The Position of Soviet Jewry: Human Rights and the Helsinki Accords 1985 / Governments in both East and West approached the Helsinki process with considerable cynicism; even at the moment of signing the Final Act in August 1975 most Western representatives could not have expected the humanitarian principles of ’Basket Three’ to be observed in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The decade which followed proved these fears justified, and review meetings frequently deteriorated into propaganda warfare and mutual recriminations. Yet the records of East and West are very different. Western governments are responsive to democratic pressures in a way that those of the ‘socialist community’ are not. However, the public debate stimulated by the Helsinki process benefits democracy rather than authoritarian systems, and the very fact that such a debate was possible, gave a little hope that the second decade of follow-up meetings might bring some change for the better.
