The International Sakharov Hearings - Specialized Research AI at MIT

The International Sakharov Hearings
and Transnational Human Rights
Activism, 1975–1985

✣ Bent Boel

The International Sakharov Hearings were a series of hearings examining
human rights violations in the Soviet bloc. The ﬁrst session took place in
Copenhagen in 1975, the second was held in Rome (1977), the third in
Washington, DC (1979), the fourth in Lisbon (1983), the ﬁfth and last
in London (1985). A sixth, planned to take place in Bonn in 1986 on Andrei
Sakharov’s 65th birthday, never materialized.1 The organizers saw them as cru-
cial for the process initiated by the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975.
In 1984, Sakharov’s stepson-in-law, Efrem Yankelevich, deﬁned their role as
follows:

Many Soviet human rights advocates, including Dr. Andrei Sakharov, see the
pressure of the world public opinion, including governmental pressure, and pres-
sure coming from international organizations, as an extremely important factor
in the struggle to promote liberalizing tendencies in the Soviet society. Thus by
educating the public on the human rights situation in the USSR, the Sakharov
Hearings help to sustain and direct this pressure, and therefore to promote de-
mocratization of the Soviet society.2

The hearings typically had an organizing committee, an executive director, a
group of sponsors or advisers, a questioning panel (which would also func-
tion as a jury-like institution, issuing a statement at the closing of the hear-
ing), a more or less honoriﬁc chairmanship or presidency, witnesses (mostly

1. Efrem Yankelevich to Allan Wynn, 8 June 1985, in Edward Kline Papers, Andrei Sakharov Archives,
Harvard University (henceforth Kline Papers); Cornelia Gerstenmaier to Martin Dewhirst, 12 June
1985, in Kline Papers; Dewhirst to Michael Bourdeaux, 11 July 1985, in Kline Papers; Dewhirst to
Wynn, 19 September 1985, in Kline Papers; and Dewhirst to Lawrence Elliott, 30 September 1985,
in Kline Papers. Many of the Kline Papers used for this article were donated to Kline by Dewhirst.

2. Efrem Yankelevich, “The Fifth Sakharov Hearings in London, Proposal” (draft application sent to
the National Endowment for Democracy), 1984, in Kline Papers.

Journal of Cold War Studies
Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer 2021, pp. 81–137, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_01008
© 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology

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Boel

exiles freshly arrived from the Soviet Union who had not testiﬁed at a pre-
vious Sakharov Hearing), a message from Sakharov (until he was sent into
internal exile in Gorky in January 1980) and sometimes also from Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, a focus on the Soviet Union (though some hearings also allowed
discussion of East European issues), an evaluation of Moscow’s compliance
with the Helsinki Final Act’s human rights stipulations, a few recurrent par-
ticipants (e.g., the “founding father” Øjvind Feldsted Andresen, Mario Corti,
Lyudmilla Thorne, Martin Dewhirst, Kronid Lyubarsky, Simon Wiesenthal,
and Yankelevich), an invited audience (comprising activists, politicians, ex-
perts, intellectuals, prominent Soviet-bloc exiles), special guests (such as Car-
dinal Josyf Slipyj in 1977, Solidarno´s´c representatives in 1983, members of
Sakharov’s family), coverage by major news outlets, a concluding statement,
aspirations to have a political impact at the domestic level and on the Con-
ference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) process, allegedly
private but not always transparent funding, a prestigious setting in a Western
capital, a subsequent publication, occasionally an institutional aftermath, a
duration of two to four days, and a biannual rhythm.3

It all started with the “Moscow Appeal.” The publication of Solzhenitsyn’s
The Gulag Archipelago in Paris on 28 December 1973 put a dramatic spotlight
on human rights violations in the Soviet Union. Six weeks later, Solzhenitsyn
was arrested and deported to West Germany. On 13 February 1974, one day
after the arrest but just before the deportation, a group of Soviet dissidents
met in Sakharov’s apartment in Moscow and issued a statement, which be-
came known as the “Moscow Appeal.” It called for the release of Solzhenit-
syn, the publication of his work, and the establishment of an “international
public tribunal” to investigate human rights abuses in the Soviet Union.4 A
biography of Sakharov asserts, somewhat misleadingly, that the appeal was
not heard.5 The error is understandable, insofar as it reﬂects the fact that the

3. The organizational set-up and denominations (executive committee, organizing committee, panel,
executive director, chairman, president, honorary committee, advisory board, etc.) varied from one
hearing to another. In 1984 Yankelevich wrote: “Most, if not all, of the Soviet dissidents and for-
mer Soviet human rights activists now residing in the West have participated in the Hearings.” Efrem
Yankelevich, “The Fifth Sakharov Hearings in London, Proposal,” September 1984, in Box 49, Hu-
man Rights Watch Archives (HRWA), Columbia University.

4. Andrei Sakharov et al., “An Appeal from Moscow,” A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, No.
7 (January–February 1974), pp. 12–13; and Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1990), p. 406. The signatories of the appeal were Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner, Vladimir Maksimov,
Mikhail Agurskii, Boris Shragin, Pavel Litvinov, Yurii Orlov, Sergei Zheludkov, Anatolii Marchenko,
and Larisa Bogoraz.

5. Richard Lourie, Sakharov: A Biography (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2002), p. 260.
For a more positive assessment of the appeal’s resonance in the West, see Friederike Kind-Kovács,

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

Sakharov Hearings have been largely ignored in the scholarly literature. They
are mentioned in passing or in footnotes in various publications.6 But read-
ers are generally left to ponder what these hearings were actually about, who
instigated them, and what role they played. With one exception—devoted to
the sole Copenhagen hearing—no scholarly study has been published about
the individual Sakharov Hearings, let alone the whole process.7 The slightly
greater historical interest in the ﬁrst hearing reﬂects the intensity of Cold War
controversies in Denmark, where the Copenhagen hearing has been used in
heated ﬁnger-pointing debates about who were the “good guys” and the “bad
guys” during that period.8 Historians’ lack of interest can to some extent be
explained by the dearth of readily accessible sources. No “Sakharov Hearings
archives” exist. Much material may no longer be extant. This no doubt has
much to do with the short-lived nature of most of the organizing groups. The
one exception, the Danish group, would delight any conspiratorially minded
researcher. The organization itself allegedly did not keep its own archives,
and the relevant material of three key individuals—Feldsted Andresen, Ernö

Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Budapest: Central
European University Press, 2014), p. 74; and Sakharov, Memoirs, p. 407. On the domestic impact, see
Robert Horvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 23–24; and Marco
Clementi, Storia del dissenso sovietico (Rome: Odradek Edizioni, 2007), p. 194.

6. See for example: Valentine Lomellini, L’appuntamento mancato: La sinistra italiana e il dissenso nei
regimi communisti (1968–1989) (Milan: Mondadori, 2010), p. 153; Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights
Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 116, 162; Warren I. Cohen, Proﬁles in Humanity: The Battle
for Peace, Freedom, Equality, and Human Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 2009), pp. 191–
192; Richard D. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race
and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 226; Gene Sosin, Sparks of Liberty:
An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999),
p. 190; Jean Chiama and Jean-François Soulet, Histoire de la dissidence (Paris: Seuil, 1982), pp. 388–
389; Charles Rhéaume, “Science et droits de l’homme: Le soutien international à Sakharov, 1968–
1989,” Ph.D. Diss., McGill University, Montreal, 1999, pp. 145–146; Cécile Vaissié, “Le combat des
dissidents de Russie en Occident,” in Wojciech Fałkowski and Antoine Marès, eds., Intellectuels de l’Est
exilés en France (Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 2011), pp. 143–155, esp. 149–150; Clementi, Storia del
dissenso sovietico, pp. 241–242; Hans Olav Lahlum, Haakon Lie: Historien, mytene og mennesket (Oslo:
Cappelen Damm, 2009), pp. 551, 768; George Bailey, The Making of Andrei Sakharov (London: Allen
Lane, 1989), p. 339; and Tomas Venclova and Ellen Hinsey, Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas
Venclova (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2017), p. 341.

7. Bent Boel, “Menneskerettighedspolitik fra neden? Sakharovhøringen i København, oktober 1975,”
Fund og forskning, Vol. 50 (2011), pp. 549–588.

8. Bent Boel, “Go East! Danish Contacts with Soviet Bloc Dissidents during the Cold War,” in Ann-
Marie Ekengren, Rasmus Mariager, and Poul Villaume, eds., Northern Europe in the Cold War: East-
West Interactions of Security, Culture, and Technology (Turku: Aleksanteri Cold War Series, 2016), pp.
158–185. In Italy, the Sakharov hearings have belatedly found a posthumous political use. In 2014,
supporters of Silvio Berlusconi, under investigation for various criminal offenses, purported to have
set up a “Tribunale Dreyfus,” explicitly modeled on the “Tribunale Sacharov,” to investigate what they
claimed was the unjust persecution of “today’s Dreyfus.” See “Forza Italia contro la ‘malagiustizia’:
Nasce il Tribunale Dreyfus,” Il Mattinale, No. 13/05 (13 May 2014), p. 3.

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Boel

Eszterhás, and Erik Dissing—has vanished under more or less mysterious cir-
cumstances.9

For various reasons, the Sakharov Hearings deserve our interest. The
Copenhagen hearing was an innovation. Never before had such a major in-
ternational citizens’ tribunal been convened to review human rights violations
in the Soviet Union. The hearing increased international focus on Sakharov
and his human rights agenda, and it took place despite considerable Soviet
pressure on the Danish government and other institutions and despite waver-
ing in some political quarters. The ﬁve Sakharov Hearings taken as a whole
constitute a case of international citizens’ tribunals that were original because
of their organization, longevity, and political orientation.10 In four of the ﬁve
host countries (Italy being the exception), the tribunals resulted in the most
important hearings ever organized to examine human rights violations in the
Soviet Union. They also offer an interesting example of a sphere for transna-
tional political debate involving a large number of Western groups and in-
dividuals supportive of Soviet-bloc dissidents. Key twentieth-century human
rights ﬁgures such as Sakharov and Wiesenthal were involved in all ﬁve hear-
ings, and many prominent exiled Soviet dissidents, as well as some East Euro-
pean dissidents, played important roles.

Throughout the years, the Sakharov Hearings were mostly well covered
by the media. In 1984, the Soviet dissident and historian Lyudmilla Alekseeva
hailed the International Sakharov Hearings as “one of the most established
tools for informing the West” about the human rights situation in the USSR.11
In 1985, former U.S. CSCE Ambassador Max M. Kampelman paid tribute
to the “extraordinarily vital role that the Sakharov Hearings have played in
recent years.”12 Wiesenthal devoted part of his memoirs to his participation

9. Hans Kristian Neerskov, interview, Bagsværd, Denmark, 2 May 2007. Øjvind Feldsted Andresen’s
sister-in-law Mikki Andresen and Ernö Eszterhás’s son, Peter Eszterhás, respectively recall that Feldsted
Andresen’s and Eszterhás’s private archives were removed by a group of people whose identity they did
not know or no longer remember. Mikki Andresen, telephone interview, February 2007; and Peter
Eszterhás, interview, Copenhagen, 2 March 2007. Erik Dissing’s papers have vanished except for his
agendas for 1967–1973 and 1976. Agendas for the two years relevant to the Copenhagen hearing,
1974 and 1975, are missing.

10. On international citizens’ tribunals, see Arthur Jay Klinghoffer and Judith Apter Klinghoffer, Inter-
national Citizens’ Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance Human Rights (New York: Palgrave,
2002); and Arthur W. Blaser, “How to Advance Human Rights without Really Trying: An Analysis of
Nongovernmental Tribunals,” Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 14 (1992), p. 348.

11. Lyudmilla Alexeyeva, “On the Sakharov Hearings,” Russia, No. 9 (1984), p. 55.

12. Kampelman to Wynn, 14 January 1985, in Folder “International Sakharov Hearings (5th Ses-
sion, London), Correspondence,” Box 25, Human Rights Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard
University.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

in “the famous” Sakharov Hearings.13 The experienced Guardian journalist
Hella Pick later stated,

By keeping Sakharov’s plight in the forefront of international attention, the In-
ternational Sakharov Hearings certainly helped to convince Gorbachev, newly
installed as President, that his credibility in the West demanded freedom for
Sakharov as one of the early moves of his Presidency.14

All of this justiﬁes scrutiny of these hearings as a special and presumably sig-
niﬁcant case of transnational human rights activism.

The Copenhagen Hearing: Origins

The timing of the “Moscow Appeal” seemed auspicious. It ﬁt in neatly with
the growth of dissidence in the Soviet Union since the mid-1960s, the con-
comitant increased Western interest (at state and non-state levels) in dissi-
dents and refuseniks, the renewal of the tradition of “international citizens’
tribunals” begun by the Russell Tribunals in the 1960s, and the rise of hu-
man rights as an issue in international relations as demonstrated during the
negotiations leading to the Helsinki Final Act.15 What may seem more surpris-
ing is that the only country in which the “Moscow Appeal” was really heard
and acted upon was Denmark.16 The country lacked various factors that typ-
ically encouraged support for and interest in Soviet-bloc dissidents, such as
numerous politically active Soviet-bloc exiles, a strong Communist Party, and
signiﬁcant Trotskyist groups.17 Nevertheless, Denmark is where the story of
the Sakharov Hearings begins.

13. Simon Wiesenthal, Recht, nicht Rache: Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1988),
pp. 446–450.

14. Hella Pick, Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996),
p. 239.

15. Philipp Gassert, “Das Russell-Tribunal von 1966/67: ‘Blaming and Shaming’ und die Nürnberger
Prinzipien,” in Norbert Frei and Annette Weinke, eds., Toward a New Moral World Order? Men-
schenrechtspolitik und Völkerrecht seit 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013), pp. 149–163; and
Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Commu-
nism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 58–88.

16. The appeal did gain notice in other countries, and in West Germany the Internationale
Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte circulated a petition that gathered many signatures. But nowhere
else were attempts made to set up a tribunal as requested by the “Moscow Appeal.”

17. Boel, “Go East”; Bent Boel, “Western Trotskyists and Subversive Travelling in Soviet Bloc Coun-
tries, 1956–1989,” Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, Vol. 25, No. 2 (December
2017), pp. 237–254; and Bent Boel, “French Support for Eastern European Dissidence, 1968–1989:
Approaches and Controversies,” in Poul Villaume and Odd Arne Westad, eds., Perforating the Iron
Curtain. European Détente, Transatlantic Relations and the Cold War (Copenhagen: Museum Tuscu-
lanum Press, 2010), pp. 215–241.

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Boel

On 29 June 1974, the Common Committee of East Exiles in Denmark
wrote to the Praesidium of the Folketinget, the Danish parliament, referring
to the “Moscow Appeal,” and suggesting that a tribunal be set up in Chris-
tiansborg Palace, the parliament building, to discuss human rights violations
in the Soviet Union.18 After lengthy debates, the suggestion was accepted in
November 1974, when the country was still ruled by a center-right coalition
led by Venstre, the liberal party. Parliamentary leaders then reafﬁrmed the
go-ahead after the January 1975 elections, which handed power to a Social
Democratic minority government. The hearing ﬁnally took place in October
1975.19

Who Organized the Copenhagen Hearing?

The proposal emanated from the largely unknown Common Committee of
East Exiles, which had been created in 1969 by what its founder called a “mi-
croscopic group,” a handful of Danes involved in various anti-Communist
activities working together with another handful of Soviet-bloc exiles.20 The
driving force behind the initiative was Feldsted Andresen. But each member of
the committee had his (initially they were all men) own agenda, interests, and
trajectory, of which little is known. Among the myriad groups, networks, and
other entities frequented by these people were the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Na-
tions (ABN), the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), the World
Anti-Communist League (WACL), the European Freedom Council (EFC),
and an informal circle gathered around Ole Bjørn Kraft, a conservative leader
and minister of foreign affairs in the early 1950s who subsequently got in-
volved in groups such as ABN, EFC, WACL, ACEN, and Interdoc A/S.21
Feldsted Andresen, ofﬁcially second in command but de facto leader of the
group, had a past in the Danish resistance during World War II and later took

18. Feldsted Andresen to the Praesidium of the Folketing, 29 June 1974, in Folder “38.C.1, Fællesrådet
for Østeksiler i Danmark 1974–1975,” Folketingets Arkiv (Archives of the Danish Parliament, FA).
The “Copenhagen” section of my discussion here draws largely on Bent Boel, “Menneskerettighed-
spolitik fra neden? Sakharovhøringen i København, oktober 1975,” Fund og Forskning, Vol. 50 (2011),
pp. 549–588.

19. For a detailed account of these negotiations see Boel, “Menneskerettighedspolitik fra neden.”

20. Øjvind Feldsted Andresen, “Vejen til Glasnost,” Berlingske tidende (Copenhagen), 30 June 1989,
p. I:11. Initially, there were perhaps ten; by 1979 there were six.

21. For more on Interdoc, see Giles Scott-Smith, Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network:
Cold War Internationale (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The relationship between In-
terdoc and Interdoc A/S has not been elucidated.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

part in Danish anti-Communist networks.22 Erik Dissing was the youngest
and was farthest to the right—in the late 1960s and early 1970s he privately
professed Nazi sympathies. He supported all kinds of groups and activities,
including the South Vietnamese regime, the Greek military junta, and the
National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (Narodno-Trudovoi Soyuz; NTS).23
He had contacts with far-right elements around Europe and with the Danish
secret services. At the same time, he tried to pursue a career in more solidly es-
tablished political parties, starting in the Conservative Youth, moving to Ven-
stre, and then joining the right-wing populist Progress Party.24 Preben Kühl
was another far-right activist. By the mid-1970s he was a lieutenant colonel in
the Danish Defense Research Establishment. He had participated in activities
with the Danish far-right activist Hans Hertel, a link that allegedly prompted
him to begin a one-year self-exile in the United States around 1970 after an
action went wrong.25 Eszterhás and August Koern were active in Hungarian
and Estonian exile politics. The former almost became minister in a Hungar-
ian exile government after 1956, and the latter was minister of foreign affairs

22. Feldsted Andresen to Koern, 21 July 1968, in August Koern Papers, Baltiska Arkivet, Riksarkivet
(Swedish National Archives, SNA); Øjvind Feldsted Andresen, “Oversigt over modstandsaktiviteter
under besættelsen 1940–45,” in Erstatningsrådet, Rigsarkivet (Danish National Archives); and Poul
Dalgaard, “Sabotage der var nær ved at koste 300 livet,” Ekstra bladet (Copenhagen), 20 December
1963, p. 28. Feldsted Andresen had been close to the prominent Social Democrat Urban Hansen since
1949, the very year Hansen founded the social democratic Arbejdernes Informationscentral, an anti-
Communist propaganda and intelligence center. He also claimed to be close to Jens Lillelund (leader
of the World War II resistance group Holger Danske and allegedly involved in U.S.-ﬁnanced intelli-
gence activities after the end of the war). See Feldsted Andresen to MPs of the Social Democratic Party,
13 October 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA. Among Feldsted Andresen’s international contacts in the
1960s was the French former Socialist turned far-right anti-Communist activist Suzanne Labin, with
whom Feldsted Andresen worked closely. See Feldsted Andresen to Jay Lovestone, 19 April 1969, in
Box 350, Jay Lovestone Papers, Hoover Institution Archives (HIA). The nature of Feldsted Andresen’s
political activities prior to 1969 remains unclear. His profession (in the late 1960s/early 1970s) has var-
iously been described as machine manufacturer, lamp producer, and ophthalmologist. For the last, see
“Østﬂygtninge i Danmark ønsker Solsjenitsyn-høring,” Berlingske tidende, 3 September 1974, p. I:7.
Feldsted Andresen allegedly maintained a friendly relationship with the Chilean embassy after 1973.
Bernard Gilland, interview, Copenhagen, 6 August 2018.

23. The NTS was a rightwing, Soviet-exile organization with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main. See
Bernd Stöver, Die Befreiung vom Kommunismus: Amerikanische Liberation Policy im Kalten Krieg 1947–
1991 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), pp. 519–536; and Benjamin Tromly, “The Making of a Myth: The
National Labor Alliance, Russian Émigrés, and Cold War Intelligence Activities,” Journal of Cold War
Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter 2016), pp. 80-111.

24. Agenda and notes of Erik Dissing, 1967–1973, Erik Dissing Papers. Dissing was one of the Con-
servative Youth’s two full-time employees. He was excluded because he was deemed too extreme. Berit
Dissing, interview, Copenhagen, 24 November 2013; Tue Rohrsted, telephone interview, 17 February
2014; and Agenda, 1969, in Dissing Papers.

25. Preben Kühl,
interview, Hillerød, Denmark, 23 September 2011; and Osbrandt to Kühl
(Forsvarets Forskningstjeneste, Østerbrogades Kaserne, Copenhagen), 12 January 1976, in Preben
Kühl Papers.

