An examination of the state of play in the cultural Cold War as of the early 1970s reveals striking successes for the Soviets everywhere except Europe and North America. American prosperity and complacency were eroded by the oil shocks, civil unrest, and visible humiliations of Vietnam and Watergate. In contrast, Soviet woes were largely private. For the developing world, Moscow rode high. The USSR continued to sponsor revolutionary nationalist projects and to paint the United States as the universalist power with the imperial agenda. This was especially manifest in the politics around the United National Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), that under the leadership of its director-general, Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, launched a campaign for a New World International Communication Order (NWICO). NWICO promised worldwide protection for international journalistic standards, but also pledged to defend the right to national regulation. The United States detected a Soviet ploy to establish a right to censorship in the name of resistance to the growing power of the Anglo-American communications industries and quit UNESCO in the early 1980s.681
The Soviets also seemed to dominate the diplomatic negotiating tables. On August 1,1975, President Gerald Ford, Leonid Brezhnev, and leaders of thirty-three other states from East and West met in Helsinki, Finland, and signed the
Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation (CSCE) in Europe. The Helsinki Final Act was the pinnacle of detente and the fruit of two and a half years of negotiation. The accords recognized European boundaries and established principles for East-West trade and scientific cooperation. Brezhnev could proudly show his own people America’s acquiescence to the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and their acceptance of the principle of nonintervention. President Ford paid the price for this in the election of 1976.
But Helsinki was the watershed. In the long term, the Helsinki Accords transformed the Soviet state and its satellites. The Final Act included a so-called "Third Basket" of principles that dealt with promoting East-West contact in the personal (including tourism and freedom of travel), informational, educational, and cultural fields. The document stressed the need for more exchanges. It opened the way for the greater flow of Soviet ideas westward and the spread of Western culture and ideas into the Soviet orbit. The Helsinki principles meant that authors could contact foreign publishers and printed materials could be freely distributed. They also allowed for direct contact between parties arranging educational exchanges and encouraged extensive reform of the working conditions for Western journalists in the East.
The cultural elements of Helsinki were refined and broadened still further at a series of CSCE meetings in Madrid from 1980 to 1983. While the Soviet government dragged its feet, it was obliged to implement these reforms. The numbers of people involved in student exchanges jumped dramatically, and cultural figures found it much easier to travel. Major appearances of Western artists in the East included a legendary concert by the British singer Elton John who stunned his hosts by performing the officially forbidden Beatles number "Back in the USSR" as his encore. The Soviet leaders who thought they would lose little from acceding to increased information flows had clearly miscalculated. As the Soviet economy stalled, the doors opened by Helsinki revealed to the world the grim reality behind the official image ofthe worker’s paradise. The positive image which the Soviets had nurtured at such expense around the world withered away.
Helsinki brought a yet more significant blow to the Soviet system. Following pressure from the countries of the European Economic Community, the "First Basket" of the Helsinki Accords included a pledge by all signatories to "respect human rights and fundamental freedoms." While in the short term the Soviets could reap credit from having publicly embraced such principles, the undertaking opened the Kremlin to a new level of domestic and international criticism when it and its allies systematically ignored their obligations. After 1975, national "Helsinki Watch" committees sprung up around the world to monitor compliance with the accords, including committees inside the Soviet Union and its satellites. In 1982, the national committees formed an International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. The Helsinki Watch committee in the United States developed into the NGO Human Rights Watch. Helsinki proved a double-edged sword for Moscow: a short-term success bought at the price of the concession of principles that inspired a generation of dissidents, defined a standard by which the USSR could be judged, and facilitated the exchange of ideas across an increasingly transparent Iron Curtain.682
World History
