Begin with the date, because everything about this book follows from it.
The Helsinki Final Act was signed on 1 August 1975 by thirty-five states including the Soviet Union. Its third "basket" committed the signatories to respect for freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, and to the freer movement of people and information across the blocs. Moscow had wanted the conference for a decade, principally to secure Western recognition of the post-1945 borders; it got that, and paid for it with a text that Soviet citizens could then quote back at their own government. They did. The Moscow Helsinki Group was founded in May 1976 by the physicist Yuri Orlov to monitor Soviet compliance. Ukrainian and Lithuanian groups followed that November, Georgian and Armenian ones in 1977. Orlov, Alexander Ginzburg and Anatoly Shcharansky were arrested in 1977 and tried in the summer of 1978; Shcharansky received thirteen years. On 22 January 1980 Andrei Sakharov was seized in a Moscow street, stripped of his decorations and deported without trial to Gorky, a city closed to foreigners. That July the Olympic Games opened in Moscow, boycotted by sixty-odd countries over the invasion of Afghanistan five weeks before Sakharov's exile.
This book is Progress Publishers' answer to that argument, in English, in that year. Its Russian title translates as "There, where human rights are real" — the "there" is the point. The whole volume is a preposition aimed at a Western reader.
Except that the year on the spine is not the year of the text, and the difference decides what the book can fairly be accused of. The narrative closes in the winter of 1978–79. The latest events reported in the author's own voice are Alexei Kosygin's announcement of a record 230-million-ton grain harvest on 4 November 1978, the October 1978 issue of Senior Citizen News, and the report of the US Civil Rights Commission of 12 February 1979 on school segregation. The year 1980 does not occur anywhere in the book. Everything later than early 1979 sits in footnotes signed "— Ed.": the population of Baku "according to the 1979 census"; George Meany's retirement and Lane Kirkland's election at the AFL-CIO convention of November 1979; the release on 14 December 1979 of the last of the imprisoned Wilmington Ten; and a revision of the Bureau of Labor Statistics family budgets that carries "the almost 11.5 percent increase in the cost of living, by government figures, for the year 1979". That last figure cannot have been written before January 1980. The scanned front matter carries no printing history, so the date has to be argued from the text — and the text argues for an American manuscript finished in early 1979 and reopened by a Moscow editor in the first weeks of 1980, who chose to add US inflation statistics rather than a line about Gorky.
This settles what the silences mean, and it narrows them. A manuscript closed in February 1979 cannot be convicted of failing to mention Sakharov's deportation, the invasion of Afghanistan or the Olympic boycott: none of them had happened. The silence about those belongs to the revision rather than to the draft, and as findings go it is a small one — nobody expected a Progress editor to insert Gorky. The absences that count are the ones the author had in front of him, in Moscow, and left out.
There the count is severe. He was resident while the Helsinki movement was being arrested. The word "Helsinki" occurs once in about sixty thousand words, and it names a city where Soviet engineers were helping to design a metro. The name Sakharov occurs four times, and every one of them belongs to Professor Alexander Sakharov, a criminologist at the All-Union Institute for the Study and Work of Means of Crime Prevention, whom the author interviewed about juvenile offending. Andrei Sakharov appears twice, spelled "Sakharoff", inside quotation marks, in a single paragraph about the credulity of the Moscow press corps. Shcharansky appears exactly once, transliterated "Scharansky", as a subordinate clause. Orlov, Ginzburg and Grigorenko do not appear; neither do Solzhenitsyn, Bukovsky, Plyushch or Medvedev. Neither do the words censorship, psychiatric, samizdat, purge, or Gulag. "Stalin" occurs once, inside "Stalingrad".
The author is not an official of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. He is George Morris, for many years the labour correspondent of the American Communist Party's Daily World, and before that of the Daily Worker; a man who went to Moscow in March 1928 as, in his own words, "a youth representative in the United States delegation, headed by William Z. Foster, to the Fourth Congress of the Red International of Trade Unions", lived there in 1929–30, returned in 1959, 1966 and 1970, and was resident as his paper's Moscow correspondent for the two years spanning the 25th Party Congress, the 16th Trade Union Congress and the adoption of the 1977 Constitution. That is the commission. Progress had no shortage of Soviet academics who could recite the constitution. What it wanted, and what it could not manufacture, was a foreign eyewitness — an American trade-union journalist who had seen both systems and would say, in idiomatic English, that he had looked and it was true. The book's genre is the friendly traveller's report, a form with a long and not always creditable history, and it is subtitled Impressions of the USSR.
