Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights

Contrary to the prevailing Cold War narrative that the Soviet Union was a passive or hostile observer of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), this paper demonstrates that the Soviet state became a sophisticated and active participant in human rights diplomacy. After abstaining from the 1948 vote, Soviet officials quickly recognized the Declaration's potential as a weapon in the ideological struggle against the West. By the 1950s, the Soviet Foreign Ministry and other state organs were actively citing the UDHR to bolster their own legitimacy and to critique the human rights records of capitalist nations.

The Soviet delegation played a crucial role in the UN debates regarding the drafting of legally binding human rights covenants. They consistently argued for the indivisibility of rights, insisting that economic, social, and cultural rights were as fundamental as civil and political ones. By linking these economic rights to the Soviet Constitution and the history of the October Revolution, Soviet diplomats positioned the USSR as a champion of the working class. This strategy was not merely defensive; it allowed the Soviet Union to challenge Western powers, particularly the United States, by highlighting domestic inequalities and the failure of capitalist states to guarantee basic economic security.

The paper reveals how the boundary between international diplomacy and domestic politics became increasingly porous during the Khrushchev era. Initially, the Soviet Foreign Ministry attempted to isolate the UDHR from the domestic public. However, as the UN began drafting more technical treaties, the Ministry was forced to involve other government agencies, such as the Academy of Sciences and the Procuracy, in human rights policy. This led to a wider dissemination of the Declaration within the state apparatus. Furthermore, state-directed organizations like the Association for the Promotion of the United Nations (ASOON) began promoting the UDHR domestically to maintain international legitimacy, effectively using the Declaration to validate the post-Stalinist policy of socialist legality.

This research challenges the assumption that human rights history was frozen by Cold War binaries. Instead, it shows that the UDHR served as an elastic document that competing ideologies could manipulate for their own ends. By documenting how the Soviet Union integrated human rights language into its own legal and political frameworks, the paper provides a more nuanced understanding of how international norms are adopted, contested, and instrumentalized by authoritarian regimes to project power and seek legitimacy.