchev fell in 1964 and was replaced by Brezhnev. Conditions affecting freedom of expression did not change immediately. Before [Page 106] long, however, it became evident that a new wind was blowing from the Kremlin. In 1966, two well-known writers, Daniel and Sinyavsky were convicted for the authorship of books which had been published abroad during the Khrushchev era. From then on the state authorities, which sought to limit freedom of expression, and the intellectuals, who wanted to see the area of freedom enlarged, began to play a cat-and-mouse game. The intellectuals kept pushing for greater freedom and the state authorities would from time to time slap back, imprisoning some of the most outspoken critics of the regime or, in some instances, resorting to a new form of punishment, the commitment of sane persons to institutions for the mentally ill. It was this cat-and-mouse game, namely the government’s efforts to repress intellectuals who wanted to exercise freedom of expression, that made these intellectuals dissidents and, in due course, created the dissident movement.
What characterized these Soviet dissidents and their movement was the modesty of their program. These were not revolutionaries who were attempting to overthrow the government. They did not even ask for fundamental change in government policies or the structure of the state. All they asked for was freedom of expression and for the Soviet Union to interpret its own laws reasonably, so as to permit such freedom of expression. In fact, when this group of intellectuals joined to form an organization they called themselves the “Movement in Defense of Legality.” In spite of the clear statements of disapproval from the government, the movement kept growing. Though it was originally centered in Moscow, offshoots developed elsewhere. Many of these offshoots developed into something the government found increasingly troublesome: they began to identify themselves with the cultural aspirations of the Soviet Union’s national minorities, such as the Ukrainians, Georgians, and the Baltic peoples. These minorities were committed to withstand efforts at Russification. They wanted to see their respective languages and cultures preserved. Their counterparts among the Jews, also committed to cultural revival, had one other goal: emigration.
Thus, by the early Seventies, for the first time in close to 50 years, numerous dissident groups were functioning as such in the Soviet Union.
The Clamp-down
By 1972, however, a change in the Government’s response could be noted. While most moves against dissidents still appeared haphazard, a comprehensive effort was launched in January 1972 to end the Ukrainian dissident movement. (The danger of Ukrainian separatism remains to this day an issue of deep concern to the Soviets.) More than 100 young Ukrainian intellectuals were arrested, tried and convicted of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” and received maximum sentences: 7–10 years of hard labor, followed by 3–5 years of internal exile.
[Page 107]Arrests and trials occurred in other areas of the Soviet Union as well. A celebrated case was the expulsion, in 1974, of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In 1976 the newspapers carried warnings that too much ideological laxness was being tolerated. And then, in 1977, the iron hand of a newly invigorated KGB came down on the dissident movement. Its leaders were arrested, tried for anti-Soviet agitation, and sentenced to heavy prison terms (usually seven years of incarceration plus five years of internal exile). By 1980, when Andrei Sakharov, the leader of the dissident movement, was exiled to Gorky, the movement had been destroyed.
In the succeeding years there were additional arrests. Wherever and whenever a potential dissident spoke up, the KGB would quickly bring such dissident activity to an end. Dissidents would not only be deprived of their freedom, but would also be subjected to extraordinarily harsh treatment in prisons and prison camps or mental institutions. The Soviet apparatus of repression was now operating more brutally than it had at any time since Beria’s arrest. With Brezhnev in decline and Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, increasingly assuming the Soviet Union’s leadership position, the KGB was once again at the center of state authority.
This state of affairs carried forward into the period following Brezhnev’s death, when Andropov became General Secretary, and then into the year in which Chernenko served in that position, when Gorbachev was clearly the heir apparent. It also carried forward into the first 15 months of Gorbachev’s leadership.
It is only during the last 10 months that we have witnessed changes in the Soviet Union’s domestic behavior that has significant human rights implications. It is to an analysis of these changes that the next memorandum will be devoted.2
- Source: Reagan Library, Shultz Papers, 1987 Mar. Apr. U.S.-Soviet Mtg w/ Gorbachev. Limited Official Use. Drafted by Schifter. Copies were sent to Ridgway, Solomon, Abramowitz, Derwinski, Kampelman, and Adelman. A stamped notation on the memorandum indicates Shultz saw it.↩
- See Document 32.↩