Human Beings over Systems

Abstract

In a study of Russian literature spanning one century, author Tristan Landry demonstrates, interestingly, that Stalin's great purges of 1936-38 did not come about exnihilo. Murdering people in the hundreds of thousands was made easier by a Begriffsfeld - a notional field, as Landry calls it, which had developed in successive layers over decades, and which permitted the lives of individuals to be disposed of for the sake of a common objective.1 In that context, the value of an individual's life was equated with its degree of social utility. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for one, however, remains convinced of a noteworthy distinction between the old regime in Russia - whose in- habitants were not constrained in their choices - and communist rule in the Soviet Union - a purely criminal endeavour aimed at destroying individuals and communities alike.2Anti- individualism in the Soviet Union ran counter to the person- centred of western civilization. essence of this attitude was to reject any measure of autonomy reflected in the independence of the individual. The person [was] sacrificed, victimized in a vulgarized notion of unity and conformity, notes Russian historian Alexander Obolo nsky.3 A dichotomy between collective - economic and social - and individual rights developed in the wake of the opposition between the socialist and capitalist systems. That cleavage became particularly clear during discussions on the drafting of the universal declaration of human rights in the 1940s, the communist bloc advocating the preeminence of collective rights and western democracies promoting individual rights.One of the factors that caused the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union was certainly the that emerged from the final act of the conference on security and cooperation in Europe, or CSCE, that 33 European states, including the USSR, and also Canada and the United States, signed in Helsinki on 1 August 1975. That included the expression of a consciousness of-and a primitive step towards - Europe as a single entity from the Atlantic to the Urals, to borrow Charles de Gaulle's famous expression. It sprang from a belief that beyond the all-important states and across borders were human beings with their concrete and sometimes urgent needs. This article examines how the convergence of this belief in three different settings - Canada, the United States, and the Soviet Union, through the pivotal role of Yuri Orlov and the group he founded in Moscow in 1976 - enlivened and nurtured that fertile spirit of Helsinki.A CANADIAN AGENDAThe conference on security and cooperation was a welcome opportunity for Canada to tighten its relations with Europe. It fit particularly well with the Trudeau doctrine, named after Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, which implied acquiring more economic and political independenee from the United States. CSCE was also an opportunity for Canada to show goodwill towards Europe after it had reduced its military participation in NATO. In addition, Canada was meant to play a creative role at the meeting because the United States saw the multilateral conference as an impediment to its preferred bilateral relations with the Soviet Union and was therefore less involved.4Canada is a land of immigration. Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin was reminded of this when he visited in the fall of 1 971 and Trudeau handed him a list of some 600 names of Canadian families, mainly of Jewish and Ukrainian descent, seeking to have relatives still in the Soviet Union reunited with them. Some 278,000 Ukrainians emigrated to Canada between 1891 and 1 971, settling for the most part in the western prairies.5In the CSCE talks, explains the former head of the Canadian delegation to the conference, Tom Delworth, aimed at dealing with problems in a practical way. As political systems collide and crush real people in the middle, we thought first and foremost of trying to smooth things up between the bureaucracies of east and west. …