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in the Estonian government-in-exile from 1964 to 1981 and was ACEN’s rep-
resentative in Denmark from 1954 to 1972.26 The exiles associated with the
Common Committee were generally elderly and had come to the West in the
1940s or 1950s. What they all had in common was a ﬁerce anti-Communism;
unbridled activism; membership in small, sometimes secretive and informal
groups and networks; and, to various degrees, international contacts. The fo-
cus of the Danish group members, however, was on domestic politics.27 From
the outset the committee stated that its key goal was to ﬁght domestic left-
wing propaganda.28 Dissing partook in these endeavors, which landed him in
the right-wing populist Progress Party, for which he stood as a candidate dur-
ing the parliamentary elections in 1973.29 Hardly anything was known about
the committee at the time of its creation, and perhaps even less was known
ﬁve years later because it did almost nothing to publicize itself. Journalists
were struck by the secretiveness of the group, which fed rumors and fueled
accusations of “crypto-Nazism.”30

By February 1974 this tiny, obscure group with a dubious reputation
seemed destined for oblivion. Its members were isolated anti-Communists in
search of a mission. Then came the “Moscow Appeal.” Feldsted Andresen
was apparently the one who got the idea of holding a hearing in Christians-
borg Palace. He was probably inspired by the Frankfurt am Main-based In-
ternationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte (IGfM), which had circulated a

26. Peter Kyhn, “Danmark og det baltiske spørgsmål 1940–1991,” M.A. Thesis, University of Copen-
hagen, Copenhagen, 2000, pp. 51–52; Pauli Heikkilä, “Cold War in Margin in Denmark: August
Koern as the Representative of Assembly of Captive European Nations in Copenhagen” (paper pre-
sented at the 29th Congress of Nordic Historians, Aalborg, 15–18 August 2017); Eszterhás, interview;
and Lars Fredrik Stöcker, Bridging the Baltic Sea: Networks of Resistance and Opposition during the Cold
War Era (New York: Lexington Books, 2018), pp. 147–148.

27. The key individuals in the Common Committee of East Exiles (in 1975 renamed “The Organiz-
ing Committee for the Sakharov Hearing”) were Eszterhás (the nominal chairman, in line with the
view that the chairman ought to be a Soviet-bloc exile), Feldsted Andresen (ofﬁcially second in com-
mand but the de facto leader), Dissing (secretary general of the committee and in charge of ﬁnancial
issues), Bernard Karawatski (whose linguistic skills occasionally gave him an important role as a trans-
lator/interpreter), and Kühl. Among those who joined during the preparatory phase were Osbrandt,
Neerskov, and Bernard Gilland.

28. Bent Nørgaard, “Propaganda skal bekæmpes med fakta,” Berlingske tidende, 23 November 1969,
p. 3.

29. Election ad for Erik Dissing, n.d., in Folder “Fællesrådet for Øst-Eksiler i Danmark,” Koern Pa-
pers, SNA.

30. Frank Osvald, “Eksilpolitisk kold krig i Danmark,” Information (Copenhagen), 10 December
1969, p. 4; August Koern, “Fællesrådet for Østeksil,” Information, 20–21 December 1969, p. 9; Mads
Nissen Styrk, “Erhard i tvivlsomt selskab,” Ekstra bladet, 13 September 1974, p. 14; Feldsted Andresen
to MPs of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), 13 October 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; Feldsted An-
dresen to Helge Hjortdal, 3 November 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; and Feldsted Andresen to Kühl,
27 April 1975, in Kühl Papers.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

petition to support the appeal.31 The Danes, however, decided to give the
idea a twist. The signatories of the Moscow Appeal wanted to “investigate
the crimes described in The Gulag Archipelago,” but Feldsted Andresen
and his friends swapped the somewhat distant past for a decidedly more
contemporary—and politically more controversial—focus on the post-1965
period.32 Once the committee had decided to organize a hearing, its activity
increased considerably, and it undertook to expand its international network.
Having earlier deﬁned itself as an anti-Communist group, it now switched
to a language of human rights.33 Despite remaining tiny and secretive and
still lacking proper contemporary contacts in the Soviet bloc, a few new in-
dividuals joined it, including two young exiled Poles; the leader of the Bible-
smuggling group Danish Europe Mission (DEM), Hans Kristian Neerskov;
and a Dane of Russian descent, Lyudmilla Osbrandt.34 Neerskov’s network
facilitated the subsequent funding of the hearing by various Scandinavian
Bible-smuggling groups. Osbrandt soon became the secretary and the “soul
of the Copenhagen group.”35 In July 1975, after more than a year’s plan-
ning, and less than three months before the hearing was supposed to take
place, Eszterhás worried that everything might have to be canceled because
of lack of funding.36 A month later the designated chair, Ib Thyregod, ex-
pressed similar concerns. In September, however, the ﬁnancial problem was
solved, and the hearing was again on track to take place as planned in October.

31. Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte e.V., “Moskauer Appell,” February 1974, in Folder “Sakharov
høringen København 1975,” Koern Papers, SNA; Feldsted Andresen to Kühl, 13 March 1979, in
Kühl Papers; Kühl to Feldsted Andresen, 16 March 1979, in Kühl Papers; Leonid Leszcynski and
Herbert Binsky, “International henvendelse,” Berlingske tidende, 17 June 1974, p. II:7; and Preben
Kühl, “Moskva-appel,” Berlingske tidende, 30 January 2001, p. I:17.

32. Sakharov, Memoirs, p. 406; Feldsted Andresen to Praesidium of the Folketing, 29 June 1974, in
Folder “38.C.1,” FA; and Arrangørkomiteen for Den Internationale Sakharov-Høring, ed., Sakharov-
Høringen: Dokumenter om menneskerettighederne i Sovjet 1965–75 (n.p.: n. pub., 1975), n.p.

33. Morten Sørensen, “Forsøget på objektivitet førte til udvisning af medlem af spørgepanelet,” Infor-
mation, 18–19 October 1975, p. 2; and Arrangørkomiteen, Sakharov-Høringen, p. 10.

34. Bent Boel, “Denmark: International Solidarity and Trade Union Multilateralism,” in Idesbald
Goddeeris, ed., Solidarity with Solidarity: Western European Trade Unions and the Polish Crisis, 1980–
1982 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 2010), pp. 219–242, esp. 222. On DEM, see Bent
Boel, “Bible Smuggling and Human Rights in the Cold War,” in Luc van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin,
and Giles Scott-Smith, eds., Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and
Networks (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 263–272; and Hans Kristian Neerskov,
Sejrende martyrer (Copenhagen: Doxa Forlaget, 2004), p. 116.

35. Rainer Hildebrandt to Corti, 28 April 1978, in Mario Corti Papers.

36. “Referat af møde angående Sakharov-høringen hos Høeg Hagen den 21. juli 1975,” in Viggo
Fischer Papers. By 1 July 1975 the organizers claimed to have gathered 22,680 Danish kroner (DKK)
(the budgeted expenses amounted to 200,000 DKK). See Feldsted Andresen, Circular letter No. 5,
July 1975, in Folder “1.1.2. Korrespondenz zum Hearing,” Box 1, “Sakharov Hearing 1975,” Simon
Wiesenthal Archives (SWA).

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A 40,000-Deutschmark donation from an unidentiﬁed West German source
no doubt helped, and some of the Scandinavian Bible-smuggling groups may
also have contributed funding. Finally, some reports indicate that the group
received funding from the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen, from the American
Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and
possibly from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Allegedly, Feldsted
Andresen regularly went to the U.S. embassy and also met with AFL-CIO
leader Irving Brown.37 Although the full story of the funding remains to be
elucidated, it is clear that the Copenhagen hearing beneﬁted from a substan-
tial amount of non-Danish funding.38

The Copenhagen Hearing: The Domestic
Political Battle

Of the ﬁve Sakharov Hearings the ﬁrst caused the most prolonged domestic
political debate, both contemporarily and subsequently. Originally proposed
in June 1974, the hearing did not take place until sixteen months later. Why
was there such a long delay? The Danish Social Democrats are often assumed
to have been the main culprits, but the reality is rather different.39

What made the Copenhagen hearing so controversial was the organizers’
desire that it take place in the parliament building, Christiansborg Palace. For
this to happen, the Praesidium of the Folketing had to give its go-ahead. It had
done so twice in the recent past: once for a hearing devoted to the Vietnam
War (an opening session of a Russell Tribunal in October 1972) and another
for a meeting devoted to Chile after the military coup that had removed the

37. On AFL-CIO funding, see Neerskov, interview; and Brown to Bonner, 10 January 1979 (misdated
1978), in Box 14, Houghton Library. On regular visits to and funding by the U.S. embassy, see Kühl,
interview. On CIA funding, see Gilland, interview. Brown was a key ﬁgure in the AFL-CIO’s anti-
Communist activities in Europe during the Cold War, and he was closely associated with the CIA.
See Frances Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New
York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 74–75; and Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret
History of America’s War on Drugs (London: Verso, 2006), p. 270.

38. “Rapport af møde den 28.5.1976,” in Kühl Papers; “Rapport af møde den 24.10.1975,” in Kühl
Papers; and “Referat af møde i planlægningsudvalget den 25.8.1975,” in Kühl Papers. Neerskov claims
to have been regularly in contact with the CIA whenever he went to the United States, which he started
doing in the early 1970s. His trips there increased from 1975, when he established a U.S. outpost—
Mission Possible—of his Bible-smuggling group (Danish Europe Mission). Neerskov, interview.

39. The Social Democrats are singled out in Feldsted Andresen, “Flygtningenes tribunal,” Berlingske
tidende, 11 September 1974, p. II:5; and Neerskov, interview. See also Bent Jensen’s comments in Bent
Blüdnikow and Mikael Jalving, “Den uartige systemkritiker,” Berlingske tidende, 3 February 2007,
pp. II:18–19; and Bent Jensen, Ulve, får og vogtere: Den kolde krig i Danmark 1945–1991, Vol. 1
(Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2014), p. 552.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

democratically elected Salvador Allende (the so-called Chile tribunal in June
1974).40 The Common Committee argued that the two hearings had resulted
in a political imbalance that should be corrected. That is, after two hearings
devoted to “Western” crimes it was only fair that a hearing should be devoted
to “Eastern” crimes. The parallel the committee sought to draw was not per-
fect, however. Only the opening session of the Vietnam hearing was held in
Christiansborg, with the remainder taking place in Roskilde. Moreover, both
hearings were sponsored by the biggest party in parliament, the Social Demo-
cratic Party. The Bureau of the Folketing, which initially refused to host the
Sakharov Hearing, emphasized that it had been very reluctant to accept the
earlier hearings because “Christiansborg by lending out rooms for such pur-
poses gave the hearings an ‘ofﬁcial Danish stamp of approval.’”41 That, of
course, was exactly what the Common Committee of East Exiles was seeking.
Two other arguments spurred opposition to holding the hearing in Chris-
tiansborg Palace. First, left-wing politicians and activists, concerned about the
allegedly dubious nature of the Common Committee, were skeptical.42 Simi-
lar misgivings were also found in more mainstream circles, voiced for instance
by the Chief Rabbi Bent Melchior and the former World War II resistance
leader Jens Lillelund.43 Second, fear of antagonizing the Soviet Union induced
the Danish Foreign Ministry to advise the Bureau of the Folketing against
holding the hearing in Christiansborg.44 Such worries were paramount for the
center-right Venstre, the mainstream party that most adamantly opposed the
Sakharov Hearing. The U.S. embassy in Copenhagen cabled the State De-
partment that Venstre was “strongly opposed being sensitive presumably to
the Government’s relations with the Soviet Union.”45 Conversely, the Social

40. The opening session of the Vietnam Tribunal was introduced by a speech by Danish Prime Min-
ister Anker Jørgensen, and this prominent sponsorship further exacerbated the already tense relation-
ship between Denmark and the United Sates in 1972–1973. See Dansk Institut for Internationale
Studier (DIIS), Danmark under den kolde krig, Vol. 2 (Copenhagen: DIIS, 2005), pp. 700, 733;
and Thorsten Borring Olesen and Poul Villaume, I blokopdelingens tegn 1945–1972 (Copenhagen:
Gyldendal, 2005), pp. 685, 693.

41. Christian People’s Party, Press release, 2 October 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA. For details, see
Boel, “Menneskerettighedspolitik fra neden.”

42. “Sakharov-høring med huller i spørgepanelet,” Jyllands posten, 30 September 1975, p. 4.

43. Bent Melchior, interview, Copenhagen, 10 March 2014; and Bent Melchior, email to author,
2 June 2014. The organizers wanted Melchior as a sponsor, but he declined. See “The Honorary
Committee of Protectors of Andrei Sakharov,” n.d., in Kühl Papers.

44. Jespersen to Karl Skytte, Note, 9 August 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; and Koesgaard-Pedersen,
Note, 19 August 1974, in Box 124, UM.5.D.30.A, Udenrigsministeriets Arkiv (UMA, Danish Foreign
Ministry Archives).

45. Telegram (Tel.) No. 3317, American Embassy (AmEmb) (Crowe) to Secretary of State (Sec-
State), 25 November 1974, in National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Citations from

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Democratic Party was ﬁrst among the major parties to give the hearing a green
light.46 Despite this, some have pointed to the Sakharov Hearing in Copen-
hagen as evidence that the Danish Social Democrats were “soft” on Commu-
nism or at least “soft” when it came to criticizing the Soviet Union. In this
particular case, however, the main “softies” among the mainstream parties in
Denmark were members of the Liberal Party.

Soviet Pressure

Previous Danish criticism of Soviet human rights violations had triggered
ﬁerce Soviet rebuttals, and the Danish Foreign Ministry worried about possi-
ble negative repercussions for bilateral relations if the Sakharov Hearing went
ahead. Such concern was understandable. The Soviet State Security Commit-
tee (KGB) took credit for several actions against the planned event.47 The
organizers of the hearing later asserted that they were subjected to threats,
sabotage, phone tapping, misinformation, and attempted inﬁltration.48

Moreover, Moscow exerted constant pressure on various Danish authori-
ties, asking them, sometimes quite rudely, to prevent the hearing from taking
place.49 The Soviet ambassador even took up the issue twice with the prime
minister. The second time, on 16 September 1975, the ambassador reiterated
the view that the hearing amounted to “crude interference in Soviet domes-
tic affairs” and violated the Helsinki Final Act. Danish Prime Minister Anker
Jørgensen pondered the issue and declared:

NARA here and in subsequent footnotes are available online at https://aad.archives.gov/aad/index.jsp.
See also Nathalie Lind to Knud Enggaard, 3 October 1975, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; Minutes, Meeting
of Praesidium, 21 November 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; and Minutes, Meeting of Praesidium, 6
October 1975, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA.

46. Minutes, Meeting of Praesidium, 23 October 1975, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA.

47. Morten Heiberg, KGBs kontakt- og agentnet i Danmark: PET-Kommissionens beretning, Vol. 13
(Copenhagen: Ministry of Justice, 2009), pp. 54–55; Regin Schmidt, PET’s overvågning af politiske
partier 1945–1989, PET-Kommissionens beretning, Vol. 7 (Copenhagen: Ministry of Justice, 2009),
pp. 242–244; DIIS, Danmark under den kolde krig, Vol. 2, p. 325; and Joshua Rubenstein and Alexan-
der Gribanov, eds., The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005),
pp. 21–24.

48. Jens Thomsen, “Sakharov-høringen udsat for trusler og sabotage,” Berlingske tidende, 14 July 1975,
p. I:5; and Jens Thomsen, “Sakharov-vidner skræmmes med overfald og trusler,” Berlingske tidende,
12 October 1975, p. I:1.

49. Friis-Møller to Hjortdal, 3 January 1975, in Box 125, UM.5.D.30.A, UMA; Prime Minis-
ter’s Ofﬁce (Gersing) to Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (UM), 18 August 1975, in Box 125,
UM.5.D.30.A, UMA; Despatch No. 508, Danish Embassy in Moscow to UM, 10 October 1975, in
Folder “38.C.1,” FA; Tel. No. 393, Danish Embassy to UM, 12 November 1975, in Folder “38.C.1,”
FA; and Nils Morten Udgaard, “Tass er vred over tribunal i Folketinget om Sovjet,” Politiken (Copen-
hagen), 24 December 1974.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

In principle it was right, that there should be no interference in the domestic
affairs of other states, but sometimes it was reasonable that countries did voice
themselves about the state of affairs in other countries when human rights were
violated. The Prime Minister could, for instance, inform the Ambassador that
the Danish government today has issued a statement concerning the capital pun-
ishments meted out in Spain.50

Jørgensen’s ﬁnal remark put the debate about interference to rest, as the Soviet
ambassador conceded that Moscow, too, intended to condemn the executions
ordered by Francisco Franco’s regime.51 Contrary to what has been asserted,
implied, or taken for granted by some, there is so far no convincing evidence
that Soviet pressure had any signiﬁcant impact on the attitude of Danish po-
litical parties, decision-makers, or media outlets toward the Sakharov Hearing
in Copenhagen.52 The one important exception was the Liberal Party’s nega-
tive stance toward the hearing, a position motivated by fear of how the Soviet
Union might react.

The Bumble Bee That Flew

The International Sakharov Hearing in Copenhagen was apparently an amaz-
ing and unlikely success story: a tiny, obscure, allegedly dubious group, whose
members were unknown but generally well to the right of the Danish political
mainstream and who initially lacked parliamentary support, had managed to
gain signiﬁcant establishment support and win the rare privilege of holding a
hearing in the parliament building on a theme likely to strain the country’s re-
lationship with the Soviet Union. It took a combination of audacity, cunning,
deceitfulness, bullying, luck, and a few useful contacts to make this happen.

The organizers shrewdly identiﬁed Christiansborg Palace as the key to
success. They had a friendly contact—increasingly a partner—in Jens Thom-
sen, a journalist for the conservative newspaper Berlingske tidende.53 He suc-
cessfully conveyed the impression to his readers that a tiny group constituted a

50. Prime Minister’s Ofﬁce (Gersing) to UM, 16 September 1975, in Box 125, UM.5.D.30.A, UMA.
Unless indicated otherwise, all non-English quotations have been translated by me.

51. Ibid.

52. Heiberg, KGBs kontakt- og agentnet i Danmark, pp. 54–55; Schmidt, PET’s overvågning af politiske
partier, pp. 242–244; and Jensen, Ulve, får og vogtere, pp. 557–562.

53. Feldsted Andresen, “Forslag fra Jens Thomsen til Sakharov Komiteen,” 31 June 1979, in Kühl
Papers; “Møde den 21.8. 1980,” in Kühl Papers; and Jens Thomsen, “Dansk hyldest til de forfulgtes
talsmand,” Berlingske tidende, 27 September 1979, p. I:5.

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large organization representing 6,000 Soviet-bloc exiles in Denmark. He also
vividly described the righteous outrage and shock allegedly felt in the exile
community after the Folketing’s initial refusal to host a hearing that almost
no one had heard about, thus triggering a wider media debate.54 Thanks to
this decisive assistance from a newspaper that had helped launch the Com-
mon Committee of Exiles by hosting its press conference in 1969, the or-
ganizers managed to mobilize support from two small centrist parties, the
Center Democrats and the Christian People’s Party.55 The members of these
parties turned out to be effective lobbyists. They organized a petition in sup-
port of the hearing and collected signatures among their fellow members of
parliament (MPs), thus putting pressure on the Bureau of the Folketing. The
organizers deftly used the argument of political balance and fairness. They
misleadingly created the impression that they had the support of organizations
that were blissfully unaware of the project (such as Amnesty International and
the International Confederation of Trade Unions).56 They sold the planned
event as something it was not; namely, a literary hearing in which the witnesses
would primarily be exiled Soviet writers, such as Andrei Sinyavsky, Pavel Litvi-
nov, Valery Chalidze, Vladimir Maksimov, Anatolii Radygin, Joseph Brod-
sky, Zhores Medvedev, Viktor Nekrasov, and Solzhenitsyn—none of whom
showed up at the hearing. They threatened to launch a campaign if the
Folketing did not budge.57 Once permission to hold the hearing at Chris-
tiansborg was granted, they managed to obtain broader support by sending
out letters again making it appear to be something it was not—an ofﬁcial
Danish parliamentary hearing—thereby convincing several well-known and
respected Danish and non-Danish personalities to join “The honorary com-
mittee of protectors of Andrei Sakharov” (although some of these celebrities
may have been unaware of the group’s existence).58 The organizers secured the

54. “Østﬂygtninge i Danmark ønsker Solsjenitsyn-høring,” p. I:7. See also Jens Thomsen, “Sakharov
til de danske MFere: Hjælp Sovjets mange forfulgte,” Berlingske tidende, 22 November 1974, p. I:1.

55. Nørgaard, “Propaganda skal bekæmpes med fakta.” Berlingske Tidende also hosted the Copenhagen
group’s phone conversation with Sakharov on 22 November 1974.

56. “Proposal list for a preparing-meeting [sic] in Copenhagen for a public international tribunal in
defence of human rights in the USSR,” n.d., in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; Minutes of Meeting of Prae-
sidium, 16 October 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; and Jespersen to Hjortdal, 15 October 1975, in
Folder “38.C.1,” FA.

