Abstract
Communist states are widely known for their economic and social achievements, such as their generally high rates of economic growth, their low levels of unemployment and inflation, their virtual elimination of illiteracy and their comprehensive provision of health care. There are few, however, who would be inclined to argue that they have made a positive contribution of the same kind to the field of politics, or to the enlargement of human liberty in particular. It had been supposed by Marx that, broadly speaking, once capitalism — the last of the class-divided and exploitative societies — had been abolished, there would be no more need for a separate sphere of political administration, and the state (in Engels’s celebrated phrase) would ‘wither away’ or ‘die out’ (aussterben). In the communist states, however, there has been little sign of a process of this kind (some have unkindly suggested that the only thing that has withered away is the idea that the state should wither away). The communist states, on the contrary, have generally been large, powerful and authoritarian institutions, in which the rights and liberties, of the citizen, at least in Western terms, have been systematically repressed; they are generally regarded, not as having inaugurated a new era of freedom, but as having added a new chapter to the history of dictatorship.
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Further Reading
There are several worthwhile treatments of the questions of democracy and human rights to which this chapter is addressed: see for instance C. B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (New York, 1972),
Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford, 1977),
Jack Lively, Democracy (Oxford, 1975),
and J. Roland Pennock, Democratic Political Theory (Princeton, N.J., 1979).
On the Soviet theory of democracy more particularly, see L. G. Churchward, Contemporary Soviet Government, 2nd edn (London, 1975), ch. 17,
and M. A. Krutogolov, Talks on Soviet Democracy (Moscow, 1980).
On the Soviet legal system, see E. L. Johnson, An Introduction to the Soviet Legal System (London, 1969),
Donald D. Barry and Harold J. Berman, ‘The jurists’, in H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths (eds.), Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, N. J., 1971),
and Donald D. Barry et al. (eds.), Soviet Law since Stalin, 3 vols. (Leyden, 1977–79).
The RSFSR Criminal Code is translated in Harold J. Berman and James W. Spindler (eds.), Soviet Criminal Laws and Procedures: the RSFSR Codes, 2nd edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1972),
and together with other legal codes in William B. Simons (ed.), The Soviet Codes of Law (Alphen aan den Rijn, 1980).
On religious and political dissenters, see Michael Bordeaux, ‘Religion’, and Peter Reddaway, ‘The development of dissent and opposition’, in Archie Brown and Michael Kaser, (eds.), The Soviet Union since the Fall of Khrushchev, 2nd edn (London, 1978);
Rudolf L. Tökés (ed.), Dissent in the USSR (Baltimore and London, 1975);
F. J. M. Feldbrugge, Samizdat and Political Dissent in the Soviet Union (Leyden, 1975);
Amnesty International, Prisoners of Conscience in the USSR, 2nd edn (London, 1980);
and Marshall S. Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 1981).
On human rights in Eastern Europe, two works edited by Rudolf Tökés are useful general surveys: Eurocommunism and Detente (Baltimore, 1978)
and Opposition in Eastern Europe (London, 1979).
Opposition movements in the various countries are analysed in Vladimir Kusin, From Dubcek to Charter 77 (Edinburgh, 1978);
Hans-Peter Riese (ed.), Since the Prague Spring (New York, 1979);
A. Ostoja-Ostaszewski et al., Dissent in Poland (London, 1977);
and Gerson Sher, Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Bloomington and London, 1977).
Up-to-date information may be found in the journals Labour Focus on Eastern Europe and Index on Censorship, both published in London; the latter is a valuable source on all questions of censorship, unofficial literature and samizdat. Paul Lendvai, The Bureaucracy of Truth: How Communist Governments Manage the News (London, 1981)
and Gertrude Joch Robinson, Tito’s Maverick Media: the Politics of Mass Communication in Yugoslavia (Urbana, 1977) are both relevant.
On religion, see Bohdan Bociurkiw and John W. Strong (eds.), Religion and Atheism in the USSR and Eastern Europe (London, 1975) and the periodical publication Religion in Communist Lands (London).
A massive study covering major aspects of the legal system in China is Jerome Cohen, The Criminal Process in Communist China (Cambridge, Mass., 1968),
which may be supplemented by Victor Li, ‘The role of law in Communist China’, China Quarterly no. 44 (1970)
and the same author’s study of the police in a Chinese county, ‘The public security bureau in Hui-yang’, in John W. Lewis (ed.), The City in Communist China (Stanford, Calif., 1971).
Ezra Vogel’s ‘Preserving order in the cities’ in the same volume is also useful. Political ‘crime’ is covered in Amnesty International, Political Imprisonment in the People’s Republic of China (London, 1978).
Peter R. Moody, Opposition and Dissent in Contemporary China (New York, 1977) is useful for the Maoist period.
Roderick MacFarquhar covers the views of the 1957 critics in The Hundred Flowers (London, 1960) and provides a detailed study of the background to that movement in The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (London, 1974).
More recent events are well covered in David S. G. Goodman, Beijing Street Voices (London, 1981),
James D. Seymour, The Fifth Modernisation (New York, 1980),
and Roger Garside, Coming Alive (London, 1981).
See also the journal Index on Censorship for February 1980; June Drey er, ‘Limits of the permissible in China’, Problems of Communism XXIX (1980),
and Shao-Chuan Leng, ‘Criminal justice in post-Mao China’, China Quarterly no. 87 (1981).
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© 1982 Stephen White, John Gardner and George Schöpflin
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White, S., Gardner, J., Schöpflin, G. (1982). Democracy and Human Rights. In: Communist Political Systems. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16851-4_6
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