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Soviet Dissidents and Jimmy Carter The Transformation of Human Rights into An International Norm International Memorial Society and National Security Archive Launch On-Line Dossier Web Publication of Russian and U.S. Documents Marks 1970s Turning Point for U.S. Policy and for International Support of Dissent and Human Rights National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 391 Posted - September 18, 2012 For more information contact: National Security Archive: Svetlana Savranskaya, 202.994.7000, svetlana@gwu.edu International Memorial: Arsenii Roginsky/ Gennadii Kuzovkin/ Natalya Petrova, 7 (967) 271-4171, natalia.petrova@gmail.com http://www.nsarchive.org Moscow, Russian Federation, 18 September 2012 -- The first-ever Web publication of previously secret U.S. documents on Soviet dissidents, matched with reports and letters by the dissidents themselves from the Memorial Society Archives in Moscow, illuminate the landmark turning point during Jimmy Carter's presidency in the late 1970s when U.S. policy first elevated human rights concerns, and the dissidents led the international movement that discredited Soviet claims that attention to such issues was "interference in internal affairs." The rise of Soviet dissent in the 1960s and 1970s played a catalytic role in the transformation of human rights into an international norm of expected state behavior, according to the newly-published documents; and while Soviet repression succeeded in the short term in exiling or imprisoning most of the leading dissidents, the resulting legitimacy deficit contributed to the collapse of the Communist system at the end of the 1980s. The documents published today include highest-level memoranda to President Carter from his top advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance, CIA assessments of the dissident movement and the Soviet government's reactions, and U.S. National Security Council discussions of the issue. The Memorial documents include contemporaneous reports written by dissidents such as Moscow Helsinki Group co-founder Lyudmila Alexeyeva about specific arrests, trials, and repressions - often in the form of personally-addressed letters to President Carter requesting U.S. attention to the issues. Veterans of the Soviet dissent movement will join representatives of Memorial and the National Security Archive for a public discussion and reception at the Memorial building in Moscow (Karetny Ryad, No. 5/10) at 6 p.m. on September 18 to mark the launch of the Web publication - which appears in Russian on the Memorial Web pages and in English and Russian on the National Security Archive Web pages. Read today's posting at the National Security Archive website - http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB391/ Visit International Memorial's posting at their website - http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/carter_index.html ________________________________________________________ THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.
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