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Translation of Prava cheloveka i Sovetskiæi Soëiìuz.
Leading specialists and activists from Russia and the USA join, in this volume, to offer a searching assessment of human rights in their own countries and in the world at large. They reflect on past history, present problems associated with system breakdown and decline, and the obstacles and opportunities on the way to the realisation of human rights in this uncertain post-Cold War era and the millennium that is now dawning. The participants in the discussions detailed here include Yelena Bonner, Viktor Chkhikvadze, Norman Dorsen, Riane Eisler, David Forsythe, Paula Garb, Charles Henry, Susan Heuman, Irina Lediakh, Vladimir Kudriavtsev, Pavel Litvinov, Richard Schifter, Henry Shue, Evgenii Skripilev, Vladimir Vlashihin, Oleg Vorobiev and the editors.
"According to official Soviet propaganda, crime is an adjunct of capitalism and has virtually disappeared in the Soviet Union; whatever crimes are committed are attributed to survivals of capitalism sixty years after the Revolution. As a result, crime statistics are hard to come by, and even legal scholars cannot always get access to court records. Nevertheless, Soviet dissident Valery Chalidze, using whatever records he was able to find and drawing on previous conversations with informed individuals in the USSR, here presents a side of the Soviet Union not previously covered in books on the subject. His object is to fill some of the gaps that exist in the outside world's knowledge of the USSR, but he also confesses that "I have always been fascinated by the customs and personalities of Russian criminals," and he begins with the centuries-old Russian criminal tradition--the attitude, often of tolerance, toward various kinds of crime that no later history has been able to erase completely. He covers the use made of the criminal underworld by the Bolsheviks during their rise to power and the later split between the underworld and the new regime. And he discusses in some detail recent murders, rapes, thefts and the all-prevailing 'hooliganism' (acts of random violence, often while drunk) that accounts for a vast majority of court cases today. Finally he turns to such peculiarly Soviet crimes as 'private enterprise' and 'entrepreneurism.'" -- Provided by publisher
Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Peace Prize winner and physicist, was a leading human rights activist in the Soviet Union, and one of the world's great thinkers. His principled messages contributed To The non-violent, revolutionary changes of 1989, and continue to influence work in favour of justice and human rights today. This book, containing selected human rights texts, Is published as part of a series of initiatives highlighting how acutely relevant his ideas remain in our time.