TARTU – The basis for the “orange”-style revolutions now taking place in post-Soviet countries already was put in place 30 years ago this month when Moscow agreed to the Helsinki Final Act, an accord that the Soviet leadership believed ratified the post-war division of Europe but that in fact opened the way to the destruction of its communist half.
In fact, Sergei Matveychuk argues in an essay posted online last week, that accord since the very beginning has served as a “Trojan horse” that has allowed the West to promote its values by intervening in a variety of ways in the affairs of other countries and especiallly those in the communist bloc (
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Signed on August 1, 1975, the Helsinki agreement consisted of three parts, invariably known as „baskets.” The first or political basket recognized the borders in Europe that had emerged during and after World War II as permanent and pledged all signatories to the principle of non-intereference in the internal affairs of others.
(There was one significant exception: In signing the Final Act, US President Gerald Ford explicitly said that in Washington’s view, nothing in the accord affected its longstanding policy of not recognizing the forcible incorporation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the Soviet Union.)
The second basket included calls for expanded trade and economic cooperation among the then-CSCE, now OSCE states. And the third basket committed the governments signing this accord both to protect human rights and to allow for the free flow of information among their populations.
Some in the Soviet leadership were very much opposed to signing this accord. One of those who was, former CPSU Central Committee secretary and one-time Soviet ambassador to Bonn Valentin Falin told Matveychuk that he had tried without success to convince the members of the Politburo that the Soviet Union should not agree to the Helsinki Act.
Falin says now that he was concerned even then that NATO was at that time developing methods to exploit for its own purposes “cases of anti-regime uprisings in Poland, the GDR or other countries of the Warsaw Pact,” events that at the present time, Matveychuk suggests “would be called ‘orange’ revolutions.”
But the Brezhnev leadership decided to sign because it very much wanted the West to agree to the legitimacy of then-existing borders and to the principle of non-interference in the affairs of other countries. But it reached that conclusion, Matveychuk suggests, because Brezhnev and his supporterss defined non-interference “in an out-of-date way.”
That is, for the Soviet leadership at that time and despite the warnings of people like Falin, “interference” still meant “armed invasion, espionage and so forth” rather than the impact of the importation of Western goods let alone that of a significantly freer media or a population that was convinced it had a right to both.
Specifically, Matveychuk continues, the Soviet leadership „ignored” or at the very least played down the significance of its new commitment to observe human rights, a commitment that opened the way to the end of the Soviet Union and the “orange” revolutions now taking place.
That is because, Matveychuk says, observing human rights “presupposed monitoring. And such monitoring, according to Western ideology, is not interference in the internal affairs [of other countries]. And from monitoring it is but a single step to the direct support of opposition groups.”
Or as Falin told him, “the proclaimed renunciation of interference in the internal affairs of others did not prevent the Atlanticists from planning interference on a grand scale [and working to] perfect methods to involve large portions of the population in street demonstrations, to destroy with their help the institutions of public order, and in this way, to set up a ‘peaceful’ blockade of the Soviet forces in the countries of the Warsaw Pact.”
Over the last 30 years, OSCE structures, Matveychuk says, “have become a powerful weapon for pulling out from under Russian control the democratic process both in European (Ukraine) and in non-European countries (for example, in Kyrgyzstan, where the main ‚controller’ of the elections was the OSCE mission headed by a Slovene).”
And consequently, the Moscow analyst concludes, “the 'third basket' – with its priority of human rights and call for openness – destroyed the very post-war status quo which the ‘first basket’ was supported to make permanent.” Indeed, events have shown that “the mass media, jeans and Pepsi Cola have turned out to be stronger than rockets and tanks.”