57. Note (concerning letter from Common Committee of East Exiles), November 1974, in Folder
“38.C.1,” FA; and Feldsted Andresen to Hjortdal, 3 November 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA.

58. In 1979, Arthur Koestler wrote, “I cannot remember having joined any Danish Committee.”
Koestler to Thorne, 12 June 1979, in Box 14, Houghton Library. See also Feldsted Andresen to Jens
Otto Krag, March 1975, in Jens Otto Krag Papers, Box 2 (“Sakharov høringen”), Arbejderbevægelsens
Bibliotek og Arkiv (Danish Labor Movement’s Library and Archive), Copenhagen.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

acceptance of Thyregod, a Supreme Court barrister and former MP for Ven-
stre, to chair the hearing.59 Although the organizers initially planned to call
the event a “tribunal,” they switched to the more neutral “hearing,” and after
initially contemplating naming the event after Solzhenitsyn, they ﬁnally opted
for Sakharov.60 Taking ownership of the name of the Soviet regime’s “public
enemy number one” was no doubt decisive for the success of the subsequent
endeavors.61 More than any other Soviet dissident, Sakharov had the potential
to become a ﬁgure around whom human rights activists in the West could
rally.62 Once the parliamentary leadership had given its go-ahead to the hear-
ing, Sakharov voiced his support during a phone conversation with Feldsted
Andresen, afﬁrming that the hearing was “extremely important” and giving
permission for it to bear his name.63 Subsequently, Sakharov allowed his wife,
Elena Bonner, to get involved in the preparatory discussions. (She met with
the Copenhagen group in September 1975 in Florence.) Other international
contacts were established when Niels Schoubye went to London to meet Pe-
ter Reddaway and brought back material from Amnesty International to be
exhibited during the hearing.64 Suspicions of “crypto-Nazism” were success-
fully dismissed as fruits of KGB propaganda and manipulation.65 To help de-
ﬂect suspicions and increase the hearing’s legitimacy, the organizers sought to
win over prominent Social Democrats, explicitly emulating what they saw as
earlier Communist endeavors to manipulate leaders from that same political
tradition.66 Social Democratic sponsors (such as former prime minister Jens
Otto Krag and the chairman of the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions,

59. Feldsted Andresen to Bureau of the Folketing, 17 February 1975, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA.

60. Minutes of the Meeting of the Praesidium, 21 November 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; Chris-
tian People’s Party, press release, 16 October 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; Christian People’s Party,
press release, 23 October 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; Ib Larsen to Praesidium of the Folketing, 8
September 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; Feldsted Andresen to Skytte, 14 November 1974, in Folder
“38.C.1,” FA; Feldsted Andresen, “Flygtningenes tribunal”; and “Østﬂygtninge i Danmark ønsker
Solsjenitsyn-høring,” p. I:7.

61. Rubenstein and Gribanov, The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, pp. 21–24.

62. On the international campaign to support Sakharov, see Charles Rhéaume, Sakharov: Science,
morale et politique (Laval: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2004), pp. 33–39. On the differences between
Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, see Andrei Sakharov, “In Answer to Solzhenitsyn,” The New York Review
of Books, 13 June 1974, pp. 3-5. For a semi-ﬁctional account of the differences between the two men,
see Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden (New York: New Directions, 2001), pp. 54–57.

63. Thomsen, “Sakharov til de danske MFere.” See also Minutes of the Meeting of the Praesidium, 21
November 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA.

64. Niels Schoubye, interview, Vanløse, Denmark, 14 March 2014.

65. Feldsted Andresen to MPs of the Social Democratic Party, 13 October 1974, in Folder “38.C.1,”
FA.

66. Feldsted Andresen to Kühl, 27 April 1975.

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Boel

Thomas Nielsen) were successfully courted. The committee also distanced it-
self from its more sulfurous friends, such as Hans Hetler, editor of Minut, a
Danish weekly named after the French far-right weekly Minute.67 Finally, they
switched from a confrontational, Cold-Warrior, anti-Communist rhetoric to
the language of human rights. All of this helped them recruit witnesses and
members for the hearing’s questioning panel.68

The Copenhagen Hearing: Chronicle
of a Fiasco Foretold?

Solzhenitsyn seems to have been skeptical early on, as were other exiled So-
viet writers, who all stayed away.69 Bonner was allowed to go to the West for
an eye operation in Italy in 1975, and in early September she met Feldsted
Andresen in Florence, together with Cornelia Gerstenmaier, Maksimov, Zi-
naida Shakhovskaya, and Victor Sparre. When Bonner saw the draft program,
she was horriﬁed and requested the removal of several witnesses whom she
considered unﬁt because of their extremist views, unethical stands, or general
untrustworthiness. Her advice was politely listened to and then ignored. This,
allegedly, induced Maksimov and other Soviet émigrés to stay away. Likewise,
when Wiesenthal heard that former Nazi collaborators had been invited, he
threatened to boycott the hearing. However, in the end he did participate.70

67. Feldsted Andresen asked Kühl to be cautious in his dealings with the far-right activist Hetler:
“I have absolutely nothing against this newspaper or its editor, but when we have gotten the Social
Democrats as sponsors and Minut is involved in a court case against [the Social Democratic Prime
Minister] Anker Jørgensen,” any publicized cooperation between Kühl and Hetler or Minut in such
a delicate moment could seriously compromise the cause of the Sakharov hearing. Feldsted Andresen
to Kühl, 27 April 1975; and Hetler to Neerskov, 11 January 1976, in Kühl Papers; and Neerskov to
Hetler, 8 January 1976, in Kühl Papers. Dissing remained a key ﬁgure until late 1975. “Opstilling over
Sakharov Høringen per 1.12. 1975”; “Rapport af møde den 31.10. 1975”; and “Rapport af møde den
24.10. 1975,” all in Kühl Papers.

68. Arrangørkomiteen, Sakharov-Høringen; and Nørgaard, “Propaganda skal bekæmpes med fakta.”
Within the group, the tone remained strongly anti-Communist. In 1979, Kühl denounced the “Holo-
caust happening right now . . . in the Eastern European communist dictatorships.” Kühl to Feldsted
Andresen, 16 March 1979.

69. Tel. No. 788, AmEmb to SecState, 18 March 1975, in NARA, available online at https://aad.
archives.gov/aad/createpdf?rid=207864&dt=2476&dl=1345.

70. Corti, Note, n.d., in Corti Papers; Osbrandt, “Rapport af ferieophold i Paris fra den 8.4. 1979,”
in Kühl Papers; Shakhovskaya, “I kongeriget Danmark,” n.d. (most probably a translation of an ar-
ticle published in Novoje Russkoje Slovo, 1 January 1976), in Kühl Papers; and Victor Sparre, Lågan
i mörkret: Kampen för de mänskliga rättigheterna i Sovjetunionen—Som jag har sett den (Uppsala: Pro
Veritate, 1983), p. 100. Maksimov’s application for a visa was rejected by the Danish authorities be-
cause it was handed in too late. Maksimov complained to the press that this decision was politically
motivated. However, the Danish organizers of the hearing accepted that the visa denial was justiﬁed.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

The hearing took place on 17–19 October 1975. It seemed to start under
a lucky star. Through what may or may not have been a coincidence, Sakharov
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just a week before the hearing.71 From
the outset, though, it was beset by “grotesque” scenes and bitter conﬂicts,
including “scenes of hysteria and fainting” and accusations that various par-
ticipants were “KGB agents.”72 On the ﬁrst day of the hearing, two members
of the questioning panel, Michael Bourdeaux and Shakhovskaya, who carried
Sakharov’s message to the hearing, threatened to leave unless a third mem-
ber of the panel, Michael Wurmbrand, was removed.73 Wurmbrand was the
son of the Romanian Christian minister Richard Wurmbrand and represented
the staunchly anti-Communist organization Jesus Christ to the Communist
World Inc.74 After “an apparent rampling [sic] and highly-strung statement
lasting one and a half hours,” Wurmbrand was escorted out of the conference
room by security guards.75 Feldsted Andresen subsequently stated that, with-
out this forced removal, “the hearing would have collapsed.”76 The next day
the French-Romanian writer Eugène Ionesco left the hearing in protest after
one of the witnesses stated that he did not care about the Communist regime’s
treatment of homosexuals, who he said were criminals. Ionesco stated, “this
whole circus is pointless if there are such people among the witnesses. Be-
cause they are no better than those they accuse.”77 Five of the most prominent

See Jan Michaelsen, “Sakharov-vidne får ikke lov til at rejse ind i Danmark,” Aktuelt, 17 October
1975, p. 10; and Jan Michaelsen, “Panel-medlem smidt ud under Sakharov-høringen,” Aktuelt, 18
October 1975, p. 10. It is unclear why the application was handed in too late. According to Corti,
Maksimov’s absence from the Copenhagen hearing had little to do with the visa issue and a lot to do
with his disapproval of the turn the hearing was taking. Corti, Note, n.d.

71. “Sakharov ﬁk Nobels fredspris,” Berlingske tidende, 10 October 1974, p. II:1. The chair of the
Nobel Committee was Aase Lionæs, a close friend of Haakon Lie (who participated in the Copenhagen
hearing) and later herself a participant in the Sakharov hearings.

72. Corti, Note, n.d.

73. Bourdeaux was the founder and head of Keston College and editor of Religion in Communist Lands.
Shakhovskaya was the editor of the Paris based La Pensée russe.

