ILGWU Local 155 strikers Jack Wishnefsky and Max Kampelman picket in front of MarJan and Sternberg knitting mills, 134 West 36 St., New York, in the 1950s. Photo by Harry Rubenstein, ILGWU Justice
By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Max Kampelman, the American ambassador to the Helsinki talks and lawyer from Fried, Frank died on January 25 at the age of 92.
There are obituaries in the New York Times and Washington Post, and a remembrance from Freedom House, where Max served on the board, and now at least the rather anemic Wikipedia entry has been updated.
I was fortunate to meet Kampelman a number of times in the 1980s and 1990s when I was at Helsinki Watch, as the Eurasian Division of Human Rights Watch was called then, and then later as a public member of the US delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which is how the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was first called.
When a colleague emailed me that Kampelman had passed away and we should let "the Helsinki family" know, I knew exactly what she meant -- hundreds of dissidents, activists, former prisoners of conscience and of course ambassadors, government officials and scholars will all mourn Max's passing.
I think of Max as the "patriarch" of this family because two other prominent ambassadors -- Arthur J. Goldberg, who had run the first Helsinki talks in Belgrade after the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, and Warren Zimmerman, who ran then from 1986-1989 after Kampelman, had already passed away long before.
I last saw Max at a meeting organized by Finland, Center for Transatlantic Relations and SAIS at the end of the Finnish term as chair-in-office in 2008.
Above in the photo from the Cornell archives, you see Max as a young man walking on a picket line in the rain on behalf of labour rights in New York City. That and many other experiences he had, from taking care of disabled children to working on a farm to participating in an experiment on the effects of starvation, made him into a man who could not just talk the talk but walk the walk. Kampelman was that rare thing, a World War II pacifist (like Kathleen Norris) a position he came to as he studied Jewish theology and the works of figures like Gandhi. He opted for alternative service as a conscientious objector, and volunteered to take part in a famous starvation experiment and go on very short K rations to see the effects of hunger, and then to help scientists figure out how to bring the starving back to health -- as he described, their findings, with his help, came just in time to help those liberated from POW and concentration camps.
Kampelman, not a foreign service officer but a lawyer with considerable political experience starting from his days as an advisor to Hubert Humphrey, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to go and serve in the Madrid talks for the CSCE from 1980-1983; President Reagan re-appointed him though Max was a Democrat as a sign of just how crucial he was to these talks.
These were the worst years of the Andropovshchina, the period of the rule of Yuri Andropov, KGB chief and then General Secretary of the Soviet Union, known for his harsh policies and cruelty.
Nowadays, diplomats at the OSCE having to attend the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM) in Warsaw, for a scant 14 or even 10 days, whine about having to listen to boring speeches of their counterparts and complain about the "victimology" of activists trying to make their case, as autocrats like Kazakhstan in the chair gavel them down. Some diplomats can't wait to bolt for the receptions, and try to leave what they see as an excruciating session after a few days, leaving deputies in the chair.
Not so Max, who was made of sterner stuff in a harder age. What a contrast! Ambassador Kampelman spent three long years negotiating with the Soviets during the crackdown on Poland's Solidarity; the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan; and the jailing of dissidents all over the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who had first emerged in happier times during the 1970s detente, and formed the Helsinki citizens' movement.
Max spent an enormous amount of face time with the most notorious Soviet apparatchiks of the day, and didn't yield. In those days, we came to him again and again and again with petitions and lists of prisoners of conscience and long, long reports of "Violations of the Helsinki Accords". The ambassador received them all graciously and avidly tried to push the issues. There was some objection in those days at "giving away too much" to the Soviets by even having the Helsinki Accords, and there were calls to end the talks. Kampelman believed in continuing them.
I remember at one point toward the end of the Madrid session, Kampelman spoke enthusiastically about a "planeload of dissidents" that he was going to get out for us.
Sometimes Kampelman's work -- and indeed the whole Helsinki process of those years -- is only seen as limited to getting out Soviet Jews to Israel or the West. But while a major cause of the day, there were many other issues besides emigration -- freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, minority rights, freedom of religion, labour rights -- and Max worked on all of these under the "third basket" of the Helsinki Accords.
The Helsinki monitors were particularly dear to his heart, as they symbolized the ability of citizens not just to "know and act upon their rights" but monitor and defend the accords for the rights of others. They were not binding, but they referenced the UN treaties on human rights.
Max kept trying and trying to get his "planeload" -- the story is referenced in Sarah Snyder's book Human Rights Activism: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Human Rights in History, Cambridge University Press). The Soviets had finally told Max after years of interventions that they were prepared to release Jewish refuseniks, Pentecostals, the chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Dr. Yuri Orlov, a physicist and others -- this was to be the "planeload" of several hundred people.
Then the Soviets reneged on their word. Some activists then got mad at Max, feeling as if he had overstated his ability to get this for their groups.
Kampelman, foreground right, at a briefing with Reagan. President Reagan in a staff briefing with Paul Nitze, Donald Regan,
George Shultz, Ken Adelman, John Poindexter, Richard Perle and Max
Kampelman in Hofdi House during the Reykjavik Summit in Iceland.
12/10/86. Courtesy of Reagan Library.
But in fact, Kampelman had strenuously laid the groundwork for the eventual release of all these people two and three years later, as emigration began to increase and Sharansky was let out in February 1986 and Orlov in October 1986. I remember Roz Ridgeway calling from the State Department to say, "We got your man."
