It is hard to imagine. In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the capital of what, in the second half of the 1980s, is still the totalitarian Soviet Union, a number of ministry officials are working openly to destroy the totalitarian foundations of the state. This was the same ministry headed during the Cold War by the grim-faced Andrei Gromyko, widely known in the West as “Mister No” from the results of his negotiations and almost automatic rejection of all Western proposals. Yet the story is true. It was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that initiated and pushed through almost all of the democratic changes in the Soviet Union during the tenure of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Why did part of the foreign policy establishment of the USSR seek to destroy the totalitarian regime and establish democracy and a state ruled by law in a country devoid of legitimacy and justice? The answer reflects the rather well-organized confusion of the era of change that began with Gorbachev’s accession to power in March 1985. The new leadership of the ministry demanded it.
From their service abroad, many Soviet diplomats were familiar with a world outside their own country that was entirely different. More than many others in the USSR, they had a better and clearer understanding of not only the need to promote the democratic reformation of society but also how to achieve it. To give one prominent example, Gorbachev’s close associate Alexander Yakovlev, generally recognized as the chief ideologist of perestroika, had spent many years on diplomatic assignment in Canada.
The Foreign Ministry and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze were meant for each other. A unique synthesis existed in the ministry between those officials who had mastered the science and art of diplomacy and Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s minister of foreign affairs, who possessed political will and was intimately acquainted with every facet of Soviet life. Prior to becoming the leader of the Soviet Republic of Georgia (1972–85), he had headed Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Of course, Shevardnadze did not act on his own. First, appropriate conditions had to be created for the Foreign Ministry to become active in the field of human rights, an area that had been clearly outside its domain. According to a resolution the Foreign Ministry proposed at the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), in February–March 1986, humanitarian affairs was designated one of the foundations of international security. This empowered the Foreign Ministry to address human rights issues inside the USSR that had previously been out of bounds not only for the diplomatic service but also for all other government departments apart from the punitive ministries, which punished those who even dared to speak of human rights.
Soon a Directorate for Humanitarian and Cultural Cooperation was established in the Foreign Ministry. Its main task was to resolve a broad range of questions in the field of human rights. It was far from obvious, however, how to undertake the task of cleaning up one’s own home, sweeping out all the accumulated dirt and trash.
Shevardnadze’s appointment as minister of foreign affairs triggered an intense allergic reaction among many ministry officials. After the simple and predictable Andrei Gromyko, Shevardnadze was an enigma, especially to officials who were unfamiliar with the complex issue of human rights or simply clueless as to what was going on around them. For almost a year Shevardnadze sized up the ministry and made no changes among its leading personnel. Only just prior to the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, did he replace his first deputies. Instead of the hawkish Georgy Kornienko and Viktor Mal’tsev, he appointed Anatoly Kovalev and Yuly Vorontsov to these positions. Then Kovalev’s closest associates, Anatoly Adamishin and Vladimir Petrovsky, also became deputies to the minister.
Starting from the top down, I shall provide brief sketches of those persons to whom Russia is indebted for what was good and democratic in its recent past.
I can only judge Eduard Shevardnadze, whom both well-wishers and adversaries referred to as the Silver Fox, on the basis of what I know personally. There have always been too many lies and too much slander surrounding him, born of misunderstanding and hatred. Yet there can be no doubt that he made an invaluable contribution to the establishment of democracy in Russia. He and Alexander Yakovlev were the main authors of the democratic reforms.
During perestroika, this lively, charming, energetic, gray-haired man was as greatly respected by the supporters of democratic reforms as he was hated by their opponents. His name is linked to the end of the arms race, the Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War, and the Soviet Union’s entry on the path of establishing democracy and observing human rights at home. His enemies accused him of abandoning the foreign policy positions of the USSR and of weakening the country’s military potential. His supporters admired the courage with which he jettisoned moldy dogmas and facilitated the USSR’s rapprochement with civilized, democratic countries. He was always in the thick of contentious matters and seemed to attract them to himself.
His first deputy (and my father) was Anatoly Kovalev. Shevardnadze did not deal with a single important foreign or domestic policy issue without consulting him. Possibly this was because of my father’s closeness to Gorbachev; possibly it was because of the foreign minister’s empathy and trust in him. As far back as the height of the period of stagnation in the 1970s when Leonid Brezhnev was in power, Kovalev was instrumental in having the USSR assume unprecedented obligations with regard to human rights by signing the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). He was close to all the Soviet leaders, starting with Brezhnev, and was especially close to Gorbachev, to whom he had direct access. Kovalev’s other persona was that of a poet. He embodied a paradoxical combination of idealism grounded in what, for those times and for people in his profession, was an unusual belief in common sense together with a combative personality. He was a cunning chess master who calculated diplomatic moves many turns in advance. In his youth he had boxed and played soccer and many other sports. This synthesis of creativity and combativeness enabled him to be effective in both the foreign and domestic policy arenas.
Yet he was hampered by a tendency to idealize his like-minded political associates, and he was excessively loyal toward Shevardnadze and Gorbachev. His combativeness helped when he was pushing forward some good initiatives but not when he failed to realize there was no chance for success. Still it was thanks to Shevardnadze and Kovalev that the Foreign Ministry succeeded in getting the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the CPSU to include human rights on the agenda of international security policy.
The deputy minister of foreign affairs of the USSR Anatoly Adamishin was a liberal even down to the smallest details. Clever and intelligent, he was a very modest man who achieved much more for democracy and liberalism than all the inveterate demagogues put together. He liked to compare himself to a medieval battering ram in the service of Shevardnadze and Kovalev. This is a striking metaphor, of course, but if he was a battering ram, he was by no means a medieval one. Adamishin acted too intelligently, too resourcefully, and with too much talent for this comparison to be valid. This slim and resourceful diplomat was distinguished by his outstanding boldness and exceptional human decency.
Vladimir Petrovsky replaced Anatoly Adamishin as the custodian of human rights and democratic standards after Adamishin’s departure to serve as ambassador to Rome. Even after Eduard Shevardnadze’s retirement in December 1990, Petrovsky continued to work actively on human rights and did everything he could to ensure the successful convening of the Moscow Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (September–October 1991).
Under Shevardnadze the Foreign Ministry’s activity in the field of human rights may provisionally be divided into three basic components. First was freeing political and religious prisoners from their places of confinement including psychiatric hospitals. Second was resolving the problem of the so-called refuseniks—that is, persons who were refused permission to emigrate. The third was “bringing Soviet legislation and the implementation of Soviet laws into accord with the international obligations of the USSR.” (This was my basic brief.) Translating the bureaucratic jargon into ordinary language, it turned out that during my government service in the Foreign Ministry, my assignment was to promote the democratization of the country. Thus, I had to deal with activities that according to existing legislation were illegal and punishable by imprisonment.
In transforming the Soviet Union into a law-based state, the international human rights standards that had been formulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948, and other such documents served as a kind of “absolute weapon.” The declaration was a reliable guidepost that had been tested by others and was protected from ideological crusaders. An emphasis on international standards provided a legal foundation for our dialogue on human rights with Western countries, with the United States in the first instance. Soviet diplomats stopped avoiding discussions with Western colleagues regarding human rights violations in the USSR. We ourselves often added names from our own information to the lists Western diplomats gave us of prisoners of conscience, psychiatric prisoners, and refuseniks before we sent the lists on to the relevant ministries and departments to confirm the grievances presented to us. Fortunately, no one thought to compare these enhanced lists with the original lists; otherwise, there would have been an incredible scandal.
When we were accused of allowing foreign interference in our domestic affairs, we always had this naive response at hand: “We are simply cooperating in the implementation of universal human rights standards!” It may sound paradoxical, but without the critical input and pressure from our foreign partners, it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to resolve many problems of democratization in the USSR. Richard Schifter, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, played a special role in this regard. Western representatives often acted as intermediaries between the Soviet authorities and Soviet dissidents. At the time there was no simpler path for dialogue.
The Foreign Ministry had another powerful means of exerting pressure on opponents of liberal reform—the Vienna conference of states represented in the CSCE (1986–89). The USSR had succeeded in persuading the Vienna meeting to hold a human rights conference in Moscow. By this means the Foreign Ministry provoked our Western colleagues to push more actively for the Soviet Union to respect human rights. We needed them to do this. The West introduced the proposals that we needed, the Soviet delegation in Vienna requested Moscow’s approval, and the Foreign Ministry secured the agreement of the “relevant ministries and departments,” which mistakenly supposed they would not have to fulfill their promises. The delegation in Vienna received the go-ahead from Moscow, and these same ministries and departments had no alternative but to fulfill their own promises.
The Foreign Ministry also took advantage of other opportunities to resolve human rights problems. Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech at the UN on December 7, 1988, would provide what we thought was a unique opportunity to deal a crushing blow to the obstructionists. I was in the office of my boss Alexei Glukhov when Anatoly Kovalev, the first deputy minister, called on his secure line and instructed him to prepare a specific section of the speech.1 (Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were not in Moscow at the time; Kovalev was acting on his own initiative and later reported on this issue to a session of the Politburo.) I was assigned the task of preparing a first draft that both Glukhov and Kovalev Sr. subsequently revised. Standing at the rostrum of the UN and barely containing his sincere jubilation, Gorbachev would shortly make his sensational announcement, “There are no persons in prison [in the USSR] for their political and religious beliefs.” The previously unrevealed background to these words was rather dramatic.
A text that openly contradicted the status quo in the USSR had been prepared in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR. Its purpose was to transform that status quo. A memorandum containing specific instructions to the ministries and departments was immediately drafted in the Central Committee of the CPSU regarding measures that needed to be taken to ensure that the imminent declaration would accord with the actual situation. It was approved in record time. Just a few days remained until the speech. I heard that during this time no one in the Procuracy and the KGB slept at all. By December 7 all the dissidents known to the Foreign Ministry had completed their passage through the purgatory of the Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps (GULAG) and the psychiatric prisons. Gorbachev could now make his speech at the UN with a clear conscience.
We took advantage of Gorbachev’s talks with “appropriate” Western interlocutors to release as many political and religious prisoners as possible and to grant refuseniks permission to emigrate. I don’t know whether Gorbachev himself ever discussed any of these lists; most likely such questions were resolved at a lower level. But his talks provided an excellent opportunity to resolve existing problems.
