Human Rights in the Soviet Union: Including Comparisons with the U.S.A.

352 Pages·1984·6.919 MB·English

by  Albert Szymanski

Human Rights in
the Soviet Union
Al Szymanski
To the disappeared persons and thousands of others
who have been killed in Latin America since the
mid-1960’s for their advocacy of freedom; and for
D.R.
Zed Books Ltd., 57 Caledonian Road, London NI 9BU.
Human Rights in the Soviet Union was first published by Zed Books Ltd.,
57 Caledonian Road, London NI 9BU, in 1984.
Copyright © A1 Szymanski, 1984
Proofread by Miranda Davies
Typeset by Shirley Coombs
Cover design by Jacque Solomons
Printed by Biddles of Guildford
All rights reserved
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Szymanski, Albert
Human rights in the Soviet Union.
1. Civil rights — Soviet Union
I. Title
323.4'0947 JC599.R9
ISBN 0 86232 018 6
ISBN 0 86232 019 4 Pbk
US Distributor
Biblio Distribution Center, 81 Adams Drive, Totowa,
New Jersey, 07512.
Contents
Acknowledgements i
Preface iv
1. Introduction 1
Freedom: Some Definitions 2
The Historical Logic of Restricted
Emigration and Exit 13
Comparative Analysis 26
A Note on Sources 30
2. The Asian Nationalities in the USSR 33
Origins of Soviet Power in Central Asia 34
Economic Development 37
Welfare 43
Education 46
Cultural Development 31
Politics 39
Soviet Policy Towards Islam 61
Anti-Soviet and Anti-Socialist Nationalist
Attitudes and Movements 63
Attitude of Soviet Asians to USSR
Intervention in Afghanistan 66
Conclusion 67
3. The European Nationalities in the USSR 72
Economic Development 72
Health Care and Education 74
Cultural Development 73
Nationalism and Dissidence in the European
Republics 77
The Jewish People in the USSR 88
Conclusion 99
4. Women in the USSR 102
The Rights of Women 102
The Family, Housework and Child-Care 107
Education 110
Labour Outside the Home 112
Protective Legislation 117
Women in Political Positions 118
Analysis 120
Conclusion 124
5. Economic Rights 128
Living Standards 128
Imports 129
Social Consumption and the Social Wage 134
Job Rights 137
Rights of Participation in the Management
of Enterprises 140
General Enterprise Meetings and the
Permanent Production Conferences 141
The Role of Enterprise Branches
of the Unions 142
The Role of the Enterprise Branch of the
Communist Party 145
Job Rights in the USA 146
Conclusion 148
6. The Land of the Free 152
The American Revolution and CivilL iberties 152
Federalists vs Jeffersonians: 1798-1808 155
The Conflict over Slavery and Civil Liberties:
1830-77 157
The Repression of the Working-Class Movement:
1866-1914 161
Repression of the Left: 1917-24 164
Depression, War and Civil Liberty:1 930-45 172
Repression of the American Communist Party and
Civil Liberties: 1947-56 175
The 1960s and Political Repression 187
United States Support of Repressive Regimes
Overseas in the 1960s and 1970s 195
Conclusion 198
JS* Toleration and Repression in the USSR:
1918-54 204
Civil War, Invasion, and Relaxation (1918-27) 205
How History Judges: I. Famine and
Collectivization (1928-34) 212
How History Judges: II. The Growing Threat of
Invasion and ‘The Great Purge’ (1935-39) 229
Traitor Mania and the Moscow Trials of 1936-38 235
The Numbers of Those Affected 241
The Politics of the Executions: 1936-38 248
Causes and Effects 250
Invasion, Reconstruction and the Renewed
Threat of Invasion: 1941-54 257
8. Tolerance and Repression in the Soviet Union:
1965-82 267
Trends in Contemporary Soviet Policy and the
Dissident Movement 267
Definition of Dissident Activity in the USSR 269
The Extent of the Dissident Movement 273
Strategy and Tactics of the Dissident Movement 276
Sanctions against Dissidents 279
Dissidents Categorized as Schizophrenic 282
Numbers of Dissidents Confined 284
Political Tendencies of Dissident Activists 285
Comparisons with the USA 290
9. Conclusion 295
Summary 295
State Power and Civil Liberty 299
Factors Determining the Level of the Civil
Liberty of Public Advocacy 305
The Class Basis of Civil Liberties 313
Disinformation and the Cold War 314
Trends in Rights in Capitalist and
Socialist Societies 318
Bibliography 323
Index 333
list of Tables
2.1 Produced National Annual Income and Index of
Monthly Wages 1978, by Republic 38
22 Percentage of Total Working Population
Engaged in Different Economic Sectors 40
23 Health Care: 1971 45
2.4 Literacy: Percentage of Population Aged 9-49 47
2.5 Number of Pupils and Students in the Union Republics 47
2.6 Higher Education by Nationality 49
2.7 Scientific Workers by Nationality 1971 50
2.8 Books and Newspapers Published
in Union Republics, 1970 52