74. Jens Thomsen, “Appel fra Sakharov: Vesten må redde de politiske fanger,” Berlingske tidende, 18
October 1975, p. I:5; and “Spørger bortvist fra Sakharov-høringen,” Kristeligt dagblad (Copenhagen),
18–19 October 1975, p. 1. Wurmbrand’s entry ticket to the panel was a $10,000 donation to the hearing. See Shakhovskaya, “I kongeriget Danmark.” 75. Tel. No. 3099, AmEmb (Lukens) to SecState, 21 October 1975, in NARA, https://aad.archives. gov/aad/createpdf?rid=292392&dt=2476&dl=1345; and Michaelsen, “Panel-medlem smidt ud under Sakharov-høringen.” 76. Britta Nielsen, “Sakharov-høringen sluttede i splid,” Jyllands posten, 20 October 1975, pp. 1–2. For a similar assessment, see C. G., “Sacharow fordert Amnestie für politische Häftlinge—Spannungen zwischen den Gruppen der Emigranten bei der Anhörung in Kopenhagen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 October 1975, p. 3. 77. “Dramatisk slutning på Sakharov-høringen,” Kristeligt dagblad, 20 October 1975, newspaper clip- ping, in UMA. 97 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Boel dissident participants, who happened also to be among those closest to Sakharov, then issued a vehement protest on the last day of the conference: We feel compelled to declare that the elements of intolerance, prejudices, and lack of objectivity and the propagandistic tone in many of the testimonies we have heard, are incompatible with the principles which are the reason why we are present at this hearing in Copenhagen.78 Eszterhás had to abbreviate the closing press conference because it broke down in heated verbal inﬁghting.79 At stake were sensationalist claims made by some witnesses concerning chemical experiments allegedly performed by the Soviet regime on political prisoners and the current number of such prisoners (20 million or at most 10,000?).80 The hearing was plagued by conﬂicts between those who advocated a moderate tone and insisted on the need for objec- tivity in the examination of Soviet human rights violations, and those with a more explicit political agenda who saw the hearing as an anti-Communist operation.81 Michael Wurmbrand was among the latter: he had made his par- ticipation and ﬁnancial support conditional on there being no criticism of the United States during the conference, and he insisted that neither Vietnam nor Chile be mentioned. The organizers accepted his conditions.82 The organizers later expressed their satisfaction, and the event was covered by all signiﬁcant Danish newspapers as well as by some international media, but the disorder and even chaos that characterized the proceedings was ob- vious in many press reports.83 With one notable exception—the Berlingske tidende’s Thomsen, who dismissed the clashes as “minor episodes”—most 78. A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, Nos. 17–18 (October–December 1975), pp. 23–24. The protest was signed by Andrei Grigorenko, Viktor Balashov, Lev Kvatsjevskij, Viktor Fainberg, and Boris Shragin—the latter had also signed the “Moscow Appeal.” 79. Jan Michaelsen, “Sakharovhøringen endte i kaos: Vidner kom op at skændes,” Aktuelt, 20 October 1975, p. 5; and Morten Sørensen, “Sakharov-høringen i København: Panelet tilslutter sig kravet om generel amnesti for politiske fanger,” Information, 20 October 1975, p. 2. 80. Bent Falbert, “Sakharov-høringen druknede i kaos,” Ekstra bladet, 20 October 1975, newspaper clipping, in UMA. 81. “Sakharov-høring med huller i spørgepanelet,” Jyllands posten, 30 September 1975, p. 4. The U.S. embassy considered the event “an anti-Communist hearing.” See Tel. No. 3317, AmEmb (Crowe) to SecState, 25 November 1974, in NARA, https://aad.archives.gov/aad/index.jsp. 82. Shakhovskaya, “I kongeriget Danmark”; Jesus to the Communist World Inc., Press release, 24 October 1975, in Folder “38.C.1,” FA; and Alexander Vardy to Editorial Board (probably of Novoje Russkoje Slovo), March 1976, in Kühl Papers. Wurmbrand alleged that his removal from the hearing was orchestrated by Soviet “agents inﬁltrated in the committee.” 83. See, for example, Bjarne Nederby Jessen, “Menneskerettighedserklæringen må efterleves i Sovjet,” Frederiksborg amts avis, 22 October 1975, p. 13. 98 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism observers found that the hearing was marred by serious weaknesses.84 Sev- eral media organizations declared that it was “amateurishly organized and led” and that it “drowned in chaos.”85 The weaknesses were mentioned in both Danish and non-Danish press reports and can hardly be dismissed as the re- sult of KGB manipulation or the media’s ostensible left-wing political bias.86 Former Prime Minister Poul Hartling (Venstre) stated that the contribution of the Sakharov Hearing to the cause of the West had been a “bare plus.” The prominent and broadly respected political scientist Erling Bjøl called it “scandalous,” “amateurish,” “badly organized,” and a “failure.”87 Key dissi- dent exile circles and some of their supporters likewise considered it a fail- ure. Shakhovskaya was extremely critical.88 Solzhenitsyn called it “tomfool- ery” and wanted nothing to do with it.89 Reddaway found that, as a result of the Copenhagen hearing, “harm was done to Sakharov’s cause and im- age.”90 Based on discussions with Soviet exiles who had been involved in the hearing, Corti, the organizer of the subsequent hearing, concluded that the Danish organizers were amateurs, ignorant in Soviet matters, and lacking proper contacts in the dissident milieu. The Danes’ overriding concern, Corti felt, had been to realize “an anti-Communist and anti-Soviet operation using the authoritative cover of Sakharov’s prestigious name,” and the result had been “a ﬁasco.” Corti warned that “lies, even made for a good cause, will be counterproductive.”91 So, was the Copenhagen hearing a success or a ﬁasco? Arguably, it was both. The holding of the hearing, the fact that it actually took place, was an 84. Jens Thomsen, “Sakharovhøringens appel til Sovjet: Stands den ubarmhjertige forfølgelse,” Berlingske tidende, 20 October 1975, p. I:3; and Jens Thomsen, “Slavearbejderne er nødvendige for Sovjet,” Berlingske tidende, 18 October 1975, p. I:5. 85. Per Sjögren, “Sacharovförhören gav växlande råmaterial,” Dagens nyheter (Stockholm), 20 October 1975, in author’s personal archive; Niels Stensgaard, “Sakharov-høringen endte i uenighed,” Politiken, 20 October 1975, p. I:1; and Falbert, “Sakharov-høringen druknede i kaos.” See also Michaelsen, “Sakharovhøringen endte i kaos: Vidner kom op at skændes”; Grit Bendixen, “Høringen endt i kaos,” B. T., 20 October 1975, p. 10; “Dramatisk slutning på Sakharov-høringen,” Kristeligt dagblad, 20 October 1975, newspaper clipping, in UMA; and Nielsen, “Sakharov-høringen sluttede i splid.” 86. Heiberg, KGBs kontakt- og agentnet i Danmark, pp. 54–55; Camille Olsen, “L’Audition Sakharov’ demande l’amnistie de tous les prisonniers politiques en URSS,” Le Monde, 21 October 1975, p. 5; “Sakharov-høringens svagheder,” Weekendavisen (Copenhagen), 24 October 1975, p. 8; and C. G., “Sacharow fordert Amnestie für politische Häftlinge,” p. 3. 87. Tel. No. 3099, AmEmb to SecState, 21 October 1975, in NARA, https://aad.archives.gov/aad/ createpdf?rid=292392&dt=2476&dl=1345. See also Michaelsen, “Sakharovhøringen endte i kaos.” 88. Shakhovskaya, “I kongeriget Danmark.” 89. Corti, Note, n.d. (probably early 1978), in Corti Papers. 90. Reddaway to Thorne, 8 February 1979, in Kline Papers. 91. Corti, Note, n.d. 99 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Boel impressive feat, but the hearing itself was not. In its immediate aftermath, no one would have been surprised if the ﬁrst Sakharov Hearing had also been the last. Corti wrote: “The Copenhagen hearing had clearly discredited the initiative in the eyes of those on whom the success of [a second hearing would] depend, the Soviet dissidents and the experts on these issues.”92 This, however, was not the end of the story. The “Tribunale Sacharov”93 The Second International Sakharov Hearing took place in Rome, Italy, in the EUR Palazzo dei Congressi on 25–28 November 1977. The “Tribunale Sacharov” or “Udienze Sakharov” presents a double mystery. Given the mishaps of the ﬁrst hearing, how did a follow-up hearing materialize? And why in Italy? Even after the disappointment of the poorly executed ﬁrst hearing, many still felt that an international citizens’ tribunal named after Sakharov and de- voted to human rights violations in the Soviet bloc was an excellent idea. One positive lesson from the experience in Copenhagen was that such a hearing had the potential to generate signiﬁcant media coverage. The intensity of dis- sident misgivings about the ﬁrst hearing was not public knowledge.94 The drive, stamina, and resourcefulness of the Danish “amateurs” helped keep the idea alive. The Common Committee of Exiles had become the Or- ganizing Committee for the International Sakharov Hearing in 1975.95 A year later it preemptively laid claim to Sakharov’s prestigious name and rebranded itself the International Sakharov Committee.96 The Danes were keenly aware that Sakharov’s name was their main asset, and they were determined not to let go of it. Together with like-minded groups they organized events in Den- mark and abroad. Among these were a press conference about the German 92. Ibid. 93. Comitato italiano di “International Sakharov Hearings,” Tribunale Sacharov, atto secondo (Milan: La Casa di Matriona, 1979). “Tribunale” was used for the book title and favored by some people, but the ofﬁcial term was “udienze.” 94. Corti, Note, n.d. 95. “Vedtægter: Forbundet til afholdelse af ‘Andrej Sakharov høringen i Danmark,’” n.d., in Kühl Papers. 96. The International Sakharov Committee, despite its name, was a Danish committee, comprising Danish citizens and a few Soviet-bloc exiles living in Denmark, some or most of whom had become Danish citizens. Feldsted Andresen stated: “Sakharov’s name was the key that opened the door to our own parliament in Denmark and to many human rights organizations.” “An Interview with the Founder of the Sakharov Hearings,” Smoloskyp, Vol. 1, No. 5 (Fall 1979), pp. 3, 5. 100 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism Democratic Republic (GDR) held on 12 August 1976 in Copenhagen with the Berlin-based group “Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. August”; a well-publicized hearing in Bad Godesberg concerning alleged Soviet use of forced labor to build gas pipelines, held with the IGfM on 18–19 November 1982; cooper- ation with the NTS and the Wilberforce Council; and human rights events devoted to Cuba, the Baltic countries, and Raoul Wallenberg.97 In November 1975, when the U.S. Helsinki Commission sent a delegation to Europe, Feld- sted Andresen was among the handful of Danes selected to meet the U.S. dele- gates.98 Although other organizing committees proved short-lived, the Danish one survived, at least in name, until 2017. From 1976 to 1991 the committee regularly issued a publication about human rights violations in the Soviet bloc, Danizdat. The Danes claimed paternity of the successful proposal to exchange the Soviet prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky for the Chilean dictatorship’s prisoner Luis Corvalán.99 But a key objective for the group from the outset was to insti- tutionalize and perennialize the Sakharov Hearings, holding them in different countries while ensuring that the Danish committee stayed in charge and thus deserved its “international” label. The publication of the proceedings of the Copenhagen hearing in six languages—Danish, Swedish, English, German, Italian, and Russian—helped stimulate interest in a follow-up.100 Any follow-up hearing, however, was contingent on Sakharov’s blessing, and the problem was that Sakharov was dismayed by what he had heard about the Copenhagen hearing. He asked his stepson-in-law, Yankelevich, who left the Soviet Union in September 1977, to be his representative in the West and 97. The hearing in Bad Godesberg was mention in U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, Senate, 16 February 1983, p. 2,363. 98. Report of the Study Mission to Europe to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1977). 99. They are far from the only ones to have made that claim. See Guillaume Nicolas-Brion, “Un rouage contre la machine ou les combats de Vladimir Boukovski,” M.A. Thesis, IEP de Toulouse, Toulouse, 2004, p. 56, Among those credited with the idea are Sakharov, Gerstenmaier, and the International Sakharov Committee. See, respectively, Vladimir Bukovsky, interview, Cambridge, UK, 28 August 2013; Cornelia Gerstenmaier, telephone interview, 2013; and C. P., “Wiesenthal inizia l’istruttoria sull’arcipelago Gulag,” Il resto del Carlino (Bologna), 8 October 1977, pp. 1–2. The Danish group most probably played a signiﬁcant role, but the exact nature of this role still needs to be ascertained. Concerning the exchange, see Olga Ulianova, “Corvalán for Bukovsky: A Real Exchange of Prisoners During an Imaginary War: The Chilean Dictatorship, the Soviet Union and U.S. Mediation, 1973– 1976,” Cold War History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2014), pp. 315–336. 100. Feldsted Andresen to the U.S. Sakharov Hearing Committee, 8 June 1979, in Box 39, Houghton Library. The activism of the Danish group ensured that the Soviet authorities kept an eye on its leader, Feldsted Andresen. “Isvestija: Dansk hetz mod Sovjet: Dirigeres af erfarne provokatører i CIAs sold, skriver avisen,” Jyllands posten, 23 August 1977, p. 2. 101 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Boel to co-organize any subsequent hearings.101 He was later quite happy with this decision: Efrem’s logical mind, knowledge and absolute integrity ensured the exclusion of any false, unsubstantiated, or sensational testimony, and a focus on signiﬁcant issues. The success of the Rome hearings (and of the later ones in Washington and London) was due in large part to his efforts.102 Sakharov let the Danish committee know that his go-ahead for the next hear- ing would be conditional on ﬁnding trustworthy witnesses.103 The physicist’s determination to achieve some degree of control bore fruit. Bonner had a sig- niﬁcant impact on the Rome hearing and Yankelevich helped shape all subse- quent hearings. The follow-up hearing took place at the same time that the Biennale del Dissenso was being held in Venice (15 November–15 December 1977), thus running the risk of being eclipsed or engendering dissidence fatigue. At least two factors help to explain this potentially self-defeating duplication. The ﬁrst has to do with the intensity of Italian interest. In Italy, as in France at the time, Soviet-bloc dissidence was an important domestic political issue largely because—in the Italian case—of the prominent role played by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the fact that the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) un- der Bettino Craxi’s leadership (1976–1993) had decided to make Soviet-bloc dissidence a major theme in its rivalry with the PCI.104 A Sakharov Hearing in Italy was thus less surprising than one held in Copenhagen. Second, the or- ganizers of the two initiatives were apparently unaware of the other until they were both well advanced. They came from different circles, although contacts were established later on. Who took the initiative in Italy? In 1975–1976 nobody questioned that the Danes “owned” the Sakharov Hearings and that it was up to them to decide who should be in charge of the next hearing. Among the options dis- cussed were Norway, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy. In Norway the Danes were in touch with the prominent Labor Party leader Haakon Lie. In the United Kingdom, Geoffrey Stewart-Smith and David Markham were 101. Yankelevich left together with his wife, Tatiana Yankelevich (Bonner’s daughter), and their two children. Sakharov, Memoirs, p. 473. 102. Ibid., p. 474. The two omitted hearings (Copenhagen and Lisbon) were also the most politicized ones. 103. “Rapport fra møde den 30.10. 1976,” added note by Osbrandt (concerning a meeting in Moscow between her cousin and Sakharov), 2 November 1976, in Kühl Papers. 104. Lomellini, L’Appuntamento mancato, p. 131. 102 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism interested. Former Canadian Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker was will- ing to chair a Canadian hearing. Such plans failed for various reasons. The Norwegians were involved in difﬁcult ﬁshery negotiations with the Soviet Union, which they did not want to jeopardize. The Canadians gave up, possi- bly because of upcoming elections. London seemed the most serious option, and by September 1976 planning was underway for a hearing there in May 1977. However, in January 1977 the hearing was called off because Stewart- Smith was caught up in a legal battle in Seoul with his ex-associates from the WACL.105 The most persistent suitors were the Italians. Terenzio Magliano, MP for the Italian Democratic Socialist Party (PSDI), had attended the hearing in Copenhagen and upon returning to Italy suggested setting up a permanent section of the Sakharov Hearings in Italy. He allegedly got the backing of a half dozen parliamentarians from other political parties (Republicans, Liber- als, Socialists, and Christian Democrats). The request for their support was made on Magliano’s behalf by Lyudmilla Thorne from the Radio Liberty– funded and Rome-based Associazione Letteraria Internazionale (ALI, part of a secret CIA-run book-distribution program aimed at the Soviet bloc).106 The Danes asked for additional information, but it is not clear whether they ever received an answer. In any event, the Rome option was abandoned.107 Soon, however, it was back, this time promoted by Bonner, who suggested Corti as a suitable organizer. Once the London project had faltered, the Danes obliged 105. “Rapport af møde den 28.5. 1976”; “Rapport fra møde den 24.9. 1976”; “Rapport fra møde 8.10. 1976”; “Rapport ang. møde lørdag den 30.10. 1976”; “Rapport, møde den 19.11. 1976”; “Rap- port af den 18.1. 1977”; “Rapport fra møde 10.2. 1978”; and “Danizdat,” all in Kühl Papers. 106. “Dagsorden, møde den 31.10. 1975,” in Kühl Papers; Thorne to Karawatzki, 18 November 1975, in Kühl Papers; and Lyudmilla Thorne, “Memoirs” (unpublished manuscript), pp. 179–180, in Kline Papers. Thorne was born in the Soviet Union in 1938 (d. 2009), moved to the United States in 1949, worked for the Radio Liberty Committee (1961–1971), became vice president of Bedford Publications (later renamed the International Literary Center) (1971–1973), and then became project manager at the International Literary Association (ALI) in Rome (1973–1975). She was a friend of Gerstenmaier (who participated in the Copenhagen hearing), and she knew Bonner (she hosted her in Rome in late 1975) and would thus have been well informed about the Copenhagen hearing. See Thorne, Resume, in Kline Papers; and Ombretta Orlandini, interview, Rome, 27 May 2017. Leonard R. Sussman (executive director of Freedom House from 1967 to 1988) devotes a chapter to Thorne in A Passion for Freedom: My Encounters with Extraordinary People (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2004), pp. 383–390. On ALI, see Alfred A. Reisch, Hot Books in the Cold War? The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014), p. 508. Another Italian group, the far-right Europa Civiltà, also manifested an interest in the Sakharov hearing. See Feldsted Andresen to Facchinetti, 23 June 1975, reproduced in Loris Facchinetti, Il Manifesto Umano: La Destra Invisibile (Rome: Prima Edizione, 2011), p. xxx [sic]. 107. “Dagsorden, møde den 31.10. 1975”; Thorne to Karawatzki, 18 November 1975; “Forslag til besvarelse af skrivelse af den 18.11. 1975 fra fru Ludmilla Thorne,” in Kühl Papers; and “Møde den 5.12,” in Kühl Papers. 103 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Boel and handed over the torch to Corti, who initiated the planning with a trip to Copenhagen in February 1977.108 Who were the Italian organizers? Corti was in charge and became pres- ident of the executive committee. A former Fiat employee, he had been in- volved in Fiat’s business relations with the USSR.109 He had learned Russian and for many years been involved in the work of Russia Cristiana. From 1972 to 1975, Corti had worked as a translator and interpreter at the Italian em- bassy in Moscow, where he “became deeply involved with the Moscow human rights community.”110 He had befriended Sakharov, Bonner, and Solzhenit- syn, and after Solzhenitsyn’s deportation he organized, with the help of Italian embassy staff, an effort to smuggle out a sizable part of the writer’s personal library. Corti himself brought the suitcases to Zurich. In Italy, he was in touch with ALI, and he knew Thorne (they traveled together to visit Solzhenitsyn in Zurich in early 1974).111 Although Russia Cristiana and its publishing house, Casa di Matriona, were not the ofﬁcial organizers of the hearing, the bulk of those formally or informally involved in the preparations came from that mi- lieu. Russia Cristiana was created in 1957, focused on links with Orthodox Russia, and for a while had been involved in the smuggling of religious lit- erature into the Soviet Union. From the late 1960s it was close to the group Comunione e Liberazione. Its activities allegedly had earned it a good repu- tation among Soviet dissidents.112 In contrast to the Copenhagen group, the Italians had the expertise, knowledge, and contacts required to organize a se- rious hearing. 108. Feldsted Andresen to Wiesenthal, 1 September 1977, in Folder “B., I., 1.2.3.,” SWA; and “Møde den 30.3. 1977,” Kühl Papers. 109. In 1966 Fiat and Moscow reached an agreement to build a major car manufacturing plant in the Soviet Union at the center of a new town, the so-called Togliattigrad. The plant started operating in 1969. See Valentina Fava, “Between Business Interests and Ideological Marketing: The USSR and the Cold War in Fiat Corporate Strategy, 1957–1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall 2019), pp. 26-64. 110. Thorne, “Memoirs.” These activities, unsurprisingly, made him unpopular with the Soviet au- thorities. “Mosca accusa ex dipendente ambasciata: ‘Quell’italiano à un agente CIA,’” Il giorno (Milan), 21 August 1980, newspaper clipping, in Corti Papers. 111. Thorne, ‘Memoirs”; Mario Corti, interview, Artegna, Italy, 4 May 2012; Orlandini inter- view; Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Invisible Allies (London: The Harvill Press, 1997), p. 248; and Mark Hopkins, Russia’s Underground Press: The Chronicle of Current Events (New York: Praeger, 1983), p. 135. 112. Romano Scalﬁ, interview, Seriate, 2 May 2012; Pigi Colognesi, Russia Cristiana: Una biograﬁa di padre Romano Scalﬁ (Milan: Ed. San Paolo, 2007), pp. 104–108, 133, 138–141, 151–152, 184, 209, 214–224; Maria Barberis, “Centro Studi Russia Cristiana (1957–2000): Un approccio storico,” M.A. Thesis, University of Pavia, Pavia, 2003, pp. 209–213, 224–225; and Corti, note, n.d. Politically, Comunione e Liberazione was close to the rightwing Christian Democrat party Movimento Popolare. 104 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism In addition to Corti (president), the executive committee ofﬁcially com- prised Dario Staffa (vice president), Giovanni Codevilla (secretary), and Er- minio Salmoiraghi (treasurer).113 The actual membership was larger, however, and may have included Sergio Rapetti, Giovanna Gruccio, Lucio dal Santo, Tatiana Khodorovich, Efrem Yankelevich, Irina Alberti, and possibly still oth- ers.114 Moreover, the Italians knew that to some degree they had to accept Danish “ownership” of the Sakharov Hearings and that the green light to hold the second hearing came with strings attached. Indeed, the Danes expected signiﬁcant co-involvement in both substantive and practical matters. Bilateral meetings were held in Copenhagen, Munich, Milan, and Florence, sometimes also attended by others in addition to the Danish and Italian organizers such as Maksimov, Bonner, and Chalidze. Some decisions seem to have been taken in common. The Copenhagen group helped with much of the ofﬁcial corre- spondence and with most non-Soviet contacts, possibly sending an emissary, Schoubye, to meet Jacek Kuro´n in Warsaw.115 The Danes argued that Soviet dissidents were too difﬁcult to deal with and therefore advocated that the second hearing focus on Eastern Europe rather than on the Soviet Union. The Italians insisted on maintaining a focus on the Soviet Union, but they agreed to expand the scope of the hearing to include human rights violations in Eastern Europe. However, cooperation between the two groups was not frictionless. According to Corti, the Danish group was paranoid and obsessed with anti-Communism. When Corti told them about the Biennale del Dis- senso in Venice and voiced his concern that this might interfere with their plans, Feldsted Andresen denounced the Biennale as a provocative act aimed at sabotaging the Rome hearing and even suspected Corti of colluding with the Biennale organizers.116 The success of the hearing depended on getting the right participants, starting with the honorary president. The Danes initially favored Count Otto von Habsburg for the position, but Corti made clear that such a choice would not be popular in Italy. They then suggested the former Nuremberg trial 113. Liano Fanti, “Contro il crimine dovunque e da chiunque perpetrato,” Avanti (Milan), 9 October 1977, newspaper clipping, in SWA; and Sandro Scabello, “I diritti umani nell’URSS,” Corriere della sera (Milan), 7 October 1977, newspaper clipping, in Box 13, Houghton Library. 114. About Rapetti, see Colognesi, Russia Cristiana, pp. 113–114. 115. Schoubye, interview. See also “Meeting of the Sakharov Hearing Committee with Giovanni Codevilla in Copenhagen on 1–2 June 1977,” in Kühl Papers; “Rapport af møde den 8. juni 1977,” in Kühl Papers; “Report re. the meeting in Milano with the Comitato Organizzatore, Sezione Italiana on 25–26 June 1977,” in Kühl Papers; “Møde afholdt den 1.8. 1977,”in Kühl Papers; Corti to Feldsted Andresen, 29 April 1977, in Kühl Papers; and “Møde den 30.3. 1977.” 116. Corti, Note, n.d. 105 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Boel prosecutor Hartley Shawcross, who excused himself on grounds of other engagements. The French liberal intellectual Raymond Aron also was not available. Finally they came to favor Wiesenthal. The Italian committee was divided, but Corti sided with the Danes, and the choice then fell on the well- known Nazi hunter, who accepted.117 That he could not be accused of being a fascist was considered crucial.118 Prestigious sponsors—members of the advi- sory board—were another precondition for success. Corti convinced, among others, the mathematician and human rights activist Ennio de Giorgi and World War II resistance ﬁghter, politician, and journalist Leo Valiani to join the board.119 Finding good witnesses proved more challenging. Disagreements arose concerning the potential witnesses, some of whom were accused of anti- Semitism or of having betrayed fellow dissidents. In Corti’s view, a good rela- tionship with Sakharov was essential for a successful hearing. In practice this meant a good relationship with Bonner and, subsidiarily, with Yankelevich.120 Corti’s Moscow years and his well-established relations with the Sakharovs proved crucial for ensuring just that. Bonner played a key role in overcom- ing the skepticism generated by the Copenhagen hearing among Soviet ex- iles (e.g., writers associated with Kontinent and La Pensée Russe). In the end, Lyubarsky (exiled in 1977 and the publisher in Munich of USSR News Brief), Alexeyeva, Leonid Plyushch, Valentin Turchin, Tomas Venclova, and Arkady Polishchuk all agreed to testify. At Bonner’s suggestion, a fourth day was added to the originally planned three days. The additional day was devoted to Western lawyers of indicted Moscow Helsinki Group members. Bonner got so involved in the preparations that some teasingly suggested renaming the event “the Bonner hearing.”121 Thanks to Solzhenitsyn’s assistant, Alberti, Solzhenitsyn was persuaded to send a supportive message to the hearing.122 117. “Møde afholdt den 1.8. 1977”; and Shawcross to Feldsted Andresen, 4 April 1977, in Corti Papers. For a more skeptical assessment of Wiesenthal’s credentials as a “Nazi hunter,” see Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends (New York: Schocken Books, 2010), pp. 9, 27. 118. “Rapport af møde den 8.6. 1977,” in Kühl Papers. 119. Corti, Note, n.d.; Feldsted Andresen to Corti, 7 May 1977, Corti Papers; Sergio Rapetti and Giovanni Codevilla, interview, Milan, 30 April 2012; Corti, interview; and Bukovsky, interview. On Corti’s stay in Moscow, dissident contacts, and smuggling of material out of the Soviet Union, see Colognesi, Russia Cristiana, pp. 110–111. 120. Corti, Note, n.d. 121. Ibid. Bonner did not attend the Tribunale Sacharov. Soviet authorities insisted on a quick re- turn to Moscow to prevent her from attending the hearing. See Yankelevich to Robert Bernstein, 21 October 1978, in Box 14, Houghton Library. 122. Alberti was a Rome-based correspondent for Radio Liberty who moved to Vermont, where she worked for Solzhenitsyn from 1976 to 1979. In 1980 she succeeded Shakhovskaya as editor of La 106 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism Also thanks to Alberti, the organizers obtained the participation of the U.S. delegate to the CSCE meeting in Belgrade, Millicent Fenwick; the psychi- atrist Robert Jay Lifton; the Western legal counsels of Alexander Ginzburg, Alexander Sergienko, and Mykola Rudenko; and several other human rights advocates.123 Corti and Bonner agreed to organize an undercover operation to carry a message from Sakharov to the Rome hearing. Rapetti went to Moscow after signing up for a trip organized by a PCI-associated travel agency. Once there, he slipped away from his fellow travelers to meet and ﬁlm Sakharov giving a message. The footage was subsequently shown at the opening of the Rome hearing. The initiative, initially kept secret (although the treasurer and the main funder were aware), did not escape the attention of Soviet authorities. As Rapetti was boarding his return ﬂight, he was approached by an ofﬁcial and told that if he ever ventured back to Moscow he would be killed.124 The Biennale del Dissenso and the Tribunale had completely different origins. Links, however, developed. The Socialists Carlo Ripa di Meana and Craxi, who played a key role in the Biennale, also expressed their support for the Tribunale.125 Ripa di Meana and Corti worked closely with the exiled former Czechoslovak television director Jiˇrí Pelikán, who assisted with both events. Rapetti’s trip to Moscow beneﬁted not only the Tribunale but also the Biennale, for which he also brought back a ﬁlmed message from Sakharov.126 Some, like Sister Anne Gillen, executive director of the U.S. National Interre- ligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry, participated in both events. Staffa, one of the organizers of the Tribunale Sacharov, was also involved in the Biennale del Dissenso.127 Ripa di Meana invited Father Romano Scalﬁ, one of the founders of Russia Cristiana, and Codevilla to participate in the committee in charge of religious issues at the Biennale. This, however, prompted the resignation of two other Biennale committee members, Giorgio Girardet and Renato pensée Russe in Paris. Irina Alberti, “Io, esule alla scoperta della Russia,” La nuova Europa, No. 2 (2001), pp. 4–14. 123. Feldsted Andresen to Corti, 7 May 1977; and Corti, Note, n.d. 124. Andrei Sakharov, Memorie (Milan: SugarCo Edizioni, 1990), p. 549 (translation by Corti’s wife, Elena Corti). The source of this information is no doubt Rapetti. See also Sergio Rapetti, “Andrej Sacharov a dieci anni dalla scomparsa: Une testimonianze,” paper presented at the “Andrej Sacharov a dieci anni dalla scomparsa: Dall’URSS alla Russia” seminar, Trento, 2 November 1999–14 January 2000, in Sergio Rapetti Papers; Corti, interview; and Rapetti, interview. 125. Corti, interview; and Rapetti, interview. 126. Rapetti, “Andrej Sacharov a dieci anni dalla scomparsa.” 127. Staffa wrote the ﬁrst part of the report. Gianfranco Dogliani, ed., “B77 [Biennale del Dissenso], Tecniche del consenso e forme del dissenso all’est,” in Archives of the Centro Studi sulla Storia dell’Europa Orientale. 107 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j c w s / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 2 3 3 8 1 1 9 5 5 7 8 5 / j c w s _ a _ 0 1 0 0 8 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Boel Maiocchi. The former believed that Russia Cristiana was CIA-ﬁnanced and linked with the extreme right.128 A crucial issue for all the hearings was funding. The person who made the Tribunale Sacharov possible was the businessman Silvio Berlusconi. The future Italian prime minister took a signiﬁcant step in 1977 by venturing into politics and journalism with his acquisition of the conservative newspaper Il giornale. The funding of the Tribunale Sacharov is a hitherto unpublicized case of Berlusconi’s early anti-Communist endeavors. The link between the Milan-based organizing committee and the Milan-based Berlusconi was dal Santo, who knew the entrepreneur from their school days at the Salesian col- lege preparatory school and decided to ask his old schoolmate for a contribu- tion. Berlusconi obliged and in March 1977 agreed to cover up to $65,000
of the hearing’s expenses, so long as the funding was kept secret.129 Berlus-
coni named Salmoiraghi to be his personal representative on the organizing
committee. A special bank account was set up that was accessible only to
Corti and Salmoiraghi. To protect Berlusconi’s anonymity, face-to-face con-
tacts between the organizing committee and Berlusconi were taken care of
by dal Santo. However, a few meetings evidently occurred, especially during
the early phase, between Berlusconi and some of the organizers of the hearing.
Corti occasionally circumvented dal Santo if major unforeseen expenses arose.
Two such cases were the “Moscow operation” (Rapetti’s trip to see Sakharov in
Moscow) and the addition of a fourth day as suggested by Bonner. Berlusconi
apparently also got involved, through intermediaries, in other practical issues
with cost implications, such as the length of the Italian publication devoted
to the Copenhagen hearing.130

The aim of the Second Sakharov Hearing was to investigate the hu-
man rights situation in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia,
Poland, and the GDR. It had four components. The ﬁrst day and part of the
second day were devoted to civil and political rights, the remainder of the sec-
ond day to social and economic rights, the next to religious freedom, and the

128. Colognesi, Russia Cristiana, p. 141; on suspicions of CIA ﬁnancing of Russia Cristiana, see
pp. 131–136.

129. Corti, Note, n.d.; Corti to Feldsted Andresen, 29 April 1977; and “Møde den 30.3. 1977.” On
Berlusconi’s early political involvement, see Alexander Stille, The Sack of Rome: Media + Money +
Celebrity = Power = Silvio Berlusconi (London: Penguin Books, 2007), pp. 28–29, 63–65, 67, 79–80.
130. Corti, interview; Corti, email, 2 August 2012; Corti, Note, n.d.; Georgio Ponti to Corti, 22 April
1977, in Corti Papers; Osbrandt, “Report re. the meeting in Milano with the Comitato Organizza-
tore, Sezione Italiana, on 25–26 June 1977,” 27 June 1977, in Kühl Papers; and Corti to Vittorio
Moccagatta, 12 September 1982, in Corti Papers.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

fourth and last day to presentations by Western lawyers of Soviet dissidents.131
The organizers made clear that the hearing would evaluate the extent to which
the Soviet Union was living up to its Helsinki Final Act commitments. “It was
all about human rights, it was not an anti-Communist or anti-Soviet opera-
tion,” Dario Staffa stated. “We do not want to condemn a regime. . . . We are
also in solidarity with political prisoners in Chile, Brazil, and so many other
countries.”132

The hearing was not marred by the sort of publicized conﬂicts that had
plagued the Copenhagen hearing. Messages were read from both Sakharov and
Solzhenitsyn, and the hearing also beneﬁted from the participation of numer-
ous prestigious human rights activists and from the presence of Wiesenthal,
who opened the event and presided over its “commission” (sometimes referred
to as a “panel”). Judging from the signiﬁcant and largely positive media cover-
age, the hearing was a success. According to Corti, the most successful day was
the fourth, which was devoted to presentations by the Western legal counsels
of the Moscow Helsinki Group prisoners. Another highlight was a surprise
visit by Cardinal Slipyj.133

The hearing concluded with the issuance of a written statement signed by
the “fellow members of the Panel”: Wiesenthal (“president”), Neerskov (“sec-
retary general”), Feldsted Andresen (“member of the arranging committee”),
and Corti (“member of the arranging committee”). The statement referred
to the declaration issued at the end of the Copenhagen hearing, which had
raised doubts about whether the Soviet Union was living up to its interna-
tional commitments under the Helsinki Final Act and the UN International
Covenants.134 The verdict reached in 1977 was that such doubts no longer
existed: the Soviet Union was not living up to its commitments.135

131. “II Sessione, Udienze Internazionale Sacharov, Programma,” in Corti Papers.

