Word: helsinki
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...also raided the apartment of Mykola Rudenko, head of the Helsinki group's Kiev chapter. The agents trashed the contents of Rudenko's flat and stripped his wife naked to humiliate her. Rudenko and Oleska Tykhy, a committee member from the city of Donetsk, were then hauled off to Ukrainian prisons...
Part of the Soviet dilemma stems from the Helsinki agreement, which many at first regarded as a victory for Moscow because it supposedly established the "inviolability" of existing frontiers, thus legitimizing the Soviet takeover of the Baltic states and the status quo in Eastern Europe. The agreement also contained broad humanitarian declarations in favor of the right of people to leave and enter countries on family visits, access to foreign publications, international youth meetings, and the improvement of working conditions for journalists abroad. Moscow presumably saw nothing too threatening in those principles. After all, far more specific rights are guaranteed...
...libertarians in the U.S.S.R. and other Communist countries were taking Helsinki seriously-or acting as if they were. According to a tale that has been repeated with local variations in virtually every Communist country in Europe, a grandmother goes to the police station in Pinsk and requests permission to visit her sister in The Bronx. The policeman just shakes his head. The old lady then pulls out of her string shopping bag the tattered pages from Pravda reproducing the text of the Helsinki agreement. "It says here, young man, on page 3, section A-Contacts and Regular Meetings...
determined effrontery. On a larger scale, would-be reformers in the Soviet Union and East Europe have used the Communist governments' ratification of Helsinki as a lever to press for liberalization on many fronts, such as censorship and immigration-with scant success. The Kremlin and the other East bloc regimes have no intention of permitting the free flow of ideas and people that Helsinki calls...
Embarrassingly for Moscow, under the terms of the Helsinki agreement, the Soviets must submit next summer to a review in Belgrade of their observance of its provisions. Sitting in judgment will be not a little group of Russian dissidents but representatives of the 34 other nations who signed the accord. Moscow and the other East European capitals are apparently trying to put down the current wave of dissent before the meeting...