2.9 Speakers of Languages of Major Nationalities
of USSR, 1970 53
2.10 Titular Nationality as Percent of Republic
Population, 1959-70 57
2.11 National Composition of CPSU, 1 January 1972:
Union Republic Nationalities 59
3.1 Books/Newspapers in the National Language in the
Baltic Republics, Armenia and Georgia,
compared to % of Nationals 75
4.1 Women’s Higher Educational Achievements:
Some Comparisons between the USSR and the USA 111
4.2 Distribution of Women Workers and Employees and
Average Monthly Earnings, by Economic Sector,
1975 (USSR) 113
5.1 Nutrition: Comparative Figures for the USSR
and the West: 1975- 77 129
52 Soviet Grain (Millions of Metric Tons, Annual Average) 130
5.3 Soviet Livestock 1955-1979 131
8.1 US Aid, Investment Climate and Human Rights
in Ten Countries 197
Acknowledgements
This book like all others is, in C. Wright Mills* words, a product of the inter­
section of biography and history. Its coming into being has been a result of
the social forces operating on myself as author, acting through my family,
my schooling, my structural position as a US professor of sociology, and my
political involvements. This book, perhaps more than others, owes a great
deal to the influence of my parents who shaped my fundamental attitudes
to equality, tolerance, liberty, authority and freedom. It also owes a great
deal to my teachers from Ward Senior High School, through the University
of Rhode Island to graduate school at Columbia University, who introduced
me to the theories and debates around the questions of freedom and rights.
My students and co-teachers at the University of Oregon during the 1970s
provided continuing stimulation (usually critical, but sometimes supportive)
which had a major impact on the development of the ideas in the book. But
most of all, the ideas have been formed through my political involvements
since the late 1950s.
My first political act was to join the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People at the beginning of the civil rights movement
in 1959. My second was, as a naive freshman, to send a letter of outrage to
the student newspaper comparing the harsh penalties inflicted by the Dean
of Women on female students who smoked cigarettes in their dorm rooms to
the horrors of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. In the early 1960s I
defined my political commitments as two: support of civil rights for Black
people, and support of civil liberties for all, especially for students who were
then subject to the (since discarded) university doctrine of in loco parentis.
I joined the American Civil Liberties Union and became an outspoken advo­
cate of the right of all to voice their political views. As president of the
University of Rhode Island S.D.S. Chapter in 1962,1 was responsible, to the
considerable irritation of Dean Quinn, for bringing to town the first Com­
munist Party member in 15 years to speak publicly on the campus.
But gradually, during the mid-1960s, with the intensification of the
student and Black movements, as well as the growth in my generation oi
support for the Cuban, Vietnamese, and Chinese Revolutions, my commit­
ment to abstract civil liberties became transformed into an appreciation of
the more fundamental rights of national liberation and self-determination.
i
Human Rights in the Soviet Union
Swept up in the political and intellectual excitement of the last half of the
1960s, 1 became a Marxist, but retained my earlier concern for questions of
liberty and rights.
Donna Rae Crawford must be specially acknowledged as my research
assistant for this book. She carefully checked the references, quotations and
calculations, thereby making this work considerably stronger. She must also
be thanked for her supportive friendship during the time of this book’s
production.
Robert Molteno, Neil MacDonald and Anna Gourlay of Zed Books, as
well as Beverly Jones and Lawrence Hill, must be especially thanked for
stimulating the growth of this manuscript into a full fledged book from two
long papers on Asian minorities and dissidents in the USSR. Their critical
comments and suggestions were vital to the forming and shaping both of the
questions dealt with and the content of this work.
Other individuals who have had an impact on this work through various
combinations of intellectual stimulation and friendship include Sue Jacobs,
Michel Amieu, Carolyn Dornsife, Catherine Duriez, Gail Lemberger, Evelyn
Sparks, Madelene MacDonald, David Elliott, Val Burris, Charlie Kauften,
Cheyney Ryan, Mike Goldstein, Harry Humphries, Ron Wixman, Juan Linz
and Terry Hopkins.
