Politburo Cites Multi-Million Unemployment to Protect Imprisoned Poet
By Vera Kessler ·
Imprisoned poet Alexander Ginzburg and physicist Andrei Sakharov fueled a Cold War clash as the Kremlin countered US human rights pleas by citing American race discrimination.
The document is a Top Secret extract from protocol No 46 of the meeting of the CC CPSU Politburo, dated February 18, 1977. It takes the form of specific instructions provided to the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, for a conversation with US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. As published in the English translation by the Cold War International History Project, the record captures the Kremlin's irritation with the Carter administration's insistence on linking diplomatic relations to the treatment of Soviet citizens.
"Utmost Bewilderment"
At the center of the dispute was Alexander Ginzburg, a Russian journalist and poet who, according to the public record, had been sentenced three times to labor camps between 1961 and 1969. By early 1977, the US administration had raised the question of Ginzburg's freedom with Moscow. The Politburo's response, as scripted for Dobrynin, was one of "utmost bewilderment."
The instructions command Dobrynin to tell Vance that Ginzburg was a Soviet citizen "convicted for his actions punishable by law in accordance with our criminal code." The document rejects the American framing of the issue as a matter of "human rights," asserting that such concerns do not change the "essence of the matter," which the Soviet leadership viewed as an interference in domestic affairs. To the Politburo, the US position was "categorically unacceptable."
The record reveals a rigid adherence to the principle of non-interference, citing both the 1933 establishment of diplomatic relations and the 1972 "Fundamentals of mutual relations between the USSR and the USA." The Soviet leadership argued that because the two nations possessed different ideologies and social-political systems, they naturally had different approaches to rights and liberties. The document asserts that the Soviet system provided "in reality the right for work, education, social security, free medical assistance, and retirement to all Soviet citizens."
First Secretary Pressel
Beyond the legalistic defense of Ginzburg's imprisonment, the protocol shifts into the language of counter-intelligence. The Politburo viewed the US focus on "dissidents" not as a moral crusade, but as a calculated attempt to instigate people who had "separate themselves from the Soviet society."
The instructions explicitly mention the activities of American journalists and embassy personnel. The document claims that some US Embassy staff in Moscow were directly involved in identifying and publicizing the activities of dissidents. Dobrynin was instructed that if Vance asked for specifics, he should name "the First secretary Pressel."
This suspicion extended to the physicsist Andrei Sakharov. The record notes that representatives of the American Embassy in Moscow had been secretly meeting with Sakharov, who the document notes "knows the state secrets related to the national defence." The Politburo highlighted a specific meeting that took place on February 8, characterizing it as a "direct act of the American intelligence services against the USSR and against the Soviet social system."
Scripting the TASS channel
To ensure the diplomatic encounter served Soviet domestic and international interests, the Politburo provided a pre-written announcement to be sent to Moscow via the TASS channel following the meeting. This script was designed to mirror the American accusations, turning the "human rights" argument back upon the United States.
The draft TASS announcement states that the Soviet side "resolutely rejects all the attempts to interfere in the Soviet domestic affairs" using the "pretext" of human rights. Crucially, the instructions authorized Dobrynin to bring up specific American failings to neutralize the US moral position. The list included "multi-million unemployment, deprivation of rights of ethnic minorities, race discrimination, unequal rights for women, [and] the violation of citizens rights by the state organs."
By framing the conversation this way, the Kremlin sought to categorize the US interest in Ginzburg and Sakharov as a hypocrisy. The document argues that if the Soviet Union had linked inter-state relations to "actually existing problems" in the US, such as race discrimination or the "persecution of people with progressive convictions," it would have only served to aggravate relations and jeopardize the goals of security and friendly relations.
The document closes with a bureaucratic directive for the ambassador to "telegraph the fulfillment" of these instructions. While the protocol outlines the Soviet strategy for managing the Ginzburg case in 1977, it leaves the eventual resolution to other records; public records indicate that Ginzburg was eventually released and expelled to the United States in 1979 as part of a prisoner exchange.