The Soviet-American summit in Rejkavik was nevertheless a big disappointment, even with Gorbachev more liberal than Andropov and a few prisoners trickling out prior to it. Once again, Ludmila Alexeyeva, the representative of the Moscow Helsinki Group abroad, with whom I worked closely, trudged off on a long trip with her little blue suitcase, wearing her blue jumper. She returned rejected -- no prisoners released, although the Soviets had been doling them out at each summit, and it seemed Gorbachev was going to be better. Ultimately, while Gorbachev began the process of opening the GULAG, it took Yeltsin to finish it.
Among the many hundreds of people grateful for their liberation from the GULAG was my ex-husband Alexander Shatravka, who had served nine years in total for first attempting to escape the Soviet Union, but who was returned by the Finns, and then later jailed for samizdat.
In those days, Kampelman used to come to our Wednesday morning meetings at Random House, chaired by then president Bob Bernstein, to give us briefings and receive our reports. I remember sitting next to him one morning when everyone was dejected at the lack of progress.
"He's...all in tattoos," Max said in quiet exasperation about one of his Soviet counterparts sent by Andropov -- and I knew instantly what he meant -- a thug with a criminal past who had been in the camps and likely cooperated with the regime (not a hipster as the connotation might work today).
By September 1991, when I served on the CSCE delegation to Moscow for the HDIM -- a prize given to Moscow after concessions during glasnost and perestroika, Max now faced a different kind of challenge. The defeat of the coup had just occurred in August 1991, but Moscow was roiling -- statues were toppled, demonstrations were still occuring, refugees from some civil unrest in the republics were arriving to petition in the capital, and Yeltsin's VP, the nationalist Alexander Rutskoi, in fact had occupied half of the "White House" as the Soviet parliament was called them, with armed men.
In the Hall of Columns, where some of the meetings took place, the lovely ladies and gentlemen of Europe beamed at an orator with a handsome head of hair and a theatrical voice who suddenly began orating from atop the stairway. "Isn't it wonderful they have free speech now," these diplomats congratulated each other. The orator was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and he was talking about Russian soldiers dipping their boots into the Indian Ocean. The transition had begun. It was to be a rocky one.
At one session of this conference, I saw Sergei Kovalev, the biochemist and former prisoner of conscience who was made head of the Russian delegation at the time by a liberal foreign ministry, as he gave a speech proposing what was later to be called "the Moscow mechanism," a means by which participating states could respond to human rights emergencies -- just like the days of the coup. I looked up, and saw Yuri Reshetov, the Soviet foreign ministry apparatchik in charge of "human rights," who would often meet with Amb. Richard Schifter and other US officials and of course Kampelman. Reshetov, folders in hand, was frozen in a strange obsequious posture, nervously waiting for Sergei Adamovich to finish.
All of a sudden, it was clear who was in charge here. Speaker after speaker endorsed Kovalev's proposal -- from the Soviet republics -- Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, others.
I pushed a note over to Kampleman. "Looks like Yuri's telephone isn't hooked up to anything anymore," I said.
Max nodded, but then we pushed the paper back and forth on the table, arguing whether in fact Reshetov/the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs really wasn't as relevant as the RSFSR ministries and parliament, coming into its own (Boris Yeltsin was its chair).
"But look at all these republics, they are individual countries now with the postpredstvo [permanent representative office] functioning as an embassy," I wrote. "I think it's over," I said of the USSR.
"No, we have to work with them," Max said -- because it wasn't over yet. While not a foreign service official, and a lawyer who had therefore more flexibility in his dealings with the Soviets, he still had to follow instructions from Washington. At a reception, Lidiya Ivanovna Semina, Kovalev's aide, proudly pinned an Russian flag on the lapel of a startled Amb. James Collin, the American ambassador in those days, trying to explain to him that Russia valued its independence from the Soviet Union as much as the republics. He wasn't ready to hear it.
As Paul Goble, the former State Department official who helped nurture the independence of the Baltic states despite internal resistance, put it: "The last place in the world where the Soviet flag was lowered was the US State Department." Indeed.
Many people have Max to thank personally for their own freedom and the freedom of their families. And we all have to thank Max for helping to ensure -- drawing on his rich life of experience and knowledge and dedication -- that the 1991 transition was largely a peaceful one, although there were the tragedies of killings in Vilnius, Tbilisi, Sumgait and elsewhere. Max went on to further peace and disarmament in a variety of other roles.
It's curious to me to see that the Twitterati can get all meta about Kampelman being "complex" as a "cold warrior" because he at one time proposed that Communist Party membership be banned -- a proposal that in fact never came to pass.
Kampelman's experience in the labour movement brought him into direct contact with communists who advocated violence and revolution, and of course all of his later diplomatic experience brought him into direct confrontation of the people who not only massacred tens of millions of people in the Stalin era, but killed one million civilians in their invasion of Afghanistan, who jailed hundreds of workers in Poland during martial law, and of course jailed thousands in the Soviet Union and other Soviet allies. People looking at the figures of the early "Helsinki" era after detente chilled don't seem to get how you need to be with mass murderers and totalitarians who aren't really reforming: cold.
The idea of banning CP membership wasn't about ruining somebody's career or harming their civil rights or eliminating political opponents from the field -- although it had all those ramifications. It was about how you address the profound challenge -- similar to the problem of terrorism we face in our time -- of communists bent on violent revolution who will take away everyone's rights once they come to power. A labour rights activist in the US is not guilty of all the Soviet Union's crimes and may have a just cause; but his support of a deadly regime is indeed a danger when it becomes widespread and he embraces and justifies their methodology.
Young people today don't feel the massiveness of the Soviet crimes against humanity -- they haven't seen the mass graves and the GULAG camps and the emaciated prisoners -- and their keepers in tatoos -- as we have seen first-hand. I'm sad that Max has passed from the scene and one more powerful voice that could tell the full dimension of the truth of those days is gone...
Comments