132. Franco Mimmi, “Tribunale Sacharov si riunirà a Roma,” La stampa (Turin), 8 October 1977;
and Scabello, “I diritti umani nell’URSS.” When asked about his attitude toward Communism as
compared to Nazism, Wiesenthal stated: “The nazi idea was criminal and so was its practice; the
communist idea is not criminal. But its practice is.” C. P., “Da cacciatore di nazisti a difensore dei
dissidenti,” La nazione (Florence), 8 October 1977, p. 12. For Wiesenthal on “Red fascism,” see Piero
Benetazzo, “Scende in campo per il dissenso il cacciatore di criminali nazisti,” La repubblica (Rome),
8 October 1977, newspaper clipping, in SWA.

133. Corti, Note, n.d.. Sakharov’s assessment, based on reports from his friends and family in the
West, was also positive. See Sakharov to Feldsted Andresen, 12 May 1978, in Kühl Papers (the letter
was translated and forwarded by Yankelevich).

134. Arrangørkomiteen, Sakharov-Høringen, pp. 166–168. In 1975, the Copenhagen organizing com-
mittee had issued its own resolution, which was “considerably tougher on the Soviet Union than the
Panel resolution.” Tel. No. 3099, AmEmb (Lukens) to SecState, 21 October 1975, in NARA, available
online at https://aad.archives.gov/aad/createpdf?rid=292392&dt=2476&dl=1345.

135. “II. Session, Udienze Internazionali Sacharov, Conclusion,” in Kline Papers.

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Polemics appeared in the media and elsewhere about the political orienta-
tion of the hearing. Some outsiders saw it as closely linked to Russia Cristiana
and, by association, to the extreme right and the CIA. Others (on the far
right) accused the hearing of being “Eurocommunist.”136 Still others asserted
that the PSI was trying to control it.137 Although some on the committee were
close to the Christian Democratic Party (DC), a majority wanted it to “relate
to the moderate area,” understood as extending from the PSI to the Liberal
Party (PLI) as well as the DC.138 This was in line with Berlusconi’s views,
since he cultivated ties both with the DC and with Craxi’s PSI. However, the
committee also hoped to obtain the support of individuals further to the left.
As a result, PCI Senator Umberto Terracini was among the sponsors of and
participants in the hearing. Although his participation was a meager piece of
evidence in support of the claim of “Eurocommunism,” it was sufﬁcient to
cause alarm among some of those dismayed by the strength of the PCI and
the conjectures about a so-called historic compromise between it and the DC.
One of the striking moments at the hearing was the reading of Solzhenitsyn’s
message warning against “Eurocommunism’s siren song.”139

Though some argued that the Biennale “stole the show” from the Tri-
bunale Sacharov, such an assessment seems exaggerated.140 The Rome hearing
attracted a great deal of media attention, both domestically and internation-
ally. Even Feldsted Andresen had to concede that the Rome hearing had been
more successful than the Copenhagen session.141 However, the aftermath was
less uplifting. Once the hearing was over, the committee split up, possibly
because of a clash of personalities rather than strong political disagreements.
Corti and Rapetti were forced to leave the committee, which thus lost cru-
cial expertise on Soviet dissidents, and Corti moved to Munich to work for

136. “Quattro Giornate per Sacharov,” Euroitalia (Rome), Vol. 7, No. 257, 1 December 1977, pp. 1–
2.

137. Andrea Albertini, “In pieno svolgimento l’offensiva del PSI per giungere al ‘controllo del dis-
senso,’” Corriere del Ticino (Muzzano, Switzerland), 23 December 1977, newspaper clipping, in Corti
Papers.

138. Corti, Note, n.d.

139. Fausto de Luca, “Solgenitsyn: L’eurocomunismo è un nemico del dissenso,” La repubblica, 26
November 1977, p. 4. One Italian newspaper emphasized the political diversity of the exiled dissidents
participating in the Rome conference: “many of these dissidents still identify themselves as Marxists
or at least Marxian.” See Paolo Pinto, “Denunciata la tragica utopia del marxismo dal volto umano,”
Il popolo (Rome), 29 November 1977, p. 3.

140. Franco Jappelli, “Cronache del ‘Tribunale Sacharov’: Terracini che c’entra?” Il Borghese (Rome),
4 February 1977, pp. 1,107–1,109.

141. Feldsted Andresen to Wiesenthal, 6 December 1977, in Box “2. Sakharov Hearing. 1977. Rom,”
SWA.

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Radio Liberty. However, Corti was widely perceived to be the primary ﬁgure
responsible for the success of the Rome hearing, and he was the one Italian
who remained signiﬁcantly involved in the subsequent Sakharov Hearings.142

The Washington Hearing

The third hearing was held in Washington, DC, on 26–29 September 1979
in the Dirksen Senate Ofﬁce Building. Actually, two separate hearings were
planned. The ﬁrst was Danish. After the Rome hearing, the Danish com-
mittee seemed convinced that nothing had changed and that it still “owned”
the Sakharov Hearings. It praised Corti and Rapetti for organizing the Rome
hearing in cooperation with the Danes but took the view that the Interna-
tional Sakharov Committee (i.e., the Copenhagen committee) should decide
what to do next. Brown from the AFL-CIO secured funding from the union
for the Copenhagen group. In February 1978, the Danes suggested to Brown
that the next hearing be held in the United States, and together they decided
that it should focus on workers’ rights. By June 1978, the AFL-CIO presi-
dent, George Meany, had given his support to that idea.143 At this stage the
Danish committee believed it had the overall responsibility for planning the
Washington event. By August 1978, however, Brown believed that the hearing
would be co-organized as a transatlantic event and that a European committee
(he saw the Danes and the French anti-Communist intellectual Jean-François
Revel as key partners in such an endeavor) would be cooperating with a U.S.
committee. The latter was to be set up by the AFL-CIO and its members
designated by Meany. Brown soon realized that he had misread the situation.
Another initiative, taken by Yankelevich and Thorne, proved to be the
consequential one. Yankelevich, whom Sakharov had designated as his repre-
sentative in the West and as the person in charge of supervising the Sakharov

142. Corti to Alberti, 26 September 1978, in Corti Papers. Yankelevich sympathized with Corti: “Un-
fortunately, as it often happens, those who do the most are also susceptible to the greatest criticism.
As a result of a variety of accusations, which, in my opinion, were unjustiﬁed, and which emanated
from other members of the Italian Committee, Mr. Corti was forced to leave the Committee in the
beginning of this year, and Mr. Rapetti soon followed suit.” See Yankelevich to Kahn, 2 October 1978,
in Box 14, Houghton Library. According to Vladimir Poremsky from the NTS, Berlusconi likewise
took Corti’s side. See “Møde den 12.8. 1978 med Poremsky fra NTS (Possev),” in Kühl Papers.

143. “Rapport af mødet den 10.2. 1978,” in Kühl Papers; Brown to Feldsted Andresen, 28 June
1978, in Kühl Papers; International Sakharov Committee, “The Aims and Activities of the Sakharov
Committee,” n.d., in Archives of DEM; Brown to Yankelevich, 3 August 1978, in Box 14, Houghton
Library; Brown to Meany, 9 August 1978, in Box 14, Houghton Library; and Feldsted Andresen to
the U.S. Sakharov Hearing Committee, 8 June 1979.

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Hearings, had arrived in Italy just in time to participate in the Rome hearing.
In the immediate aftermath of the Tribunale, while Yankelevich was still in
Italy but soon to leave for the United States, where he settled near Boston,
Yankelevich discussed with Corti and Thorne the setting up of a more perma-
nent institution, an Italy-based Sakharov Foundation for human rights. How-
ever, the splitting of the Italian group put that idea to rest.144 Another topic
they broached was a follow-up hearing in the United States. Thorne, a U.S.
citizen of Russian descent, had pioneered Italian attempts to get the hearing
to Rome. She was well connected with the AFL-CIO leadership, and when
the Tribunale materialized she attended it and covered it extensively for the
publication AFL-CIO Trade Union News.145 Thorne had moved from Rome
to New York by December 1975, and two years later Yankelevich moved to
the U.S. as well.146 By then, an agreement in principle had been reached, and
Yankelevich asked Thorne to be in charge of the U.S. hearing, for which they
set out to create an organizing committee. When making these preparations,
Yankelevich endeavored to stay in touch with his stepfather-in-law and told
the committee that “of course, the time, place and participants of the Hearing
will also need to be approved by Dr. Sakharov.”147 By the summer of 1978, a
tentative program was starting to take shape, and contacts with some of the
potential funders had been established.

When Brown learned that Yankelevich and Thorne had made these plans,
he emphatically took up the Danes’ cause. Since the Copenhagen hearing,
he had admired their anti-Communist commitment. He saw Feldsted An-
dresen and Osbrandt as “rare souls here in Europe,” who were “working day
in and day out on the problem of the Soviet and East European dissidents”
and thus should be involved in the hearing.148 No doubt, the shared commit-
ment to a hearing focused on workers’ rights, a focus Brown deemed crucial to
mitigate Western sympathy for Soviet Communism, helped make the Danes
an attractive partner in his eyes.149 Yankelevich, however, made clear to the
AFL-CIO that Brown was not going to be able to change things and that he

144. Yankelevich to Bublil, 15 January 1978, in Box 14, Houghton Library; and Yankelevich to Kahn,
27 February 1978, in Box 13, Houghton Library.

145. Thorne, “Memoirs,” p. 195; and Lyudmilla Thorne, “Testimony in Rome at the Second Interna-
tional Sakharov Hearing,” AFL-CIO Free Trade Union News, Vol. 33, No. 3 (March 1978), pp. 10–13.
The latter item was the second part of a two-part article on the Rome hearing.

146. Thorne, “Memoirs,” p. 198; and Barbara Gamarekian, “Soviet Dissidents’ Wives Share a Crusade
in U.S.,” The New York Times, 5 February 1978, p. 7.

147. Yankelevich to Kahn, 2 October 1978.

148. Brown to Thorne, 28 November 1978, in Box 14, Houghton Library.

149. Ibid.; and Brown to Bonner, 10 January 1979 (misdated 1978).

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and Thorne were now in charge of the U.S. hearing. Moreover, he added,
Sakharov wanted a hearing devoted to human rights rather than to workers’
rights.150 As Yankelevich pointed out to Tom Kahn (assistant to the presi-
dent of the AFL-CIO): “the purpose of the hearing will again be to pose the
question: Are human rights in the USSR respected or are they not, rather
than is ‘Soviet socialism’ good or bad and is it better or worse than ‘American
capitalism.’”151 Moreover, neither Yankelevich nor Bonner shared Brown’s en-
thusiasm for the Danes.152 From the late summer of 1978, the Third Sakharov
Hearing was scheduled to place in Washington, DC, with Thorne in charge
and Yankelevich having a supervisory role.153 Brown’s displeasure with the
dismissive treatment of the Danes and what he considered insufﬁcient atten-
tion to workers’ issues made Thorne worry that he might organize a parallel
and potentially rival hearing. However, in the end the AFL-CIO accepted the
Thorne-Yankelevich hearing as the only show in town.154

The Danes took much longer to accept this new state of affairs. Thorne
and Yankelevich repeatedly tried to make clear that although the Danes de-
served great credit for their pioneering role, their future role would be consul-
tative only. Sakharov had intimated that the Copenhagen committee “should
work in close touch and harmony with” Yankelevich, but the Danes proved
extraordinarily resistant to this message. When Neerskov met Thorne in New
York in November 1978, he insisted that “his Danish committee would con-
tinue with the organizing of the United States Hearing, and that [the U.S.]
committee should carry everything out on the technical side.”155 His argu-
ments were that the Copenhagen committee came “ﬁrst,” that it was an
“international” committee, that it alone could ensure overall continuity and
permanence of the hearings, and that it should be in charge of the Washington
hearing. The Danes unsuccessfully tried to convince the AFL-CIO to with-
hold any ﬁnancing pending Thorne’s and Yankelevich’s acceptance of their

150. Yankelevich to Kahn, 2 October 1978.

151. Ibid. See also Yankelevich to Kirkland, 21 August 1979, in Kline Papers.

152. Feldsted Andresen to Yankelevich, 28 July 1978, in Box 13, Houghton Library; Yankelevich to
Feldsted Andresen, 4 July 1978, in Box 14, Houghton Library; Brown to Meany, 9 August 1978;
and Osbrandt, “Rapport af ferieophold i Paris fra den 8.4. 1979.” Yankelevich’s cool feelings were
reciprocated by the Danes. Feldsted Andresen to International Sakharov Committee, 10 December
1978, in Kühl Papers.

153. Thorne, “Progress Report,” 23 March 1979, in Kline Papers.

154. Brown to Thorne, 13 October 1978, in Box 14, Houghton Library; Thorne to Brown, 3 Novem-
ber 1978, in Box 39, Houghton Library; Brown to Thorne, 28 November 1978; and Thorne to
Brown, 14 December 1978, in Box 14, Houghton Library.

155. Thorne to Brown, 14 December 1978. See also Brown to Meany, 9 August 1978.

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demands. When that did not work, the Danes brieﬂy considered working
with West European trade unions to organize a competing hearing.156 They
also stated that they were already planning the hearing that would come after
Washington.157 In June 1979, the Danes were still pretending to dictate the
content of what they persisted in calling a “Labor hearing.”158 They had, how-
ever, reluctantly conceded that they were being sidetracked. They knew that
a break with Yankelevich would mean a break with Sakharov, which would
lead to the drying up of all signiﬁcant sources of income and, probably, to the
demise of their group.159

The Washington hearing was well, though not entirely transparently,
funded.160 The two main contributors were the AFL-CIO ($47,127) and the Smith Richardson Foundation ($40,000). Somewhat smaller amounts were
donated by the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries ($5,000), the United Federation of Teachers ($5,000), the Unione Italiana del Lavoro
($3,100), the International Ladies Garment Workers Union ($1,000), and the
Jewish Documentation Center ($1,000). The Smith Richardson Foundation,
however, did not want its support disclosed.161 As a result, The Washington Post
reported that the hearing was ﬁnanced “by unidentiﬁed private individuals

156. Feldsted Andresen to Brown, 16 December 1978, in Kühl Papers; and Feldsted Andresen to
Kühl, 13 March 1979.

157. The Danes were not really planning anything. They were corresponding with a Spanish journalist,
Gabriel Amiama, who was interested in organizing a hearing in Spain. “Rapport fra møde 15.12.
1978,” in Kühl Papers; Osbrandt, “Rapport af ferieophold i Paris fra den 8.4. 1979”; and Amiama
(Carta del Este, Prima-Press International) to the U.S. Sakharov Hearing Committee, 3 August 1979,
in Kline Papers.

158. Feldsted Andresen to the U.S. Sakharov Hearing Committee, 8 June 1979.

159. U.S. Sakharov Hearing Committee to Danish and Italian Sakharov Hearing Committees, 4 May
1979, in Kline Papers; “Rapport om mødet den 10.2. 1978,” in Kühl Papers; Sakharov to Feldsted
Andresen, 12 May 1978; Yankelevich to Kahn, 2 October 1978, in Kühl Papers; Feldsted Andresen to
the International Sakharov Committee, 10 December 1978; Thorne to Osbrandt, 12 December 1978,
in Kühl Papers; Feldsted Andresen to Brown, 16 December 1978; Thorne to Brown, 22 January 1979,
in Kühl Papers; Brown to Feldsted Andresen, 29 January 1979, in Kühl Papers; Feldsted Andresen
et al. to Brown, 14 February 1979, in Kühl Papers; Feldsted Andresen to Kühl, 13 March 1979; Kühl
to Feldsted Andresen, 16 March 1979; Feldsted Andresen to Brown, 31 March 1979, in Kühl Papers;
Brown to Feldsted Andresen, 2 April 1979, in Kühl Papers; Thorne to Osbrandt, 12 April 1979,
in Kühl Papers; Brown to Osbrandt, 2 May 1979, in Kühl Papers; Feldsted Andresen to the U.S.
Sakharov Hearing Committee, 17 May 1979, in Kühl Papers; Feldsted Andresen to the U.S. Sakharov
Hearing Committee, 8 June 1979, in Kühl Papers; Feldsted Andresen, “Til orientering for Sakharov
komiteen,” 24 June 1979, in Kühl Papers; Thorne to Feldsted Andresen and Osbrandt, 12 July 1979,
in Kühl Papers; and Feldsted Andresen to Thorne, 20 July 1979, in Kühl Papers. See also Thorne to
Feldsted Andresen, 14 August 1979, in Corti Papers.

160. Yankelevich to Wiesenthal, April 1980 (received 2 May 1980), in Folder “B I.1.6.,” Box “3.
Sakharov Hearing. 1979. USA,” SWA.

161. Randolph Richardson to Myron Kolatch, 12 February 1979, in Kline Papers. See also Bernard
Weinraub, “Foundations Assist Conservative Cause,” The New York Times, 20 January 1981, p. A25.

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and the AFL-CIO.”162 Yankelevich worried about the secretiveness imposed
by the Smith Richardson Foundation, which, he said to the AFL-CIO, “has
already caused some harm to the Hearings’ reputation.” He added,

As you undoubtedly know, enterprises similar to the Hearings are often held
suspect in regard to their ﬁnancial support, which, it seems to me, should urge
us to avoid such suspicion and not give vent to Soviet propaganda which always
maintains that the human rights struggle is ﬁnanced by the CIA.163

The problem was not new, and it proved to be a recurrent one for the Sakharov
Hearings.164

Thorne became executive director and was, as of October 1978, hosted
by Freedom House in New York.165 Overwhelmed by the scale of the work for
the hearing, Thorne decided in January 1979 to hire Adrian Karatnycky as
assistant director. An executive committee was established comprising Patri-
cia Barnes, Corti, Albert Shanker, Yankelevich, and Roman Kupchinsky (who
soon left). The committee held its ﬁrst meeting in October 1978. The driv-
ing force was Thorne, who was the only one working full-time preparing the
hearing.166 Others who provided input during the planning of the hearing
included Lane Kirkland, Carl Gershman, Kahn, and George Bailey.167

The hearing was to have three themes. Two were “Freedom of Movement
inside the USSR” and “Socialist Legality.” Neither Yankelevich nor Thorne
wanted to devote the hearing solely to workers’ rights, as the Danes had agreed
with the AFL-CIO. Thorne did accept that one-and-a-half days out of four
could be devoted to that theme, though in a somewhat diluted version under
the heading “The Workers’ Question: Economic and Social Rights of Soviet
Citizens.” Sidestepping that issue entirely would have been difﬁcult in any

162. Robert Kaiser, “Soviet Dissidents Tell Stories of Life in the Motherland,” The Washington Post,
30 September 1979, p. A5.

