The Cambridge History of Communism

Understanding the relationship between human rights and communism properly begins with Marx, Karl’s 1843 “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx and Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, Robert C. (New York: Norton & Co., 1979), 26–46. Only recently have scholars of communism turned attention to the history of human rights. The Soviet Union’s engagement in the UN-based human rights norm-making in the 1940s best emerges in Amos, Jennifer, “Embracing and Contesting: The Soviet Union and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948–1958,” in Hoffman, Stefan-Ludwig (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 147–65; and her “Soviet Diplomacy and the Politics on Human Rights, 1945–1964” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2012). On the fraught history of social and economic rights in the Soviet Union, see Smith, Mark B., “Social Rights in the Soviet Dictatorship: The Constitutional Right to Welfare from Stalin to Brezhnev,” Humanity 3, 3 (Winter 2012), 385–406. On Soviet participation in the Nuremberg Trials, see Hirsch, Francine, “The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,” American Historical Review 113, 3 (June 2008), 701–30.

For the making of the 1940s global human rights movement more broadly, see Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), ch. 2; Winter, Jay and Prost, Antoine, René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Bradley, Mark Philip, The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination: A Twentieth-Century Transnational History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), part I. The Soviet and Chinese entanglements with postcolonial state-making and human rights emerge in Burke, Roland, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

On Soviet dissidents, see Nathans, Benjamin, “The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol’pin and the Idea of Rights Under ‘Developed Socialism,’” Slavic Review 66, 4 (Winter 2007), 630–63; his “Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era,” in Hoffman (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, 166–90; and his “The Disenchantment of Socialism: Soviet Dissidents, Human Rights and the New Global Morality,” in Eckel, Jan and Moyn, Samuel (eds.), The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 33–47. More conventional but still important narratives include Rubenstein, Joshua, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 30–42; and Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985).

On Helsinki, see Snyder, Sarah B., Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Thomas, Daniel C., The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights and the Demise of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). For Czech dissent, see Bolton, Jonathan, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture Under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

The impact of Soviet and East European dissidents on West European leftist thought and practice in the 1970s emerges in Horvath, Robert, “‘The Solzhenitsyn Effect’: East European Dissidents and the Demise of Revolutionary Privilege,” Human Rights Quarterly 29, 4 (Nov. 2007), 879–907; Christofferson, Michael Scott, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Press, 2004), ch. 2; Pons, Silvio, “The Rise and Fall of Eurocommunism,” in Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westad, Odd Arne (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 45–65; Brier, Robert, “Beyond the ‘Helsinki Effect’: East European Dissent and the Western Left in the ‘Long 1970s,’” in Villaume, Poul, Mariager, Rasmus and Porsdam, Helle (eds.), The “Long 1970s”: Human Rights, East–West Détente and Transnational Relations (London: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 71–86; and Brier, Robert, “Broadening the Cultural History of the Cold War: The Emergence of the Polish Workers’ Defense Committee and the Rise of Human Rights,” Journal of Cold War Studies 15, 4 (Fall 2013), 104–27.

For Carter-era human rights diplomacy, and its connection to Soviet dissidents, see Keys, Barbara J., Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Parthé, Kathleen, “The Politics of Détente-Era Cultural Texts, 1969–1976,” Diplomatic History 33, 4 (Sep. 2009), 723–33; and Peterson, Christian Philip, “The Carter Administration and the Promotion of Human Rights in the Soviet Union,” Diplomatic History 38, 3 (Jun. 2014), 628–56.

On broader global concern with human rights in the 1970s, see Moyn, Last Utopia, ch. 4; Bradley, United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination, ch. 5; and contributors to Eckel and Moyn (eds.), The Breakthrough. For the politics of postsocialist human rights memory, see Gilligan, Emma, Defending Human Rights in Russia: Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969–2003 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005); and Nalepa, Monika, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Useful starting points for late twentieth-century Chinese human rights history include Foot, Rosemary, Rights Beyond Borders: The Global Community and the Struggle over Human Rights in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Svensson, Marina, Debating Human Rights in China: A Conceptual and Political History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); and Lizhi, Fang, The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State (New York: Henry Holt, 2016).