The Black Panthers and the Soviets: A Comparative History of Human Rights Movements

The contemporaneous movements for human rights that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers waged during the 1960s are analysed in a comparative fashion here for the very first time. The book also examines the extra-legal measures that both the KGB and FBI employed to destroy them. The Black Panthers and the Soviets innovatively compares Soviet human rights activists' exposure of the workings of the Soviet police state with the miniature, city-level surveillance police states that the Black Panthers exposed as operating across the United States. It illuminates the legal tactics of counter-surveillance that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers employed as a means of restraining acts of state-sanctioned violence. The book also highlights how the U.S. production of knowledge about Soviet 'dissidents' reified white supremacist, anti-communist notions of dissent, human rights, and state violence that facilitated the repression of the Black Panthers and the mass incarceration of African Americans as criminals. Meredith L. Roman disrupts the enduring Cold War binaries of authoritarianism-democracy and oppression-freedom that obscure our understanding of the complex, overlapping histories of these two superpowers. Roman convincingly argues that the Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers' vast documentation of domestic human rights abuses and the repressive measures that they faced for mobilizing to end them serve as an important societal reminder; they reaffirm that genuine democracy and the safeguarding of human rights are incompatible with authoritarian practices, the conditions of racial capitalism, and the ideology of national security.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Liberation from a Soviet and American Spiritual Death 2. Counter-Surveillance and Decriminalization: The Law, Publicity, and Aid Programs 3. Reporting Truth over Lies: The Chronicle of Current Events and The Black Panther Community News Service 4. Traitors and Patriots: Criminalization and Valorisation in the Soviet and U.S. Press 5. Counterintelligence and the Hunted: Incarceration, Assassination, and Betrayal Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Meredith L. Roman is Associate Professor of History at SUNY Brockport, USA. She is the author of Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928-1937 (2012).

Review :
Comparative history is a dish best-served cold. In this fascinating, well-written, and strongly argued book, Meredith Roman analyzes two Cold War frames: the elite Soviet dissidents whose literary accomplishments and peaceful moral activism won acclaim across the Western world and the community-based Black Panthers whose struggles for equality, civil rights, and economic justice were tarnished by accusations of criminality and violence. Meredith Roman wrote a highly original and well-researched comparative history of Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers. Brimming with empathy and nuance, this important book offers new ways of thinking about truth, dignity, humanity, state violence, and resistance on both sides of the Cold War divide. In this masterful study, Roman examines methods used by the FBI and the KGB against radicals in the 1960s. Her work is a pithy and taut study of police methods that were adapted to respond to the tactics used by the Black Panthers and Soviet dissidents ... This extraordinary work offers an interesting slant on radical movements in two different systems. Highly recommended [for] all readers.