163. Yankelevich to Kirkland, Richardson, and Sherry, 7 November 1979, in Box 14, Houghton
Library.

164. In April 1980 Yankelevich wrote to Wiesenthal, who was expected to co-organize the Fourth
Sakharov Hearing: “And please allow me to express my hope that all the sources of ﬁnancial support
will be made public and will not be a subject of any suspicions.” Yankelevich to Wiesenthal, April
1980.

165. Thorne to Sussman, 6 October 1978, in Folder “9,” Box 151, MC 187, 1933–2007, Freedom
House Archives, Princeton (FHA); Thorne to Shanker, 6 October 1978, Box 14, Houghton Library;
and Adrian Karatnycky, interview, New York, 29 June 2013.

166. “Press Announcement: The International Sakharov Hearings, Third Session, 5.9.1979,” in Folder
“International Sakharov Hearings,” Box 34, Alfred M. Loewenthal Papers, HIA; and Thorne to
Brown, 3 November 1978.

167. “Candidates for Membership in the International Advisory Board of the U.S. Sakharov Hearings,
1979,” in Box 39, Houghton Library.

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case, given that the Washington hearing was heavily funded by the AFL-CIO.
However, getting European trade unions to participate proved challenging.
Thanks to Brown, two Italian trade unions, the Unione Italiana del Lavoro
and the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori, pledged to send one
representative each, and Thorne asked the Danes to convince other Euro-
pean trade unions to support and participate in the Washington hearing. In
the end, however, no prominent European trade unionist showed up.168 The
president of the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions, Thomas Nielsen,
made clear to Feldsted Andresen that European trade unions had strong mis-
givings about a hearing so closely associated with the AFL-CIO, which had re-
cently severed ties with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
(ICFTU). Nielsen also wrote to Shanker, ﬂatly refusing any participation un-
less the ICFTU was involved in the preparation of the hearing, something
Thorne ruled out. A basic problem seems to have been a perception among
some West European trade unions that the Washington hearing was primarily
an ideological anti-Communist operation.169

Just as in Denmark, the organizers believed that a parliamentary venue
would heighten the hearing’s visibility, send a positive signal to those in the
Soviet Union longing for Western support, and possibly have some kind of po-
litical impact.170 Kahn convinced Senators Daniel P. Moynihan and Howard
Baker to act as sponsors and allow for the meeting to take place in the Dirk-
sen Senate Ofﬁce Building. While this was important, it was less unusual and
therefore also less publicity-generating than was holding the ﬁrst Sakharov
Hearing at Christiansborg. Moreover, the Carter administration denied the
hearing ofﬁcial U.S. support. Patricia Derian, assistant secretary of state for
human rights and humanitarian affairs, voiced her sympathy but refused to
attend because that “might have the effect of turning the hearings into a gov-
ernment exercise in Soviet eyes.”171

168. Thorne to Brown, 24 July 1979, in Corti Papers; “West European Trade Union Leaders to Be
Invited through Irving Brown to Participate in the Sakharov Board and Commission,” n.d., in Corti
Papers; Thorne, Memorandum, 23 March 1979, in Kline Papers; and Brown to Meany, 9 August
1978.

169. Kühl to Feldsted Andresen, 16 March 1979; and Thomas Nielsen to Shanker, 13 September
1979, in Kline Papers; and Yankelevich to Kirkland, 21 August 1979. Shanker was the president
of the United Federation of Teachers (1964–1986) and was deeply involved in the preparation of
the Washington hearing. Thorne to Shanker, 6 October 1978, in Kline Papers; and Yankelevich to
Kirkland, 21 August 1979.

170. Thorne to Reddaway, 9 August 1979, in Kline Papers.

171. “Media Focus on Fonda, Not Freedom Fighters,” Accuracy in Media Report, Vol. 8, No. 20, 11
October 1979, newspaper clipping, in Box 14, Houghton Library.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

The Washington hearing was nevertheless an important human rights
event. It had seven congressional cochairmen: Howard Baker (R-TN), Robert
Dole (R-KS), Henry M. Jackson (D-WA), George McGovern (D-SD), Daniel
P. Moynihan (D-NY), Claiborne Pell (D-RI), and Richard Stone (D-FL).
As in Rome, messages were sent from Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, the latter
read by the writer’s wife, Natalia Solzhenitsyn. Chalidze delivered an opening
speech. Moreover, the event provided an important meeting place for numer-
ous prominent Soviet-bloc exiles.172 However, although it did feature in U.S.
and international newspapers, media coverage was modest compared to that
of the two previous hearings.173 According to Corti, this was partly because of
the organizers’ failure to emphasize relations with the media.174 In a big coun-
try like the United States such a hearing would inevitably have to struggle to
be visible at all. Moreover, by 1979 some degree of weariness may have kicked
in. Human rights violations in the Soviet bloc were no longer big news four
years after the Helsinki Final Act and three years after President Jimmy Carter
had pledged to put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy.175 The
Washington hearing was also the only one, despite several attempts, that did
not lead to a book publication. Nevertheless, Freedom House seems to have
judged the event a success.176

A few months after the Washington hearing, on 22 January 1980,
Sakharov was deported to the closed city of Gorky, where he, at least in princi-
ple, could no longer communicate with the outside world. In reaction to this,

172. “International Sakharov Hearings: Third Session: USA: Program,” in Kline Papers; and Kaiser,
“Soviet Dissidents Tell Stories of Life in the Motherland.”

173. Albert Shanker, “Media Mostly Ignored Sakharov Hearings,” The New York Times, 21 October
1979, p. E9; and Thorne to AFL-CIO, Smith Richardson Foundation, and United Church of Christ,
10 October 1979, in Corti Papers.

174. Corti to Pereira, draft letter, 1983, in Corti Papers.

175. Joe Renouard, Human Rights in American Foreign Policy from the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 158–159. In a similar vein, Bailey has
argued that the reporting was modest mainly because in the United States the hearing was uncontro-
versial (i.e., its message was largely in tune with that of the Carter administration) and media outlets
therefore considered it unnewsworthy. See George Bailey and Nico Nagel, Künstler im Exil: Kontinent-
Autoren im Bild (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1982), pp. 15–17.

176. Both Karatnycky and Thorne subsequently became Freedom House staff. In the immediate
aftermath—and most likely as a result—of the hearing, Freedom House created a Center for Ap-
peals for Freedom “to serve as a channel for distribution of dissident literature originating in oppres-
sive regimes around the world, both of the left and the right.” See Edward W. O’Brien, “Voice of
Dissidence,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 29–30 September 1979. The decision was announced by the
Republican Senator Clifford P. Case, and on 22 October 1979 Thorne was appointed director of the
new center and editor of Freedom House’s publication Freedom Appeals. In practice, Thorne was put
in charge of Freedom House’s Soviet-area programs. Thorne to Sussman, 22 October 1984, in Box
56, Folder “7,” FHA; and Thorne, “Memoirs.” Karatnycky later became president of Freedom House
(1993–2004).

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Karatnycky and others involved in the Sakharov Hearings launched the An-
drei Sakharov Defense campaign, which, among other efforts, tried to enlist
Democratic and Republican support during the run-up to the U.S. presiden-
tial election in November 1980. The goal was to launch a worldwide cam-
paign for Sakharov’s release.177 This may have diverted some of the energies
that otherwise would have gone into preparing the next hearing.

The Lisbon Hearing

The Lisbon hearing, held amid resurgent Cold War tensions, took place in
a country in which the Communist Party and the Portuguese Socialist Party
(PSP) had recently engaged in a major ideological battle. This dual context
no doubt contributed to the strong politicization of the hearing. Initially, the
fourth hearing was supposed to take place in Amsterdam in September 1981.
Wiesenthal had suggested, and Yankelevich had accepted, that Ivo Samkalden,
former Social Democratic (PvdA) mayor of Amsterdam, would be in charge
of its organization, with Wiesenthal in a key supportive role. Sakharov had
been consulted, and he had requested that education be one of the hearing’s
themes.178 For unknown reasons, the Amsterdam hearing was canceled in late
November 1980. Both Britain and Canada were brieﬂy considered as alter-
native venues, but on 3 December Lyubarsky, with a mandate from Yankele-
vich, wrote to António Maria Pereira (of the center-right Social Democratic
Party, PSD), asking him to organize the fourth session in Lisbon. However,

177. Karatnycky, Statement to the Democratic Party Platform Committee, 10 April 1980, in Folder
“B I.1.6,” Box “3. Sakharov hearing 1979 USA,” SWA; Andrei Sakharov Defense Campaign, “Cal-
endar of Events, April–June 1980,” in SWA; and Karatnycky to Wiesenthal, 30 April 1980, in SWA.
After leading the Andrei Sakharov Campaign, Karatnycky replaced Kahn as assistant to the AFL-
CIO’s president, Kirkland, and became involved in the union’s drive to assist Solidarity in Poland
in the 1980s. Kahn, Shanker, Karatnycky, and Gershman all at one time had been activists in Social
Democrats/USA. See Beth Sims, Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor’s Role in U.S. For-
eign Policy (Boston: South End Press, 1992), p. 47; Adrian Karatnycky, “How We Helped Solidarity
Win,” The Washington Post, 27 August 1989, p. A17; and Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America:
A Complete History (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2015), pp. 522, 525–526, 534–535. Even
though this group served as a conduit through which some far-left-wingers evolved into neoconser-
vatives this does not necessarily bear out the thesis of neoconservatism’s Trotskyist ﬁliation. For a
critical examination of that thesis, see William F. King, “Neoconservatives and Trotskyism,” American
Communist History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2004), pp. 247–266.

178. Wiesenthal suggested Amsterdam as a venue to Yankelevich. Wiesenthal to Samkalden, 19
November 1979, in SWA; Wiesenthal to Feldsted Andresen, 23 June 1980, in Folder “B.I.1.6.,
Sakharov 1983/84,” SWA; and Yankelevich to Wiesenthal, April 1980. Among those involved in
the planning of the Amsterdam hearing were Wiesenthal, Corti, Lyubarski, Jules Huf, René Eijbersen,
and Ivo Samkalden. Corti, Note, n.d.; and “Sakharov Hearing, Amsterdam 1981,” in Corti Papers.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

the death of the Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco Sá Carneiro (PSD), a
friend and close associate of Pereira, the following day, got in the way.179 At
that stage the organizers must have concluded that the session was unlikely to
come together. Nevertheless, after several further delays, the hearing eventu-
ally materialized in Lisbon on 12–14 October 1983, at the Ritz Hotel.

Why was Lisbon chosen for the fourth hearing? The answer is not ob-
vious. The presence of a relatively potent Stalinist Communist Party and a
strong anti-Communism energized by the experience of the Carnation Rev-
olution and its aftermath in 1974–1975 created a favorable context.180 The
proximity of Madrid, where a CSCE follow-up conference started in Novem-
ber 1981 and lasted until September 1983, probably also weighed in Lisbon’s
favor. The organizer, Pereira, was a lawyer, a human rights expert, and a politi-
cian. Though he had no prior signiﬁcant involvement in Soviet-bloc matters,
he had numerous international, especially U.S., connections. The most obvi-
ous link between Pereira and the Sakharov Hearings was Jerome J. Shestack,
who participated in both the Washington and the Lisbon hearings. The two
lawyers were friends and members of two of the hearing’s sponsors: the Inter-
national Commission of Jurists (ICJ; Pereira was the founder and president
of the Portuguese section) and the International League of Human Rights
(Shestack was the long-serving president, Pereira a board member). Both men
were also politically active. A Democrat, Shestack had been the U.S. envoy
to the UN Commission on Human Rights during the Carter administration
(1979–1980), and Pereira was an MP for the centrist PSD and a member of
its international committee.181

The executive committee for the Lisbon conference comprised ﬁve mem-
bers: Pereira (president), Dewhirst, Lyubarsky, Corti, and Lénia Lopes (sec-
retary).182 None of the Portuguese organizers had any notable expertise in
Soviet-bloc matters, and Pereira was anyhow busy both as a politician and as

179. Thorne to Wiesenthal, 25 November 1980, in Folder “US Committee for the ISH, Correspon-
dence,” Box 39, Houghton Library; Pereira to Lyubarsky, 16 January 1981, in Folder “International
Sakharov Hearings, Session IV (Lisbon 1983),” Box 19, Houghton Library; Yankelevich to Kahn, 11
December 1982, in Folder “International Sakharov Hearings, Session IV (Lisbon 1983),” Box 19,
Houghton Library; Wiesenthal to Samkalden, 19 November 1979; Yankelevich to Wiesenthal, 29
April 1980, in SWA; R. M. Austraat (on behalf of Wiesenthal) to Samkalden, 13 May 1980, in SWA;
and Wiesenthal to Feldsted Andresen, 23 June 1980.

180. Jerome Shestack, “Especial para Portugal,” Diário de notícias, 14 October 1983, p. 4.

181. Lénia Lopes, interview, Lisbon, 15 April 2013; and “António Maria Pereira,” in Assembleia da
República, Biograﬁas dos deputados (Lisbon: Direcção-Geral de Apoio Parlamentar, 1990), n.p. In an
interview, Pereira identiﬁed the International League of Human Rights as the key link between him
and the Sakharov Hearings, which seems to conﬁrm that Shestack was indeed the decisive connection,
as indicated in O País, 13 October 1983, p. 34.

182. “Audiências Sakharov, Lisboa” (Program), in Lénia Lopes Papers.

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a lawyer.183 As far as dissident participation was concerned, the three non-
Portuguese members of the organizing committee were the key players. Corti,
Lyubarsky, and Dewhirst had all been involved in at least one Sakharov Hear-
ing, and they all had extensive knowledge of the dissident milieu (Dewhirst
had smuggled texts for the NTS in the early 1960s and later cooperated with
Radio Liberty).184 Although overall responsibility for the hearing and many
practicalities lay with the Portuguese, nearly all of the substantive input came
from Corti, Dewhirst, and Lyubarsky. Decisions were made during meetings
in Geneva or discussed via correspondence.

As usual, funding was a challenge. Corti tried to convince Berlusconi to
contribute again, and Pereira was in touch with various U.S. grant-making
foundations.185 The Friedrich Naumann Foundation agreed to contribute a
modest sum.186 In the end, the organizers “[raised] considerable (public) fund-
ing,” the exact nature of which has not been elucidated.187

After some hesitation, the organizing committee agreed to call the event
a “hearing” (audiências) rather than a “tribunal.”188 Another complicated issue
was where to position the hearing on the left-right political spectrum. The
organizers decided to ask Portuguese Prime Minister Mário Soares, leader of
the PSP, to be the honorary president of the hearing along with Wiesenthal.
The latter, however, had to cancel his participation because of a schedule con-
ﬂict.189 Soares’s anti-Communist credentials were impeccable, and the nom-
ination of the Socialist leader limited the potential for a drift to the right.

183. Pereira to Dewhirst, 2 November 1982, in Corti Papers.

184. Draft list of members of the questioning panel, 22 September 1975, in Kühl Papers; Corti to
Pereira, draft letter, n.d., in Corti Papers; Corti to Ripa di Meana, 4 May 1982, in Corti Papers; and
Ann Komaromi, “Samizdat as Extra-Gutenberg Phenomenon,” Poetics Today, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter
2008), p. 655.

185. Corti to Moccagatta, 12 September 1982; and Dewhirst to Pereira, 9 July 1983, Corti Papers.
Moccagatta was apparently one of several go-betweens when Corti needed to get in touch with Berlus-
coni both in 1977 as the Rome hearing was being prepared and afterward. Moccagatta was a former
student at Centro Europa Scuola Educazione e Società and was for a while “the right-hand man of
Berlusconi,” according to Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins
of Neoliberalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 154.

186. Bernd Scheitterlein (Friedrich Naumann Foundation) to Pereira, 6 October 1983, in Lopes
Papers.

187. Yankelevich to Kahn, 11 December 1982. Tom Gehrels, who had been invited to Lisbon as a
“Jury Member” of the fourth hearing, mentioned that he and the other members of the panel were
“guests of the Portuguese government.” See Tom Gehrels, On the Glassy Sea: An Astronomer’s Journey
(New York: BookSurge, 1988), p. 152.

188. In the Portuguese Communist press the hearing was systematically referred to as “audiênCIA.”
See, for example, “AudiênCIA Sakharov começa hoje em Lisboa,” O diário (Lisbon), 12 October 1983,
p. 6.

189. Dewhirst to Pereira, 23 June 1983, in Corti Papers. In the end Corti did not participate, either.

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Moreover, the Lisbon hearing was to be devoted to four issues: Sakharov;
workers’ rights; intellectual and artistic freedom in the Soviet bloc, mainly
the Soviet Union; and, as part of a special session, Poland.190 The focus on
workers’ rights was an idea originally advanced by the Danish committee and
the AFL-CIO for the Washington hearing. Their aim was to highlight the gap
between ideology and reality in the Communist countries, thus undermining
the attractiveness of the Soviet model among left-wingers.191

The Danes needed to be assuaged or at least “approached soon and kept
informed.”192 Feldsted Andresen was invited to Lisbon, where he gave one of
the opening speeches. A striking and innovative feature of the Lisbon hearing
was the signiﬁcant French presence: Alain Besançon, Revel, André Glucks-
mann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Jean Elleinstein participated. The interna-
tional roster—and Glucksmann’s participation especially—contributed to se-
curing broad coverage of the hearing in the Portuguese media.193

The Lisbon hearing was the most unapologetically political of the ﬁve
Sakharov Hearings. It was organized by a prominent member of the PSD
and postponed several times because of local political developments.194 It
received substantial public funding, and the Portuguese government was
heavily involved, with Prime Minister Soares as honorary president, Deputy
Prime Minister Carlos Mota Pinto (PSD) and Pereira (PSD) giving open-
ing speeches, and Soares giving the closing speech. Several other Portuguese
politicians also participated, including Maria Barroso, a prominent PSP leader
(and Soares’s wife). Blunt statements were made during the hearing. Pereira
situated it squarely in the conﬂict between “two political philosophies: the
pluralist democracy which respects human rights and totalitarianism, which
suppresses them.”195 Deputy Prime Minister Mota Pinto condemned the

190. Presidência do Conselho de Ministros, “Audiências Sakharov,” n.d., in Papers of Mário Soares,
Fundação Mário Soares; and “International Sakharov Hearings, 4th Session, Lisbon,” press release, in
Box 19, Houghton Library.

191. Dewhirst to Pereira, 6 February 1983, in Corti Papers.

192. Dewhirst to Pereira, 23 June 1983, in Corti Papers.

193. “União Soviética espezinha e anula os direitos dos seus cidadãos,” Diário de notícias (Lisbon), 13
October 1983, p. 4; “Audiências Sakharov condenam URSS e Polónia,” Diário popular (Lisbon), 13
October 1983, p. 6; João Carlos Espada, “André Glucksmann: ‘Um intelectual não é um senhor que
não se engana,’” Expresso (Lisbon), 15 October 1983, p. 29; and Hélène Carrère d’Encausse to Pereira,
24 October 1983, in Lopes Papers. The proceedings were published in Russian. Semyon Reznik,
ed., The Fourth International Sakharov Hearing: Lisbon, October 1983 (London: Overseas Publications
Interchange, 1985). A planned Portuguese version never materialized. See Lyubarsky to Lopes, 4 July
1986, in Lopes Papers.

194. Dewhirst to Pereira, 17 March 1983, in Corti Papers; and Tel., Pereira to Lyubarsky, n.d., in
Folder “International Sakharov Hearings, Session IV (Lisbon 1983),” Box 19, Houghton Library.