Set the omissions aside for a moment, because the positive case is substantial and a reader who dismisses it learns nothing.
The book's core is a chapter-by-chapter walk through the rights enumerated in the 1977 Constitution, and the list is not trivial: Article 40, the right to work, meaning guaranteed employment at not less than a state minimum; Article 41, the right to rest, with a working week capped at forty-one hours and paid annual leave; Article 42, free medical care; Article 44, the right to housing at low rents; Article 45, free provision of all forms of education; Article 35, equal rights for women with paid maternity leave and reduced hours for mothers of small children; Article 52, freedom of conscience. Morris asks, of the health system, "what human right could be more important than the government's guarantee of the best available health care treatment and rest at no cost as an obligation to all citizens?" It is a fair question and the liberal tradition has never answered it well.
The underlying argument is older and better than its packaging. It is that a right which costs nothing to grant and delivers nothing to the propertyless is a formality; that the freedom to sleep under a bridge is not freedom; that unemployment, eviction and untreated illness are unfreedoms as real as arrest. Marx made it in On the Jewish Question in 1844, and the point survives every criticism this introduction will make of the state that later appropriated it. Morris's sharpest pages are those where he sets the enumerated Soviet rights against the American constitution's silence on work, housing, health and childcare, and against the concrete texture of American life in 1978 — the Bureau of Labor Statistics budgets, the wage figures falling behind inflation, the absence of a national health bill.
Much of the social provision he describes was also real. Employment was guaranteed. Rents were negligible: a Rustavi gas worker's five-room cottage with a garage at fifteen roubles a month is the kind of detail a propagandist does not invent, and Soviet housing costs did run at a few per cent of household budgets. Medical care was free at the point of use and doctors did make house calls. Childcare places numbered in the millions. Education through university cost nothing. The book's summary of what this meant subjectively — that people were not "plagued or worried by money problems, the next month's rent, meeting college costs for children, job insecurity, medical bills, fear of retirement, vacation costs" — is the honest heart of it, and it is why so many former Soviet citizens told pollsters in the 1990s that they had lost something.
The volume is also, in places, more candid than its title suggests. On housing, Morris quotes the union officials Makarov and Obekunov saying flatly that "the housing situation in the Soviet Union is still serious", records that Moscow's average living space had been three square metres per person as late as the early 1960s, and notes that post-war blocks were badly built. On consumption he concedes that "the Soviet press features many complaints over the lack of certain products or the difficulty of buying them because of inadequate supply", and that Western industrial workers were better off for housing space, food, fruit and textiles. A book that admitted nothing would be worthless as evidence. This one admits enough to be used, carefully, as a source on what Soviet social provision actually looked like from inside a Moscow flat in 1977.
Then come the political rights, and the method changes. It is not denial. It is redefinition, conducted in the open, and the openness is what makes the book valuable.
Morris quotes Article 50 in full: the Constitution guarantees "freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly". He then quotes the rest of the article, the part usually left out of Soviet propaganda for foreigners, which requires those freedoms to be exercised "in accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system". He treats this qualifier not as an embarrassment but as the superior clause — as the mark of a constitution that has rejected "the hypocricies of bourgeois constitutions". He reinforces it with Mikhail Georgadze, Secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, at a press conference: "There is no freedom in general, or democracy in general. Socialist democracy is the democracy for the working people." Earlier the book puts it in its own voice: "The idea of allowing organizations opposed to socialism to function is out."
Who decides what strengthens the socialist system? The book does not ask. But it has already answered, by quoting Article 6, which for the first time wrote the leading role of the Communist Party into the fundamental law. The rights of Article 50 are conditional on a judgement, and the judgement belongs to a body that is not elected in any contested sense and not removable by those whose rights are conditional upon it.
One article is missing from the walk-through, and it is the one the book's longest chapter is about. Article 72 of the 1977 Constitution retained the right of every union republic freely to secede from the USSR. Morris tours the fifteen republics from the Baltic to the Pacific, quotes Article 34 on equality before the law and Article 36 on the drawing together of the nations at length, and answers Lithuanian émigré claims about the "Soviet yoke" head-on. Article 72 is never mentioned; the words secede and secession do not occur in the book. This is not personal to him. V. S. Semyonov's Nations and Internationalism, issued by Progress in 1979 and a full theoretical treatise on the national question, has the same zero in the same place. Two books, a year apart, on the same subject, silent on the only constitutional provision that would have given the republics a right against the centre.
