In this 20th anniversary year of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, the chief Soviet negotiator of the 1975 agreement, Anatoly Kovalev, reveals some of the USSR’s difficulties in making concessions on human rights and freedom of information. In these excerpts from a new, unpublished memoir, Kovalev lifts the veil on the Soviet delegation’s discussions with Moscow and concludes that those who supported the act were ‘renovationists’ who helped to bring the concept of human rights to the former Soviet Union
