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The Helsinki Group was founded on May 12, 1976, when Soviet dissidents from a variety of political, religious and national backgrounds — 11 of us, led by physicist Yuri Orlov — joined together. Our aim was to monitor the Soviet Union’s compliance with the Helsinki Accords, signed the previous year by the U.S.S.R. and 34 other nations. The accords, in addition to other provisions, committed the Soviet regime to respect its citizens’ human rights.
Within a year, almost every one of the group’s founding members had been exiled or arrested. Yet, in that first year alone, the group published more than 20 documents detailing the Soviet Union’s myriad human rights abuses, and in so doing helped change the course of Soviet history.
The Helsinki Group remained a thorn in Moscow’s side until the U.S.S.R.’s final days. It united diverse opposition movements beneath a single banner and spurred the creation of satellite human-rights-monitoring groups around the world. The U.S. Congress used the documents of our groups as the basis for hearings about compliance with the Helsinki Accords. The group’s creation thus marked a turning point, at which dissidents began to speak with one voice against the regime, and Western powers began to see us as their allies in the fight against it.
Now, nearly half a century later, with Moscow’s barbaric aggression against Ukraine, Russia has experienced a quick return to almost Stalinist-era levels of repression. New laws have made it impossible for the free press and human rights organizations to operate. Some outlets have closed voluntarily, while others, including the Helsinki Group and Memorial — which only last year was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize — have been forcibly shut down. Prison sentences for criticizing the regime are becoming increasingly common and harsh.
Consider the cases of Putin’s most prominent domestic critics, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Alexei Navalny.
Kara-Murza’s only transgression was to work tirelessly, including as a Post Opinions contributor, defending Russia’s nascent democratic institutions and speaking out against the war in Ukraine. For this, Kara-Murza was recently sentenced to 25 years in prison, one of the first such lengthy sentence for a political “crime” since the time of Joseph Stalin.
Navalny, meanwhile, was jailed repeatedly for his work exposing corruption at the highest levels of Russian society. Since his most recent imprisonment a year and a half ago, his sentence has been repeatedly extended on invented charges. He had already spent more than 150 days in the punishment cell. Such cells are much worse than solitary confinement, with the isolated prisoner denied warm clothing in freezing conditions, allowed no meetings with the family and no daily walk, and kept on the most meager rations. (For comparison, my more than 400 days in such a cell over the course of nine years was considered a kind of record; Navalny is likely to easily have the misfortune of breaking it.)
No less frightening, both Kara-Murza and Navalny have been subjected to an unconventional weapon favored by Putin, one worse than any experienced by dissidents in Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s time: poison.
Kara-Murza was poisoned twice, first in 2015, after which he nearly died of kidney failure, and again in 2017. His health is now so weak as a result that even a few years in prison could be a death sentence for the 41-year-old. Navalny spent weeks in a coma after his poisoning in August 2020 and then later ingeniously extracted an admission of responsibility from Russia’s Federal Security Service.
Despite the severity of their treatment, however, both men had chosen to return to Russia from abroad, knowing that their arrests were almost certain. Many ask: Why would they do such a thing?
I see an answer in comments made to me by another dissident, Jimmy Lai, the now-jailed Hong Kong publisher and democracy activist. Lai and I spoke at length in 2020 as he prepared himself for what he, too, knew was coming. At 72, he also knew that he would likely spend the rest of his life in prison. During our conversations, I said to him, “You are a wealthy and powerful man, one of the most prominent in Hong Kong. You have access to private airplanes. You have British citizenship. Why don’t you simply escape?”
Lai responded that he was too committed to his fellow democracy advocates in Hong Kong to do that. Running away would mean abdicating his responsibility as their leader, abandoning them and betraying their faith.
Similarly, in founding the Helsinki Group, my comrades and I knew that we would be arrested for our activities. Yet we, too, felt we had no choice but to carry forward the historic struggle for freedom.
Kara-Murza and Navalny are also convinced that the Russian people long to be free and that freedom is within their reach. In letters sent from their captivity, both betray a remarkable optimism about their country’s future. Both have said, in one way or another, that Putin’s regime will not outlive their own prison sentences.
As Kara-Murza put it in his courageous and powerful speech during the closing session of his trial, “I also know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate … when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognized as criminals. This day will come as inevitably as spring follows even the coldest winter.”
History shows that there are two necessary conditions for the fall of a tyrannical government such as Putin’s. The first is the presence of dissidents who are willing to put the struggle for freedom above their own survival. In Russia, there are thousands of people ready to speak out against their government. What is more, thanks to social media, they can broadcast their messages instantaneously to the entire world. Outside powers therefore have an army of allies prepared to mobilize in the fight against the regime.
The second condition is leaders and citizens of the free world standing in solidarity with those struggling inside. Today, because of his unforgivable aggression in Ukraine, Putin has earned the opprobrium of the world. Yet much more can be done to stop him: by linking all economic and other contacts with his regime to the fate of these democratic dissidents.
It is in helping to forge such solidarity that dissident leaders truly have a historic role to play. During Brezhnev’s time, it was the work of the Helsinki Group and other opposition movements that stirred international awareness and action against the regime. Today, Kara-Murza, Navalny and others are accomplishing that under even more terrifying and oppressive conditions.
If they can muster optimism in these darkest of times, then we owe it to them — and to ourselves — to do the same.
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