30 Years After Helsinki
Dimitry Babich
How a Human Rights David Defeated a Geopolitical Goliath
The general appraisal of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), signed on Aug. 1, 1975, has changed a number of times in Russia over the ensuing 30 years. Until the late 1980s, it was viewed as a great achievement of former General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s diplomacy, fixing the borders of postwar Europe and thus legitimizing what was then called the “socialist camp,” who had become members of Eastern Bloc organizations like Comecon and the Warsaw Pact largely thanks to the victories of the Soviet army during World War II. In the late 1980s, the emphasis was placed on human rights and freedoms, which then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev considered his strong point in negotiations with the West. Given that today the borders of Russia have largely returned to their 17th century positions, some experts now look at the Helsinki agreements as nothing more than a piece of history.
Soviet history textbooks mostly referred to the so-called “first basket” of Helsinki agreements, which called for “non-intervention in internal affairs” and the inviolability of the borders. The “third basket,” which focused on the “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms,” was viewed by the Soviet regime as an unwelcome appendage to the first.
“In the beginning, we had no taste for the third basket,” remembers Georgy Korniyenko, who was first deputy to the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in the 1970s. “But we understood that if we didn’t go for a compromise, we would not get what we wanted most of all.”
In the first place, the Soviet Union wanted official recognition of East Germany on the part of the Western powers, and a freeze on changes to the European borders, which were largely drawn up by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt at the Yalta conference.
“The event was planned as a super-Yalta on the Soviet side,” said Yuri Rubinsky, the head of the department of French Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Europe. “Despite the frequent accusations of planning aggression, the Soviet authorities were quite content with the post-war status quo in Europe. In 1975 they decided to set the de facto situation legally.”
The road to the Helsinki agreements was paved by then-German Chancellor Willy Brandt, a Social Democrat, who signed the Moscow Treaty, which improved West Germany’s relations with Moscow over the East Germany issue, in 1970. Under the Adenauer administration in the 1950s and 1960s, West Germany had taken a tough stance against other countries granting East Germany diplomatic recognition, while refusing to have diplomatic relations with its eastern neighbor itself. In December 1972, West Germany’s Brandt established “good neighborly” diplomatic relations with East Germany “on the basis of equality.” The Soviet leadership’s hopes of legitimizing the East German regime forever appeared to have come true. In November 1972, negotiations on preparations for CSCE, the forerunner of the OSCE, were started in Helsinki.
What did the Soviet authorities have to give in return? On the surface, not much. For the first time in its history, the Soviet Union signed an international agreement that bound it to conform to some Western values. They included “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief,” “contacts or regular meetings on the basis of family ties,” “reunification of families,” “travel for personal or professional reasons,” “meetings among young people” and “dissemination of newspapers and oral information.”
The Soviet Union did not move toward meeting these norms until the late 1980s, but protests against this state of affairs had at least theoretical legal grounds after 1975.
“Until the Helsinki agreements we could only appeal to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” remembers Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, founded in 1976 on the basis of the 1975 agreements. “After 1975, we had a legal basis for our demands on the authorities. According to international law, if several states concluded an international agreement, every signatory has the right to demand from the others that they fulfill the agreement. To make such demands to the Soviet Union was especially easy, because the Helsinki agreements were very favorable for the Soviet side.”
Most of the experts point out that the dissident movement worked more effectively not in Russia, but in the other East European countries.
“The third basket gave the Soviet dissident groups a chance to show themselves in action,” Korniyenko said. “But the collapse of the Soviet Union had other, deeper reasons behind it. The economy was degenerating. The political system, which had largely remained intact since the times of Stalin, required a real reform, not a cosmetic one. This reform did not happen. Gorbachev, who had no clear concept of reforms and refused to listen to the advice of wise people on it, is at fault for that.”
If the Soviet Union collapsed for internal reasons, the other East European countries failed to resist to the external “irritants.” In return for recognizing East Germany, West Germany gained greater opportunities for human contacts and economic cooperation with its neighbor, which led the east to become indebted to and dependent on West Germany by the end of the 1980s. Recognition by Bonn of the territorial integrity of Poland and Czechoslovakia reduced these countries dependence on the Soviet Union as their “protector” against German revenge.
In 1987, the Soviet authorities stopped jamming Western radio broadcasts in Russian. In 1989, the Moscow Helsinki Group, which had stopped its activities due to arrests in 1982, resumed operations. People were no longer required to have an “internal visa” to travel abroad. It seemed to Gorbachev that he had fulfilled all of the Helsinki agreements, a fact that he considered a trump card during his summit meetings with then-U.S. President George H. W. Bush in 1989 and 1990.
“When Gorbachev agreed to include the human rights issues in the agenda of his summits with Bush, he weakened Russia’s negotiating position in the future,” said Professor Anatoly Utkin, the director of the Center on International Politics at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ U.S.A. and Canada Institute. “Gorbachev did not get anything in return for loosening state control in the Soviet Union. Even the country’s collapse was met with nothing but cold surprise in the West. But Gorbachev created a precedent, according to which Russia can be pressured on human rights issues at any negotiations, including those covering economic or disarmament issues.”
Most experts agree that the OSCE machine, which the Soviet Union helped to create in 1975, now works against Russia’s interests, especially on the territory of the former Soviet Union.
“Since its creation in 1994, the OSCE has become a major instrument for protecting the political processes in CIS countries from any kind of Russian influence,” Yuri Rubinsky said.
The OSCE opposed the plan for a peaceful settlement of the Transdniester conflict in Moldova that was put forward by Russian envoy Dmitry Kozak in 2002. OSCE activities during the monitoring of elections in Ukraine in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan in 2005 were also criticized in Russia and other CIS countries. The leaders of the CIS countries even made a special statement about the OSCE’s activities at the organization’s summits in Moscow in July 2004, and later that year in September in Astana, Kazakhstan. The Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry accused the “field missions” of the OSCE of using double standards while monitoring elections in CIS countries.
So, do the Helsinki agreements have any relevance today? “No. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Unites States’ strivings to become the only superpower, commanding the whole world, the Final Act is purely a historic document, and nothing more,” said Georgy Korniyenko.
“The Final Act played a positive role, and we shouldn’t only view it in a negative light,” said Igor Maksimychev, the former Soviet envoy in Berlin in 1990 and now a leading expert at the Institute of Europe. “But now Russia needs more binding documents on security from its partners in the West. We already had the Paris Charter of 1990, which did not save us from the expansion of NATO and a lot of other empty declarations. We need binding agreements with figures and clear obligations of all sides.”
Beitrag veröffentlicht mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Russia Profile.
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