Authors

Denis Shedov¹;  ¹ University College London, UK

Discussion

The history of Russian dissidents and human rights defenders of the Soviet period has seemingly been told many times by the dissidents themselves (e.g., the canonical history by Lyudmila Alexeyeva) and ‘Western’ historians. Our research demonstrates that many parts of dominant existing narratives require further reflection. ‘Soviet’, ‘Russian’, and ‘Moscow’ human rights movements have often been conflated while they deserve critical distinction. As a result, the status of the 'first human rights association' in the Soviet Union and the 'birthday of the human rights movement', often referred to as 5 December 1965 – when the Glasnost meeting was held in Pushkin Square – also require nuancing. This chapter presents the human rights movement in Soviet Russia in a broader context and to trace the transit of human rights knowledge and techniques from the Soviet times to the post-Perestroika period. We do so by analysing documents produced by a plethora of known and lesser-known human rights groups in order to show how human rights defenders translated specific everyday situations into the language of human rights. While the forefront of the analysis is devoted to the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) in the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s, we demonstrate how MHG was able to draw on and adapt human rights reporting techniques developed by other movements and different actors and make it ‘their own’ by the consistent appeal to the Helsinki Final Act.