Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) – As secretary of state, George P. Shultz possessed a combination of strength, personality, and the ability to shift between advocacy and statesmanship that helped the Reagan administration triumph over the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
That’s what speakers who lived through that time, either in service at the US State Department or deep in the bowels of a KGB prison, concluded during the inaugural George P. Shultz Memorial Lecture on Human Rights on February 12, 2025.
Moderated by Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow Peter M. Robinson and adapted for an episode of Uncommon Knowledge that aired on February 21, the lecture featured Hoover Institution director and 66th secretary of state Condoleezza Rice; Natan Sharansky, founder of the Helsinki Group, who spent nine years in Soviet prison and went on to be a politician in Israel; and Abraham Sofaer, a former State Department counselor to Shultz who was appointed the first George P. Shultz Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in 1994.
During the discussion, Sharansky recalled what changed within the Soviet Union two years after it joined with other countries in signing the Helsinki Accords in 1975.
Despite the Accords’ emphasis on human rights, Sharansky was later arrested for the “high treason” of documenting and publicizing abuses by the regime.
Shultz made significant efforts to assist the “refuseniks,” as Sharansky and other Russian Jews denied permission to leave the USSR were called. Rice said the personal references to individual cases Shultz made to Soviet authorities in the 1980s set a trend for all future secretaries of state to become aware and knowledgeable about individual human rights cases.
The participants in the discussion also pushed back on certain arguments made in recent literature examining the politics of the 1980s, which suggest that the Reagan administration did not plan for or actively encourage the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Rice, Sofaer, and Sharansky all called this revisionist history.
From advocating for the rights of Soviet dissidents to implementing the defense buildup and announcing the Strategic Defense Initiative, all three interviewed said, Reagan and Shultz put significant efforts into constraining the security, diplomatic, and economic choices available to Soviet leadership.
“It’s not that Gorbachev woke up one day and said, ‘You know, I think I would like the Soviet Union to look different. I want to have a different relationship with the United States,’” Rice said. “The conditions were set so that he really had very few choices.”
Sharansky said that as the Soviets looked to open new trade and cooperation ties in the West in the 1980s, they could not escape talking about the plight of the refuseniks and other Soviet dissidents with western diplomats.
It began to dawn on Soviet leaders, starting with conversations they had with Shultz, that they had to start loosening restrictions on civil society and free expression if they were ever going to be able to increase trade ties with the West.
Once those restrictions were lifted, Sharansky argued, the presence of even a small amount of personal freedom began to tear down the justification for the entire Soviet system as a whole.
“[Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev] gave a little bit of freedom, and thanks be to God he didn't realize that as a result, the Soviet Union cannot exist,” Sharansky said.
For reasons to do with the Soviet Union but also generally, Sofaer said it was always clear to Shultz that the Reagan White House needed to emphasize human rights as a cornerstone of its foreign policy.
“[Shultz] probably realized that ultimately, that was what it was all about, that was the most basic value of all the values. . . . He believed in it, and he fought for it.” Sofaer said.
The event was made possible by the Hoover Institution with generous support from the Koret Foundation.
To watch the discussion, click here.
