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.cb A RATIONALE FOR MORAL PRESSURE ON THE SOVIET UNION


	The Soviet Union has violated human rights since its inception;
as early as January 1918 - two months after the Bolshevik Revolution -
they prevented the elected Constituent Assembly from meeting.
Nevertheless, the extent of the violations have fluctuated from
time to time, and the self-confidence of the Communist Party
in these violations has fluctuated.

	At present the moral self-confidence of the Communists
is lower than it has ever been.  For example, when Jewish scientists
who wish to emigrate are denied both the right to emigrate and
the right to work in their own country, many of the people responsible
for implementing this policy, e.g. directors of scientific institutes,
realize that they are behaving in an immoral way.  Few of them are
likely to become fighters for human rights just because they
recognize this, but %3their bad conscience makes them give in
to external moral and material pressure%1 more easily than they
otherwise would.  For example, it affects their estimate of the
importance of foreign contacts, and foreign trade, and the good will
of foreign scientists.

	An event at the Fourth International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence held at Tblisi in Soviet Georgia may help illustrate this.
The rules of the conference committee allow a symposium organizer to
invite whomever he pleases, and one invited Professor Alexander Lerner,
of Moscow, who has been unemployed since 1971 when he applied to emigrate.
The issue arose six months before the conference, but was finally resolved
only on the opening morning when the threat of a demonstration at the
conference induced the Soviets to let Lerner participate.
There is evidence that the final decision was made by the 
Party bureaucracy in Georgia using authority delegated from
Moscow but that at least the local KGB was displeased, and
without daring to interfere with Lerner's attendance,
attempted to provoke incidents that would make the decision look
bad by harassing local dissidents who wanted to attend the
meeting.  No Soviet scientist would defend the regime's treatment
of Lerner.
	
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John McCarthy
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Computer Science Department
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305

ARPANET: MCCARTHY@SU-AI
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