Naturally, dialogue also took place in other arenas. One such example was connected to Pope John Paul II’s desire to visit the USSR on the thousandth anniversary of the baptism of Rus’, or when Grand Prince Vladimir had accepted Orthodox Christianity in Kiev in 988 CE. Although Shevardnadze tried his best to facilitate the proposed visit, he failed. The Central Committee of the CPSU, the KGB, and the Russian Orthodox Church—all opposed the visit. Unfortunately, they prevailed. The great pontiff was unable to realize his dream of visiting Russia. Neither the USSR during perestroika nor its successor, the Russian Federation, passed the test of real democracy and real freedom of conscience.
Although the diplomatic instruments of the Foreign Ministry were fully employed in the democratic reform of the country, they were obviously insufficient to cleanse the country from the accumulated layers of dust and filth of totalitarianism and to air out the ideological mustiness, the atmosphere of fear, and the other unpleasant odors. That demanded action at a higher political level, especially since the democratic trio of Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and Yakovlev was opposed by most of the other leaders. Had Shevardnadze only been the minister of foreign affairs, and not concurrently part of the top leadership as a member of the all-powerful Politburo, many of the democratic reforms in the USSR and Russia would have been impossible. In every possible way we took maximum advantage of the minister’s political clout. The Silver Fox not only encouraged our efforts but even pushed us toward even greater activity. As a member of the Politburo, Shevardnadze initiated legislation removing political and religious articles from the Criminal Code, introduced religious freedom, established the right to freely exit and reenter the country, put an end to punitive psychiatry in the USSR, and pursued other measures.
Every day draft proposals piled up and were dispatched by special messenger to Politburo members for their views before the Central Committee took any decisions. Shevardnadze assigned Adamishin to deal with those concerning democracy and human rights. Adamishin, in turn, often called upon me. I must give Shevardnadze his due, for he never failed to respond when asked. And, of course, my thanks to Adamishin who initiated all of this.
We ourselves were not slackers. Vladimir Lenin himself and other “Founding Fathers” unwittingly provided invaluable assistance. At the time almost no one knew what “Leninist norms” really meant, but they were considered virtually sacred. The citation of Lenin’s sayings, particularly if they were buttressed by quotations from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, produced a virtually surefire, literally hypnotic effect on the most hidebound dogmatists and reactionaries. We undertook veritable “excavations” of appropriate quotations of Lenin, Marx, and Engels, as well as of legislation passed under Lenin. There was no use to which we did not put them! This included the need to abolish the death penalty, which Lenin had spoken about passionately prior to his seizure of power and his resorting to mass extermination. We cited him regarding the inadmissibility of censorship, the need to guarantee freedom of conscience, the right of exit and reentry, the option of an alternative military service, the necessity of rectifying the practice of psychiatry, and even the abolition of residence permits. We juggled quotations and used everything we could find to facilitate the establishment of democracy in our country.
To deal with human rights we needed to master informal thinking. For example, a message arrives from the United States that a hundred rabbis want to visit a cemetery in Ukraine, but they are denied visas. Phone calls back and forth to the Council on Religious Affairs and other “relevant ministries and agencies” get us nowhere. On Glukhov’s secure government line, I phone the chairman of the executive committee of the town that the rabbis wish to visit and ask what is the problem. It turns out that the cemetery has been destroyed, there are no fences, the monuments are in ruins. I threaten him with an international scandal. The cemetery is restored, and the rabbis receive permission to pay their respects to their ancestors.
In another episode, the KGB intercepts a letter from a desperate woman in Ukraine to the secretary-general of the UN saying that she has been living for many years in a small room in a communal apartment with her husband, two children, and relatives—I don’t remember if it was a sister or a brother—and her or his family. The local authorities will not rehouse them or give them a new apartment. A photograph attached to the letter shows how they slept side by side on the dining table and under it. Glukhov gives me permission to call on the secure line, and I scare the living daylights out of the swindling chairman of the local executive committee by raising the specter of an international scandal. In just over a week, the poor devils have resolved a housing problem that had been festering for many years.
The democratization of society was Shevardnadze’s “special interest.” Much of what was done during perestroika was on his initiative. A real conveyor belt was in operation. Not infrequently those who had nothing to do with our ministry’s actions and actually did everything they could to obstruct them were credited with what we had achieved. The former chief of the Visas and Permissions Division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR Rudolf Kuznetsov insisted that it was he who had initiated and worked on the law regarding exit and reentry. The former chief psychiatrist of the Ministry of Health Alexander Churkin claimed credit as the principal reformer of Soviet psychiatry. What can one say to this? Neither on Judgment Day nor in an earthly court do such persons have any credibility.
Soon after the establishment of the Directorate for Humanitarian and Cultural Cooperation, Shevardnadze “authorized” his staff to inform him of human rights problems. There was a healthy dose of make-believe in this. After all, as already noted, it was the minister himself who had initiated the work of the Foreign Ministry on human rights. This is largely because from his experience in Georgia he was very familiar with the actual state of affairs in this sphere. Following his instructions, work began on drawing up an inventory of the USSR’s international obligations regarding human rights, on juxtaposing them with current legislation and practice, and on drafting proposals to align Soviet legislation with the USSR’s international obligations.
The phrase taking stock has a dry bureaucratic connotation, conjuring up an association with bookkeeping, yet precisely this phrase best describes the task of diagnosing the worst maladies of Soviet society and looking for ways to cure them. Taking stock of the dark side contradicted the elementary instinct of self-preservation, since what we were doing, from a strictly legal point of view, was a crime against the state. According to the spirit and the letter of the existing laws, that is how what we were doing to heal the country had to be interpreted. Leaving aside the legal perspective, the picture is no less depressing, since our activities impinged upon the interests of too many powerful persons. Soviet citizens had lost years of their lives in the GULAG simply for criticizing the totalitarian system.
Taking stock revealed rather strange things. First, not a single ministry or department knew what obligations the USSR had undertaken with respect to international treaties on human rights. Until the start of perestroika, the Foreign Ministry had shown no interest in this either, even though, according to the existing laws, it was supposed to monitor the USSR’s fulfillment of its treaty obligations. No one had even thought of undertaking such work, and no scholars were officially studying human rights issues.
My investigation revealed that according to the International Bill of Human Rights alone, the USSR had more than sixty obligations. Even from a formal, legislative point of view, let alone with regard to prevailing practices, it had violated international law with regard to every one of them. The picture that emerged was appalling. In the hands of the Foreign Ministry liberals, stocktaking became a powerful weapon. We produced what looked like a thick, three-column bookkeeping ledger. On the left side were the obligations of the USSR, in the center were the relevant statutes of the existing legislation, and, finally, on the right were our proposals. They referred, for example, to the abolition of the death penalty, the abolition of residence permits, the deletion of political and religious articles from the Criminal Code, the adoption of laws guaranteeing the right to depart from and reenter the country, the freedom of conscience, the freedom of the press, the rights of persons suffering from psychiatric disorders, and so forth. There were also proposals to introduce alternative service for conscientious objectors, to revise laws relating to criminal procedures, and much else. All these proposals became major components of the work of our ministry.
When the inventory was being drawn up, one of the points that we emphasized, even though we had to venture beyond the International Bill of Human Rights, was our failure to implement our obligations under the Final Act of the CSCE concerning the right of persons to know what their rights and obligations are and to act in accordance with them. In the pre-perestroika era the people were ignorant of their rights. This served the interests of the authorities. The Constitution of the USSR, which contained many beautiful words about human rights, was displayed in shops everywhere, but if you referred to it in court, you could be silenced or banished from the courtroom. It was also impossible to procure copies of the Labor Code, the Criminal Code, or the Criminal Procedural Code. Their print run was artificially restricted. Nor was it a simple matter to access them in a library. It became abundantly clear in the process of taking stock that one of the basic problems was the existence of all sorts of quasi-legal regulations. Each ministry and department could create its own “norms” and adopt its own secret guidelines for those who implemented them. In other words, it was not only the Constitution but also many laws that went enforced. It was practically impossible to protest the actions of an official.
I was shocked to learn that the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Internal Affairs lacked even basic knowledge of which directives regulated residence permits, of how many there were, or even of their sequence. It turned out that some of these directives had been in force from the earliest postrevolutionary years. The authorities had simply forgotten to annul them. Surrealistic situations arose in which a passport officer was operating according to some ancient directives that everyone else had forgotten about and no one else possessed. To the question of why a residence permit had been refused, she would reply, “It can’t be done. There are directives.”
Representatives of the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Procurator General laughed at the news that in Vienna we had undertaken the obligation to publish and make easily accessible all of these quasi-legal regulations and directives that affected human rights. Later, however, they had to rescind these unpublished directives.
The brilliant Soviet writer Fazil Iskander compared the relationship between the state and Soviet citizens to that between a boa constrictor and the rabbits it swallowed. The boa constrictor was chiefly concerned that the rabbit not jump out of the boa’s jaws. But on one occasion it did happen. One boa constrictor told what had occurred: “This was one of the darkest days of our history. It was not clear what the escaped rabbit would say about our internal system. How would the other rabbits respond to his words?” To ensure that nothing like this happened again, the snakes decided “to restrict the freedom of rabbits inside boa constrictors.” From then on rabbits inside the belly of a boa constrictor were allowed to move in only one direction.
According to its authors, the introduction in 1932 of an internal passport regime and a system of residence permits was supposed to solve certain problems connected, in particular, with agricultural collectivization, one of the key economic programs of Stalinism. The internal passport regime served as an instrument for controlling population movements. Thus, certain categories of persons were simply not issued internal passports. This primarily affected peasants, who were forbidden to move from their state farms and collective farms.
Shevardnadze supported our efforts to eliminate residence permits, and after the conclusion of the Vienna meeting of the CSCE member states, our work on this issue emerged from “underground” onto the interdepartmental level. We made little progress. There were several reasons for the disappointing results, chief among them the position of the Moscow authorities who apparently wielded a permanent veto on rescinding the institution of residence permits.
“Movement in just one direction” and “conduct inside the boa constrictor” constituted an iron curtain that, among other things, forbade Soviet citizens from leaving and returning to the country freely. Drafting a law on departure and reentry became one of the core missions of our ministry. In the USSR, going abroad or not returning from abroad was viewed as an anti-Soviet action punishable under the Criminal Code. “Non-returnees” were even “given the honor” of a mention in Article 64 of the Criminal Code under “Betrayal of the Motherland.” Persons whom the authorities considered undesirable were subjected to illegal expulsion from the USSR and stripped of their Soviet citizenship. Contrary to the law, persons leaving the USSR on Israeli visas were likewise deprived of their citizenship.
