"In the short run the Soviet authorities and their colleagues in eastern Europe could certainly suppress easily enough any voices raised on behalf of individual or collective rights: in 1977 the leaders of a Ukrainian ‘Helsinki Rights’ group were arrested and sentenced to terms ranging from three to fifteen years. But the very emphasis that Communist leaders had placed upon ‘Helsinki’ as the source of their regimes’ international legitimacy would now come to haunt them: by invoking Moscow’s own recent commitments, critics (at home and abroad) could now bring public pressure to bear on the Soviet regimes. Against this sort of opposition, violent repression was not just ineffective but, to the extent that it was public knowledge, self-defeating. Hoist by the petard of their own cynicism, Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues had inadvertently opened a breach in their own defenses. Against all expectation, it was to prove mortal."
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Historians from EnglandEssayists from EnglandJews from the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge facultyEducators from England
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Chap. 15 : Politics in a New Key
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Tony Judt
Tony Robert Judt (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history.
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