Both Vicki Van Nortwick and Doris Boylan must be thanked for typing
the various drafts of the manuscript. The research librarians at the University
of Oregon, in particular Robert Lockhart, are also once again thanked for
their invaluable assistance. And of course, all the people at my publishers
and the printers who did the physical production of the manuscript must be
acknowledged.
My interest in the theoretical questions of freedom and rights has deep
roots in my biography, but what compelled me to write this book was the
sharp contention in the world, in the 1970s and early 1980s, between the
growing forces of national liberation and socialist revolution and the
weakening forces of imperialism. In response to the accelerating growth both
of socialism and anti-imperialist movements throughout the world, the
leading forces of the advanced capitalist countries have counter-attacked on
the level of ideology. To the nationalist and socialist slogans of national
liberation and workers’ power they have opposed ‘freedom’. By ‘freedom’
they mean freedom to publicly advocate whatever one wants, freedom of
opportunity to get rich, freedom for professionals in the poor countries to
emigrate to wealthy countries, and freedom for owiiers to buy, sell, hire
labour and otherwise control the economy, in short ‘free enterprise’.
Utilizing highly sophisticated Madison Avenue techniques, a powerful
ideological war has been waged throughout the world: in the advanced and
in the less developed countries, and in the socialist countries themselves by
way of radio and travellers. Western ‘freedom’ has been marketed as a counter
to the rising tide of socialism.
To publicly advocate socialism in the West promptly evokes the retort:
What about the lack of freedom, emigration restrictions, political prisoners,
ii
A cknowledge merits
refugees and so on, in socialist countries? Statistics on rising living standards,
social security, political participation, national independence, equality,
never satisfy such criticism. Necessarily, then, all socialists must take a
position on the question of civil liberties/repression in the socialist countries.
One tendency of the socialist movement argues that some or all of the ‘so-
called’ socialist countries, are not really socialist, but instead new types of
class societies, equally, if not more repressive than, the older types. Others
answer that because of such problems as economic backwardness and foreign
invasion faced by socialism where it has come to power, it has become
fundamentally distorted and thus must repress significant numbers of its
people in order to survive. Another sector of the left merely dismisses all
evidence of political repression as ‘capitalist propaganda’.
Having written a book on the basic economic and political nature of the
Soviet Union, it then seemed logical to follow up by attempting to complete
the work already begun with a book on what remained the most compelling
political and theoretical questions: What about freedom? The position of
minorities? What about women? Worker’s participation and economic
security? What about the dissidents? The prison camps and psychiatric wards
used to suppress opposition?
The book deals with the most politically charged question of the last half
of the 20th Century: that of ‘freedom’. A slogan for which a great many have
shed their blood and suffered persecution on both sides of the barricades.
Probably more than any other question people’s feelings about freedom
(variously expressed as commitment to ‘free’ enterprise, to civil liberties,
national liberation, self-determination or socialist revolution) run deep.
Preface
The history of scholarship is a record of the acceptance of and resistance to
the ideas of the powerful interests of the day. Bruno was burned at the stake
for advocacy of the heliocentric view of the universe, Galileo was put under
house arrest and forced publicly to recant his ideas, and Copernicus’s works
were put on the Church’s Index, owing to the conflict between scientific
evidence and the word of the Bible. In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries
the scientific ideas of evolution fared little better. Ideas about the social
world, including the characteristics of various social groups, are integrally
related to the dominant political ideology and interests, and thus are
rewarded, encouraged, discouraged, repressed, accepted, derided, on account
of their social impact, rather than the facts mobilized in their support.
To quote Stephen Jay Gould:
... the history of many scientific subjects is virtually free from such
constraints of fact for two msgor reasons. First, some topics are invested
with enormous social importance but blessed with very little reliable
information. When the ratio of data to social impact is so low, a history
of scientific attitudes may be little more than an oblique record of
social change. The history of the scientific view on race, for example,
serves as a mirror of social movements. This mirror reflects in good
times and bad, in periods of belief in equality and in eras of rampart
racism. The death knell of the old eugenics in America was sounded
more by Hitler’s particular use of once-favored arguments for steriliz­
ation and racial purification than by advances in genetic knowledge
Gould 1981, p. 22.
Gould’s comments on ideas about race apply to ideas about freedom, rights
and socialism even more forcefully.
Of all social phenomena, those associated with the questions of political
power, the effectiveness of different economic systems, the necessity of
social inequality, and the potentialities and effects of different modes of
production, are the most central and thus particularly subject to acceptance
or rejection on the basis of factors extraneous to fact. The questions with
the greatest impact and hence where, often, fact is permitted only a minimal
iv