The electoral chapter shows the mechanism with unusual clarity, and does so almost inadvertently. Turnout in 1974 was 99.98 per cent. Morris asks the obvious question — "Why such stress to turn-out almost every vote in absence of a contest?" — and reports the answer, that the campaign is an education and a mobilisation, that "the casting of the ballot becomes a vote of confidence". He then writes the sentence on which the whole system turns: "Contests do take place in Soviet elections, but most are at the nominating stage." A contest at the nominating stage, adjudicated by a conference of representatives after which, as the book puts it, "The losers usually withdraw", is not a contest the electorate can enter. And in a passage of unintentional bleakness, the book dates the trend it is proud of: ballots not cast, it says, have been declining steadily "since 1937 when 96.7 percent of the eligible voters voted". The year is offered as a baseline for civic enthusiasm.
The same redefinition governs labour. The trade unions get a whole chapter and it is the most interesting in the book, because Soviet unions really did administer housing queues, sanatoria, holiday vouchers and disputes over illegal dismissal, and Morris documents that at first hand. But on the one power that makes a union a union, the text is unambiguous: "The Soviet trade unions have no need of strikes to get results," because workers, management and courts "are of the same class"; therefore "strikes are pointless—as senseless as cutting off your nose to spite your face."
That sentence has a date, and so does its refutation. On 26 January 1978 a group of Soviet workers held a press conference in Moscow to announce that they intended to form an independent trade union, and in early February they launched the Association of Free Trade Unions of Workers in the USSR. Its organiser, Vladimir Klebanov, had worked sixteen years as a foreman at the Bazhanova coal mine in the Donetsk region and had first tried to start a miners' union there in 1960, when the local authorities called it "anti-Soviet activity" and stopped him. The dossiers his group compiled, summarised in Intercontinental Press of 8 May 1978 as "The Three-Year Battle of a Dissident Workers Group", documented dozens of cases of workers who had exposed corruption or unsafe conditions and been demoted, dismissed, or committed to psychiatric hospitals. The association was crushed. In October 1978 a second was founded, the Free Inter-Trade Association of Workers, SMOT, which began with a hundred members and doubled within two months; Marilyn Vogt reported its emergence, and three trials of individual worker dissidents in August 1978, in the issue of 21 April 1980. These are the people who on this book's account had no need of strikes, because "the law is always on the side of the workers and their unions".
And the dissidents are handled by attribution of motive rather than description of conduct. They are "a few dozen contacts of the Central Intelligence Agency, or misfits within Soviet society objectively useful to the CIA" — which is not an accusation of anything, since being objectively useful requires no act at all, and nothing could count as evidence against it. They "have no base in the Soviet Union and have nothing in common with the society in which they are citizens." Shcharansky's conviction "of treason and espionage" is recorded without a word about the evidence, and used as a set-piece against an American Indian march on Washington the same day. The chapter ends: "Human rights is truly an issue, but not in the USSR where its human rights Constitution is practiced as the law of the land."
The book has supplied the instrument for testing that claim, and it is worth turning. Morris quotes Article 49 in full: "Officials are obliged, within established time-limits, to examine citizens' proposals and requests, to reply to them, and to take appropriate action. Persecution for criticism is prohibited. Persons guilty of such persecution shall be called to account." That is a standard, and a testable one. He applies it, with dates and figures, to the United States — the segregation findings of February 1979, the Wilmington Ten, the asbestos employers who concealed for years what they knew about cancer among their workers, the Labor Department's own series showing real wages falling. Every charge against the American state is cashed out into a specified act that could be shown not to have happened. Not one is turned the other way. In sixty thousand words there is no Soviet instance of persecution for criticism, no official called to account, no complaint that failed. Klebanov's dossiers were exactly the material Article 49 exists to cover, and no such material can appear in a book constructed like this one, because the criterion has been defined so that the state it defends cannot fail it. A standard that can only ever find fault abroad is not a standard.
There is a precedent the book never mentions. The Constitution of 1936, which the 1977 text explicitly continues, was likewise proclaimed the most democratic in the world, and its Article 125 guaranteed freedom of speech, press and assembly in almost the same conditional formula — in conformity with the interests of the working people and in order to strengthen the socialist system. It was adopted on 5 December 1936. Zinoviev and Kamenev had been shot in August. Bukharin, who worked on the drafting commission, was shot in March 1938. The qualifier was not decorative then and it was not decorative in 1980.
None of this had to wait for hindsight. The anti-Stalinist left answered it as it was being made, and answered it without conceding the Cold War's terms.
