What separated the Soviet Union and Russia from the West, she said, were not enlightened leaders but systems of checks and balances. With the Helsinki Group, for example, she tried to monitor the authorities in the Soviet Union by holding them to their own stated commitments to human rights. “She kept pushing that point,” Ms. Lokshina of Human Rights Watch said. When the screws tightened again in Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, she and other Moscow intellectuals risked their lives to keep pressing for freedom and human rights. In 1976, she co-founded the Helsinki Group to monitor compliance.

Source: New York Times December 09, 2018 19:25 UTC