The most common grounds for refusing permission to go abroad were considerations of secrecy. On that basis refuseniks could be detained for decades. One’s closest relatives also possessed a virtual “right of veto” on one’s emigration. You could have been prohibited from traveling abroad simply because your apartment faced a secret establishment and you might have seen or photographed those working inside. Those Soviet citizens who went to live abroad permanently were forbidden to return, even to visit their relatives. With the beginning of perestroika the number of refusals to travel abroad for permanent residence was sharply curtailed. The application procedure for temporary travel abroad on private business also was greatly simplified.
I was involved from the beginning in drafting the law on the freedom of exit and reentry but, unfortunately, was no longer involved when it was finally enacted. This was because unlike Glukhov, Yury Reshetov, who had become the head of the division, reacted very irritably when our unit came into conflict with other ministries. Kuznetsov, who then headed the Visas and Permissions Division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and for some reason was viewed as a democrat after the disintegration of the USSR, very clearly expressed his views regarding the position of the Foreign Ministry and my own stance when he began yelling at me during an interministerial conference at the Ministry of Justice: “Do you want to be assigned to felling timber?”2
“That’s a good idea. Clean air, a healthy way of life. And a civilized bunch of men headed by my minister whose instructions I am now carrying out.”
A break was declared. Kuznetsov immediately approached me to apologize and claimed it was a joke. After this it became easier to reach agreements with him and his office.
The struggle over adopting this law not only was torpedoed by certain departments but was also used by other departments to resolve their own problems—to the benefit of the former. The Ministry of Transportation suddenly and categorically opposed the law. It could not guarantee its implementation. Not only would it need to increase the amount of its rolling stock but it would also need to develop new railway lines. The national airline Aeroflot was alarmed, for it had too few aircraft. Nor did the Ministry of Finance remain on the sidelines. “Where will we be able to get enough hard currency?” they asked. The unanimous conclusion of those opposed to the law was they needed more time to take the necessary “preparatory measures.” Naturally, when the law was nevertheless adopted, to be implemented in phases, no one moved a finger to facilitate its implementation.
As with other bills, I considered it imperative not merely to declare a right but also to bolster it with an appropriate implementation mechanism. The government bill, adopted on the first reading, incorporated many provisions of prime importance.
It contained a provision stating that persons beginning work in fields where, for reasons of security, travel was restricted would have to be informed of this in advance. It was envisioned that such restrictions would be established directly at the place of employment. An upper limit of five years that departments could not exceed was set on the period of restrictions on travel. This term could be extended only in exceptional cases by a Commission on Citizenship of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Yet another key feature of the law was the opportunity to appeal to this selfsame commission a decision to refuse permission for permanent residence abroad. Everyone feared this feature like fire. Often it simply sufficed to inquire what were the grounds for refusing an exit visa to a certain refusenik for the department itself to rescind the refusal. A judicial complaint was anticipated in controversial cases where the obligations had not been fulfilled regarding persons who wanted to travel abroad. This feature also removed another of the sore points regarding the problem of exit and reentry. Thus, for the first time since the Bolshevik coup of 1917, the right of Soviet citizens to leave and return to the country was secured.
After our division had just been established, the “traditional” drafters of laws such as officials in the Ministry of Justice and the Procuracy tried to keep from us the bills that were being drafted. As a case in point, one of my colleagues simply stole the text of one of the drafts and enabled us to intervene in a timely fashion. Officials from other ministries simply could not understand what business it was of the Foreign Ministry. Once they figured it out, they tried to hide what was going on and exclude us from the working groups.
The main thrust of our efforts was to reform legislation regarding criminal activity. The Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the “model to emulate” for the other republics of the USSR, was critically important in the mechanism for maintaining power. Before examining the content of this remarkable document, let us make a historical-juridical excursion. As far back as 1922, the Criminal Code of the RSFSR contained such articles pertaining to “propaganda and agitation directed at helping the world bourgeoisie” and “the preparation and preservation with the intent to disseminate and the dissemination of agitational literature for counterrevolutionary purposes, false rumors or unproven information that could provoke panic in society, arouse distrust toward the authorities or discredit them.” The most curious was “in the absence of proof of the counterrevolutionary character of the aforesaid actions,” punishment may merely be mitigated. The notorious Article 58-10 of the Stalinist Criminal Code, “Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda,” came later, but its path was already well prepared. After Josef Stalin’s death, smoothly and with only a few changes, it metamorphosed into Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR and was in force even during the period of perestroika.
Glasnost, or “transparency,” was a crime according to this article, and it was not treated as a simple one but as especially dangerous. The “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” as cited in Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, referred to particularly dangerous crimes against the state. The text of this article was formulated in such an all-encompassing manner that it is worth quoting the target it describes in its entirety: “Agitation or propaganda conducted with the aim of undermining or weakening Soviet power or the commission of specific particularly dangerous crimes against the state, the oral dissemination toward the same ends of libelous thoughts that defame the Soviet state and social order, as well as the dissemination or preparation or possession of literature of such content toward these same ends.”
This article accompanied the less severe Article 190-1, which defined a crime against state authority as “the systematic dissemination in oral form of knowingly false fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social order as well as preparation or dissemination in written, printed or other form of works of like content.” This article enabled the authorities to hold persons criminally liable, for example, for an anecdote or entries in a diary. Anyone who spoke or, even more to the point, anyone who wrote—unless, of course, they exercised extreme caution—would find themselves “under the sword of Damocles” of these two articles. Naturally, we drew parallels between the Criminal Code in force in the Brezhnev era and the Stalinist one, carefully hushing up the fact that the former scarcely differed from the “sacred Leninist norms.”
On April 8, 1989, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted a decree that altered the wording of Article 70. It replaced the former deliberate vagueness of this article with a clear judicial formula containing two fundamentally important criteria. The first specified that the statements covered by the article must be of public character. The second concerned the article’s focus on calls to change the state and social order, and it removed wording that violated the Constitution of the USSR. An important change was also introduced into the literature section of the article stating that only the preparation with intent to disseminate such materials, as well as their dissemination, was prohibited and not, as heretofore, private notes. At the same time, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR revoked Article 190-1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. Thus, the juridical foundation for battling dissent by means of the Criminal Code was removed.
I am especially proud of the changes regarding the political articles of the Criminal Code and, in particular, the new wording of Article 70. My draft was adopted with the exception of one or two clarifying words. The wording occurred to me while I was taking a bath before work, and I dictated it to my wife so I would not forget. The reactionaries, however, took short-term revenge, making it a criminal offense to insult or discredit organs of the state, responsible officials, and, what was most surprising, public organizations and their public media. The notorious Article 11 lasted only until the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR met in the following year (1990).
However, even the changes introduced into the Criminal Code were insufficient for glasnost and for securing freedom of thought and of the mass media. The most blatant example was the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe of April 1986, for according to the laws then in force, it could not even be mentioned since the location of atomic energy plants was strictly secret. Secrecy, one of the major props of the regime, was founded on lies and fear. We succeeded in tackling this “sacred object” by a multifactor approach, emphasizing its enormous cost, drafting the law on exit and entry, and pointing out the absurdity of the list of what was considered secret information. Finally, the leadership of the ministry understood the need to ease the regime of secrecy.
Paradoxically, the struggle against the institution of censorship, the state organ in Russia that traditionally embodied the suppression of freedom of speech, culminated in a comparatively easy victory. The partisans of perestroika and glasnost still had to wage a long battle, to be sure, although in what were already objectively different conditions.
But let us return to the Criminal Code then in effect, starting with Article 64, “Betrayal of the Motherland,” which best illustrates its distinctive character. It immediately becomes clear that this article refers to a “flight abroad or refusal to return from outside the borders of the USSR.” There is probably no need to explain that “non-returnees” generally enjoyed the internationally recognized right to leave their own country. What follows in this article appears at first glance to be even more “criminal”: “rendering assistance to a foreign state in conducting activities that are hostile to the USSR.” If one extracts the meaning from these ominous words, it becomes clear, especially in the context of the subsequent political articles of the RSFSR Criminal Code, that any professional activity abroad—for example, work connected to journalism or to Sovietology—could be subsumed under this article. Punishment could be as severe as the death penalty plus confiscation of property.
A strange amalgam existed. Proclaimed rights and freedoms were joined with criminal responsibility, thus ensuring the rights would not be exercised. An article in the Criminal Code about parasitism turned the right to work on its head. The right to preserve health was distorted by the Ministry of Health into a license for arbitrary conduct on the part of physicians, while the right to housing in response to the phenomenon of homelessness was twisted by an article about vagrancy and residence permits. The right to enjoy the achievements of culture was nullified by the persecution of its best representatives and bans against their works; thus, the freedom of scientific, technical, and artistic creativity existed only in the private domain. Further, the right to suggest improvements to state organs and public organizations and to criticize their defects was twisted around by Articles 70 and 190-1 of the Criminal Code. A bold person who took the risk of making use of this right hazarded a trip to a psychiatric hospital for “urgent consultations.”
I have already spoken of freedom of speech and of the press. The freedom of assembly, of meetings, and of street marches and demonstrations was “implemented” exclusively so the toiling masses could show their support for the policies of the CPSU and the Soviet government. Otherwise, the exercise of this right was equated with hooliganism or stirring up the public. Freedom of conscience was achieved to a considerable degree by the religious articles of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. The inviolability of the person and of one’s dwelling was included in the Constitution just to observe the niceties. And Article 56, which proclaimed that “the personal life of citizens, privacy of correspondence, of telephone conversations, and telegraphic communications is protected by law,” was simply a mockery.
Throughout most of perestroika, a fierce battle was fought over the abolition of the death penalty, a measure we insisted on. Almost all the nonspecialists opposed its abolition. They were actively supported by the mass media. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not surrender. A compromise was reached. The list of capital crimes was drastically cut. Specifically, economic crimes were taken off the list.
The lion’s share of this work was mainly directed toward restoring what had long been uprooted from Soviet life—that is, the right of persons to be themselves. Without taking a risk, it was impossible to hold opinions that contradicted the official ideology on major questions or the official point of view on current events, to move from one apartment to another without permission from the authorities, to “break loose from the collective,” and so forth. Each person had to be just like everyone else.
