Article by Ludmila Alexeeva

A public group to monitor compliance with the Helsinki Accords in the USSR, the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), was established in Moscow on 12 May 1976 on the basis of the third “basket” of the Helsinki Accords, which contains the humanitarian articles of those Accords. These articles included basic human rights, whose observance members of the human rights movement in the USSR had been seeking for some ten years. Yuri Orlov, the founder and first chairman of the MHG, envisioned its goal as follows:

The Group will monitor compliance with the humanitarian articles of the Helsinki Accords on the territory of the USSR and inform all States that have signed that document along with the Soviet Union of any violations.

The Helsinki Accords lay down a compliance monitoring mechanism. Specifically, at annual conferences the heads of all the delegations were to evaluate the observance by all the partner States of the agreements they had signed. We hoped that the information we provided on violations of the humanitarian articles would be examined at these conferences and that the democratic States would demand that the Soviet Union observe the Helsinki Accords in full measure, including the humanitarian articles. Violation of these agreements could have led to the collapse of the Helsinki Accords, something the Soviet leadership could not accept. It was very much in the USSR’s interest to maintain what was for it an extremely advantageous treaty, considering that the country had been bled dry by lengthy isolation from the rest of the world and by a furious arms race.

Monitoring the entire vast territory of the USSR might have seemed an impossible task for the 11 members of the MHG. After all, they were just as disenfranchised as all other Soviet citizens, and the Group’s equipment consisted of two old typewriters. On the other hand, the Group did include experienced human rights activists who had by that time gathered a great amount of material on the subjects in question. What is more, foreign radio stations broadcasting to the USSR constantly carried reports on the work of the MHG, and we began to receive information on human rights violations from different ends of the country. We were informed of these matters by activists from the Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Georgian and Armenian national movements.

These reports contained information regarding infringements of the right to the use of one’s mother tongue, to education in one’s mother tongue, and the like. Religious activists (Baptists, Adventists, Pentecostals and Catholics) told us of violations of the right to freedom of religion. Citizens who were not members of any movement informed us of violations of the humanitarian articles of the Helsinki Accords that had affected either themselves or those close to them. Later on, following the MHG model, the Ukrainian and Lithuanian Helsinki Groups were established in November 1976, the Georgian Helsinki Group in January 1977, the Armenian Helsinki Group in April 1977, the Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights in the USSR in December 1976 and the Catholic Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights in November 1978. Helsinki committees also sprang up in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Arrests began in the Ukrainian and Moscow Helsinki Groups in February 1977. One of the first persons to be arrested was the chairman of the MHG, Yuri Orlov. He was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment with hard labour and five years’ exile. The Soviet court regarded his activities as anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda with the intention of undermining the Soviet State and social structure. By autumn 1977 more than 50 members of Helsinki groups had been deprived of their freedom. Many were given lengthy prison sentences, and some died before they were released. The media in the USSR’s democratic partner countries under the Helsinki Accords covered the Helsinki process and the persecution of its participants in the USSR and its satellite States. The public in these countries responded to this persecution by establishing their own Helsinki groups and committees. The establishment of the American Helsinki Group was announced in December 1978. Similar organizations later sprang up in Canada and a number of Western European countries. The goal of all of them was to put a stop to the persecution of their colleagues and exert pressure on their national governments so that they would resolutely demand of the Soviet Union the implementation of the humanitarian articles of the Helsinki Accords.

These efforts bore fruit. Beginning with the Madrid conference in October 1980, the democratic participating States began at each conference to unanimously voice these demands. Gradually, observance of the commitments within the third “basket” became one of the main aspects of the Helsinki process. The Vienna conference of 1986 saw the signing of an additional protocol under which the human rights situation in any country that was a signatory to the Helsinki Accords was recognized as a common concern for all partner countries.

In this way, the Moscow Helsinki Group became the seed from which the international Helsinki movement, with its influence on the content of the Helsinki process, was to grow. This was perhaps the first time in the history of diplomacy that public groups played this kind of role in agreements between States: the Soviet Union was charged with violating the humanitarian articles of the Helsinki Accords on the basis of documents provided by the Moscow, Ukrainian and Lithuanian Helsinki Groups.

Under pressure from the democratic partner countries, not only the members of the Helsinki groups but also all imprisoned persons convicted under the political articles of the Soviet Criminal Code were released in the USSR in 1987. In 1990 Soviet citizens were granted the right to freely leave the country and return, and the persecution of religious believers ceased.

The experience gained through this close co-operation with non-governmental organizations was reflected in the fact that the OSCE was the first international association of nations to include these organizations in its working process as equal partners. At human dimension conferences, representatives of nongovernmental organizations participate on a basis of parity with official representatives of OSCE States and are granted the floor in the same way that they are.

The Moscow Helsinki Group, which at the time of its founding was the only independent public organization in the Soviet Union, today plays a leading role in the Russian human rights community and in the civil society that has evolved in the Russian Federation. The main area of the MHG’s work continues to be the monitoring of the human rights situation. Today, however, that monitoring and protection of human rights is carried out not only on the basis of the humanitarian articles of the Helsinki Accords but also with the support of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the European Convention on Human Rights and Freedoms and other international treaties on human rights signed by the Russian Federation.