Moral Superpower in the Cold War

The Soviet Struggle for Human Rights Supremacy, 1964-1991

James Petrie Brown

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350541887
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: History

This book explores how the Cold War's ideological conflict was played out through competition over human rights values.

As the West feared that the Soviet Union might 'win' the Cold war, it shows how they sought to aggressively outflank the USSR on human rights, while the Soviet Union simultaneously attempted to establish itself as a moral superpower, superior to the West.

Examining how the Soviet leadership sought to respond to the West's amplification of prominent Soviet dissidents and global condemnation of their human rights abuses, they in turn depicted left-wing activists in the UK and the US as on par with famous Soviet dissidents in their press. Highlighting the extensive Soviet campaign to build global support for its image as a human rights' defender, it shows how they claimed support for striking trade unionists, protesting students, Native American rights activists and radical ant-racist groups, primarily in the UK and the US, to push a narrative of the inherent instability of capitalism in the two leading capitalist states.

Exhibiting this ideological struggle and uncertainty between East and West in new ways, Moral Superpower in the Cold War helps us to understand why the conflict took the trajectory that it did, and how it was experienced by those who lived through it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The breakthrough of dissent and its transnational reception, 1964–8
• 2 Soviet experiments: Razryadka and Novye-Levye, 1968–72
• 3 The Soviet Union and the human rights revolution, 1972–9
• 4 The Soviet press on human rights ‘abuses’ against British and American trade unions, 1979–85
• 5 Soviet human rights discourse during the ‘end of history’, 1985–91
• Conclusion Understanding the failure of Soviet human rights public diplomacy and the evolution of Russian rights discourse from 1991 to 2025
• Notes
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index