Andrei Sakharov, in writing about the need of human society for intellectual freedom, included the right to receive and disseminate information, the freedom of “unprejudiced and fearless discussion,” and the freedom from “the pressure of authorities and prejudices.” In his opinion, “this three-fold freedom of thought is the only guarantee against infecting the people with massive myths that, in the hands of perfidious, hypocritical demagogues can easily turn into a bloody dictatorship. This is the sole guarantee for implementing a scientific-democratic approach to politics, economics, and culture.” He defined the threat to intellectual freedom as follows: “It is a threat to the independence and value of the human personality, a threat to the meaning of human life.” After Gorbachev came to power, a turning point occurred in society, and the country’s leadership regarding all questions concerning its worldview centered on freedom.
An integral component of the ruling political cult was a dogmatic, belligerent, and ignorant type of atheism. To a large extent the education of the “New Man” was built upon this principle. The main reason for persecuting even the most harmless dissent was a strict political-ideological prescription for the “moral-political unity of society.” In other words, translating from Soviet newspeak to normal language, it eliminated any convictions that were not included in the directives from on high. This, naturally, included all religious teachings. In the best of cases, believers and, even more to the point, churchgoers were merely tolerated, but they were seen as second-class persons for whom the doors of the GULAG and the psychiatric hospitals were always open.
While taking our bearings from international standards, we realized that we could not automatically transfer foreign experience and the provisions of the relevant international rights documents to Soviet soil. For example, in the sphere of freedom of conscience, the existence in the country of various confessions, denominations, interpretations, and tendencies was a reality that contained significant moral potential, but if handled incautiously it was rife with new and serious problems that would be difficult to resolve.
Not infrequently stocktaking occurred under the pressure of circumstances. During the years of perestroika, extremists fired shots first in one region of the country and then in another. Each time it was a disaster. A majority of cases were provoked by the neo-Stalinists for whom force was an instrument of their political game. People’s lives and welfare were small change in their struggle to achieve their political and other ambitions.
The sharp interethnic conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, the predominantly ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, was the raison d’être for devising a legal framework for a state of emergency. About a year before its adoption, I was included in an interministerial group to draft a directive for what was then still the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Considering the events that followed, I do not presume to say whether this effort was the beginning of an attempt to resolve the problems facing the country posed by those who resorted to force, especially since there are grounds for supposing that the events in Nagorno-Karabakh were one of the provocations that opponents of reform initiated.
I had not expected such an assignment at all. I learned that I would have to deal with it only when I was hastily summoned to the initial meeting, which was held in the hall of the collegium of the Ministry of Justice. It was a typical meeting. Literally right after it began one of the generals in attendance took the floor and argued in favor of handing all power to the military during a state of emergency. Speaking on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I took the initiative to neutralize this danger. To be honest, I had no right to do so at the time.
Subsequently, by then fully authorized to defend the ministry’s position, I succeeded first of all in ensuring that the draft bill fully conformed to the USSR’s international obligations. Another extremely important feature was strengthening the draft edict to include a detailed regulatory mechanism for declaring and implementing a state of emergency and thus preclude any arbitrary, unjustifiable restrictions on human rights.
The circumstances of the disturbances in Tbilisi (April 1989), when Soviet troops attacked and killed nineteen unarmed Georgian demonstrators, resulted in particularly strong pressure. Hot on the heels of these events we proposed strictly regulating any resort to force. Naturally, despite the minister’s support, the law enforcement departments blocked this proposal. An enormous amount of work to elucidate what special means had been employed “to restore order,” including nerve gas, ended in failure. Officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Procuracy who had passed highly classified internal instructions and other documents to me had put themselves at risk to no avail.
All our work to promote order in the sphere of human rights took place amid the ongoing bitter political struggle. The period when the Central Committee exercised absolute power was particularly complicated and protracted. Everything became much simpler after the creation of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR (March 1989) and the election of Mikhail Gorbachev, who systematically deprived the party and the Central Committee staff of power.
In general, pushing things to a decision point was a science in itself. Notwithstanding the myth of a monolithic Soviet state and Communist Party structure, the state and party bureaucracies were actually extremely heterogeneous. A paradoxical situation often arose in which diametrically opposed decisions were forthcoming from one and the same ministry, department, or office of the Central Committee. All one needed to know was which buttons to push and what questions to submit to precisely which persons in order to achieve a positive outcome.
In the USSR the presumption of innocence was proclaimed in principle but disregarded in practice. This naturally promoted a sense of personal insecurity. In reality a presumption of guilt existed, and it tilted any criminal investigation and legal proceedings in favor of the prosecution. For example, defense attorneys were allowed to participate in a criminal case not from the time of detention but only after the conclusion of the preliminary investigation. The presumption of innocence, stipulated in the UN International Treaty on Civil and Political Rights guaranteeing the right not to be compelled to give evidence against oneself or to confess guilt, was honored in the breach.
Nonjudicial forms of persecution were widely employed. Among them Andrei Sakharov listed dismissal from work, obstacles to receiving an education, exile abroad, conditions that compelled persons to emigrate, and revocation of citizenship for Soviet citizens who were abroad.
In drafting the acts relating to human rights, we always insisted firmly on openness. Stereotypical disputes often arose. “This cannot be published.” “That means it can’t be adopted.”
Paradoxically, depriving the CPSU Central Committee and its apparatus of its plenary powers for a certain period significantly complicated our work. Many opponents of change hastened to take advantage of the breakdown of the mechanism for making and implementing decisions. We were deprived of the effective assistance that liberal staff members from the Central Committee had previously rendered. However, opposition from the reactionaries in this same organ of power now ceased. Unfortunately, the power that the party reactionaries lost was more than compensated for by that of the reactionaries from the state bureaucracy.
The fate of religious freedom in Russia was no better than that of freedom of speech. Prior to the Bolshevik coup, Russian Orthodoxy was the state religion; soon after the coup all religions were in effect virtually tabooed and placed under the strictest control by the secret police. Many Russian Orthodox priests, including the upper ranks of the church hierarchy, were simply KGB officers in cassocks. During Gorbachev’s reformation, however, an initially successful attempt was undertaken to promote religious freedom and normalize church-state relations.
The early work on rectifying this situation typified the romantic period of perestroika. Clearly there was a problem, and how to deal with it was also fairly clear. Nonetheless, for a long time nothing happened. To be sure, the USSR managed to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the baptism of Rus’ and publish a massive edition of the Bible, a natural decision that seemed hardly worth noting. But before then even possessing a Bible made one criminally liable.
That we failed to secure permission for Pope John Paul II to take part in celebrating the millennium of the baptism of Rus’ is still a matter of shame. The KGB, the Russian Orthodox Church, and those members of the Central Committee of the CPSU who supported the reactionary Yegor Ligachev, then number 2 in the hierarchy, were adamantly opposed. Following the disintegration of the USSR, their replacements hardly differed from them and perhaps were even worse. During the Soviet period there was not such open hostility, such hysteria, and other dubious mental displays toward the Vatican as what came afterward.
The core issue we faced during perestroika was what to do about legislation codifying the lack of religious freedom in the USSR. This issue became so prominent that from the depths of the law enforcement establishment, draft legislation emerged that would have permanently consigned the church—already slavishly dependent on the state—to something like a ghetto. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs exercised its veto and sent a note to the Central Committee of the CPSU demonstrating the need to pass a democratic law on freedom of conscience in conformity with the USSR’s international obligations. As in other cases, we grounded the international obligations of the USSR in what was then called Leninist norms, which we sharply contrasted with Stalinist ones. The classics of Marxism-Leninism spoke eloquently of religion. Therefore, even in “materialist” and “atheistic” Russia, their words imparted a kind of truly mystical significance.
When we began working on the issue of freedom of religion, existing restrictions limited the teaching of religious beliefs. Churches and religious societies had no right to own property, including buildings and liturgical objects. Thus, the door was wide open to arbitrary official actions. The position of religious groups and organizations was minutely regulated by the state; in force were numerous prohibitions and restrictions affecting believers and religious associations. The only books permitted in places of worship were those required by the ministers. People were denied the Bible, the Koran, and, consequently, access to their own history and culture. The approach to believers, who were treated as a special class of citizens, reflected the bonfires of the Inquisition and ideological racism.
Shevardnadze established a working group in the Foreign Ministry under the leadership of Deputy Minister Vladimir Petrovsky to deal with the whole set of church-state problems. Along with Deputy Chief of the Directorate of International Organizations V. Sidorov, we were supposed to establish contacts with the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church and other denominations. Parenthetically, it should be noted that this work too was illegal. Without exception, all contacts with religious leaders were supposed to take place exclusively through the Council on Religious Affairs. In practice, this meant it was inconceivable. If any government official, no matter what rank, wanted to explain something to members of the clergy or reach agreement on some matter, he or she had to address the Council on Religious Affairs. If this body approved, council officials would contact someone from the clergy and, at their own discretion, communicate the response. Under such conditions true dialogue was impossible. Thus, the Foreign Ministry broke with the existing practice and established direct contacts with religious leaders.
Making personal acquaintance with the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church was an interesting experience. For example, I paid a visit with my then direct superior, Yury Reshetov, to Metropolitan Yuvenaly to inform him of the results of the Vienna meeting of the CSCE member states. I naively supposed that the Orthodox Church would be very satisfied with the agreements under which Russian Orthodoxy, like other religions, would receive unprecedented freedom in our country. Was I ever wrong! We entered Yuvenaly’s rooms in the Novodevichy Monastery, where the metropolitan was reading the text of the document in Izvestiia. He saw us and instead of saying hello, he flung down the paper: “So now we have to recognize the Uniates?”3
Reshetov was dumbfounded. Taking a deep breath, I coolly confirmed this supposition and said something about what the Russian Orthodox Church would receive. I did not fail to make spiteful mention of the separation of church and state and the equality of all religions before the law.
With that our conversation concluded. This was my second meeting with Yuvenaly. The first time, when I went to see him with Sidorov, he had been extremely pleasant and impressed us as an inspirational and well-educated person.
Realizing it was useless to speak with Yuvenaly, we paid a visit to Filaret (of Minsk), who proved to be rather different. Convincingly, he cursed at length the obtuseness, sluggishness, and alcoholism of those who should be “removing” obstacles to the Uniates. Filaret’s joie de vivre was more becoming than that of his higher-ranking colleague. Parenthetically, I should note that at different times both of them were involved in external church relations.
