| The Soviet Union was not silent on issues of human rights. Even in 1948, though it abstained from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it helped shape the Declaration through active participation in the negotiations and subsequently negotiated and signed more human rights treaties than the United States. Throughout this dissertation, I show how the Soviet Union embraced, rather than rejected, human rights diplomacy in order to legitimize itself as a global moral superpower. Moreover, the USSR drafted its international diplomacy on human rights not only to positively contrast itself with the West in order to claim moral leadership, but also, just as importantly, in response to its own internal history of rights-talk. The Soviet Union used international human rights debates to gain moral legitimacy at home and abroad. Both the US and USSR saw human rights negotiations as part of a Cold War battlefield for ideological supremacy. Inasmuch as the Soviet Union prevailed it was because its arguments found receptive audiences across the Cold War divide. |