195. Pereira’s opening speech, in Box 19, Houghton Library.

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Soviet regime as a historically unprecedented “strong and violent totalitarian-
ism.”196 The quasi-ofﬁcial government participation in the hearing triggered
debates in the Portuguese parliament. A motion of protest by the left-wing
Portuguese Democratic Movement/Democratic Electoral Commissions was
rejected. Instead, the parliamentary majority voted in support of the hear-
ing.197 The hearing’s resolution demanded that Sakharov be set free and asked
West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher to raise the issue of
Sakharov’s freedom with the Soviet leader Yurii Andropov during his upcom-
ing visit to Moscow.198

The London Hearing

The ﬁfth hearing was held in the London Press Center on 10–11 April 1985.
Yankelevich was heavily involved in the choice of London as venue. In Febru-
ary 1984, when he and Dewhirst discussed plans for a ﬁfth hearing, they
agreed that they should ask Allan Wynn to join them. Wynn, an Australian
physician who had moved to London in 1972, was a veteran among West-
ern supporters of Soviet-bloc dissidents. Inspired by Rosemary Winckley and
Markham, he had, from 1973 onward, been increasingly involved in support-
ing Soviet-bloc dissidents such as Bukovsky, Ginzburg, and Piotr Grigorenko.
In 1982, he succeed Reddaway as chairman of the Working Group on Intern-
ment of Dissenters in Mental Hospitals, and the following year he became
a member of the board of Edward Lozansky’s U.S.-based Andrei Sakharov
Institute. Wynn’s focus was on human rights. He clearly sympathized with
Markham’s dismay at how a Soviet exile such as Bukovsky “had been taken
under the wing of people whose devotion to rightwing causes appeared to
be greatly in excess of their concern with human rights.”199 In the summer
of 1984, Yankelevich contacted Wynn and suggested that he be in charge of
the London hearing. Wynn initially was skeptical, arguing “that the Sakharovs

196. “União Soviética espezinha e anula os direitos dos seus cidadãos,” p. 4. Formally, Mota Pinto
spoke in a personal capacity and not as deputy prime minister.

197. “1. sess. leg., Reunião Plenária,” Diário da Assembleia da República, 13 October 1983, pp. 1,467–
1,468; and “1. sess. leg., Reunião Plenária,” Diário da Assembleia da República, 20 October 1983,
pp. 1,566, 1,590–1,599.” See also http://debates.parlamento.pt; and Lyubarsky to James Buckley, 1
December 1983, in Box 19, Houghton Library.

198. “Secretariado das ‘Audiências Sakharov’ pede intercessão de Genscher junto de Andropov,” A
Capital, 14 October 1983, p. 4; and Tel., Glucksmann et al. to Genscher, in Box 19, Houghton
Library.

199. Allan Wynn, Notes of a Non-Conspirator: Working with Russian Dissidents (London: André
Deutsch, 1987), pp. 37, 60.

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[were] to be hostages to Reagan’s re-election prospects.”200 He had some gen-
eral misgivings too:

I had been warned by friends who had been involved in the organization of ear-
lier Hearings that, perhaps inevitably, they provided a forum in which disparate
dissident groups tried to gain media attention for their views, some of which
were, to put it mildly, somewhat extreme.201

He feared the potential political impact of the hearing. Ten years after the
signing of the Helsinki Final Act, Yankelevich wanted the hearing to evaluate
Soviet compliance and then to draw conclusions on the desirability of sticking
to a policy of détente.202 Because Soviet compliance with the human rights
provisions of the agreement left much to be desired, Wynn feared that the ﬁnal
recommendation of such an evaluation would be that the whole process ought
to be scrapped, a step that, in his view, would be a serious mistake.203 Having
discussed the issue with Max Kampelman, head of the U.S. delegation at the
CSCE meeting in Madrid, and with the British CSCE team, he felt conﬁdent
that his viewpoint was aligned with ofﬁcial U.S. and British policy. Thus,
in part to prevent an undesirable outcome, Wynn accepted responsibility for
the hearing. He asked Dewhirst to be in charge of the practical preparations,
and an executive committee comprising Dewhirst, Reddaway, and Michael
Scammell was established. The London hearing thus assembled a group of
exceptionally knowledgeable people, with Wynn and Dewhirst as the driving
forces.204 Bourdeaux and his staff from Keston College were also among those
who contributed.205

200. Wynn to Dewhirst, 14 July 1984, in Kline Papers; Jack Lennard to Dewhirst, 1 March 1984, in
Kline Papers; Yankelevich to Lennard, 18 February 1984, in Kline Papers; Lennard to Yankelevich, 14
March 1984, in Kline Papers; and Yankelevich to Lennard, 14 April 1984, in Kline Papers.

201. Wynn, Notes of a Non-Conspirator, p. 177.

202. In March 1985, Yankelevich invited the mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, whom he had met during
the summer of 1984, to the planned Sakharov Hearing in London and added, “I was pleased to learn
that you share my opinion that the suspension of [the] Helsinki Accords, or at least a threat to suspend
them, could make [the] Soviet government more sensitive to the Western opinion on their human
rights abuses.” See Yankelevich to Chirac, 5 March 1985, in Box 21, Houghton Library.

203. Wynn, Notes of a Non-Conspirator, pp. 177–188; Yankelevich to Lennard, 18 February 1984;
Dewhirst to Lennard, 28 February 1984; Yankelevich to Lennard, 14 April 1984; and Yankelevich to
Wiesenthal, 7 January 1984, in Box 21, Houghton Library. Yankelevich’s ﬁrst choice was Scammell.
Wynn agreed to take over only because Scammell was unavailable. See Wynn to Gershman, n.d.
(probably second half of February 1985), in Box 21, Houghton Library.

204. Dewhirst, “Notes on Discussions between EY, AW and MD 10/84,” 9 November 1984, in Box
21, Houghton Library; Yankelevich to Wynn, 6 December 1984, in Box 21, Houghton Library; and
Wynn, Notes of a Non-conspirator, pp. 177–188.

205. Dewhirst to Bourdeaux, 11 July 1985.

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What made the hearing possible at all was the early securing of substan-
tial U.S. funding. The bulk of the expenses were covered by a contribution
that Yankelevich obtained from the National Endowment for Democracy
(NED).206 The London hearing also beneﬁted from practical assistance from
the U.S. Helsinki Commission.207 Expenses were further kept down by using
Wynn’s apartment as the ofﬁce for the executive committee and by letting
Wynn cover some of the administrative expenses.208 As for the event itself, the
organizers ﬁrst sought to have the London School of Economics (LSE) host it.
However, LSE administrators decided “it would not be in the best interests of
the School to become involved in such a contentious issue.”209 The London
Press Center was thus chosen in its stead.

Wiesenthal agreed to chair the hearing’s panel. Against Yankelevich’s
wishes, Wynn and Dewhirst opted for a shortened, two- rather than three-
day conference. Their goal was for the hearing to have an impact through the
media rather than be a “talk fest,” and they thus believed that length might be
a handicap rather than an advantage.210

The organizers tried to elicit a statement of support from British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher, but this effort was unsuccessful.211 However,
they did manage to gather a strong group of participants. The London hear-
ing brought together many prominent ﬁgures: seasoned Sakharov Hearings
participants, policymakers (e.g., U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Hu-
man Rights Elliott Abrams and U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
Mark Palmer), government ofﬁcials (e.g., John MacGregor, assistant head of

206. Dewhirst to Lawrence Elliott, 30 September 1985; Dewhirst, “Notes on Discussions between EY,
AW and MD 10/84”; Dewhirst to Charles Janson, 10 January 1985, in Box 21, Houghton Library;
Wynn to Yankelevich, 17 February 1985, Box 21, Houghton Library; and Wynn to Gershman, n.d.
The NED was established in 1984 as a private organization that was publicly funded through yearly
U.S. congressional allocations. From 1984 to 2021, Gershman served as the NED’s president. See
Robert Pee, “The Rise of Political Aid: The National Endowment for Democracy and the Reagan
Administration’s Cold War Strategy,” in Robert Pee and William Michael Schmidli, eds., The Reagan
Administration, the Cold War, and the Transition to Democracy Promotion (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2019), pp. 51–74.

207. Dewhirst to Dante B. Fascell (Chairman, U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in
Europe), 22 March 1985, in Kline Papers.

208. Martin Dewhirst, interview, London, 29 August 2013; Wynn to Yankelevich, 17 February 1985;
Wynn to Gershman, n.d. (probably second half of February 1985), in Kline Papers; and “Revised
Budget,” December 1984, in Kline Papers.

209. Dewhirst to Barrett, 28 May 1984, in Kline Papers; and Barrett to Dewhirst, 7 June 1984, in
Kline Papers.

210. Wynn, Notes of a Non-Conspirator, p. 180; and Wynn to Yankelevich, 29 November 1984, in
Kline Papers.

211. Dewhirst to Reddaway, 31 March 1985, in Kline Papers.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

the UK Foreign Ofﬁce’s Soviet Department, Cathy Cosman from the U.S.
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe), and leaders of non-
governmental organizations (e.g., Gerald Nagler, director of the International
Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, and Paul Sieghart, chairman of the
British section of the ICJ).212 A key distinguishing feature of the London hear-
ing was that it gathered experts and decision-makers rather than witnesses.
Whereas ambitions to have a domestic impact may have been paramount in
Copenhagen and possibly also in Lisbon, the ﬁfth hearing, to a greater extent
than any of the others, sought to affect the CSCE process.

The London hearing was scheduled for just before the beginning of the
CSCE follow-up conference in Ottawa in order to maximize its chances of
having an impact on the latter’s proceedings.213 Moreover, the theme cho-
sen for the hearing was domestic developments in the Soviet Union in the
ﬁrst decade after the Helsinki Final Act. The idea was to evaluate the degree
to which the Soviet Union had lived up to the commitments entered into
in 1975.214 Abrams, the Reagan administration’s representative at the hear-
ing, defended continued involvement in the Helsinki process, emphasizing
that “CSCE is a valuable forum for carrying on the human rights struggle”
between the West and the Soviet bloc.215 Yankelevich reiterated Sakharov’s
principled support for détente. However, he also emphasized what he termed
“the Sakharov doctrine”: that peace and human rights were indivisible and
that any détente worthy of the name implied progress for human rights
and democracy in the Soviet Union too.216 The hearing concluded with a

212. “Fifth International Sakharov Hearing” (Program), in Folder “5. Hearing. London, 4/85, Korre-
spondenz,” Box “S.H. 1985 + Andere Veranst.,” SWA. Patricia Derian initially accepted an invitation
but later had to cancel. See Derian to Wynn, 27 February 1985, in Box 21, Houghton Library. Accord-
ing to the Jewish Chronicle, which had spoken with Wynn, John MacGregor “represented” UK Foreign
Minister Malcolm Rifkind. See “Soviet Jews Ignored in Rights Probe,” Jewish Chronicle (London), 19
April 1985, newspaper clipping, in SWA.

213. Dewhirst to Jeri Laber, 4 February 1985, in Box 48, HRWA. The organizers speciﬁcally ruled
out the discussion of socioeconomic rights: “It has been unanimously agreed that the topic dealing
with living conditions in the USSR is outside the scope of Helsinki—we do not accept that socioeco-
nomic facts are human rights as the Soviets claim (as an excuse for the denial of political rights).” See
Yankelevich to Lyman, 17 November 1984, in Box 21, Houghton Library.

214. “Fifth International Sakharov Hearing,” press release, n.d., in Kline Papers.

215. Elliott Abrams, “Inﬂuencing Soviet Human Rights Policy,” in Allan Wynn, ed., Fifth International
Sakharov Hearing (London: André Deutsch, 1986), p. 150.

216. Wynn, Notes of a Non-Conspirator, pp. 180–181. This view was widely shared by other Soviet-
bloc dissidents. See, for example, Elisabetta Vezzosi, “The Committee of Concerned Scientists and
the Helsinki Final Act: ‘Refusenik’ Scientists, Détente and Human Rights,” in Nicolas Badalassi and
Sarah B. Snyder, eds., The CSCE and the End of the Cold War: Diplomacy, Societies and Human Rights,
1972–1990 (New York: Berghahn, 2019), p. 126.

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resolution that appealed to the participants in the Ottawa “meeting of Experts
to prepare the meeting on Compliance with Human Rights and Fundamental
Freedoms” to consider the material gathered by the Fifth Sakharov Hearing,
to improve the human rights situation in the Soviet Union, and to secure
Sakharov’s freedom.217 The hearing seems to have had a signiﬁcant media im-
pact.218 In addition, Dewhirst and Wynn believed that it had an impact on
the CSCE process and on British human rights policy:

[We] feel we made some impact on the Ottawa meeting in May and June. So
far as Britain is concerned, we were taken seriously (after, I suspect, some initial
misgivings) by “the authorities,” with whom we remain in close touch. Human
rights, both in general and always with some carefully chosen speciﬁc cases, are
now automatically raised by UK representatives every time they meet with any
Soviet ofﬁcials. Dr. Wynn and I feel that we have made, and will continue to
make, a worthwhile input here.219

Wiesenthal, who had not been involved in the preparations, told Wynn that
“he had never attended an event with greater international impact.”220 The
extent to which the London hearing actually had this alleged impact is an
issue still needing to be explored.

217. Yankelevich to Yale Richmond, 24 April 1985 (misdated 1984), in Box 21, Houghton Library.

218. See, for example, “Out of Balance” (editorial), The Times (London), 9 April 1985, newspaper
clipping, in SWA; “Trumpet Call” (editorial), The Times, 15 April 1985, newspaper clipping, in SWA;
“Moskau unterdrückt die Krim-Tataren,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 April 1985, newspaper
clipping, in HRWA; and Yankelevich to Jeri Laber and Robert Bernstein, 26 April 1985, in Box 48,
HRWA.

219. Dewhirst to Elliott, 30 September 1985. Tracing the origins of such ideas and practices is obvi-
ously difﬁcult. Bourdeaux, involved in the London hearing as a sponsor, adviser, speaker, and provider
of practical assistance, was an adviser to Thatcher on human rights issues (1983–1989) and a mem-
ber of the conservative advisory group Centre for Policy Studies. See Dewhirst to Bourdeaux, 11 July
1985. Bourdeaux, Wynn, and Dewhirst all pushed for more explicit support of dissidents during ofﬁ-
cial British visits to Soviet-bloc countries. Michael Bourdeaux, interview, Ifﬂey, UK, 27 August 2013;
and Dewhirst to Elliott, 30 September 1985. See also Mark Hurst, British Human Rights Organiza-
tions and Soviet Dissent, 1965–1985 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 138. Whether for this
reason or some other, Sir Geoffrey Howe (foreign secretary, 1983–1989) did initiate dissident contacts
and advised his fellow Western foreign ministers to do the same. Howe’s prompting is what inspired
Danish Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen (Liberal Party) to meet dissidents in Czechoslovakia
in March 1989. Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, interview, Hellerup, Denmark, 5 August 2014. Wynn’s and
Dewhirst’s connection with Thatcher allowed them to arrange a meeting between the prime minister
and Bonner when Sakharov’s wife was in London in May 1986. Wynn, Notes of a Non-conspirator,
pp. 193, 198–199. See also Dewhirst to Rifkind, 23 January 1985, in Kline Papers; and Roland (For-
eign Ofﬁce, Soviet Section, Research Department) to Sheinwald, 5 November 1982, in FCO28/5093,
The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNAUK).

220. Wynn to Lennard, 16 April 1985, in Box 21, Houghton Library.

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An Overall Assessment: Right-Wing Transnational
Human Rights Activism?

The International Sakharov Hearings can be depicted as a series of interna-
tional citizens’ tribunals that resulted from right-wing transnational human
rights activism pursued in Sakharov’s name in the context of the Helsinki
process. Each component of this characterization, however, must be qualiﬁed
or at least explained.

“International Citizens’ Tribunals”

The Sakharov Hearings ﬁt into the pattern of what are customarily called
“international citizens’ tribunals.” Initiated in the 1930s, tribunals achieved a
renaissance of sorts with the 1967 Russell Tribunal on the Vietnam War.221
Since then, numerous citizens’ tribunals have been set up, some with an in-
ternational scope, others with a domestic focus. A full explanation of why the
phenomenon of the tribunal expanded after the early 1960s is beyond the
scope of this article, but among the factors suggested by observers are the “de-
mocratization” of foreign policy in the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam War protest
movements, and the rise of various social movements in Western countries.
The ﬁrst Sakharov Hearing was presented as a necessary corrective and com-
plement to the Russell Tribunal and included such classic components of in-
ternational citizens’ tribunals as a “prosecution” (the opening statements); a
trial and examination of the evidence (witnesses); the involvement of victims;
the absence of any kind of defense (a feature occasionally deplored by some
participants); the testimony of lawyers, scholars, and other experts; references
to legal documents and international agreements (human rights legislation
and the Helsinki Final Act); media participation; attempts to have a broader
impact; a strong political agenda; and a verdict (conclusions of the hearing).
As international citizens’ tribunals, the Sakharov Hearings were remarkable
for their institutional ﬂuidity. No single secretariat was in charge of all the
hearings, and it is difﬁcult even now to determine who was really in charge of
each individual hearing.

The expression “citizens’ tribunal” is also misleading. The initiatives
were taken not by ordinary citizens but by small groups of activists, and
the “tribunals” were not really tribunals; they were political rather than le-
gal events. Even among the organizers the term “tribunal” was controversial.

221. Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals, p. 103 ff.

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The “Moscow Appeal” called for a tribunal, and the Danes initially used that
term, but they soon shifted to the more neutral “hearing.” The Italians were
torn. The ofﬁcial name given to the Rome event was “udienze” (hearing), in
line with Corti’s thinking. However, some members of the organizing group
preferred “tribunal,” and the Italian press generally referred to the event as
the “Tribunale Sacharov.” After Corti’s exit, those in charge of the publication
of the proceedings titled the book Tribunale Sacharov, a term that has stuck
to the Rome event ever since. Both in Washington and in Lisbon the ofﬁcial
name was “hearing,” but occasionally, though rarely in the U.S. case, the word
“tribunal” was used in non-ofﬁcial correspondence. In London the event was
consistently referred to as a “hearing.”222

“Right-Wing”

Most human rights transnational activism in the 1970s can be labeled “left-
wing,” at least in its origin.223 The Sakharov Hearings appear to be the odd
case out. One scholar, Arthur Blaser, has argued that participants in the
Sakharov Hearings leaned to the right.224 His characterization is generally ac-
curate, though in need of qualiﬁcation. The ﬁrst hearing was organized by
rightwing anti-Communists whose primary concern was to wage a domestic
political battle against the left. For those organizers, countering the efforts of
the Russell Tribunal by shifting the focus from “Western” to “Eastern” human
rights violations was essential. For the remaining hearings, however, the story
is more complicated. Russia Christiana had a rightwing reputation, reinforced
by its links with Comunione e Liberazione. Some even labeled it “fascist,”
and some believed it to be CIA-ﬁnanced.225 The Washington organizers were

222. Thorne occasionally called the Washington event a “tribunal.” Thorne to Sakharov Hearings
Executive Committee Members, Counsel, and Staff and Tom Kahn, Myron Kolatch, Steve Brooks,
Roger Kaplan, Roman Kupchinsky, Heather Richardson, Irving Brown, 29 August 1979, in Box 14,
Houghton Library. The Lisbon hearing was initially called “Tribunal Internacional Sakharov” before
changing its name to “audiências.” Pereira to Lyubarsky, 13 September 1982, in Corti Papers; and
Dewhirst to Pereira, 9 July 1983.

223. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2012), pp. 4, 168; and Van Dongen, Roulin, and Scott-Smith, eds., Transnational Anti-
Communism, p. 9.

224. Blaser, “How to Advance Human Rights,” pp. 354–355.

225. On the close links between Russia Cristiana and Comunione e Liberazione that developed from
the mid-1960s, see Colognesi, Russia Cristiana, pp. 100–102. Alberti sympathized with the Movi-
mento Popolare (she considered it “the healthiest group in Italy”), a rightwing Christian Democrat
party founded by Roberto Formigoni. Thorne to Sussman, 1 July 1986, in Folder “1,” Box 107, Se-
ries 4, FHA. On the links between Russia Cristiana and Movimento Popolare, see Colognesi, Russia
Cristiana, p. 162.

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hosted by Freedom House and later made careers within that organization,
whose take on the human rights issue was arguably conservative; its leaders
saw the issue as a key one in the Cold War but wanted to limit its application
to civil and political rights.226 The Lisbon hearing was organized by a centrist
or center-right politician. The organizers of the London hearing subscribed
to the view that socioeconomic rights did not qualify as human rights, but
they do not otherwise appear to have had a strongly party-political afﬁliation,
though Wynn disapproved of what he saw as extremist right-wing views. The
only high-proﬁle policymaker among the London speakers was Abrams, as-
sistant secretary for human rights in the Reagan administration, and he was
not particularly popular among human rights activists. However, the London
hearing had a greater political ﬂuidity than a “rightwing” label might lead us
to believe. From the outset, the organizers of Sakharov Hearings made an ef-
fort to obtain sponsors and participants from the non-Communist left and
occasionally even from among Eurocommunists. The Copenhagen group was
so satisﬁed with Social Democrat Ole Espersen’s role during the ﬁrst hearing
that they ensured, despite their disagreements with him, that he was one of a
few Danes to serve on the panel for the Rome hearing, with his trip and stay
fully covered.227 When Corti in 1982 gave Pereira tips for a successful hearing,
he wrote,

When organizing the Hearings in Italy I realized that another precondition for
their full success was the involvement of representatives of the whole political
spectrum, and, speciﬁcally, of representatives of political forces that, presum-
ably, would have assumed the most critical attitude toward the hearings. So, for
example, we succeeded in involving Senator Umberto Terracini . . . a member of
the Communist Party’s Central Committee.228

For both the second and the fourth hearings, a Social Democratic executive di-
rector was considered as an option (Lie and Ivo Samkalden respectively), and
a Socialist, Soares, was the Lisbon hearing’s honorary president, ﬁnal keynote
speaker, and host of a dinner for the participants.229 Political considerations
also affected the content of some of the hearings, and they help to explain
the attention given to workers’ rights in the Soviet Union. These generally

226. Carl J. Bon Tempo, “From the Center-Right: Freedom House and Human Rights in the 1970s
and 1980s,” in Petra Goedde and William Hitchcock, eds., The Human Rights Revolution: An Interna-
tional History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 223–244.