Their successor, Metropolitan Kirill, who later became patriarch, was cut from different cloth. He was a consummate diplomat and master of protocol. At the time, he was already no less ambitious than Yuvenaly, who had pretensions to the patriarchate. Kirill thought that any Russian should become Orthodox, and if the person didn’t like the church, then he or she could leave it. His was an enlightened position. The closest contact I made was with Metropolitan Pitirim. He was an interesting conversationalist, a very worldly man. To observe Lent with him was unbelievably tasty.
Naturally, there were also meetings with religious leaders from other denominations. At one of them we heard: “How good that you have finally come. Now we shall know what to do.”
These contacts convinced me of the complete absence of spirituality on the part of my religious interlocutors. My experiences also persuaded me to form my own opinions about church-state relations and intra-church problems.
The working group drafting a new Soviet law on freedom of conscience assembled in a house belonging to the Council on Religious Affairs and then in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The positions of the group’s participants were clear and diametrically opposed. An overwhelming majority were strongly opposed to any liberalization in this sphere. What passions raged during the drafting of the bill! The ideological fanatics even tried to prohibit the churches from engaging in charitable activities by including provisions in the draft that, for example, would have made it impossible for them to open hospitals.
Passage of the Law on Freedom of Conscience and of Religious Organizations on October 1, 1990, not only thoroughly liquidated the old order but also established a new political and legal framework that guaranteed the sovereignty of the individual in questions of faith and in relation to religion. Until the law was adopted, directives from the Council on Religious Affairs were in force that categorically forbade “the registration of religious societies and groups of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, True Gospel Orthodox, Orthodox Christian, the True Orthodox Church, Adventist Reformers, and Murashkovites.”4 But the list was not comprehensive, since it contained an “etc.” at the end. Thus, the directives prohibited just about any religious group.
The new law precluded such arbitrariness. It specifically stipulated that documents defining religious teachings and deciding other internal matters of religious organizations were not subject to registration. Government departments of religious affairs no longer possessed plenary powers and could no longer interfere in the internal affairs of religious organizations. As far as the law enforcement organs were concerned, holding religious beliefs could no longer in and of itself be seen as a violation of the law.
Naturally, the process of drafting and passing the law did not occur in a vacuum. The Council on Religious Affairs estimated that at the beginning of 1991, there were about 70 million believers in the USSR belonging to almost fifty different denominations, sects, and tendencies. The situation became even more strained with regard to intra-church affairs. Centrifugal tendencies became sharply evident. In October 1990 the Ukrainian Orthodox Church separated from the Moscow Patriarchate. Mutual reproaches flew back and forth between the Moscow Patriarchate and all those who disagreed with it.
The Moscow Patriarchate believed that it was one thing if the Ukrainian Orthodox Church became autonomous in the course of normal intra-church development, but it viewed the establishment of a Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church as an entirely different matter. The Autocephalous Church specifically accused the Russian Orthodox Church of having failed to maintain control of the situation in western Ukraine and of “having retreated without giving battle in the face of Catholic pressure.” Similar processes occurred in Moldova. The Moscow Patriarchate, with no less passion, reproached the Kiev ecclesiastical hierarchy for its inertia and for its inability to cope with the evolving situation.
Relations between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad became strained. However, they had never enjoyed cordial relations. The Moscow Patriarchate was considerably agitated when the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad established its first legal parish in the Vladimir district in 1990.
Hints of normalizing relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican and the dialogue that had commenced between them, as well as the strengthened position of Catholicism in various regions of the country, caused the so-called patriotic wing of the Russian Orthodox Church to attack the church leadership and accuse it of complicity in the “Catholicization” of Russia. Similar accusations were leveled at Gorbachev, especially after his conversation with John Paul II in the Vatican in 1989. The agents of darkness and regression accused Gorbachev of “plotting with the Vatican.”
Problems relating to the Ukrainian Greek Catholics (Uniates), who were dominant in some districts of western Ukraine, proved especially complicated for both the government and the Moscow Patriarchate. According to official data the Uniate Church had four million to five million followers. Naturally the faithful demanded that both the government and the Russian Orthodox Church grant full juridical recognition to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and restore it as an autonomous religious organization.
In a number of western districts of the USSR, the Uniates became a symbol of personal freedom and national consciousness. It was useless and harmful to struggle against them. At sessions of the interdepartmental working group drafting a bill on freedom of conscience, we were told of occasions when the police received reports that a Uniate service was taking place literally two steps behind a police station. A military detail would be dispatched to the scene. It would return and report that no service was taking place. The original complainant would insist that it was and that even the singing was audible! He would be told that no one else but him had heard any singing, that he was imagining things, that he needed to rest up, otherwise . . . The complainant had no recourse but to return home.
The hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church complained about both the inaction of the authorities as well as the severe shortage of Orthodox priests capable of conducting services in Ukrainian and of religious literature printed in Ukrainian. They asserted that the Vatican was skillfully and actively filling this vacuum in order to “implant” Catholicism in the USSR. The redistribution of church property was far from the last item on the Moscow Patriarchate’s list of complaints. It did not want to lose what it had received, while the Greek Catholics tried to recover what they had lost. Unfortunately, for too long the government failed to distinguish its own position from that of the church. The process of registering the Uniate communities only began in mid-1990 after a considerable delay.
The new patriarch Aleksei II, who was well acquainted with the activity of the USSR Foreign Ministry in defense of the rights of believers and religious organizations, attended the final meeting of the parliamentary commission drafting the law. I refused the blessing of this KGB agent even though he may have been only a “former” agent. Regrettably, this law was not in force for long. The RSFSR parliament began feverish attempts to draft its own law. It is a curious fact that those members of our commission who had been unable to persuade the commission of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to adopt their own aggressively atheist and KGB-type approaches later joined the RSFSR parliamentary commission.
I must confess that while I was involved in helping to resolve these religious problems, because of my own naïveté, I failed to realize that religion could be a commercial enterprise. The churchmen themselves were not so naive. They were well aware of this potential.
In the winter of 1986–87, a classified radio transcript summarizing foreign radio broadcasts into the USSR that was intended for the Soviet leadership’s use revealed the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. Eduard Shevardnadze instructed us to report to him promptly on this matter. From that evening serious efforts began to reform Soviet psychiatry, work in which I was engaged for several years. Frankly none of us suspected the scale of the tragedy or the depth and complexity of the problems confronting us. We possessed only moral reference points. By acquiring information we were able to adopt a position but not to analyze the problem comprehensively and devise appropriate and, most important, realistic proposals. Everything had been done to conceal the truth from outsiders’ eyes. Although they knew more than we did, the guardians of the law were in roughly the same position. Yet the main point soon became obvious: A healthy person who landed in a psychiatric hospital could be deprived of his or her will with a single jab in the arm. A second jab and the person would go mad. Practically no one who underwent such “treatment” emerged healthy.
Among the main preoccupations of our Western partners concerned with human rights in the USSR were their lists of the prisoners of Soviet psychiatry. These lists contained the names of about three hundred persons who had been placed under psychiatric treatment for political reasons and often held criminally accountable under political and religious articles of the Criminal Code. Some among them had never had any connection to politics.
For many years, in response to widespread accusations about politically motivated psychiatric abuse, Soviet psychiatrists either maintained a proud silence or alleged that they were being libeled. As a result, in 1983 they were actually expelled from the World Psychiatric Association.
By rebuffing any sort of criticism as slander or libel, Soviet psychiatry showed that it had been gravely ill itself for many years. The psychiatrists were adept at diagnosing their patients’ inability to critically assess their own actions as a symptom of their illness; however, the psychiatrists failed to observe this in themselves. To be fair I must note that it was not the psychiatrists themselves who were responsible for introducing the belief in their own infallibility. They were simply the executors of a political and religious line that came from above.
The criticism from the West was shocking. In essence it maintained that in the USSR, healthy people were placed in psychiatric hospitals because of their political and religious convictions. Our Western interlocutors handed the Soviet authorities lists of psychiatric prisoners who, after the start of Gorbachev’s perestroika, for the first time became objects of intense scrutiny by the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Establishing the dictatorship of comprehensive ideology in the USSR had both moral as well as juridical consequences. The political and religious articles of the Criminal Code, along with the bizarre system of psychiatric diagnosis devised by Academician Andrei Snezhnevsky, who propounded the notion of sluggish schizophrenia, facilitated the transformation of nonstandard political or religious convictions into a criminal matter and then a psychiatric diagnosis. Even worse was the subsequent arbitrary action via extrajudicial compulsory hospitalization. The pretext was so-called hospitalization for emergency reasons on account of urgent symptoms. The abuse of psychiatry intensified after the Prague Spring of 1968 and the 1975 signing of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which provided a powerful impetus for defending human rights in the USSR.
In organizational terms, the suppression of dissenters was done in two ways. The first, more complicated way involved applying the political and religious articles of the Criminal Code, followed by compulsory treatment in special hospitals run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This system worked flawlessly. A person held criminally accountable could be transferred to judicial-psychiatric specialists at any stage of the investigation or by a court. Normally, however, such matters did not reach a court. Moreover, supposedly out of “humanitarian considerations,” defendants who were tried were not brought to court. Many of them never even saw a lawyer face-to-face.
Why were such violations of criminal procedural laws necessary? In some cases even the elastic wording of the Criminal Code allowing persons to be judged for expressing thoughts to a spouse or to friends, or for writing thoughts in a diary, for example, did not suffice to hold persons criminally accountable. That’s where expert opinion came in. The psychiatric instruments of combating dissent were honed to perfection. Psychiatrists were free to act as arbitrarily as they pleased. The arbitrariness of some encouraged the arbitrariness of others. One’s neighbors, one’s boss, or anyone at all could demand that someone be isolated in a psychiatric hospital because of “urgent symptoms.”5 This was the second method of uprooting “heresy” from the “monolithic Soviet society” and suppressing dissenters.
Battling this monster was difficult. To initiate action, my father, then first deputy foreign minister of the USSR, spoke with Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, who was surprised and indignant upon learning of the scale and methods of psychiatric abuse for nonmedical ends. Ryzhkov asked my father if there was anything on paper. After receiving information I had prepared, he vented his anger at a Politburo meeting according to those present. However, psychiatric repression was so deeply entrenched that even the clear and firm position of Gorbachev, the prime minister, the minister of foreign affairs, and Yakovlev sufficed only to provide a legal basis for the investigatory work that was under way. Moreover, this legal basis was quite shaky. According to the existing rules, everything that transpired at Politburo meetings was strictly confidential. I was not supposed to know about it, let alone refer to it.
