How the Helsinki Accords helped end communism
National Post, 3 August 2025
The accords, signed 50 years ago on Aug. 1, forced the Soviets to honour human rights
Fifty years ago, Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, achieved a long-desired diplomatic triumph by signing the Helsinki Accords on Aug. 1, 1975. Sixteen years later though, the Soviet Union itself was thrown on the ash heap of history. What happened?
Brezhnev did not realize — nobody did — that in signing the accords, he was moving the Cold War onto unfavourable ground for the communist tyrannies. Onto the moral high ground, to be specific, ground that was owned by the courageous dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and their allies in the democracies.
By the early 1970s, 25 years after Stalin’s subjugation of Eastern Europe at the conclusion of the Second World War, the West was growing weary of the Cold War and wary of catastrophe in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Détente was the mot du jour, a desire to lower tensions with Moscow and to advance nuclear arms control agreements.
The Helsinki process took place under the auspices of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), a meeting of 33 European countries, including the Soviet Union, as well as the United States and Canada — hence its boast that it promoted co-operation from Vancouver to Vladivostok.
By 1975, Brezhnev had realized that the Soviet Union could not keep pace with the West economically, and therefore, militarily. The Soviets were thus increasingly reliant on the madness of MAD — mutually assured destruction — for their security. Soviet foreign policy thus sought a sort of “cold peace,” a recognition of the territories gained by the Red Army in the Second World War.
The CSCE meetings rambled on in Geneva until the grand summit in Helsinki. There, the 35 countries signed the final document. U.S. President Gerald Ford had been in office less than a year and was excoriated — along with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — for being soft on communism. In the presidential election of 1976, Ford was denounced by both Ronald Reagan, his Republican primary opponent, and Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee, for his weakness at Helsinki.
It produced a pivotal moment in the Ford-Carter presidential debate. Helsinki was the context for an exchange in which Ford said that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” an astonishing gaffe that may have cost him a close election against Carter.
What had Ford given away at Helsinki that earned him bipartisan ire? In the first “basket” of the accords all 35 countries agreed to respect the international boundaries of post-war Europe. This had been a Soviet goal since the 1950s, and Brezhnev regarded Helsinki as legitimating the internal Soviet empire regarding the Baltic countries, the external empire of Poland and its neighbours and the division of Germany.
Carter agreed with Brezhnev on that reading and attacked Helsinki as “legitimizing Soviet domination.” Reagan considered the accords a moral abandonment of the enslaved nations of what he would characterize eight years later as the “evil empire.”
Everyone got it wrong. As Kissinger himself would write later: “Rarely has a diplomatic process so illuminated the limitations of human foresight.”
To get his de facto recognition of empire, Brezhnev conceded to the inclusion of “basket three” in the Helsinki accords. Those provisions committed the signatories to permitting the peaceful changes of international borders, allowing states to leave or join alliances (NATO and Warsaw Pact) and, most remarkably, committed the Soviets to “the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms … in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
The Soviets had solemnly signed a promise to honour human rights. Brezhnev thought he had made an easily ignored concession to gain a hard-won recognition of Russian imperial ambitions. He was wrong.
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