Human Rights Discourse within the Human Rights Movement: Disputes over Terms

• In Event: Law and Legality II: Concepts and Narratives of Soviet Legality

Abstract

This paper is based on an interview with Pavel Litvinov, one of the key figures in the Moscow human rights movement of 1967–68, one of those in this circle who established contacts in the West and proposed that the movement’s program and practice should be based on the notion of “human rights.” Starting from research about Alexander Esenin-Volpin, one of the ideologists of the reliance on the notion of “human rights,” and from works that place the human rights movement in the USSR in the context of the movements that emerged in Eastern Europe in the 1960s, I want to examine the “human rights movement” not as having a coherent program, as is usually characteristic of “movements,” but as developing within itself meanings for such key concepts as “rights,” “law,” “democrats,” and “politics.” As well as analyzing the conceptual battles of the time, the report will also mention blind spots – what seems to have been left out of the debate.

Author

• Olga Rosenblum, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (Germany)