Documenting Cold War Truth: Human Rights Abuses and Spiritual Death in the USSR and the US

Abstract

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Soviet activists in the USSR and members of the Black Panther Party in the United States emphasized the need to document the truth of domestic human rights abuses not in the land of the Cold War adversary but in their own. In the process, they contested the dominant misrepresentations of Soviet citizens and African Americans that obscured those routine human rights abuses. Members of both groups conceived of documenting this truth as essential to ultimately eliminating these domestic forms of state-sanctioned violence. They also spoke of the act of speaking the truth in word and deed as facilitating their own liberation from what they similarly identified as a devastating Soviet and American spiritual death in countries that were officially represented in the Cold War universe as the moral antithesis. The ‘woke’ or liberated individual was no longer a subservient, mask-wearing ‘Homo Sovieticus’ or ‘Negro’ who mouthed the lies of unbounded Soviet democracy and American freedom, but a genuine citizen and full human being who demanded respect for their human rights.