Gorbachev and Human Rights

The day before he began his state visit to France last week--his first trip to a Western nation since becoming the Soviet leader--Mikhail S. Gorbachev submitted to a televised interview by French journalists. Gorbachev conducted himself with some suavity, until he was asked about political prisoners in the Soviet Union. His angry retort was to dismiss the question as “absurd.” When similarly asked in Paris a few days later about human rights, political dissent and emigration policies in his homeland, Gorbachev again waxed indignant. “I believe that the Soviet Union cannot be taken up as a partner in inconsequential debates,” he said.

What may be inconsequential to Gorbachev remains, of course, a matter of abiding concern to legions of others, both those within the Soviet Union who are prevented from exercising fundamental freedoms and those in the outside world who care deeply about violations of human rights wherever they occur. No one expected the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party to acknowledge that political dissent in his country is a crime, that the “freedom of thought, conscience, religion (and) belief” that the Soviets pledged to respect a decade ago in the Helsinki Agreement has never been granted or that Soviet citizens who want to emigrate are persecuted for that desire. Gorbachev, on his part, seems not to have expected the intensity of concern that he found in France over how the Soviet state treats its people.

Judged by that alone, Gorbachev’s exposure to the kind of questioning that Western leaders regularly experience could have some beneficial results. A firsthand encounter with Western concern and indignation over the status of human rights in the Soviet Union isn’t going to prompt any sudden changes in policy. But perhaps the blunt reminder that the external world judges the Soviet regime in good part on its human rights attitudes may, in time, prompt a leadership eager for greater international respectability to reconsider those harsh policies.