227. “Møde den 15.12. 1977,” in Kühl Papers; and “Møde den 1.8. 1977,” in Kühl Papers.

228. Corti to Pereira, draft letter, n.d. See also “Møde den 30.3. 1977.”

229. Alexeyeva, “On the Sakharov Hearings,” pp. 55–56.

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moderate left-of-center participants did not always limit themselves to just
putting in an appearance. They sometimes intervened and helped shape the
hearings. Even though the Copenhagen hearing was organized by right-wing
anti-Communists with a domestic political agenda, many key subsequent or-
ganizers appear to have been primarily and genuinely preoccupied with hu-
man rights issues rather than with any kind of party politics. The hearings did
not lend themselves to easy or simplistic political categorization.230

“Transnationalism”

All the hearings had a dual nature. Each was steeped in a particular setting,
had unique features reﬂecting its national, political, cultural, and temporal
context, as well as more contingent or agency-related characteristics connected
to the speciﬁc group of organizers. And yet, the International Sakharov Hear-
ings are an obvious and original case of transnationalism in “the long 1970s.”
Each was part of a transnational process, and they all shared certain fea-
tures. Organized by non-state actors, the hearings took place in ﬁve differ-
ent capitals. Each hearing involved organizers, sponsors, multiple categories
of participants (e.g., witnesses, panel members, audiences, chairs), fundrais-
ing by non-state actors (Bible-smuggling groups, the National Endowment
for Democracy, and various foundations, trade unions, and individuals), and
most achieved a broad impact through international media coverage. More-
over, the hearings were all part of a single transnational process. The ﬁrst hear-
ing would not have taken place without the “Moscow Appeal.” None of the
subsequent hearings would have been imaginable without the previous ones.
There was also a basic continuity between the hearings. They shared not just
the name but also concepts and organization, the human rights theme, and
several individuals, networks, and milieux. The International Sakharov Com-
mittee (the Copenhagen committee), Wiesenthal, and the Sakharov family
were involved in all ﬁve hearings. The Sakharov family (Bonner, Sakharov,
and Yankelevich) played key roles in deciding the location and giving the go-
ahead to each of the gatherings. Several additional individuals played a role

230. In 1982, a British Foreign Ofﬁce ofﬁcial related his conversation with Corti and Dewhirst. He
reported their critical remarks about some Soviet dissidents and then continued: “Dewhirst . . . spoke
of the tactical need for the West to support Russian nationalist dissidents who had a greater chance of
achieving popularity than the human rights activists. This is, of course, a popular theme with some
emigrants—including the NTS—and certain Western academics and, naturally, highly unpopular
with most Jewish emigrants. Dewhirst argued that such an approach would be a more realistic way of
trying to disintegrate the system from within, even if at ﬁrst an unpleasant fascist type of State might
emerge.” See Roland to Sheinwald, 13 April 1982, FCO28/5093, TNAUK.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

in most or all of the hearings: Corti, Thorne, Dewhirst, Bourdeaux, Gersten-
maier, Lyubarsky, and Reddaway. Among the recurring networks and milieux
were the Bible-smuggling community (Keston College, the Danish Europe
Mission, and other Scandinavian Bible-smuggling groups, Russia Cristiana,
etc.); several exile Soviet groups (including La Pensée russe, Kontinent, possibly
also the NTS); the ICJ (Sieghart, Shestack, and Pereira); and the International
League of Human Rights (Shestack and Pereira). One means of signaling con-
tinuity was for the organizers of previous hearings to be given the opportunity
to address all the participants at the opening of the next hearing.231 Finally,
this transnationalism involved not only intra-Western cooperation but also
East-West cooperation among Westerners, Soviet-bloc dissidents (Sakharov
and Bonner in particular), and exiles.

The many links between those involved in the Sakharov Hearings obeyed
different and often overlapping logics. In some cases, the links were profes-
sional or expertise-based. Reddaway was a professor at the LSE, Dewhirst was
a lecturer at Glasgow University, and both were experts on Soviet politics—as
academics and as activists. Although Corti was not an academic scholar, he
too became an expert on the Soviet Union.232 For some, opposition to Com-
munism or human rights activism provided the glue (Feldsted Andresen, Ger-
stenmaier, Thorne, Wynn, Reddaway, Corti, and Dewhirst were all, in various
ways, engaged in anti-Communist or human rights–related activities).233 For
still others, links, whether positive or hostile, were created because the Soviet
bloc was a deeply personal issue (e.g., émigrés involved in exile politics).

The International Sakharov Hearings provided a transnational public
sphere in which conﬂicts were waged.234 The provenance of these con-
ﬂicts was not always easy to identify. Some were personal, and others were
presented as cultural (both the Danes and the British pointed ﬁngers at
the Soviet émigrés’ alleged penchant for inﬁghting, self-righteousness, and

231. Yankelevich to Pereira, 14 September 1983, in Box 19, Houghton Library. The London hearing
was different in that respect as well. Feldsted Andresen was invited to attend but not to give a speech.

232. A British Foreign Ofﬁce ofﬁcial praised Corti for doing “a highly professional job” as second in
command of Radio Liberty’s Arkhiv Samizdata. Roland to Sheinwald, 13 April 1982.

233. An example: Gerstenmaier, daughter of former Bundestag President Eugen Gerstenmaier, formed
together with Thorne and Markham what Thorne called “Bukovsky’s troika” because of their active
role in support of Bukovsky until his release in December 1975. Thorne, “Memoirs,” p. 194. Gersten-
maier met Bukovsky during a visit to Moscow in 1970. Bukovsky, interview.

234. On divisions among Soviet dissident exiles, see Vaissié, “Le combat des dissidents de Russie en
Occident,” pp. 151–154. On conﬂicts in Soviet-bloc exile circles, see also Stéphane Dufoix, Politiques
d’exil: Hongrois, Polonais et Tchécoslovaques en France après 1945 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2002), pp. 79–85.

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responsibility for

long-windedness).235 Some conﬂicts boiled down to power struggles (who
the hearings—the International
should have overall
Sakharov Committee? another competing institution? the successive organiz-
ing committees? Yankelevich?). Some controversies were clearly political, pit-
ting different strands within the Soviet émigré community (such as liberals
and nationalists) against each other. Similarly, proponents of détente were op-
posed to those who advocated that the Helsinki process be scrapped and to
other Cold Warrior anti-Communists. Human rights activists who preferred
to focus on civil and political rights were at odds with those who believed
that socioeconomic rights were also human rights and were therefore topics
relevant for the Sakharov Hearings.236 Underlying all of this was sometimes an
ethical tension between those who took an anything-goes approach in ﬁghting
the Soviet Union and those who insisted on truth and objectivity.237

But did the International Sakharov Hearings represent a transnational
turn? Transnationalism was not new.238 Those who organized the hearings
had often been involved in transnational activities in the 1960s or even ear-
lier. Many had participated in international anti-Communist networks or in
transnational exile politics (Bible-smuggling, ACEN, ABN, EFC).239 Coop-
eration between the organizers of the different Sakharov Hearings was greatly
facilitated by preexisting personal links and international organizations and
networks. Yet, the hearings did represent a transnational turn insofar as they
led to a deepening and broadening of international contacts before, during,
and after each hearing. Where did this turn lead? The tempting conclusion is

235. See, for example, Wynn, Notes of a Non-Conspirator, p. 180: “Russians are very rarely brief when
given a public opportunity to air their views. On the contrary, they always seem to be convinced that
what they have to say is epoch-making and that, irrespective of prior agreement, they must be given
unlimited time to say it.” The time allotted to the speakers or their lack of self-discipline tended to
spark acrimony at most of the hearings.

236. Jappelli, “Cronache del ‘Tribunale Sacharov.’” Corti emphasized that for criticism of Soviet-bloc
human rights violations to be credible, activists also had to be willing to criticize “Western” human
rights violations: “I would like to express my hope that the concern for human rights in the so-called
Socialist bloc not lead to the easing of our own consciences but would always be accompanied by an
identical concern for the implementation of human rights in our own country, in our own home. If
this were not so, then our work could be described in many convenient ways, but it could not be
described as a true concern for human rights.” Corti, Notes for speech to the Washington hearing,
n.d., in Corti Papers.

237. Corti, Note, n.d.; and Wynn, Notes of a Non-Conspirator, pp. 31, 43–44, 93–94.

238. Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2013).

239. See, for example, Slava Stetsko to Kühl, 27 August 1982, in Kühl Papers; and Kühl to Yaroslav
Stetsko, 15 August 1982, in Kühl Papers.

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

. . . nowhere. In the ﬁve countries that hosted the Sakharov Hearings, hardly
any visible legacy or memory of them remains.240

Such a stark judgment, however, may give short shrift to their actual im-
pact. The available evidence suggests that the International Sakharov Hearings
did matter at the time they took place. Before concluding that the hearings
had no long-term impact, more thorough studies will be needed on the effects
of the hearings in the host countries. In principle, many kinds of impact are
conceivable. In Denmark the ﬁrst hearing has been used in memory wars con-
cerning the Cold War. In the United States the third hearing probably inﬂu-
enced the subsequent development of Freedom House and, especially, its focus
on Afghanistan and the Soviet bloc.241 The London hearing may have had an
inﬂuence on British human rights policy. All of the hearings—especially the
last two—involved a dialogue between non-state actors and policymakers, the
impact of which we know too little about. These are some of the issues that
deserve further investigation.

“Human Rights”

To what extent were the hearings not just about human rights in the Soviet
bloc but about domestic politics in the countries where the hearings were
held? Disentangling the instrumental from the genuine is often difﬁcult, or
even impossible. Ostensibly, the hearings were about human rights violations
in the Soviet bloc. The organizers often stressed that the sessions were not
about anti-Communism, anti-Sovietism, or domestic politics. However, do-
mestic politics played a signiﬁcant role in Denmark and Portugal and was
not absent in Italy. In the Danish case, regardless of the ofﬁcial human rights
discourse, domestic anti-Communism still appeared to be a driving motive
for the organizers. In Italy, Solzhenitsyn’s denunciation of Eurocommunism
highlighted the role of the PCI. In Portugal, keynote speakers decried Com-
munism as a totalitarian threat to democracy, and the hearing was hotly de-
bated in the Portuguese parliament. On the margins, the Washington hear-
ing may have fueled polemics about the substance of the Carter administra-
tion’s human rights policy, but domestic political instrumentalization of the

240. The one exception is Denmark. However, the International Sakharov Committee was always a
tiny group, and its newsletter Danizdat ceased to appear in 1991. Neerskov (d. 2017) took over the
chairmanship of the International Sakharov Committee when Feldsted Andresen died in 1997.

241. Karatnycky, interview. After the hiring of Thorne, Freedom House became a “center for work
on behalf of Soviet dissidents.” See Freedom House, “Remembering Leonard R. Sussman, Former
Freedom House Executive Director,” press release, 29 March 2015, https://freedomhouse.org/article/
remembering-leonard-r-sussman-former-freedom-house-executive-director.

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hearing appears to have been insigniﬁcant. That seems even more obvious for
the London hearing.

“Grassroots Activism”

The hearings were instigated and organized by non-state actors and may be
understood as a case of grassroots activism.242 However, rumors that were
spread by the Soviet Union—and dismissed by the organizers—circulated
about covert U.S. government (speciﬁcally CIA) involvement in the hearings.
Although some indications of possible U.S. involvement, including testimony
about U.S. embassy or CIA support for the Copenhagen group and the NED’s
funding of the ﬁfth hearing, have emerged, there is no conclusive evidence.
Whether the United States acted as a facilitator of events that would other-
wise not have materialized cannot be determined on the basis of currently
available sources.243 Although the Sakharov Hearings certainly appear to have
emerged from initiatives taken by non-state actors, these actors persistently
sought contact with, support from, and inﬂuence on governments. Some-
times their endeavors in this regard were successful, as in 1983 and, possibly
(and more signiﬁcantly if true), in the case of the London hearing.

“Sakharov”

The “Father of the Soviet Hydrogen Bomb,” the prominent human rights ac-
tivist who by the mid-1970s had become the Soviet Union’s “Public Enemy
No. 1,” was involved in the hearings in multiple ways.244 He was a driving
force behind the “Moscow Appeal,” suggesting the establishment of a tribunal.

242. “In this memorandum we would likewise like to remind all of us that the main purpose of
the Sakharov Hearings is to examine and to bring to light the status of human rights in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, and that they should not be considered as a political undertaking. In this
connection, the Hearings should not accept funds from any government or governmental body and
they should not serve the purpose of any political group or party.” U.S. Sakharov Hearing Committee
to the Danish and Italian Sakharov Hearings Committees, 4 May 1979.

243. The explanation for this may simply be that the author has had no access to the relevant intelli-
gence archives.

244. Sidney D. Drell and Sergei P. Kapitza, eds., Sakharov Remembered: A Tribute by Friends and Col-
leagues (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1991), p. 130; and Lourie, Sakharov, p. 276. One
dimension of Sakharov’s key early role among dissidents in the Soviet Union is illustrated by the
following quotation: “In the dissident community, [Chalidze] was known as ‘the prince,’ Sakharov
was ‘the physicist,’ Solzhenitsyn ‘the classic,’ and Petr Grigorenko was ‘the general.’ When a group of
dissidents was planning to gather signatures for an important human rights document, they would
ask ‘Whom should we go to ﬁrst?’ It was usually ‘the physicist,’ and then ‘the general’ and ‘the
prince;’ everyone knew that ‘the classic’ practically never signed joint statements, so there was no use
in trying.” Thorne, “Memoirs,” pp. 142–143. This role is hardly remembered in today’s Russia. Serge

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The International Sakharov Hearings and Transnational Human Rights Activism

He gave the green light to hold the hearings and occasionally provided more
substantial input (suggesting some themes, advising against others). Until he
was deported to Gorky in January 1980, he sent a message to each hear-
ing. He was, moreover, involved through his wife, Bonner, who tried to
co-organize the ﬁrst hearing and, with much more success, helped shape
the second hearing. He also acted through Yankelevich, his representative in
the West from 1977 onward, who had a say in major decisions, particularly
the choice of host country.

Although the hearings’ initial focus was not on Sakharov’s own fate, that
changed after he had been sent into internal exile. All subsequent hearings
concluded with initiatives aimed at easing Sakharov’s situation. That the hear-
ings achieved such longevity and managed to involve so many prominent ex-
iles and Western dissident-supporters likely had much to do with the chosen
name, which provided both a good cause and a prestigious patronage. The
hearings did not make Sakharov famous—he already was. But they helped
to enhance international interest in him and the wider dissident commu-
nity and to keep pressure on the Soviet regime, particularly in the 1980s,
when Sakharov became a major bone of contention in the West’s relationship
with Moscow.245 Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision in December 1986 to allow
Sakharov to return to Moscow signaled a major step for the Soviet leader’s lib-
eralization efforts. However, Sakharov’s name was not uncontroversial. Com-
munists campaigned against him. In particular, they used his letter to Augusto
Pinochet in an attempt to discredit him as an admirer of the Chilean dicta-
tor.246 Generally, however, propaganda against the hearings focused on their
purported goals or instigators rather than on Sakharov himself. What is strik-
ing is how coveted his name was. Many human rights groups took up his
cause, especially after January 1980. Some made Sakharov a major focus of
their activities and signaled this by naming themselves after him. In that world
the “International Sakharov Hearings” were an important player, as they con-
stituted a recurrent event that enjoyed the blessing of Sakharov and his fam-
ily. Other actors purported to defend Sakharov too. In most cases this was

Schmemann, “Sakharov, Little Remembered in Putin’s Russia,” The New York Times, 18 December
2014, p. A18.

245. One example could be the U.S. congressional resolution and President Ronald Regan’s decision to
proclaim 21 May 1983 “National Andrei Sakharov Day.” The most dramatic Western gesture came in
June 1984 when French President François Mitterrand delivered a speech in the Kremlin and explicitly
invoked Sakharov.

246. Harry J. Lipkin, “Andrei Sakharov and the Weizmann Institute,” in P. N. Lebedev Physics Insti-
tute, Andrei Sakharov: Facets of a Life (Gif-sur-Yvette, France: Éditions Frontières, 1991), p. 459.

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unproblematic because they did not pretend to speak in his name. However,
some uses of Sakharov’s name, then and later, caused tensions.247

“The Helsinki Process”

The “Moscow Appeal” was issued in the context of the CSCE negotiations,
as was the Danish proposal to organize a Sakharov Hearing. The hearings all
referred to the Helsinki Final Act and largely focused on documenting the
failure of the Soviet Union to live up to the commitments laid out in that
document. Although the hearings were not part of the ofﬁcial monitoring
process initiated with the Helsinki Final Act, the organizers saw them as a
non-state contribution to that process. The ﬁrst hearing set out to investigate
whether the Soviet Union was living up to its commitments and concluded
that this seemed doubtful. At the second hearing such doubt was cast away
in favor of an unambiguously negative assessment. The ﬁfth meeting asked
whether it made sense to pursue the process further. The conclusion was a
“yes, but.” Yes, but only if the Soviet Union began to respect human rights.
The hearing made Sakharov’s thinking—Yankelevich called it the “Sakharov
doctrine”—its own: there could be no international peace without domestic
peace, without respect for human rights.

All

in all, keeping in mind the necessary caveats, the International
Sakharov Hearings can fairly be seen as an international citizens’ tribunal that
resulted from centrist and right-of-center human rights transnational activism
pursued in Sakharov’s name in the context of the Helsinki process. While
some within this milieux leaned rightward, others seem to have been political
moderates or just not that easy to label politically. Despite the murky Danish
origins and chaotic beginning of the hearings, they managed to broaden their
political appeal and to gain respectability, legitimacy, and even access to inﬂu-
ential political actors at both state and non-state levels. These achievements
were attributable mainly to a small number of ﬁery souls, but they could
not have succeeded without a permissive environment, several preexisting

247. Examples of individuals, groups, interventions, or events that caused open or hidden controversy,
then or later, include Lozansky and his Andrei Sakharov Institute, Michael Stern and his International
Sakharov Tribunal of Conscience and Peace (The Hague, 4–5 September 1980), the Internationale
Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte, and Marek Halter. Marlene Somsak, “Plan Born at Stanford Meet-
ing Splits Sakharov Backers,” San Jose Mercury News, 6 November 1984; Ronald Hilton, “Hilton
Protests Secrecy of Sakharov Institute Conference,” Stanford University Campus Report, 26 September
1984; Yankelevich to Michael Stern, 4 August 1980, in Box 22, Houghton Library; Andrei Sakharov
Institute, Secretary’s Memorandum, 21 May 1986, in Sanford A. Gradinger Papers, American Jewish
Historical Society; Piotr Smolar, “Enquête sur Marek Halter: Le bonimenteur,” Revue XXI, No. 4 (Fall
2008), pp. 142–151; and “L’homme qui a tout vécu,” Le point (Paris), 28 April 2005, p. 7.

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networks (anti-Communists, Bible smugglers, human rights activists, Soviet-
bloc exiles), the support of some less-visible actors, and Sakharov’s sponsor-
ship. The hearings seem to have had an impact at many levels. They are among
numerous endeavors during the later stages of the Cold War that sought to
put a spotlight on human rights violations in the Soviet bloc. However, the
Sakharov Hearings stand out for their persistence, diversity, and, occasion-
ally, the weight of their actors and contributors; their dogged and sometimes
successful attempts to join forces with politically inﬂuential actors; and their
contribution to putting Sakharov and other persecuted dissidents high on the
East-West political agenda. Beyond their possible impact on overall East-West
relations, they seem to have had an impact in several host countries, notably
on Freedom House in the United States and on memory politics in Denmark.
The International Sakharov Hearings thus illustrate how a transnational pro-
cess can unfold as a set of extremely diverse events, depending, among other
things, on the national context. They also demonstrate that some important
“national” events can be understood only if put into their proper transna-
tional context. The International Sakharov Hearings have been undeservedly
overlooked in the scholarly literature, and they ought to be taken into consid-
eration when discussing the Helsinki process.248

Acknowledgments

An earlier draft of this article was presented as a paper at the workshop “The
1970s in Europe: A Transnational Turn for Political Cultures?” LUISS G.
Carli University, Rome, 25–26 May 2017, where it beneﬁted from comments
by the discussant, Federico Romero.

248. Future research into the domestic and transnational impact of the Sakharov hearings will no
doubt involve a more detailed examination of the individual hearings, the testimonies, the participants,
and their interaction with and inﬂuence on other state and non-state actors, among other topics.

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