Raymond J. de Souza: How the Helsinki Accords helped end communism
Carter agreed with Brezhnev on that reading and attacked Helsinki as 'legitimizing Soviet domination.' Reagan considered the accords a moral abandonment of the enslaved nations of what he would characterize eight years later as the 'evil empire.'
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Everyone got it wrong. As Kissinger himself would write later: 'Rarely has a diplomatic process so illuminated the limitations of human foresight.'
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To get his de facto recognition of empire, Brezhnev conceded to the inclusion of 'basket three' in the Helsinki accords. Those provisions committed the signatories to permitting the peaceful changes of international borders, allowing states to leave or join alliances (NATO and Warsaw Pact) and, most remarkably, committed the Soviets to 'the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms … in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.'
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The Soviets had solemnly signed a promise to honour human rights. Brezhnev thought he had made an easily ignored concession to gain a hard-won recognition of Russian imperial ambitions. He was wrong.
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'Helsinki became, in short, a legal and moral trap,' in the judgement of leading Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis. 'Without realizing the implications, Brezhnev thereby handed his critics a standard, based on universal principles of justice, rooted in international law, independent of Marxist-Leninist ideology, against which they could evaluate the behaviour of his and other communist regimes.'
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By 1976, a 'Public Group to Promote Observance of the Helsinki Accords' was operating in Moscow with the endorsement of Andrei Sakharov, the leading scientist-dissident. 'Helsinki Groups' were established in other communist countries, and the regimes were unable to silence them, given that they existed to monitor what the Soviet regime had itself promised.
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Contrary to Brezhnev's securing the legitimation of communist rule at home and in the near abroad, Gladdis concluded that, 'the Helsinki process became instead the basis of legitimizing opposition to Soviet rule.'
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Five years after Helsinki, Pope John Paul II had visited Poland and shook the regime to its foundations; Lech Wałęsa was leading the strikes that would lead to Solidarność, the Polish trade union that heralded an end to communist rule; Václav Havel had formed Charter 77 to advocate for human rights in Czechoslovakia; Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street and Reagan was on his way to the White House.
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The Cold War had always been at heart a moral argument, but the realpolitik of the 1970s sought to minimize that. Helsinki was realpolitik in intention, but massively not in effect. It restored the language of morality, of good and evil, to the Cold War. And once that was done, the end happily came sooner than expected.
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