デタントとソ連人権運動

ソ連圏諸国の内政と外交

抄録

The aim of this paper is to examine the development of the Soviet human rights movement which started in the early 1970s under the impact of detente between U. S. -Soviet relations. In view of the possible infiltration of “bourgeois ideology” into the Soviet and East European societies, Soviet leaders sought to restructure alliance relations among the Soviet bloc countries by institutionalizing consulting system at every level. Accordingly the 1970s saw a rapid progress of integration of the bloc on interstate and inter-party relations at the highest levels.
It is at this time when the Soviet human rights movement started. Under the tightened and unified ideological control in the bloc, the Soviet dissident movement, which was isolated socially at the time, was forced to make an attempt to win popular support and international aid. The approach adopted by the movement was legal and non-ideological one with special emphasis on the protection of human rights. Based on Soviet constitution and international law, the newly born Soviet human rights movement began to demand the Soviet government to observe its own law, and to appeal to international public opinion to interfere in the internal problems of the Soviet Union.
It is the concluding document of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) that made great impact on the development of the Soviet human rights movement. Now that the Soviet government has signed the document which reaffirms unbreakable relation between international peace and the protection of human rights in a country, the movement has found legitimacy in calling upon signatory countries of the document and international public opinion for international humanitarian interference. At the same time, while winning wider popular support in the society by focussing its aim specifically on human rights issue, the Soviet human rights movement has spread to East European countries. Because of the common goal and strategy among many ethnic movements in the Soviet bloc, there came to appear a loosely unified human rights movement in the second half of the decade.
The internationalization of the Soviet human rights problems and the international humanitarian interference by the West in Soviet internal affairs, however, has made little contribution to the improvement of the problems. On the contrary the movement has come to suffer from harsher political suppresion particularly with the beginning of Carter's human rights policy, and the U. S. and the Soviet governments came to be confronted as the human rights issue became one of the most important issues between the two governments, The rise and fall of the Soviet human rights movement may suggest that, firstly, under the conditions of the detente human rights problems of the Soviet Union can not be immune from the impact of international concern on human rights problems, and, secondly, only the legal and non-ideological approach can successfully internationalize human rights issue.