Initially the task seemed fairly mundane: figure out what was going on, draft proposals to amend the normative documents, and submit them to the Politburo for the signatures of Shevardnadze and the minister of health. Obstacles arose almost at once. First was the unprecedented opposition we encountered from the Ministry of Health. Naturally we wanted to study the existing protocols. Unexpectedly, the bureaucrats in the ministry told us, “There are no protocols.” We knew that there were. There had to be. Moreover, we had our own set, copies that had come into our hands via means like something from the plot of a detective story.
At my first meeting with Alexander Churkin, the chief psychiatrist of the Ministry of Health of the USSR, I referred to these protocols, using a pretext I had prepared in advance: “I need to report to the leadership the measures we need to take for the USSR to rejoin the World Psychiatric Association.”
This pretext was invented so that the feudal lords and inquisitors of Soviet psychiatry would all agree to the reformation of their domains. Specifically, there were questions about the protocols governing psychiatric examinations.
“There are no such protocols,” Churkin flared.
I took out my notebook and flipped through it to the proper page. “Well, how could there not be, Alexander Alexandrovich? Their full title is ‘Protocols Concerning the Initial Medical Examination of Citizens to Determine Their Mental Health.’ First Deputy Minister of Health [Oleg] Shchepin approved them on 26 June 1984.”
“There is such a protocol,” Churkin acknowledged grudgingly, almost interrogatively. He knew he was trapped. “But how do you know about it?”
“We have our own ways of getting the information we need.”
The psychiatrists had much to hide. According to this document, anyone could be subjected to a compulsory psychiatric examination if one’s conduct “aroused suspicion that he manifested severe psychiatric disturbances that threatened the life and safety of the person in question or those around him.” A special provision stipulated the right of responsible officials, relatives, and neighbors to send for a psychiatrist. Moreover, “individuals who disrupt the work of institutions, enterprises, and so forth by absurd actions, innumerable letters containing absurd contents, as well as groundless demands may be examined by a physician-psychiatrist directly in these institutions.” Therefore, practically any person distinguished from the mass by unusual thoughts or eccentricity, or by insisting on his or her rights, could ultimately be hospitalized against his or her will by deploying the medical terminology “for emergency reasons.”
Together with our judicial “investigations,” we conducted others as well. From every possible source we added names that had not appeared on the original list of victims of punitive psychiatry presented to the Soviet delegation in Vienna. We circulated these revised lists to all departments so they could initiate possible reviews of the fate of the persons named therein. I say “possible” because among those on the lists there turned out to be persons—criminals—who really were suffering from psychiatric illnesses. Sometimes, to be sure, we were deceived in this regard. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the physicians concluded that the victims of punitive psychiatry, whose names appeared on the lists, could be discharged from psychiatric hospitals or transferred from the special hospitals of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to regular hospitals.
The breakthrough came during preparations for Gorbachev’s first visit to the United States. Included among the numerous materials was an official document listing the names of persons who had been discharged from psychiatric hospitals and those who would be discharged prior to the start of the visit. The lists had been compiled with the help of psychiatrists after they had reexamined these patients.
Nevertheless, at the last moment someone somewhere reneged on his word. The mechanism of releasing dissenters from the psychiatric torture chambers was stuck in neutral gear. We needed to adopt harsh measures to convince the psychiatrists and the concerned ministries and departments that there could be serious consequences if the general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU engaged in misinformation. Of course, we exaggerated somewhat, but they snapped to at once. The conclusion I drew was crystal clear: “Do what you want to, but keep your promises. Otherwise, we shall all pay the price.”
It was obvious that a good law was needed to bring order into psychiatry. We possessed a powerful weapon in the initial stage of perestroika in the form of a Leninist-era resolution (directive) from People’s Commissar of Justice Pēteris Stučka, published in Izvestiia, that governed the examination of those suffering from mental illnesses. This directive was presented to Shevardnadze, who fully grasped the lethal power of “Leninist norms” for the Soviet psychiatric inquisition. A whirlwind of activity began to push through a Politburo resolution on the need for a law regulating all aspects of psychiatric care. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Health, allied to the punitive organs, came out on top in the struggle with the Foreign Ministry. Thus, on January 5, 1988, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree authorizing compromise regulations governing the provision of psychiatric care. Although it had been drafted on Shevardnadze’s initiative, in the key memorandum to the Central Committee we had been able to exert influence only at the stage of formal balloting by Politburo members.
Despite the decree’s shortcomings, it contained many positive elements. Most important of all, it was the first legislative, rather than bureaucratic, effort to regulate the provision of psychiatric care. It established strict time frames for examining and reexamining patients who had been involuntarily placed in psychiatric hospitals. The decree provided not only administrative but also judicial as well as prosecutorial control over the actions of psychiatrists. Unfortunately, the mechanism of such control was not specified and, therefore, could not function. The special psychiatric hospitals that had been operated by the Ministry of the Interior were to be transferred to the public health services, but this decision, too, was also sabotaged at the last possible moment. One of the excuses given was that the salaries of personnel in the special hospitals were higher than those working in ordinary hospitals. The decree also established the principle of criminal culpability for placing a “person undoubtedly known to be healthy” in a psychiatric hospital. Since it was impossible to say that someone was “undoubtedly” known to be healthy, this was a masterful—and completely useless—formulation.
The decree also contained a provision broad enough to cover almost any abuse: “Persons committing actions that gave sufficient grounds for supposing that they suffered from psychiatric disorders, and who infringed upon public order or the rules of socialist communal life . . . can be subjected to an initial psychiatric examination without their agreement, or the agreement of their relatives or legal representatives.” It would be impossible to think of a vaguer and more expansive formula for any sort of arbitrary action than the notorious “rules of socialist communal life,” since they could be interpreted in a completely capricious fashion. In sum, the positive elements were practically nullified by the absence of an enforcement mechanism and by the traditionally elastic formulations. At the same time, the decree was significant since it actually did facilitate the further reform of psychiatry.
Even with the full support of Shevardnadze, nothing could have been accomplished at that time without the close cooperation of reform-minded personnel in the offices of the Central Committee of the CPSU. The section on human rights, whose work was overseen by Alexander Yakovlev, took up these issues. It was undoubtedly because of the incontestable authority of the all-powerful party apparatus that the psychiatrists began to cooperate with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Later, when things took a dangerous turn, Deputy Minister Adamishin relayed instructions from Shevardnadze that I should act entirely on my own so that no one in the Central Committee bureaucracy or the Foreign Ministry, including my own immediate supervisor Yury Reshetov, would know what I was working on or how. Soon Shevardnadze sent his own special messenger to transmit his order to take possession of all the rough drafts of the papers I had presented to him the previous day. His instructions were that from then on, without exception, I should give him all the papers dealing with psychiatry without first having them officially stamped, in order to leave no paper trail, and transmit them only to the then de facto head of the secretariat of the ministry, the future foreign minister Igor Ivanov. If necessary, I should inform him orally as to who else was in the know and from where the information came.
I am not joking in speaking of the danger. The attempts by various persons to intimidate, including by psychiatric methods—manipulation, intimidation, and provocation—especially by the KGB, were merely a trifle though certainly unpleasant. The major provocation was undertaken on the eve of a visit of American psychiatrists to the USSR. We had initiated this visit based on domestic political considerations; we needed powerful pressure from abroad to spur new efforts toward restructuring psychiatry. The main objective was to gain approval from above to draft an effective law strictly regulating all aspects of psychiatric care that would prevent new abuses by the white-coated guardians of ideological purity. No less important was freeing the maximum number of political and religious prisoners from the psychiatric torture chambers. To secure permission from the Soviet psychiatric “generals,” we informed them that without a successful visit, restoring Soviet membership in the World Psychiatric Association would be impossible.
The first meeting to prepare for the visit of American psychiatrists took place on November 9–12, 1988, in Moscow. It was agreed in advance that the preparations for the visit and the visit itself would take place under the aegis of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. Department of State. Accordingly, I was appointed to head the Soviet delegation, and my American counterpart was Ambassador Robert Farrand. The American side presented a document outlining conditions it considered necessary for the delegation to conduct its work successfully. Initially, the document seemed unacceptable.
The American delegation had a particular objective in mind—to ascertain whether perestroika was occurring in Soviet psychiatry and whether the preconditions for the abuse of psychiatry for nonmedical purposes still existed. The American specialists drafted a work plan in accordance with this objective. We were presented with a list of forty-eight persons; of those, they wanted to examine fifteen who were hospitalized and twelve who had been discharged from hospital. This plan was eventually carried out.
I will not conjecture about the difficulties the American specialists faced. One thing was clear: the results of their inquiries had to be 100 percent reliable according to criteria applicable in the United States. But implementing the political will of both sides during the initial phase of cooperation depended both on correctly interpreting the intentions of one’s counterparts and on purely technical aspects.
The success of the negotiations was facilitated by the acknowledgment, literally on the eve of their start, by Alexander Churkin, the chief psychiatrist of the Ministry of Health of the USSR, that there were cases of “hyper-diagnosis” and “unjustifiably lengthy periods of compulsory psychiatric treatment.” However, as he himself admitted to me, he fabricated the number of such cases, so the number bore no resemblance to reality. It should not be forgotten that the system Soviet psychiatrists devised for diagnosing psychological illnesses could satisfy the most refined taste of the most demanding politicians—that is, demanding of others, not of themselves! In this context, the word hyper-diagnosis has a distinctly ominous sound.
Just as the “medical” contingent of the Soviet delegation was headed by Churkin, on the American side this function was fulfilled by one of the leading American authorities in the field of judicial psychiatry, Dr. Loren Roth. Thanks very much to his efforts, a Soviet-American dialogue in the field of psychiatry resumed, and a new impetus was given for reforming Soviet psychiatry. I viewed Dr. Roth as both passionate about his work and trustworthy. When we exchanged views during a critical moment when just the two of us were together, and Dr. Roth virtually confirmed my suppositions concerning the goals and possible results of the visit, I began to feel I was now on solid ground rather than just relying upon my own questionable conjectures.
Naturally, the major divergence between the Americans and us was political. I was granted considerable freedom of maneuver with just one, although very important, caveat: under no circumstances was the Americans’ visit to lead to inspections, but since there actually were calls for inspections, they had to be on a mutual basis. Reshetov and the Soviet psychiatrists anticipated that they would discover political prisoners in American psychiatric hospitals. For form’s sake, I had to go along with this demand for a while.
