Crossing the curtain: British activists and the echoes of soviet dissent in contemporary Russian human rights activism

Abstract

the important influence of domestic activist campaigns is sometimes overlooked. Snyder (2011Snyder ( , 2018, Tulli (2020), and Søndergaard (2020) have made important interventions assessing the impact of domestic campaigns on US foreign policy, but similar attention to the British context has been relatively limited (Hurst 2016a).Given the centrality of human rights issues to the Soviet policy of the British government in this period (Grealy, 2020), this is notable. The persecution of political dissidents in the Soviet Union is well known (Boobbyer 2005; Hornsby 2013; Horvath 2005), but more needs to be done to further understand the role of international activists in supporting these individuals. A broad network of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) based in Britain played a significant role in informing the world about Soviet human rights violations (Hurst 2016a), in much the same way that their contemporary counterparts attempt to hold the Russian authorities to account. Understanding this network offers the opportunity to critically assess how human rights promotion worked during the Cold War, presenting a historic case study to consider how transnational advocacy networks models by scholars such Keck and Sikkink work in practice. Their 'boomerang model ' (1998, 13) sets out how political dissidents are blocked from effectively petitioning their own government due to persecution and censorship. Dissidents instead share information with a global network of activists, who in turn used this material to pressure governments and international stakeholders -creating a 'boomerang' of political pressure across borders. Assessing how this model worked in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts opens the space to explore how contemporary activism has echoes from its Cold War counterparts, and to highlight the important role that British activists play in this network.'breakthrough' moment in the history of human rights -a period when the concept gained significant traction in international relations (Eckel and Moyn 2013). This period also saw Soviet dissidents increasingly use the language of human rights (Nathans 2014). In Britain, NGOs became increasingly influential over the direction of domestic and foreign policy in the latter half of the twentieth century, and the British public increasingly trusted experts over politicians (Hilton et. al. 2013) -a transition that had a marked effect on political life. These three overlapping developments are mutually informative in the context of the British response to Soviet human rights violations. The recognised expertise that NGOs in Britain obtained on this issue, and the reliability of the information that they distributed, came to shape the broader response to the Soviet Union from the government and other official bodies. This was integral to the successes of these campaigns, something that has echoes in the efforts of human rights NGOs in the post-Soviet landscape. Amnesty InternationalSince its 1961 foundation, the London-based Amnesty International has come to be globa...