Sakharov was not a pie-in-the-sky idealist. He championed universal principles but was well aware of the limitations of trying to influence the Soviet regime. When he wrote a letter entreating the US Congress to pass what ultimately became known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, in 1973, Sakharov stayed with the matter at hand—Jewish emigration from the USSR—instead of making grand speeches. He was a crafty verbal tactician. Knowing he couldn’t openly call for legislation that was seen as punitive toward his home country, Sakharov wrote that the USSR had been “developing under conditions of intolerable isolation” and made the case that the amendment would alleviate that isolation, and thus was actually beneficial to the USSR.
This was a clever and ironic maneuver, since the Jackson-Vanik amendment was devised to pressure the Soviets into relaxing emigration controls by tying them to trade relations, and was clearly a tool of isolation of the Soviet regime, not engagement. But it engaged the Soviet people and held out the hand of friendship and freedom to them directly, a critical distinction. What could be a more effective criticism of the Soviet Union than millions of its citizens yearning to be free? When discussing the amendment in his memoir, Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin wrote that any demand for emigration was “a reproof to our socialist paradise” and “that anyone should have the temerity to want to leave it was taken as a rank insult!”
Sakharov’s letter to Congress also made use of the dissident tactic of “civil obedience,” demanding that the Soviet government respect its own laws and international laws. “The amendment does not represent interference in the internal affairs of socialist countries, but simply a defense of international law, without which there can be no mutual trust.” The anti-Putin movement adopted this tactic as well. Our protests were often based on demands that the government abide by the Russian constitution, which, in theory, guaranteed rights of assembly and speech that the Putin regime routinely violated.
Sakharov’s letter was published a few days later on a full page in the Washington Post, leading to Leonid Brezhnev’s rage and the bizarre statement that the letter was “not just an anti-State and anti-Soviet deed, but a Trotskyist deed.” Ironically, the administration of Richard Nixon was just as angry about it.
Sakharov was an opponent of detente, a word he and other dissidents accurately saw as a euphemism for appeasement. His fellow dissident and collaborator Natan Sharansky summed up the resistance to their movement from the “realist” camp led by Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who saw the Soviet dissidents as troublemakers who threatened to derail his carefully balanced realpolitik. Sharansky writes, “Kissinger saw Jackson’s amendment as an attempt to undermine plans to smoothly carve up the geopolitical pie between the superpowers. It was. Jackson believed that the Soviets had to be confronted, not appeased.”
Sharansky, who has himself spoken and written with great eloquence and authority on moral policy, goes on to cite his friend: “One message [Sakharov] would consistently convey to these foreigners was that human rights must never be considered a humanitarian issue alone. For him, it was also a matter of international security. As he succinctly put it: ‘A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors.’” Putin’s Russia is a perfect example of this truth.
The moral policy view was shared by another well-known dissident, exiled author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who used the American founding fathers to illustrate the point. At a lecture in New York City on July 9, 1975, Solzhenitsyn said, “The men who created your country never lost sight of their moral bearings. They did not laugh at the absolute nature of the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Their practical policies were checked against that moral compass. And how surprising it is that a practical policy computed on the basis of moral considerations turned out to be the most far-sighted and the most salutary.”
If I may take the liberty of boiling Solzhenitsyn’s prose into an aphorism, the most moral policy also turns out to be the most effective policy. Believing otherwise leads to false trade-offs that imperil liberty without enhancing our security.
After discussing it for years, when the United States moved to finally revoke Jackson-Vanik in 2011, I complained about the timing of the move. The borders of Russia were open, so the original purpose of the amendment was obsolete. But to lift this landmark piece of human rights legislation while Vladimir Putin was returning Russia to totalitarian darkness was a terrible idea. More than anything, the measure confronted the USSR instead of appeasing it and said very loudly and clearly that individual freedom mattered. Jackson-Vanik was a relic of a past era, but it was a powerful symbol. To repeal it without putting something in its place would send a message that either the United States no longer cared about these universal rights or that America believed Putin’s Russia was not an authoritarian regime.
In 2011, I joined the global campaign launched by Bill Browder to promote the Magnitsky Act, partly as a way of replacing Jackson-Vanik by once again connecting American (and later European) foreign policy with human rights abuses in Russia. I gave several lectures in DC and wrote op-eds urging Congress and the Obama administration not to reward Putin for destroying Russian civil society and for persecuting those who exposed his crimes.
It was while preparing these speeches that I became a big fan of Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Washington State senator who was the primary force for a moral American foreign policy in the 1970s. I could happily fill several pages with Jackson’s powerful statements on why America had to live up to its ideals of freedom and democracy by actively promoting and defending them abroad. My favorite is the conclusion of his impassioned September 27, 1972, speech on the Senate floor to advocate for the amendment that would bear his name: “We can, and we must, keep the faith of our own highest traditions. We must not now, as we once did, acquiesce to tyranny while there are those, at greater risk than ourselves, who dare to resist.” Jackson also quoted Solzhenitsyn’s 1972 Nobel Prize-acceptance lecture, “There are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth!”
When I was invited by Hillsdale College to speak about Russia at an event in Jackson’s home state of Washington in 2013 I jumped at the chance. Hillsdale is a very politically conservative institution, the “conservative Harvard,” so I enjoyed playing the contrarian by invoking Jackson as well as his fellow Democrat Harry Truman in my lecture. Both were strong advocates of using American power and moral authority to defend people around the world from dictatorship. Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions this stance has been completely abandoned by the current generation of Democrats. After my lecture, I was approached by an elderly local woman who had clear memories of supporting Scoop Jackson (and maybe Truman!), calling him “the only Democrat I’ve ever voted for!”
The Bush 43 administration openly promoted a “freedom agenda” (aka the Bush Doctrine), an agenda of which Scoop Jackson would have been proud. It recommended actively promoting liberty abroad—an agenda I supported in nearly every aspect, by the way. But they still fell into the trap of inconsistency and trade-offs when it came to Russia. Rice’s “the Cold War really is over” when getting off the phone with Putin on 9/11 says it all. The Cold War had been over for a decade!