Robert Farrand stuck to an extremely inflexible position: there was to be no reciprocal visits. “How can there be mutuality when you have political abuses of psychiatry and we do not?” he inquired. When it seemed that we had already agreed to and decided everything, and the members of the Soviet and American delegations began to rise from the table to exchange handshakes and warm congratulations, I felt compelled to take the floor and, summing up the results of the negotiations, emphasize that the visit would take place on the basis of mutuality. Otherwise, responsibility for aborting the visit would lie with the State Department. I knew that the next day, during Secretary of State George Shultz’s visit, I was supposed to meet with Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Richard Schifter. I had no doubt that this intelligent and subtle diplomat would take a different stance than that of his subordinate, and that, in fact, is what happened.
The most interesting part of this episode began when everything was finally agreed to and it was time to carry out the obligations we had undertaken. Complications arose partly because we only had oral understandings regarding certain technical aspects of the visit. I had blocked the signing of any sort of document, even an informal one. Everyone—including the leaders of the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the KGB—would have had to sign off on it, and that was manifestly impossible. It was the source of many disagreements. Frankly, some things had simply been forgotten. No one in our delegation had written anything down, and it was simply beyond my capacity to record everything. Basic problems arose, however, through the fault of the “generals” of Soviet psychiatry and of Soviet medicine as a whole. The patients who most interested the American psychiatrists had undergone psychiatric examination in the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, but a stamp of secrecy had been affixed to their medical histories. The examinations had been conducted by academicians and distinguished professors, and the medical records contained monstrous things. For example, the hospital had refused to discharge one patient until he renounced the religious beliefs for which he had been hospitalized. Wanting to conceal this fact, everyone decided to stonewall.
With the Americans, we had drawn up a carefully planned schedule in preparation for the visit, including, with the patients’ consent, handing over to the American psychiatrists photocopies of the medical records of the patients’ illnesses to examine. The patients’ records were declassified and given to me for safekeeping. The time came and passed for delivering these records to the Americans, but despite my insistent reminders, permission from the Ministry of Health was not forthcoming. Finally, the telephone rang, and Vladimir Yegorov, who was in charge of psychiatry and narcotics in the Ministry of Health, happily informed me that a decision had been reached on handing over the records. I told him that I would quickly summon a representative from the U.S. Embassy.
Before I was able to hand over the medical records, the phone rang again. The very same Yegorov, this time speaking in an entirely different and official tone, declared, “This morning a meeting of all the leaders of the ministry took place at which a final decision was taken not to hand over the medical records to anyone.” I asked whether he himself had been at the meeting. He replied affirmatively. In other words, I had deliberately been given false information in order to settle accounts and thereby demonstratively sabotage the visit. Naturally, the Ministry of Health was well aware that anyone responsible would be held criminally liable for the unauthorized transfer of this sort of information.
Such a denouement heralded not only the aborting of the visit and the end of perestroika in psychiatry but also the victory of the darkest forces over any changes. Shevardnadze saved the situation by phoning Minister of Health Yevgeny Chazov and asking him to do everything he could to ensure the success of the visit. Nevertheless, I was told by an eyewitness that on the eve of the visit, the Soviet Union’s chief “physician” screamed, “Kovalev is selling out the honor and dignity of the Motherland!” I suppose that everyone has his or her own idea of what constitutes honor and dignity.
Now the Ministry of Health had nowhere to turn, so it resorted to technical measures. I was told all the photocopiers in the ministry were broken, so they couldn’t give me, and consequently the Americans, any photocopies of the records. Naturally, the same story was forthcoming from the Serbsky Institute and the Vartanian Mental Health Center. Then a fire broke out in Gennady Milëkhin’s office, where the medical records were stored. Fortunately, by some miracle, the medical records survived intact. Ultimately, they had to be photocopied in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Americans, of course, sensed that preparations for the visit were encountering significant difficulties. Therefore, in December Robert Farrand and Loren Roth came to Moscow on a one-day visit for negotiations that lasted far into the night. Once again there was a real possibility that the visit would fall through. Churkin resorted to shouting. Several times I had to instruct the interpreter not to interpret what our psychiatrists were saying and to declare breaks so they could calm down. Farrand, who knew Russian, saw and understood what was going on. At one point the self-possessed but emotional Loren Roth said that further negotiations were senseless. Nevertheless, around 4:00 a.m. we managed to reach an agreement. In addition to everything else, the KGB did not want to permit former Soviet psychiatrists who had emigrated to the United States, and whom the American delegation needed as interpreters, to come back into the USSR. However, we succeeded in solving this problem, too.
The “disappearance” of patients and other absurdities continued until only hours remained to decide the fate of the visit. Sitting in his office at the Serbsky Institute, Milëkhin and his team and I searched for one of the “missing” patients until 4:00 a.m. We were repeatedly informed that he had been taken from one hospital but not delivered to another. We located him only via the chief medical officer of the hospital to which this patient had actually been brought. We probably spoiled the mood of the chief medical officer as we tracked him down at his mistress’s place. The fate of the visit depended upon whether, at the last moment, we would be able to fulfill our promises to present this patient to the American psychiatrists.
Because of these and similar difficulties, whether the visit would actually take place was not finally settled until just before the scheduled arrival of the lead group of the American delegation.
The “front line” during both the period of preparation and the actual visit did not run according to national or political principles. The division was between those who stood for common sense and those who opposed it. One must give due to the dogmatists on both sides who stuck to their guns no matter what. There were negotiations within negotiations (or negotiations squared), when dialogue was taking place not only with one’s foreign interlocutors but also—and mainly—with one’s domestic interlocutors. Nevertheless, the visit finally did take place from February 26 to March 12, 1989. The work of the delegation and its conclusions are spelled out in detail in various reports on the visit. Therefore, I will not retell it here.
We had agreed with the Americans that prior to publishing the report they would send us the text so we could append our comments for inclusion in the published report. When these comments were ready, I was ill, and they were delivered to the U.S. Embassy without me. After returning to work and hearing of this, I was horrified when I read the document and the accompanying notes written by the head of my directorate Reshetov. The medical part of the commentaries was written in an exceedingly confrontational and, to put it bluntly, rude manner. It took a long while to persuade Reshetov to replace this outrage with a new text, but he finally agreed. We revised the draft with the help of specialists who had not been involved in the first version. But it had already been sent off to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow! The representative from the American Embassy, whom I had summoned, asked me to repeat over and over again that the previous version was void, and we asked the Americans to ignore it. Soon after the visit Soviet membership in the World Psychiatric Association was restored, making what, to be honest, had been my unauthorized promise to Churkin and his fellow psychiatrists come true.
Immediately after the visit was concluded, a motion was tabled in the Central Committee of the CPSU containing a draft resolution substantiating the need to adopt a human rights law that reformed psychiatry. By now neither the medical personnel nor the jurists could object.
Powerful resistance arose from a rather unexpected quarter. When the Central Committee’s resolution was already well on its way, so to speak, Politburo member Viktor Chebrikov entered a dissenting opinion about it. I drafted Shevardnadze’s reply to this bureaucratic gibberish. The minister signed it and went on leave. After a while I was summoned to the secretariat of the ministry and shown a new document by Chebrikov on the same theme. Its tone was hostile, so I decided to draft an appropriate response: “Why not draft and adopt the law since both the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice were convinced of its necessity, as were leading jurists, including Academician [Vladimir] Kudriavtsev?” The draft was sent to Shevardnadze in the south, and despite his customary sense of propriety, he signed this barefaced insult. Chebrikov no longer had a leg to stand on, and the resolution was finally adopted.
This led to a whirlwind of activity to draft the law. When the draft was ready and approved by the relevant ministries and departments, I proposed discussing it with A. Sebentsov, a member of the Legislative Committee of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. I knew him very well from working on the law about freedom of conscience.
The first session of the working group of the Supreme Soviet met in October 1990, literally on the eve of my departure for Geneva for the agreement on “The Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and the Improvement of Mental Health Care.” I believed that the principles should be adopted in a form that could be used to maximum effect in our internal battles. The draft of the law gave me sufficient freedom of maneuver, and I made a plan.
On assignment in Geneva in November 1990, and without Moscow’s sanction, I approved the principles in the name of the USSR. I did so, first of all, because they were necessary. Second, I could justify the liberties I took from the law approved by the relevant Soviet government departments on the grounds that it was in the spirit of the law if not its letter. Moreover, I categorically objected to sending the contents of the agreements that had been reached by coded telegram to Moscow, because this might torpedo the compromise that had been worked out. A telegram would inevitably fall into the hands of the Ministry of Health as well as other “interested ministries and departments,” and Chazov and his friends—punitive psychiatrists and law enforcement officials—would do everything they could to disavow my actions. If that happened, the reform of Soviet psychiatry would return to square one. In public life, maximum access to information is essential for society to regulate itself, for civil society to flourish, and for the state to be grounded in law. Bureaucratic and, in many cases, political struggle is quite another matter. To achieve outcomes that are crucial both to society and every individual within it, sometimes one must assume responsibility oneself. But this is possible only if you are fully confident that you are acting correctly and are ready to take what may be a considerable risk.
During the period of perestroika, we succeeded by political means to stop the psychiatric oprichnina.6 Could such people reemerge? Unfortunately, yes.
On January 19, 1989, immediately after the conclusion of the Vienna conference of the CSCE, I was summoned to work late at night by Yury Deriabin, chief of the CSCE Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His office was crowded with colleagues who were preparing a draft resolution on the results of the Vienna document for the higher-ups. I was needed to take responsibility for the domestic portion. The draft was so detailed that I realized only that it contained all the points I considered important. It seemed that my rather tepid approval was somewhat upsetting to the assembled throng.
Soon a Politburo resolution appeared in which literally nothing remained of this preliminary draft. All the points that had been carefully spelled out were replaced by a single sentence saying that the relevant provisions of the Vienna agreement applied directly to the territory of the USSR. Of course, there was a large dose of juridical demagoguery in this, but from a political point of view, the approach was risk free. There was no point in disputing the decision of the higher-ups. We were still in Soviet times. It turned out that my father was the one who had thought up and formulated this cunning approach that left no out for the reactionaries.