The clearest statement is by Ernest Mandel, published in Hamburg in June 1976 and translated in Intercontinental Press of 13 September 1976 as "The Fight for Soviet Democracy". Mandel begins by rejecting Sakharov's politics outright — he had moved "away from his socialist convictions toward openly procapitalist views" — and then writes: "However, while I reject Sakharov's political position, I unconditionally support his right to advocate these views freely and openly in the Soviet Union. I support his courageous campaign in defense of the human and civil rights of all Soviet citizens. I maintain, along with him, that there can be no real soviet democracy as long as dissident views cannot be openly printed and propagated. As Rosa Luxemburg put it so cogently, democracy is always freedom for dissenters." He goes on to argue that the penal-code articles on "antisoviet agitation" are themselves unconstitutional, since they gut the freedoms the constitution grants — precisely the reading of Article 50 that Morris rules out. Mandel had made the structural case in the same paper five months earlier, in "Brezhnev and Soviet Democracy" (12 April 1976). Readers who want the dissidents in their own voices can find them in the same archives: the long interviews with Leonid Plyushch and Zhores Medvedev in Inprecor No. 47–48, 1 April 1976, and the appeal for the Crimean Tatar Mustafa Jemilev in Inprecor No. 44, 19 February 1976.
The particular cases were reported week by week as they happened. Marilyn Vogt covered Yuri Orlov's twelve-year sentence, handed down after a three-day closed trial on 18 May 1978, in Intercontinental Press of 29 May 1978, and the sentencing of Shcharansky, Aleksandr Ginzburg and the Lithuanian Viktoras Pyatkus in the issue of 24 July 1978, under the heading "Free Shcharansky, Ginzburg, Pyatkus!". That report does the thing this book says cannot be done: it defends them while refusing Washington's sponsorship, quoting Andrew Young's admission to Le Matin that American prisons hold political prisoners too, and arguing that the imperialist governments' embrace of the dissidents "only lends credibility to the Kremlin's charges that the dissidents are agents of imperialism and makes it easier for the Stalinist rulers to crack down on advocates of democracy."
When Sakharov was seized, the answer came within a fortnight, and in the same weeks that the Progress editor was updating American inflation figures. David Russell's "Sakharov Exile—Attack on Rights of Soviet Masses" appeared in Intercontinental Press of 4 February 1980. It opposes Carter's Olympic boycott outright as "an act of hostility not only against the Soviet government, but also against the Soviet workers"; it records that Sakharov had campaigned as a member of Amnesty International for the imprisoned Black activist Martin Sostre and against torture in Uruguay; it says plainly that it disagrees with him about Afghanistan and thinks the way to answer him is to debate him. Then it makes the argument neither government would make: "by denying Sakharov the right to express his opinions, the Stalinist regime was issuing a warning to every single Soviet citizen that no expression of differences with the government will be tolerated. That is an attack on the rights of the Soviet workers and peasants, not on incorrect political ideas."
The reply is not that social rights are worthless. It is that they were held as a gift. A right to housing administered by a factory committee you cannot vote out, a right to work in a plant where striking is defined as absurd, a right to speak exercisable only in ways the Party judges to strengthen the system — these are provisions, and provisions can be withdrawn by whoever provides them. What had been abolished was not property in the means of production only; it was the political capacity of working people to control what they collectively owned. That is the whole content of the word "bureaucracy" in this tradition, and Trotsky had already described its origin in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): scarcity produces the queue, the queue produces the policeman, and the policeman does not go away when the goods arrive.
The test came in the very year this book reached English readers, and not in Moscow. In August 1980 the shipyard workers of Gdańsk struck and won. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International, in a statement of 25 September 1980 printed in Intercontinental Press on 27 October, listed what they had taken: "the right to organizations of its own, the right to strike, the partial lifting of censorship, access to the mass media, greater religious freedom, the liberation of political prisoners persecuted for their solidarity with the strikers, and the admission by the bureaucracy of the existence of exorbitant material privileges." Every item on that list is something this book had explained that workers under socialism had no need of. Polish workers were not CIA contacts or misfits. They were the class in whose name Article 50 was qualified, and the first thing they did with their power was to demand the rights the qualification denied them.
Read Where Human Rights Are Real for what it genuinely records — a health service, a housing programme, a school system, an absence of destitution that the countries lecturing Moscow had not matched and mostly still have not. Read it also as the record of why those things did not survive. When the system that provided them collapsed in 1991, the free clinics, the guaranteed jobs and the fifteen-rouble rents went with it, at speed, and hardly anyone was in a position to defend them, because for sixty years nobody had been permitted to organise, publish, strike or vote in their defence. Rights nobody may argue about are not owned by anyone. That is the argument this book cannot make, and it is the one its title raises.