Human Rights Defenders in the Turning Years of Russian History (1986-1993)

• In Event: Memory of Human Rights Work in the USSR: Contemporary Testimonies and Legacy in Practice

Abstract

The paper will give an overview of the history of the human rights movement during Perestroika and early Post-Soviet Russia. Traditionally, the history of the dissident movement in the USSR ends in 1987, when political realities began to change rapidly. Conferences and academic publications devoted to the Soviet human rights movement generally take into account the current context of the human rights work in Russia in the second half of the 1990s-2010s (Hovarth, 2005). At the same time, the period when human rights defenders turned from unheard margins into politicians, authors of the new Constitution, or remained human rights defenders - with new goals and approaches, and the same system of values - is paradoxically hardly described in academic literature and is only beginning to be recorded in memoirs of former Soviet dissidents (such as Alexander Podrabinek, Lev Timofeev, and Sergei Grigoryants). The paper is aimed to analyse challenges and choices made by human rights defenders in an era when some of them believed that it was still impossible to cooperate with the authorities in any form, and others tried to take advantage of the unique “window of opportunity”.

Author

• Alexey Makarov, NIPC Memorial