Nowadays the Moscow Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE has been forgotten. At the time, however, on the one hand, it was an important element in the internal Soviet political struggle, and, on the other hand, it occasioned a dialogue between Soviet leaders and their foreign colleagues on a wide range of issues. For the Western leaders the crux of the matter was whether they could trust Gorbachev and whether perestroika was just another attempt to deceive them. For the USSR the Moscow conference was an opportunity to promote democratic reform.
The idea of convening the Moscow conference was first broached at a session of the Politburo in October 1986 as members were approving the directives for the Soviet delegation to the Vienna conference of the CSCE. The key point of the directives was a proposal to assemble a conference on humanitarian questions. On his way to the session, Anatoly Kovalev, who had to report on this question, conceived the idea of holding it in Moscow.
Thus, from the beginning, the Moscow conference, which originally was proposed as the Moscow Humanitarian Conference, became a focus of my work. The decisive moment came when the Politburo stated that its preparation was a government priority, but to emphasize its importance it was often referred to as a political priority, and respective proposals to the higher-ups were often couched in terms of their utility in convening the conference. Under these banners the deletion of political and religious articles from the Criminal Code was carried out, as well as the liquidation of punitive psychiatry, the introduction of religious freedom, and practically all the other reforms.
In the fall of 1990 I wrote a concept paper for the Moscow conference, naturally not as a draft document, but as a point of departure for subsequent discussions with representatives of the member states. Then, as we prepared to hold talks, two events burst upon us—in December news of Shevardnadze’s resignation, which benefited the plotters preparing the coup of 1991, and in January the tragedy in Vilnius.7 Those officials opposed to convening the Moscow conference were ecstatic.
The efforts of the Foreign Ministry to establish democracy and human rights in the USSR were grinding to a halt, not to be resumed. The new minister of foreign affairs Alexander Bessmertnykh sought revenge for the humiliation he had endured because of his opposition to democracy and common sense. He had a simple attitude toward human rights issues. Somehow a miracle occurred, however, as Yegor Ligachev had earlier issued an order to prepare a memorandum and draft resolution on psychiatry for the Central Committee. My best recollection is that this was in December 1988, after Gorbachev had already flown to New York to deliver his speech at the UN. Since everything was top secret when it concerned the United States, I had to coordinate the drafts of the documents with the Foreign Ministry’s America hands and then forward them to Shevardnadze, not by the ordinary route through Adamishin, but via Bessmertnykh.
Quickly glancing through the papers, he said, “I’m not going to report such crap to Shevardnadze.”
Placing the papers in a folder, I replied, “Shevardnadze established a department for what you are pleased to call this ‘crap.’ And, as you know, this job was undertaken on orders from Ligachev.”
I left his office.
Soon Adamishin’s secretariat hunted me down. He was not there. Deputy Director of the USA and Canada Division Viktor Sukhodrev, who was better known as the interpreter for Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders and who had been present at my encounter with Bessmertnykh, was there instead.
“Bessmertnykh will sign everything. Just don’t show your face. Wait in a corner where he won’t see you if he comes out of his office.”
Perhaps because of the position taken by the minister of foreign affairs, rumors circulated both within the Moscow diplomatic corps and in several other capitals that Moscow was no longer interested in hosting the conference.
Many people associate the shootings of Lithuanian “separatists” in Vilnius with Gorbachev’s policies. As a result, many angry voices began to condemn the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to him, and loud protests occurred against holding the European-wide conference on human rights in Moscow. The majority of Soviet human rights defenders felt this way. Doubts, some of them absurd, circulated abroad. The following was said in one of the European capitals: “We cannot participate in a conference on human rights that will take place in the Hall of Columns where Nikolai Bukharin was put on trial.”8
With Shevardnadze’s resignation, the situation in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs became difficult. The reactionaries emerged from the woodwork. It was obvious that the liberal leaders of the ministry were losing influence. Echoes of the Cold War became increasingly evident in Soviet diplomacy. People like me went around looking battered and bruised. Those now in charge in the ministry attacked us for liberalism in domestic affairs and for trying to pursue a commonsense policy abroad. Soviet diplomats were isolated at CSCE forums and voiced indefensible views.
As almost his final order in the Foreign Ministry, Shevardnadze appointed me to head a section, endowing me with the authority of a deputy head of a directorate. My understaffed department was tasked with preparations for the Moscow meeting of the CSCE Conference on the Human Dimensions of the CSCE. I was ridiculed almost everywhere I went. “So is your conference ready to roll?”
I received an invitation from Andrei Kozyrev, who by then had been appointed foreign minister of the Russian Federation, and weighed my response. It was not clear how things would turn out regarding the invitation I had received to work for Gorbachev. It seemed to me, mistakenly as was later evident, that working in the Kremlin I would have greater opportunities to influence the situation. In any case, I decided to leave the Foreign Ministry. Meanwhile, I cooperated closely with Kozyrev’s closest colleague, Andrei Kolosovskii, and with Vyacheslav Bakhmin, with whom I had established the most cordial relations. I met with dissidents—I have particularly warm memories of Larisa Bogoraz—and managed to resolve the question of holding a Moscow-based meeting of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and to have visas issued to persons of whom the punitive organs disapproved.
Problems piled up one after the other. In its best tradition, the USSR Procuracy held that those guilty of the event in Vilnius were the victims themselves. For reasons that became fully understandable only after the August 1991 coup, Soviet troops continued to hold the television center in Vilnius. Joint patrols by the militia and the army were ordered. Tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh flared. The duo of Vladimir Kriuchkov and Boris Pugo did nothing to improve the lot of prisoners. Pamyat’, the hypernationalist organization created by the KGB and encouraged from above, grew increasingly out of control, and the anti-Semitism that it whipped up took on threatening proportions.
Nevertheless, in early 1991, consultations began in our department with representatives from the Moscow embassies of CSCE member states. We presented foreign diplomats with our vision of what the Moscow document might look like based on the ideas we had been developing. Concretely, the following partial text was proposed: “The participating states will be guided by international laws on human rights, conducting their policies in accordance with the highest ideals of morality and humanism. Confirming their adherence to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states, the participating states declare that this principle cannot serve as a basis for limiting human rights or for restricting the free flow of information, including information regarding human rights. They likewise affirm the primary importance of cooperation contained in the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe for further progress in observing human rights.”
Efforts to implement these measures domestically—that is, the democratization of the Soviet Union—proceeded in parallel. The USSR’s failure by this time to carry out a series of obligations it had already assumed made it significantly more difficult to convene the Moscow conference. A particularly pointed question concerned the approval of the second reading of the USSR law “On Departure from the USSR and Reentry into the USSR of Citizens of the USSR.” The matter of restoring Soviet citizenship to all those who had been unlawfully deprived of it was of prime importance. Nor was the obligation fulfilled to publish within one year after the conclusion of the Vienna conference, and make easily accessible, all laws and regulations governing travel within state borders. Moreover, a cunning trap existed: there was some risk that the documents would be legalized after their actual publication.
The question of the USSR’s participation in the UN’s Optional Protocol to the International Treaty on Civil and Political Rights was unresolved until the last moment. We succeeded in gaining the Supreme Soviet’s ratification of the act of adherence to the protocol at its session in the spring of 1991. All the reservations of the USSR regarding the International Convention on Ending All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, and Humiliating Forms of Treatment and Punishment had to be removed, and the procedures envisaged in Article 41 of the International Treaty on Civil and Political Rights had to be recognized.
We succeeded in securing a decision to draft a law guaranteeing the right of Soviet citizens to freedom of travel and to choose their place of residence within the borders of the territory of the USSR. It became clear that a step-by-step approach to removing the previous restrictions was warranted. I saw this, however, as an unjustified concession to the old-style ministries on the part of the Foreign Ministry. We even succeeded in including a point in the presidential directive about the need to draft a law that “envisaged punishing persons guilty of committing torture and other cruel, inhumane, and humiliating acts.”
The sharpest struggle developed around the preparation and promulgation of so-called parallel measures undertaken by public organizations.
Immediately after the collapse of the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev, the question arose of what to do about the Moscow conference—that is, whether to convene it on schedule or to delay it. Many influential and previously uncompromising supporters of the conference believed that it would be impossible to convene the conference in post-coup Moscow. Specifically, everyone was afraid that another group of anti-Gorbachev plotters within the State Emergency Committee would take over. There were no doubts concerning their existence.9
It became increasingly difficult to defend the expediency, and even the necessity, of holding the conference on schedule. Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s assistant, informed the president of who was for it and who was against it and why. There was dissension within his closest circle and likewise in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Our family was also split on this matter. My father, who was the greatest authority on European affairs, believed that the conference had to be postponed. We called each other several times each day, presenting new arguments to each other. I heard that Gorbachev was very amused when he was shown the list of supporters and opponents of holding the conference at the appointed time, and my father and I were in diametrically opposite columns. (At that time I was working in Gorbachev’s secretariat, which I discuss in chapter 2.) At the critical moment apparently there were more votes against. Nevertheless, the president decided in favor of going ahead.
Just before the opening of the conference, the Committee of European Foreign Ministers admitted three newly independent states: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. For these states it spelled the end of the shameful 1939 agreements between Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov.
Many were struck both by the fact that Sergei Kovalev, a leading human rights defender, was appointed cochairman of the Soviet delegation and by the tone of his speeches. One of the Western diplomats shared his impressions with me. “I always have the feeling that an earthquake will occur on the spot, the ceiling will collapse, and the KGB will burst into the room and arrest Mr. Kovalev in this very hall. The democratic breakthrough in your country cannot but shake things up.”
On October 4 the chairman’s gavel came down, signifying adoption of the Moscow document. This was the culmination of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Gorbachev and his associates envisioned that the Moscow conference would clear away obstructions in the USSR’s adherence to internationally recognized standards of human rights. That the international and domestic triumph of Gorbachev and his associates in the field of human rights was the final success of his policy of reforming society along liberal lines was perhaps inevitable.
While engaged in this work I did not ponder the abstract philosophical aspect of the possibility of transforming evil into its opposite. Unfortunately, neither did many other people. We destroyed a man-made hell and tried to replace it with a new, humane, and democratic reality. It seems to me that, on the whole, the operation to excise the malignant growth in human civilization went well. But had we understood from the outset that the cancer could not transform itself into healthy cells, we would have acted much more effectively.
To decree democracy and human rights from above, something unprecedented in history, was no simple matter. Nor was it a manifestation of totalitarianism.