George Morris's Where Human Rights Are Real is Progress Publishers' answer, in English and in 1980, to the argument that the Helsinki Final Act had let loose inside the Soviet Union. Its Russian title translates as "There, where human rights are real"-the "there" is the point. The whole book is a preposition aimed at a Western reader. What it genuinely records is worth having. Morris, an American Communist journalist living in Moscow, went and looked: at a health service free at the point of use, at a housing programme letting flats for a few roubles a month, at a school system, at an absence of destitution that the countries then lecturing Moscow had not matched and mostly still have not. He interviews a criminologist at the All-Union Institute about juvenile offending. He sets out family budgets. He quotes the US Civil Rights Commission's report of February 1979 on school segregation straight back at his American readers, and he is not wrong to. As an account of Soviet social provision at the end of the 1970s, assembled on the spot by a man who wanted it to be true, it is fuller than most contemporary Western surveys troubled to make, and it is the case for the defence in its strongest form. It is also a precisely datable artefact. The narrative closes in the winter of 1978-79-the latest events in the author's own voice are Kosygin's announcement of a record 230-million-ton grain harvest in November 1978 and that Civil Rights Commission report-while a Moscow editor's footnotes, added in the first weeks of 1980, carry the 1979 census and US inflation figures. The book is a manuscript finished in America in early 1979 and reopened in Moscow a year later. This edition carries a new critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which establishes that dating from internal evidence, narrowing considerably what the book can fairly be accused of leaving out, and then sets out exactly which absences the author did have in front of him.
